The only reason they can claim they "sold you a copy" is because of the DMCA which makes it illegal to circumvent the encryption on the disc to make your own copies for personal use. Of course it should still be illegal to make copies to sell or to show to the public, but it should not be illegal to make copies that you will use yourself.
What I think is fair is to purchase a new copy if it provides something better such as a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc which has higher resolution compared to a normal DVD. People should have to pay for those new discs since someone had to spend the time creating the higher resolution copy. But, if a person already owns the standard DVD and wants to create a personal HD-DVD/Blu-Ray copy from it NOTHING should stand in their way. If they have the no-how to format shift the data and that is what they choose to do so that they can use it with their new home theatre setup they should not possibly face jail time for doing so. I have no problem with movie studios wanting to get paid again for new formats of the same old stuff if they spend the money doing the conversion/adding enhancements. On the flip side if someone wants to do the conversion on their own (for personal use) they should be able to.
With that said, Hollywood has absolutely no say on how long I can legally use my purchased DVD. The fact that (in your example) all of my players broke or were thrown away as obsolete or what have you, and I can no longer play that DVD, is likewise not their fault.
They have all the say in the matter. Sure, it would be in the best of their interest to support a format as long as the market demands it but that does not mean they have no say in the matter. Once a large enough majority of the market switches to a new format then they have no reason to keep producing the former version and while that is their right it is also the right of the people who own a previous version to be able to spend their own time converting the former version to the newer version if they so wish.
Again, argue as much as you want over whether or not this is how it should be, but at least for now it's how it is. Understanding what it is you bought is critical to any understanding of the issues involved.
I do understand what I have bought and I know that format shifting allows me to create a new copy on different media for my own use. According to the case of Recording Indus. Assn of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. and regarding the Rio MP3 player: "Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or space-shift, those files that already reside on a users hard drive. . . . Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use."
Right there over-rides anything the MPAA might say about what a "copy" consists of. What they say is illegal, and the only thing stopping people from legally making copies is the DMCA which should not apply to personal use/copies.
For your information I work in the software industry, I know that "piracy" sucks and I see people illegally using the software of my company weekly. What I (and my company) don't do is restrict our customers to one physical copy of the software. They are free to redownload whatever software they are licensed to use at anytime that they wish. This comes in handy when their computer crashes and they lose all of the installers or the disc that contained the installer goes bad or is broken. In the future when a drive comes out that does not read CD's/DVD's anymore they will be free to copy the installer off of the CD/DVD they purchased and put it onto whate
Maybe because I want to spend the maximum time possible in the country I would like to visit and I don't have unlimited amounts of vacation days? Crossing the Atlantic takes around a week, that is a whole week that could be spent seeing and experiencing new sights, cultures, and food. I think the vast majority of people would agree that a week is much to long to spend travelling to the place you want your primary vacation to be at, not to mention that would be a whole week of nothing to see but the ship (after about the 2nd day the ship is boring). It also is much cheaper to fly so more money can be spent in the country the vacation is in.
I think I'd rather take a cruise ship and have lots of drinks than take a plane and not be allowed any.
Every plane I have ever flown on served drinks so that is not an issue. Sure you can't get obnoxious and out of control drunk but they always served me enough to make me happy and never have cut me off. Cruise ships are also expensive (the transatlantic cruises I could find from the US to Europe ranged from $3,000-10,000 and take a long time to get to their destination). Sure, it would be interesting to go on one of those cruises but I would rather spend a week or two travelling all over Europe rather then spend the majority of my time crossing the Atlantic with nothing to see but the ship (even on the Caribbean cruises I have been on that stopped almost daily at new islands I got sick of being on the ship). I guess if you don't have to worry about vacation days and are rich your way may be feasable but to most people it is not.
Every several years Microsoft claims they'll be hiring in the Puget Sound area, but then it turns out they've just hired in India, or China or Russia, etc.
Are you serious?? You are completely off base, MS is hiring like crazy right now at Redmond. I actually recently got invited out to Redmond to interview for a senior developer position and I am not H1-B, etc, I am a US citizen.
So if you wanted to make the trip between say Chicago and Amsterdam how exactly would you go about it besides flying and do so in a timely matter? You might be happy never seeing anywhere but the continent you live on but most people don't have your same mindset.
Really? They delay the flight to unload the baggage, then go through it to find one bad? Didn't know that.
I don't remember them ever delaying a flight by more than 20 minutes to wait up on no-shows.
Yes, they really would delay the flight if they had to to find the bag. I think the reason you never have noticed a delay for a no show is because you may not have noticed but they usually wait to load the luggage until people start boarding. I do not know exactly how the process works but since the bags all have tags on them it would not be that hard to use a scanner on a bag before sending it up the loading belt. If the bag scan reports that the person has not yet boarded the plane then set the bag aside to rescan after the other bags are checked. There should not be a delay using a system similar to that.
Just estimate the time for maximum impact, laptop turns on and detonates the 'extra' battery that is made up of C4.. now you have a nice big hole in the bottom of the plane..
They do have false positives but I would much rather have some false positives occur if it prevents real bombs from getting by. Basically how I understand these systems work is partially by checking the density and volume of the materials (using X-ray's and a CT scanner) within the bag to compare to known densities of explosives and if a "match" occurs they flag the bag and then a security employee must hand check it. If these machines are as good as the claims I have heard then I am very happy they are around and I think they would catch your bomb in a laptop/pda device in a heartbeat.
The keyboard could actually use a redesign because there are a number of keys that have no use anymore for most people. Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break.
Print screen has actually been very helpful to me in the past when I want someone I am trying to help (who has minimal computer skills and is on a Windows machine) to create a screenshot to send to me. I just tell them to make sure to have what I am interested in seeing on the screen and then have them press Print Screen, open up MS Paint, hit CTRL+V, then save the file as a JPEG and send it to me. It is a quick and easy way to get a screenshot since there is a button right on the keyboard and the other steps are trivial.
Scroll Lock and Pause/Break I do not use too often but Caps Lock comes in handy often enough that I don't think it should be phased out just yet.
Whats inside the finger does not really matter. Once it hits the skin it shuts down, so a hotdog is a worthy thing to test with. It also has been used in real life and stopped and barely broken the skin (less damage than a paper cut) successfully. I also know that one of the companies representatives has done live demonstrations using his own fingers. If those facts don't convince you that it is MUCH safer than a plain old saw then I don't know what will. I wouldn't recommend putting your fingers into one of the machines for fun but from everything I know about the product it is worlds better than the old saws. It is very, very safe.
You should check out NetFlix if you haven't yet. You get all the same renting benefits but pay less money overall. You do have to wait a few days to get the DVDs but if you have a bunch of movies queued up it shouldn't matter since you will have other movies to watch already.
Mod me troll (and grammar nazi), but DivX is a MPEG4-based codec that was named after the DIVX you-re talking about. That's why the first versions of DivX was named DivX 3.11:-)
First of all who gives a shit, this is well known and nobody cares except the nazis as you self proclaimed yourself. The words are spelled the same so thats all that matters to most people. It was also easy to tell which context the person was using it in or were you confused since he spelled it DivX? Oh no you weren't since you had to point it out. When you talk to someone about the two do you say "Capital D lowercase i lowercase v capital X"? No, you pronounce both of them the same and that is all that matters and if you are conversing by typing to each other than you should be able to tell from the context of the conversation which "divx" is intended. It is annoying when people point this out everytime someone types DivX instead of DIVX.
I have always used DVD shrink as I liked it the best. I don't think it is being updated anymore however and if so then it is basically in the same boat as DVD Decrypter.
and NO, i'm not upgrading the f'ing radio just so I can listen to the same thing available on CD. My "newer" car may play MP3's, but Its just as easy to create a mix on the computer and burn it to a music CD.
My mom on the other hand does not yet have a computer and there is no way in hell you are going to convince her to replace her car stereo. If it doesn't play in the car, ITS BROKEN.
All you need to get a portable MP3 player to work in the car is an FM transmitter like this:
So tell me now how is bringing all of your CD's with you in the car where they can be broken/stolen better than having your whole music collection on an MP3 player that you can bring with you when you get out of the car??
My mom on the other hand does not yet have a computer
My 92 year old grandmother even has a computer, get your mom out of the stone age. My grandma got hers for free and yes it is dated but it does the job of letting her check her e-mail and play solitaire so it's just fine. There has to be someone around giving away an old system that you could setup for your mom, you just have to look around a bit.
It's not about when cars add them in - it's the large number of cars out there that don't support it. For them, the CD is a requirement, FM Broadcaster units for MP3 players aside.
I think you are confused. Every car I have ever been in since I was born in 1981 has everything needed to be able to interface with a portable MP3 player that has a radio broadcaster. You set the broadcaster that is hooked to the MP3 player to a certain radio station and then you tune your car to that radio station and viola you are connected and can play songs directly through your cars radio. There is no added requirement on the car side that is not pretty much already standard since very few cars that I have seen do not have at least a basic radio.
You can get much MUCH better value you for your money there and many other places as well. If you have to get those "audio" CD-R's then they have decent deals on those too.
That, and I hate the iPod and mp3 players. They break more often than a 2 dollar pair of Giant Tiger headphones.
What exactly do you do to these things? I have had my iPod for quite a while and it is still in pristine shape and I use it every day on my way to work. Granted, my ipod came with a case from here: http://www.vajacases.com/index_01.html that gives it a whole lot of protection but even without the case I don't think it would be in bad shape. I know many people who don't have iPod cases and they aren't breaking their's all the time. What exactly makes a portable CD player more durable than an MP3 player that is well built like the iPod?? If I was going to do a stress comparison between an iPod and a normal portable CD player I would bet my money the iPod would be more durable and last longer, those things are built tough.
The CD's demise is certainly not pending, at least not in the near term.
While I somewhat agree with you I must say I think it will be less than 3-4 years before cars ditch CD players. Once personal MP3/OGG/etc players become more common I think more and more people will realize that they don't need a CD player in their car anymore, they can bring their entire music collection with them on their MP3 player and not have to worry about CD's getting damaged or stolen.
I was talking to an older gentleman (I would say in his 60's) the other day and he questioned me about my iPod and how many songs it can hold. When I told him I put every single CD (around 8,000 songs) I own on it and still have plenty of space left he was dumbfounded. He said he still carries a discman around with him and it is a hassle to only be able to bring a couple CD's along, he would love to have access to his whole music collection at all times. I am sure more older people are starting to learn about MP3 players and the advantages they have as well.
So, I think once more and more people realize the benefits of personal MP3 players and they become more widespread that the car CD player will be history. I also don't think that point in time is very far off. All that it will take is for MP3 players to all start coming with built in radio broadcasters (or whatever it is called) and then BAM, all you need is the radio in the car to listen to your music on the MP3 player and you don't even have to buy a separate broadcast unit. I think the broadcaster needs to be standard because I am amazed by the amount of people who don't know they exist and what they can do so they would never think it is possible to easily listen to a portable MP3 player in the car. The time is coming, just wait.
Finding a job that pays more than minimum wage in all this turmoil is very difficult and you should be thankful you got one.
This is simply not true unless you have no skills and nothing to offer. I got bored and posted my resume to monster.com and the response I got was overwelming, I eventually took it off of there because I was getting so many calls/emails. It was also not all headhunters, only about 25% (if that) were not people who actually worked for the companies that the jobs were at. I don't think I have anything exceptional to offer other than a pretty good understanding of c/c++ and the STL and I also can learn new concepts quickly. Sure, some of the companies offered shit salaries but there were quite a few that were between $75k-125k+, all for around 4 years of experience (and I have 2 but they still were interested) which seems damn good to me.
Two years ago the job market was tough, it took me six months to find the job I am at now and it was very frustrating. The job market nowadays however is worlds better if you at least have something to offer.
Not really. The problem with offshored call centers is less so much that they don't understand English, though there may be a few strange idioms, if you're the sort of person who thinks it's fun to talk to call center operators in riddles and clever witticisms, instead of just getting to the point.
Yes, really. The problem is not that the person doesn't understand English, it's that they usually have a hard time understanding your accent and you have the same problem with them. The biggest problem on both ends is being able to clearly understand the other person since they have some type of accent which makes it more difficult to clearly hear what they are saying which leads to a lot of repeating on both ends.
This reason is exactly why chat is so much superior, both sides get to clearly see what the other person is saying which cuts down on many, many problems.
The main problem I continually run into with offshored customer support (etc.) is that they are so far removed from the corporate core of responsibility that they can't actually *do* anything. Not only that, but they can't even connect you with someone who can, no matter what you say. It's quite a bear to reach someone (onshore, of course) that actually can really fix your real problem. At very least, an onshored call center can either transfer you or give you a number of someone who is better equipped to handle you. With offshored customer service, "escalate" never means more than "add a note to the account entry that no one will read".
This most definitely is a problem with some companies but in my own experiences the people I have talked to usually had no problem at all getting what I wanted done although some times it took a little work. I mentioned the two flawless Dell experiences and another one I will mention that wasn't so easy was with Comcast. For some reason my connection completely died and did not come back for over a day. During that first day nobody could help me since they were sticking to the script and basically saying the problem was on my side even though I knew it wasn't since I could easily ping the comcast DNS servers but could not communicate to anything outside. I finally got ahold of a level 1 support guy who found out my connection had been shutoff for "over usage" and he hit some buttons and everything worked fine again. It just depends who you get a hold of, some of them are just clueless so it might take a while to find someone who knows how to do something.
But this is why I use the internet if at all possible rather than picking up the phone, because it's very likely that, outsourced or not, I'm not going to be able to understand the person on the other end.
I completely agree. The online customer service where you can chat live is my personal favorite and in my experience it has been both much faster than waiting on hold and like you mentioned I have never been unable to understand what the person I was chatting with was trying to communicate. I also prefer it because of the real time nature it has compared to the back and forth of e-mail which can take days.
Two experiences that really stick out in my mind both were dealing with Dell (who I must add that I HATE calling their customer service). The first time I used Dell's online chat my brand new home theater project had one pixel that was constantly on which I just was not going to deal with because of the price of the thing plus the fact it was delivered that way. It only took 10 minutes while I explained the problem and gave them my shipping information and about 3 days later a brand new projector arrived which I hooked up, tested, and then put the old projector in the box and shipped it back.
The second time was at my work where my LCD monitor was starting to have full lines near the bottom of the screen that were either off completely or on and all goofy colored. I went to the online chat again and after hooking up another monitor to make sure the problem was not with the video card the agent told me that they would ship a replacement and it arrived the very next day. They actually sent me two monitors by accident and I of course sent the extra monitor back but it would have been nice to have a 2nd monitor to try if for some reason one of the "new" monitors had a problem too such as burnt out/stuck pixels.
For most customer service related conversations I think chatting online is way much superior to the usual hassle of calling on the phone, waiting forever on hold, and then getting someone who is hard to understand and communicate with. I would like more companies start setting up online chat because it could be more effective, a better experience for the customer, and it probably would be cheaper since no phone would be needed and a customer service representative could handle more than one person at a time pretty easily. Of course the companies cannot get rid of phone support completely since some people do not have internet and some people prefer the phone but they should still at least consider setting up online chat support.
My guess is that the marketer "showing off" the voice recognition didn't properly train the software before the demonstration. If he did do that then he obviously did not pick and test something that was at least known to work which is not a bad idea when you are doing product demos. The software obviously has much work left since it interpreted the two syllable sentence "select all." as 13 syllables "so double the killer delete select all" (while it did finally get "select all" where the hell did the rest of that come from?). I am suprised that Microsoft had so much confidence they would go on live TV with it.
This is one reason that I believe until software is done being fully tested and is fully released that someone technical and who knows the software inside and out (one of the developers) should be demonstrating the products. Leave the non technical marketers to demonstrate products that they can't mess up, kind of like the classes they had to take in college to get a marketing degree.
or type your message and encrypt it and then attach that to the e-mail. Your system fails to add anything of worth when real time communication is needed. I also really doubt that they would be able to decrypt any decently encrypted VoIP in any relevant time frame, so it may raise some flags but at least realtime communication should be safe. I don't care if it raises any red flags since I am not doing anything illegal (although encrypting VoIP without a backdoor may be in the future and that would be a shame) I just want my privacy.
Make a wav or mp3, encrypt it and send it as an attachment and you will not raise any flags, and that is the most important thing of all.
For me, the most important thing is not to refrain from raising any red flags, it is to keep my personal communications personal. I shouldn't have to go through extra bullshit like recording myself and encrypting it to keep my privacy.
Record a Wav file, encrypt it and send it via email.
If I was just going to e-mail someone I might as well just type the message and encrypt it instead of going through the hassle of recording what I want to say and then attaching that to an encrypted e-mail. Sometimes you want/need real time interaction and if VoIP becomes the norm I don't want any backdoors and I want control of the encryption. Also, encrypted VoIP would probably just look like "normal" traffic as well, at least if it is done right.
It's not real time, but if you need to talk to someone it will not get intercepted. This is not hard...
Both the encrypted e-mail as well as encrypted VoIP can be intercepted if someone wants to put enough effort into it by capturing all the packets. I fail to see how you think there is a difference between the two forms of communication since they both would just be sending encrypted data over the net.
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Your statement is correct, but it seems to me that your italics stopped a bit too soon. It should be: "[You] bought a copy of the movie."
The problem with this is that is blocks fair use and format shifting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_shifting
The only reason they can claim they "sold you a copy" is because of the DMCA which makes it illegal to circumvent the encryption on the disc to make your own copies for personal use. Of course it should still be illegal to make copies to sell or to show to the public, but it should not be illegal to make copies that you will use yourself.
What I think is fair is to purchase a new copy if it provides something better such as a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD disc which has higher resolution compared to a normal DVD. People should have to pay for those new discs since someone had to spend the time creating the higher resolution copy. But, if a person already owns the standard DVD and wants to create a personal HD-DVD/Blu-Ray copy from it NOTHING should stand in their way. If they have the no-how to format shift the data and that is what they choose to do so that they can use it with their new home theatre setup they should not possibly face jail time for doing so. I have no problem with movie studios wanting to get paid again for new formats of the same old stuff if they spend the money doing the conversion/adding enhancements. On the flip side if someone wants to do the conversion on their own (for personal use) they should be able to.
With that said, Hollywood has absolutely no say on how long I can legally use my purchased DVD. The fact that (in your example) all of my players broke or were thrown away as obsolete or what have you, and I can no longer play that DVD, is likewise not their fault.
They have all the say in the matter. Sure, it would be in the best of their interest to support a format as long as the market demands it but that does not mean they have no say in the matter. Once a large enough majority of the market switches to a new format then they have no reason to keep producing the former version and while that is their right it is also the right of the people who own a previous version to be able to spend their own time converting the former version to the newer version if they so wish.
Again, argue as much as you want over whether or not this is how it should be, but at least for now it's how it is. Understanding what it is you bought is critical to any understanding of the issues involved.
I do understand what I have bought and I know that format shifting allows me to create a new copy on different media for my own use. According to the case of Recording Indus. Assn of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc. and regarding the Rio MP3 player: "Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or space-shift, those files that already reside on a users hard drive. . . . Such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use."
Right there over-rides anything the MPAA might say about what a "copy" consists of. What they say is illegal, and the only thing stopping people from legally making copies is the DMCA which should not apply to personal use/copies.
For your information I work in the software industry, I know that "piracy" sucks and I see people illegally using the software of my company weekly. What I (and my company) don't do is restrict our customers to one physical copy of the software. They are free to redownload whatever software they are licensed to use at anytime that they wish. This comes in handy when their computer crashes and they lose all of the installers or the disc that contained the installer goes bad or is broken. In the future when a drive comes out that does not read CD's/DVD's anymore they will be free to copy the installer off of the CD/DVD they purchased and put it onto whate
And why do you have to get there inside a day?
Maybe because I want to spend the maximum time possible in the country I would like to visit and I don't have unlimited amounts of vacation days? Crossing the Atlantic takes around a week, that is a whole week that could be spent seeing and experiencing new sights, cultures, and food. I think the vast majority of people would agree that a week is much to long to spend travelling to the place you want your primary vacation to be at, not to mention that would be a whole week of nothing to see but the ship (after about the 2nd day the ship is boring). It also is much cheaper to fly so more money can be spent in the country the vacation is in.
I think I'd rather take a cruise ship and have lots of drinks than take a plane and not be allowed any.
Every plane I have ever flown on served drinks so that is not an issue. Sure you can't get obnoxious and out of control drunk but they always served me enough to make me happy and never have cut me off. Cruise ships are also expensive (the transatlantic cruises I could find from the US to Europe ranged from $3,000-10,000 and take a long time to get to their destination). Sure, it would be interesting to go on one of those cruises but I would rather spend a week or two travelling all over Europe rather then spend the majority of my time crossing the Atlantic with nothing to see but the ship (even on the Caribbean cruises I have been on that stopped almost daily at new islands I got sick of being on the ship). I guess if you don't have to worry about vacation days and are rich your way may be feasable but to most people it is not.
Every several years Microsoft claims they'll be hiring in the Puget Sound area, but then it turns out they've just hired in India, or China or Russia, etc.
Are you serious?? You are completely off base, MS is hiring like crazy right now at Redmond. I actually recently got invited out to Redmond to interview for a senior developer position and I am not H1-B, etc, I am a US citizen.
So if you wanted to make the trip between say Chicago and Amsterdam how exactly would you go about it besides flying and do so in a timely matter? You might be happy never seeing anywhere but the continent you live on but most people don't have your same mindset.
Really? They delay the flight to unload the baggage, then go through it to find one bad? Didn't know that.
I don't remember them ever delaying a flight by more than 20 minutes to wait up on no-shows.
Yes, they really would delay the flight if they had to to find the bag. I think the reason you never have noticed a delay for a no show is because you may not have noticed but they usually wait to load the luggage until people start boarding. I do not know exactly how the process works but since the bags all have tags on them it would not be that hard to use a scanner on a bag before sending it up the loading belt. If the bag scan reports that the person has not yet boarded the plane then set the bag aside to rescan after the other bags are checked. There should not be a delay using a system similar to that.
I was about to say the same thing. If a passenger does not board a flight then their luggage is not put on the plane.
Just estimate the time for maximum impact, laptop turns on and detonates the 'extra' battery that is made up of C4.. now you have a nice big hole in the bottom of the plane..
m enuitem.f76d98ccce4cabed5efa421766030730?selectedI D=2728&seriesyn=true
This most likely would not work since most airports (100% in the US) use explosive detection systems such as CTX scanners like the following: http://www.gesecurity.com/portal/site/GESecurity/
They do have false positives but I would much rather have some false positives occur if it prevents real bombs from getting by. Basically how I understand these systems work is partially by checking the density and volume of the materials (using X-ray's and a CT scanner) within the bag to compare to known densities of explosives and if a "match" occurs they flag the bag and then a security employee must hand check it. If these machines are as good as the claims I have heard then I am very happy they are around and I think they would catch your bomb in a laptop/pda device in a heartbeat.
The keyboard could actually use a redesign because there are a number of keys that have no use anymore for most people. Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break.
Print screen has actually been very helpful to me in the past when I want someone I am trying to help (who has minimal computer skills and is on a Windows machine) to create a screenshot to send to me. I just tell them to make sure to have what I am interested in seeing on the screen and then have them press Print Screen, open up MS Paint, hit CTRL+V, then save the file as a JPEG and send it to me. It is a quick and easy way to get a screenshot since there is a button right on the keyboard and the other steps are trivial.
Scroll Lock and Pause/Break I do not use too often but Caps Lock comes in handy often enough that I don't think it should be phased out just yet.
Whats inside the finger does not really matter. Once it hits the skin it shuts down, so a hotdog is a worthy thing to test with. It also has been used in real life and stopped and barely broken the skin (less damage than a paper cut) successfully. I also know that one of the companies representatives has done live demonstrations using his own fingers. If those facts don't convince you that it is MUCH safer than a plain old saw then I don't know what will. I wouldn't recommend putting your fingers into one of the machines for fun but from everything I know about the product it is worlds better than the old saws. It is very, very safe.
If you would have RTFA you would have seen they tested it with hot dogs.
You should check out NetFlix if you haven't yet. You get all the same renting benefits but pay less money overall. You do have to wait a few days to get the DVDs but if you have a bunch of movies queued up it shouldn't matter since you will have other movies to watch already.
Mod me troll (and grammar nazi), but DivX is a MPEG4-based codec that was named after the DIVX you-re talking about. That's why the first versions of DivX was named DivX 3.11 :-)
First of all who gives a shit, this is well known and nobody cares except the nazis as you self proclaimed yourself. The words are spelled the same so thats all that matters to most people. It was also easy to tell which context the person was using it in or were you confused since he spelled it DivX? Oh no you weren't since you had to point it out. When you talk to someone about the two do you say "Capital D lowercase i lowercase v capital X"? No, you pronounce both of them the same and that is all that matters and if you are conversing by typing to each other than you should be able to tell from the context of the conversation which "divx" is intended. It is annoying when people point this out everytime someone types DivX instead of DIVX.
Which is why we now use dvd shrink
I have always used DVD shrink as I liked it the best. I don't think it is being updated anymore however and if so then it is basically in the same boat as DVD Decrypter.
If it sucks, hey it cost less than a burrito, not a big deal.
Ahh, you must eat at Chipotle as well. Good food although somewhat pricey compared to competitors.
and NO, i'm not upgrading the f'ing radio just so I can listen to the same thing available on CD. My "newer" car may play MP3's, but Its just as easy to create a mix on the computer and burn it to a music CD.
7 36569-7252810?v=glance&n=172282
My mom on the other hand does not yet have a computer and there is no way in hell you are going to convince her to replace her car stereo. If it doesn't play in the car, ITS BROKEN.
All you need to get a portable MP3 player to work in the car is an FM transmitter like this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000AAAPF/002-9
They are very inexpensive and work like a charm.
So tell me now how is bringing all of your CD's with you in the car where they can be broken/stolen better than having your whole music collection on an MP3 player that you can bring with you when you get out of the car??
My mom on the other hand does not yet have a computer
My 92 year old grandmother even has a computer, get your mom out of the stone age. My grandma got hers for free and yes it is dated but it does the job of letting her check her e-mail and play solitaire so it's just fine. There has to be someone around giving away an old system that you could setup for your mom, you just have to look around a bit.
It's not about when cars add them in - it's the large number of cars out there that don't support it. For them, the CD is a requirement, FM Broadcaster units for MP3 players aside.
I think you are confused. Every car I have ever been in since I was born in 1981 has everything needed to be able to interface with a portable MP3 player that has a radio broadcaster. You set the broadcaster that is hooked to the MP3 player to a certain radio station and then you tune your car to that radio station and viola you are connected and can play songs directly through your cars radio. There is no added requirement on the car side that is not pretty much already standard since very few cars that I have seen do not have at least a basic radio.
It's cheap (like 10 bucks for 10 CD-Rs)
t a-branded-cd-r-cdr-52x-80min-700mb-blank-cd-media- in-50-100-200-500-1000-pack-group-1832.htm
Holy shit man, where do you live? That is NOT cheap! I recommend you check out my favorite place to get optical media:
http://www.allmediaoutlet.com/allmedia/ritek-rida
You can get much MUCH better value you for your money there and many other places as well. If you have to get those "audio" CD-R's then they have decent deals on those too.
That, and I hate the iPod and mp3 players. They break more often than a 2 dollar pair of Giant Tiger headphones.
What exactly do you do to these things? I have had my iPod for quite a while and it is still in pristine shape and I use it every day on my way to work. Granted, my ipod came with a case from here: http://www.vajacases.com/index_01.html that gives it a whole lot of protection but even without the case I don't think it would be in bad shape. I know many people who don't have iPod cases and they aren't breaking their's all the time. What exactly makes a portable CD player more durable than an MP3 player that is well built like the iPod?? If I was going to do a stress comparison between an iPod and a normal portable CD player I would bet my money the iPod would be more durable and last longer, those things are built tough.
The CD's demise is certainly not pending, at least not in the near term.
While I somewhat agree with you I must say I think it will be less than 3-4 years before cars ditch CD players. Once personal MP3/OGG/etc players become more common I think more and more people will realize that they don't need a CD player in their car anymore, they can bring their entire music collection with them on their MP3 player and not have to worry about CD's getting damaged or stolen.
I was talking to an older gentleman (I would say in his 60's) the other day and he questioned me about my iPod and how many songs it can hold. When I told him I put every single CD (around 8,000 songs) I own on it and still have plenty of space left he was dumbfounded. He said he still carries a discman around with him and it is a hassle to only be able to bring a couple CD's along, he would love to have access to his whole music collection at all times. I am sure more older people are starting to learn about MP3 players and the advantages they have as well.
So, I think once more and more people realize the benefits of personal MP3 players and they become more widespread that the car CD player will be history. I also don't think that point in time is very far off. All that it will take is for MP3 players to all start coming with built in radio broadcasters (or whatever it is called) and then BAM, all you need is the radio in the car to listen to your music on the MP3 player and you don't even have to buy a separate broadcast unit. I think the broadcaster needs to be standard because I am amazed by the amount of people who don't know they exist and what they can do so they would never think it is possible to easily listen to a portable MP3 player in the car. The time is coming, just wait.
Finding a job that pays more than minimum wage in all this turmoil is very difficult and you should be thankful you got one.
This is simply not true unless you have no skills and nothing to offer. I got bored and posted my resume to monster.com and the response I got was overwelming, I eventually took it off of there because I was getting so many calls/emails. It was also not all headhunters, only about 25% (if that) were not people who actually worked for the companies that the jobs were at. I don't think I have anything exceptional to offer other than a pretty good understanding of c/c++ and the STL and I also can learn new concepts quickly. Sure, some of the companies offered shit salaries but there were quite a few that were between $75k-125k+, all for around 4 years of experience (and I have 2 but they still were interested) which seems damn good to me.
Two years ago the job market was tough, it took me six months to find the job I am at now and it was very frustrating. The job market nowadays however is worlds better if you at least have something to offer.
Turns out the refractive index of nose grease (i.e. wipe your finger down the OUTSIDE of your nose!) is approximately the same as celluloid.
doing the same thing and dunking your finger in a poorly poured beer will help the foam go down much faster too! Oh the stuff I learned in college...
Not really. The problem with offshored call centers is less so much that they don't understand English, though there may be a few strange idioms, if you're the sort of person who thinks it's fun to talk to call center operators in riddles and clever witticisms, instead of just getting to the point.
Yes, really. The problem is not that the person doesn't understand English, it's that they usually have a hard time understanding your accent and you have the same problem with them. The biggest problem on both ends is being able to clearly understand the other person since they have some type of accent which makes it more difficult to clearly hear what they are saying which leads to a lot of repeating on both ends.
This reason is exactly why chat is so much superior, both sides get to clearly see what the other person is saying which cuts down on many, many problems.
The main problem I continually run into with offshored customer support (etc.) is that they are so far removed from the corporate core of responsibility that they can't actually *do* anything. Not only that, but they can't even connect you with someone who can, no matter what you say. It's quite a bear to reach someone (onshore, of course) that actually can really fix your real problem. At very least, an onshored call center can either transfer you or give you a number of someone who is better equipped to handle you. With offshored customer service, "escalate" never means more than "add a note to the account entry that no one will read".
This most definitely is a problem with some companies but in my own experiences the people I have talked to usually had no problem at all getting what I wanted done although some times it took a little work. I mentioned the two flawless Dell experiences and another one I will mention that wasn't so easy was with Comcast. For some reason my connection completely died and did not come back for over a day. During that first day nobody could help me since they were sticking to the script and basically saying the problem was on my side even though I knew it wasn't since I could easily ping the comcast DNS servers but could not communicate to anything outside. I finally got ahold of a level 1 support guy who found out my connection had been shutoff for "over usage" and he hit some buttons and everything worked fine again. It just depends who you get a hold of, some of them are just clueless so it might take a while to find someone who knows how to do something.
But this is why I use the internet if at all possible rather than picking up the phone, because it's very likely that, outsourced or not, I'm not going to be able to understand the person on the other end.
I completely agree. The online customer service where you can chat live is my personal favorite and in my experience it has been both much faster than waiting on hold and like you mentioned I have never been unable to understand what the person I was chatting with was trying to communicate. I also prefer it because of the real time nature it has compared to the back and forth of e-mail which can take days.
Two experiences that really stick out in my mind both were dealing with Dell (who I must add that I HATE calling their customer service). The first time I used Dell's online chat my brand new home theater project had one pixel that was constantly on which I just was not going to deal with because of the price of the thing plus the fact it was delivered that way. It only took 10 minutes while I explained the problem and gave them my shipping information and about 3 days later a brand new projector arrived which I hooked up, tested, and then put the old projector in the box and shipped it back.
The second time was at my work where my LCD monitor was starting to have full lines near the bottom of the screen that were either off completely or on and all goofy colored. I went to the online chat again and after hooking up another monitor to make sure the problem was not with the video card the agent told me that they would ship a replacement and it arrived the very next day. They actually sent me two monitors by accident and I of course sent the extra monitor back but it would have been nice to have a 2nd monitor to try if for some reason one of the "new" monitors had a problem too such as burnt out/stuck pixels.
For most customer service related conversations I think chatting online is way much superior to the usual hassle of calling on the phone, waiting forever on hold, and then getting someone who is hard to understand and communicate with. I would like more companies start setting up online chat because it could be more effective, a better experience for the customer, and it probably would be cheaper since no phone would be needed and a customer service representative could handle more than one person at a time pretty easily. Of course the companies cannot get rid of phone support completely since some people do not have internet and some people prefer the phone but they should still at least consider setting up online chat support.
Does anyone else agree?
My guess is that the marketer "showing off" the voice recognition didn't properly train the software before the demonstration. If he did do that then he obviously did not pick and test something that was at least known to work which is not a bad idea when you are doing product demos. The software obviously has much work left since it interpreted the two syllable sentence "select all." as 13 syllables "so double the killer delete select all" (while it did finally get "select all" where the hell did the rest of that come from?). I am suprised that Microsoft had so much confidence they would go on live TV with it.
This is one reason that I believe until software is done being fully tested and is fully released that someone technical and who knows the software inside and out (one of the developers) should be demonstrating the products. Leave the non technical marketers to demonstrate products that they can't mess up, kind of like the classes they had to take in college to get a marketing degree.
or type your message and encrypt it and then attach that to the e-mail. Your system fails to add anything of worth when real time communication is needed. I also really doubt that they would be able to decrypt any decently encrypted VoIP in any relevant time frame, so it may raise some flags but at least realtime communication should be safe. I don't care if it raises any red flags since I am not doing anything illegal (although encrypting VoIP without a backdoor may be in the future and that would be a shame) I just want my privacy.
Make a wav or mp3, encrypt it and send it as an attachment and you will not raise any flags, and that is the most important thing of all.
For me, the most important thing is not to refrain from raising any red flags, it is to keep my personal communications personal. I shouldn't have to go through extra bullshit like recording myself and encrypting it to keep my privacy.
Record a Wav file, encrypt it and send it via email.
If I was just going to e-mail someone I might as well just type the message and encrypt it instead of going through the hassle of recording what I want to say and then attaching that to an encrypted e-mail. Sometimes you want/need real time interaction and if VoIP becomes the norm I don't want any backdoors and I want control of the encryption. Also, encrypted VoIP would probably just look like "normal" traffic as well, at least if it is done right.
It's not real time, but if you need to talk to someone it will not get intercepted. This is not hard...
Both the encrypted e-mail as well as encrypted VoIP can be intercepted if someone wants to put enough effort into it by capturing all the packets. I fail to see how you think there is a difference between the two forms of communication since they both would just be sending encrypted data over the net.