I upgraded from an old Keyboard (which I'd had for several years) to a Voyage, and it was definitely worth it for the better display and the built-in light. Can't think of anything that would convince me to upgrade again until my Voyage dies, though.
My Voyage has been in airplane mode since I've owned it, and I left the wifi off for years on my old Keyboard. It increases the battery life tremendously. Plus, I transfer and manage all my books via USB with Calibre anyway, and I've always got a backlog of dozens of books loaded on the Kindle, so I really have no use for the wifi connectivity.
Back when I was with T-Mobile (on an old plan long out of contract), my bill went up twenty or thirty cents every couple of months like clockwork, despite the base price never changing. By the time I left them, I was paying well over $50 a month for my $35 plan (which, being an old plan, was 300 minutes a month and no data service). Now I pay $25 a month plus sales tax for a Virgin Mobile plan with 300 minutes and unlimited data, and the price never changes.
If a headhunter is charging *job seekers* money, then it's a scam and you should stay the hell away regardless of any promises they might make. Legit recruiters get paid by the companies they recruit for, not the potential employees.
I'll usually give someone a honk if they do something stupid and dangerous that nearly causes an accident. Most bad drivers will be too oblivious to know (or care) why you honked at them anyway, but there's always a small chance the offender will hear it and think "oh hey, I must have done something dumb there..." and then be more careful in the future. Getting all angry and laying on the horn and cussing at 'em incessantly doesn't do anything useful, though, and just makes you more likely to do something stupid yourself.
I used to work for a web hosting company, and it was amazing how many of our clients would submit support tickets demanding that we make their $15/mo shared web hosting accounts PCI compliant. We even had some actual *banks* hosting their web sites on our cheap shared accounts. I suspect a lot of the problem was that these customers had no IT staff or knowledge and didn't understand that their requests were ridiculous or what a terrible idea it was to store unencrypted financial data on a third party shared hosting platform. (Unfortunately, since we'd gotten out of the dedicated server business and only sold shared hosting, we weren't even supposed to tell these poor folks that it was a terrible idea and they really needed a dedicated self-managed system of some sort at a minimum, since that would mean we'd lose their account.)
There is little or no profit in selling sub-$10 hosting accounts. Your cheap hosting is subsidized by upselling other high-margin services, especially advertising services, to hosting customers, and often by monetizing your site itself. (Have you checked your site's default HTTP error pages lately? Odds are good that they're full of targeted ads based on your domain name.) If those revenue sources become less profitable, your hosting costs will eventually go up (or your hosting company will go out of business).
I had reservations about Vista myself, but honestly I've had no complaints about it so far. It took me an hour or so to figure out how to disable the annoying shit, eye candy, and resource-hogging unneccesary services, and now it runs fine and pretty much looks and acts much like my old Win2K installation from a UI standpoint.
That said, however, that I got Vista with a new (and significantly better) system, rather than trying to install it on the older box I had Windows 2000 on. I suspect that it is a bigger resource hog than 2K/XP, but on my new system (E6850/2GB/8800GTS) it still runs much faster than 2K on my old system (XP2500+/512MB/GF6100). I can now play DX10 games and use other software that doesn't work on 2K, and I have had no problems with any of my existing software so far. Granted, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to buy it beyond the whole "new software won't work in 2K/XP in the near future" aspect. Compatibility with new stuff was pretty much the only reason I went with Vista instead of XP.
At a web hosting company I used to work for in Orlando, our main datacenter was in Fremont, CA, and we had servers hosted in a few other datacenters around the country, but we also had a number of older servers hosted in our Orlando office, a small office/industrial building in an industrial park. When I first started working there, the "server room" there was a tiny supply closet with wire bookshelves holding the servers. Cooling was provided by going into the ceiling, ripping the flexible AC ductwork off of other outlets, and dropping it into the closet.
At one point, we got rid of one of our data centers and moved several dozen old BSDi web servers from it to the Orlando office. There was no room for them in our server closet, so we stuck them in an uncooled storage area in the warehouse section in back. Now, this was in Florida, so that room would routinely be well over 100 degrees during the summer. We usually had to reboot a dozen of those servers a day when they'd overheat. Sometimes they wouldn't recognize the hot-swappable drives upon rebooting. When that happened, we'd just yank the drives out and throw them in the break room freezer for five minutes, then plug them back in.
At some point, they moved the server "rack" (a wire shelf with wheels) out to the garage area and left the garage door open to provide some ventilation. Of course, this meant that there was a rack of computers on wheels, not secured in any manner, sitting inside an open garage in the middle of an industrial ghetto (our cars were regularly broken into while parked at the office). I'm amazed no one simply walked in and wheeled them away.
Despite all that, those servers continued to run just fine and almost never had any hardware failures. They eventually built a real server room with its own climate control and moved everything there, and those things kept right on going up until the time the company that bought them out closed that office.
I enjoy EVE personally, but I was lucky enough to have joined the game as part of a large group already well-established deep in hostile space, areas that most newbies don't see for quite a while. I was helping to kill fleets of expensive battleships in huge battles before my two week trial was up. If not for that, I would never have joined in the first place.
I do have to disagree with your assertation that small ships are powerless against larger ones, though. The corporation I belong to is infamous for swarming and destroying fleets of large and powerful enemy ships with groups composed largely of first-tier frigates. I've been in battles where a group of frigates took down multiple battleships. Hell, I was even in one where about sixty of us went out in the nearly useless default ships you get at the beginning of the game and destroyed a hapless battlecruiser in about ten seconds. With good fleet commanders, a well-coordinated force of weaker ships can take on quite a bit. We often tend to take huge losses numbers-wise in such engagements, but when all of our lost ships combined cost less than just the guns on the enemy's ship, we still come out way ahead in the end.
You are correct about the lag, though. That's easily the most frustrating part of the game. It doesn't bother me one bit to lose a ship in fair combat, but getting blown up before your client even loads the enemy fleet really sucks.
A person who has one of these players wouldn't have to say anything. Product recalls are strictly voluntary for consumers. That, of course, makes this lawsuit completely useless in terms of getting unlocked players out of the public's hands, since anyone who knew enough to unlock their player sure as hell isn't going to send it back for a refund because it can bypass DRM. This lawsuit is most likely a warning, as you said, and an attempt to establish precedent for future cases against any next-gen HD media player manufacturers who release similar unlockable products.
The only chance newspapers have of surviving is to provide some sort of "alternative commentary". Open a typical newspaper today, and what do you see? A bunch of national news, most of it compiled or simply copied directly from the wire services, and maybe a couple of local interest articles. Much of their content just covers the four Ws (who, what, when, where) and stops there. That was a fine approach a decade ago when newspapers would be the most up-to-date news source that most people had access to, aside from television and radio newscasts which usually provide even less detail. However, it just doesn't work today. Why am I going to pay a good chunk of money every month for a newspaper that consists mostly of ads and stuff from the AP or Reuters that I already read word-for-word on CNN.com the day before?
Basically, newspapers are going to have to provide something besides stale wire reports and three-paragraph news articles. More focus on local news and issues would be a start. Forget the national news; most people already get that from other sources long before it's published in a newspaper. Stick with the local stuff, the things people won't find anywhere except their hometown paper. If you are going to cover a national news story, go beyond the four Ws. Have your reporters do some more in-depth analysis or investigation. Basically, give people something they can't find ten thousand identical copies of at news.google.com.
I also have a phobia of needles, though not as bad (I have gotten immunizations without going physically nuts, but it's extremely stressful). If your girlfriend's is anything like mine, a local anesthetic won't help a bit. It's not the pain that bothers me (most injections don't even hurt that much...), it's the thought of the needle piercing my skin and injecting crap into me (or sucking crap out) that just freaks me out. Can't stand 'em...
Indeed. I'm sure pointy-haired middle-management types will be ecstatic about this technology as yet another way to turn a qualitative characteristic into quantitative data, so they can pretend to be doing something useful by plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and enforcing metrics instead of actually having to use their own judgement to determine whether their employees are meeting qualitative goals like politeness and good telephone manners.
The basic auth logout: yes, people have been asking for it for years, but it's HTTP itself that doesn't provide a mechanism for logging out users, it's not Apache's fault.
This one baffled me as well. How could you have a "logout" function in a stateless protocol? Logins don't persist beyond the fulfillment of a single request. The storing of a username and password for HTTP authentication is implemented on the client side, it has nothing to do with the web server or even the protocol. Complain to Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera Software or whoever makes your browser if you don't like it.
It's unlikely we will ever see a device to actively restrict drivers to the speed limit in the U.S., given the huge amount of revenue generated from speeding fines. If we were to implement such a device, it would likely be one that automatically *fines* a driver who exceeds the speed limit, as opposed to slowing their vehicle down.
Reminds me of when my old Packard Bell 486's power supply fried itself years ago. A new Packard Bell PSU was over a hundred bucks, and although the motherboard connector was standard, the physical dimensions of the PSU were smaller than most standard power supplies. Instead of paying for a new Packard Bell unit, I just took one of my standard spares and hooked it up outside the case, with the wires running through the old PSU fan/plug hole into the case. That old thing ran for a couple more years like that. (Luckily a 486SX 25MHz didn't exactly need much cooling, since there was no case fan, just the PSU fan...;) )
1. Of course, you're right, it's simply not possible to take a clear picture of a fast-moving object like, say, a race car, an airplane, or a bullet.
2. When landing, their engines will be throttled back, and therefore much quieter than usual. Also, ever heard of earplugs?
3. First you have to get the terrorists and their rocket launchers TO the beach without being noticed. Might be kind of hard considering it's a popular tourist spot on a small island in the middle of the Caribbean.
If you have a cassette player in your car, you can probably find a portable MP3 CD player with a cassette adapter and 12V DC power adapter for around twenty bucks. The sound isn't the best, but if you're just listening to speech, it's more than sufficient. If you want something fancier, MP3-CD head units can be had for around a hundred bucks these days. Really, the only advantage I can see of a solid-state or HDD-based MP3 player over an MP3-CD player is portability (for the solid-state players) or total capacity (for the HDD units). When you can hold 700MB of MP3s on a $0.10 CD-R and play 'em with a $20 MP3-CD player, what's the point in spending $200+ for an Ipod?
You could also just make good old audio CDs from the MP3 files, if they'd fit on a CD.
What it can be used for is to access material related to whatever physical task you are currently performing. If you're working on your car, you could access electronic reference materials. If you're walking around a strange town or city, you could pull up a map of the area, a list of restaurants, or a language reference if you're in another country. I don't think people would really be trying to use it to, say, write code while they're driving (hopefully!).
I agree that it is kind of a niche market. It's not going to be very popular with the home theater crowd, for sure, but I actually prefer watching movies on my PC. My 19" TV isn't much bigger than my 17" monitor, and with my lousy vision, the monitor is easier to see. Plus, it means I don't have to leave the house to go to Blockbuster, which probably wouldn't be open anyway at the time I'm in the mood for a movie.
That said, MovieLink isn't worth $5 per movie, but there are the $1 rentals at real.movielink.com (only one per week, but still a deal...), and I've actually found a few interesting flicks in their $2 and $3 rentals that I may try sometime. And with their connection speeds, it only takes me about 40 minutes to download a 700MB movie, so it's actually about as fast as hitting the video store, and much faster than Netflix. I'd probably only watch half a dozen movies at most in a month anyway, so MovieFlix would actually end up a little cheaper than the $20 mail-order services if I stuck to the $3 and below movies.
Thanks for the link! A $5 online movie rental is a bit much, but a 99-cent rental, I like. And I really like their fast servers. I'm getting almost 2Mbps (on my 3Mbps DSL connection). My first movie should be done in about half an hour. Not bad at all...
What strikes me as odd about the offer, though, is that it's supposedly for RealNetworks "customers", which I am not, but it still let me get a movie for 99 cents. Wonder if they're planning to implement tighter security or verification for this offer instead of just a different URL in the future? Sure hope not...an occasional $1 movie ain't worth signing up for (and paying for!) RealNetworks crap...
You can store the movie for 30 days without watching it, but as soon as you begin playing the file, you have 24 hours to watch it before it expires.
I tried their little free movie download to see how their stuff works. I think the 30-day limit may be a function of MovieLink's software, actually, as the media file itself just seems to have a 24-hour limit from the time it was first opened. So you might be able to keep the unplayed file longer by copying it to another location (so that the MovieLink software doesn't delete the copy), but the 24-hour playback limit is built into the file.
Their service might actually be worthwhile if their prices were lower, but $5 is a bit steep for renting a movie. Yeah, I know, that's what Blockbuster charges too, but that's why I haven't been to Blockbuster in a long time... Still, they have some half-decent flicks for $2-$3. I might give 'em a try sometime if I'm hankering for a movie to watch...
Back when I was in college, there were a few computers in the labs that I would use regularly, but it had nothing to do with "humanizing" them...it had to do with the fact that, of all the systems there, most of their monitors were in terrible condition...dark, and usually so fuzzy and out of alignment that it was literally impossible to read 10pt or smaller fonts at 800x600. Not to mention the fact that a lot of these systems were locked at a migrane-inducing vertical refresh rate of 60hz. The few that had decent monitors and higher refresh rates (or unprotected desktop settings) were worth waiting for...
Probably a lot of them are getting pressured from their bosses to make these adjustments, i.e. "Make sure payroll expenses stay under $X/wk, whatever it takes, or else...but don't let it affect prodution!" I suppose that in many cases, it comes down to making illegal "corrections" to the employee's hours, or getting disciplined or fired. Doesn't make it right in any way, but with the economy the way it is, I suppose there are more people out there who are willing to compromise their morals to keep a steady paycheck.
Of course, if the company gets caught and a complaint is ever filed, upper management denies all knowledge of the practice and blames it all on the manager(s) who actually made the alterations, so they get screwed in the end anyway. Can't say I feel very sorry for 'em, though...
Slashdot Mirror
I upgraded from an old Keyboard (which I'd had for several years) to a Voyage, and it was definitely worth it for the better display and the built-in light. Can't think of anything that would convince me to upgrade again until my Voyage dies, though.
My Voyage has been in airplane mode since I've owned it, and I left the wifi off for years on my old Keyboard. It increases the battery life tremendously. Plus, I transfer and manage all my books via USB with Calibre anyway, and I've always got a backlog of dozens of books loaded on the Kindle, so I really have no use for the wifi connectivity.
Back when I was with T-Mobile (on an old plan long out of contract), my bill went up twenty or thirty cents every couple of months like clockwork, despite the base price never changing. By the time I left them, I was paying well over $50 a month for my $35 plan (which, being an old plan, was 300 minutes a month and no data service). Now I pay $25 a month plus sales tax for a Virgin Mobile plan with 300 minutes and unlimited data, and the price never changes.
If a headhunter is charging *job seekers* money, then it's a scam and you should stay the hell away regardless of any promises they might make. Legit recruiters get paid by the companies they recruit for, not the potential employees.
I'll usually give someone a honk if they do something stupid and dangerous that nearly causes an accident. Most bad drivers will be too oblivious to know (or care) why you honked at them anyway, but there's always a small chance the offender will hear it and think "oh hey, I must have done something dumb there..." and then be more careful in the future. Getting all angry and laying on the horn and cussing at 'em incessantly doesn't do anything useful, though, and just makes you more likely to do something stupid yourself.
I used to work for a web hosting company, and it was amazing how many of our clients would submit support tickets demanding that we make their $15/mo shared web hosting accounts PCI compliant. We even had some actual *banks* hosting their web sites on our cheap shared accounts. I suspect a lot of the problem was that these customers had no IT staff or knowledge and didn't understand that their requests were ridiculous or what a terrible idea it was to store unencrypted financial data on a third party shared hosting platform. (Unfortunately, since we'd gotten out of the dedicated server business and only sold shared hosting, we weren't even supposed to tell these poor folks that it was a terrible idea and they really needed a dedicated self-managed system of some sort at a minimum, since that would mean we'd lose their account.)
There is little or no profit in selling sub-$10 hosting accounts. Your cheap hosting is subsidized by upselling other high-margin services, especially advertising services, to hosting customers, and often by monetizing your site itself. (Have you checked your site's default HTTP error pages lately? Odds are good that they're full of targeted ads based on your domain name.) If those revenue sources become less profitable, your hosting costs will eventually go up (or your hosting company will go out of business).
I had reservations about Vista myself, but honestly I've had no complaints about it so far. It took me an hour or so to figure out how to disable the annoying shit, eye candy, and resource-hogging unneccesary services, and now it runs fine and pretty much looks and acts much like my old Win2K installation from a UI standpoint.
That said, however, that I got Vista with a new (and significantly better) system, rather than trying to install it on the older box I had Windows 2000 on. I suspect that it is a bigger resource hog than 2K/XP, but on my new system (E6850/2GB/8800GTS) it still runs much faster than 2K on my old system (XP2500+/512MB/GF6100). I can now play DX10 games and use other software that doesn't work on 2K, and I have had no problems with any of my existing software so far. Granted, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to buy it beyond the whole "new software won't work in 2K/XP in the near future" aspect. Compatibility with new stuff was pretty much the only reason I went with Vista instead of XP.
At a web hosting company I used to work for in Orlando, our main datacenter was in Fremont, CA, and we had servers hosted in a few other datacenters around the country, but we also had a number of older servers hosted in our Orlando office, a small office/industrial building in an industrial park. When I first started working there, the "server room" there was a tiny supply closet with wire bookshelves holding the servers. Cooling was provided by going into the ceiling, ripping the flexible AC ductwork off of other outlets, and dropping it into the closet.
At one point, we got rid of one of our data centers and moved several dozen old BSDi web servers from it to the Orlando office. There was no room for them in our server closet, so we stuck them in an uncooled storage area in the warehouse section in back. Now, this was in Florida, so that room would routinely be well over 100 degrees during the summer. We usually had to reboot a dozen of those servers a day when they'd overheat. Sometimes they wouldn't recognize the hot-swappable drives upon rebooting. When that happened, we'd just yank the drives out and throw them in the break room freezer for five minutes, then plug them back in.
At some point, they moved the server "rack" (a wire shelf with wheels) out to the garage area and left the garage door open to provide some ventilation. Of course, this meant that there was a rack of computers on wheels, not secured in any manner, sitting inside an open garage in the middle of an industrial ghetto (our cars were regularly broken into while parked at the office). I'm amazed no one simply walked in and wheeled them away.
Despite all that, those servers continued to run just fine and almost never had any hardware failures. They eventually built a real server room with its own climate control and moved everything there, and those things kept right on going up until the time the company that bought them out closed that office.
I enjoy EVE personally, but I was lucky enough to have joined the game as part of a large group already well-established deep in hostile space, areas that most newbies don't see for quite a while. I was helping to kill fleets of expensive battleships in huge battles before my two week trial was up. If not for that, I would never have joined in the first place.
I do have to disagree with your assertation that small ships are powerless against larger ones, though. The corporation I belong to is infamous for swarming and destroying fleets of large and powerful enemy ships with groups composed largely of first-tier frigates. I've been in battles where a group of frigates took down multiple battleships. Hell, I was even in one where about sixty of us went out in the nearly useless default ships you get at the beginning of the game and destroyed a hapless battlecruiser in about ten seconds. With good fleet commanders, a well-coordinated force of weaker ships can take on quite a bit. We often tend to take huge losses numbers-wise in such engagements, but when all of our lost ships combined cost less than just the guns on the enemy's ship, we still come out way ahead in the end.
You are correct about the lag, though. That's easily the most frustrating part of the game. It doesn't bother me one bit to lose a ship in fair combat, but getting blown up before your client even loads the enemy fleet really sucks.
A person who has one of these players wouldn't have to say anything. Product recalls are strictly voluntary for consumers. That, of course, makes this lawsuit completely useless in terms of getting unlocked players out of the public's hands, since anyone who knew enough to unlock their player sure as hell isn't going to send it back for a refund because it can bypass DRM. This lawsuit is most likely a warning, as you said, and an attempt to establish precedent for future cases against any next-gen HD media player manufacturers who release similar unlockable products.
The only chance newspapers have of surviving is to provide some sort of "alternative commentary". Open a typical newspaper today, and what do you see? A bunch of national news, most of it compiled or simply copied directly from the wire services, and maybe a couple of local interest articles. Much of their content just covers the four Ws (who, what, when, where) and stops there. That was a fine approach a decade ago when newspapers would be the most up-to-date news source that most people had access to, aside from television and radio newscasts which usually provide even less detail. However, it just doesn't work today. Why am I going to pay a good chunk of money every month for a newspaper that consists mostly of ads and stuff from the AP or Reuters that I already read word-for-word on CNN.com the day before?
Basically, newspapers are going to have to provide something besides stale wire reports and three-paragraph news articles. More focus on local news and issues would be a start. Forget the national news; most people already get that from other sources long before it's published in a newspaper. Stick with the local stuff, the things people won't find anywhere except their hometown paper. If you are going to cover a national news story, go beyond the four Ws. Have your reporters do some more in-depth analysis or investigation. Basically, give people something they can't find ten thousand identical copies of at news.google.com.
I also have a phobia of needles, though not as bad (I have gotten immunizations without going physically nuts, but it's extremely stressful). If your girlfriend's is anything like mine, a local anesthetic won't help a bit. It's not the pain that bothers me (most injections don't even hurt that much...), it's the thought of the needle piercing my skin and injecting crap into me (or sucking crap out) that just freaks me out. Can't stand 'em...
Indeed. I'm sure pointy-haired middle-management types will be ecstatic about this technology as yet another way to turn a qualitative characteristic into quantitative data, so they can pretend to be doing something useful by plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and enforcing metrics instead of actually having to use their own judgement to determine whether their employees are meeting qualitative goals like politeness and good telephone manners.
The basic auth logout: yes, people have been asking for it for years, but it's HTTP itself that doesn't provide a mechanism for logging out users, it's not Apache's fault.
This one baffled me as well. How could you have a "logout" function in a stateless protocol? Logins don't persist beyond the fulfillment of a single request. The storing of a username and password for HTTP authentication is implemented on the client side, it has nothing to do with the web server or even the protocol. Complain to Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera Software or whoever makes your browser if you don't like it.
It's unlikely we will ever see a device to actively restrict drivers to the speed limit in the U.S., given the huge amount of revenue generated from speeding fines. If we were to implement such a device, it would likely be one that automatically *fines* a driver who exceeds the speed limit, as opposed to slowing their vehicle down.
Reminds me of when my old Packard Bell 486's power supply fried itself years ago. A new Packard Bell PSU was over a hundred bucks, and although the motherboard connector was standard, the physical dimensions of the PSU were smaller than most standard power supplies. Instead of paying for a new Packard Bell unit, I just took one of my standard spares and hooked it up outside the case, with the wires running through the old PSU fan/plug hole into the case. That old thing ran for a couple more years like that. (Luckily a 486SX 25MHz didn't exactly need much cooling, since there was no case fan, just the PSU fan... ;) )
1. Of course, you're right, it's simply not possible to take a clear picture of a fast-moving object like, say, a race car, an airplane, or a bullet.
2. When landing, their engines will be throttled back, and therefore much quieter than usual. Also, ever heard of earplugs?
3. First you have to get the terrorists and their rocket launchers TO the beach without being noticed. Might be kind of hard considering it's a popular tourist spot on a small island in the middle of the Caribbean.
If you have a cassette player in your car, you can probably find a portable MP3 CD player with a cassette adapter and 12V DC power adapter for around twenty bucks. The sound isn't the best, but if you're just listening to speech, it's more than sufficient. If you want something fancier, MP3-CD head units can be had for around a hundred bucks these days. Really, the only advantage I can see of a solid-state or HDD-based MP3 player over an MP3-CD player is portability (for the solid-state players) or total capacity (for the HDD units). When you can hold 700MB of MP3s on a $0.10 CD-R and play 'em with a $20 MP3-CD player, what's the point in spending $200+ for an Ipod?
You could also just make good old audio CDs from the MP3 files, if they'd fit on a CD.
What it can be used for is to access material related to whatever physical task you are currently performing. If you're working on your car, you could access electronic reference materials. If you're walking around a strange town or city, you could pull up a map of the area, a list of restaurants, or a language reference if you're in another country. I don't think people would really be trying to use it to, say, write code while they're driving (hopefully!).
I agree that it is kind of a niche market. It's not going to be very popular with the home theater crowd, for sure, but I actually prefer watching movies on my PC. My 19" TV isn't much bigger than my 17" monitor, and with my lousy vision, the monitor is easier to see. Plus, it means I don't have to leave the house to go to Blockbuster, which probably wouldn't be open anyway at the time I'm in the mood for a movie.
That said, MovieLink isn't worth $5 per movie, but there are the $1 rentals at real.movielink.com (only one per week, but still a deal...), and I've actually found a few interesting flicks in their $2 and $3 rentals that I may try sometime. And with their connection speeds, it only takes me about 40 minutes to download a 700MB movie, so it's actually about as fast as hitting the video store, and much faster than Netflix. I'd probably only watch half a dozen movies at most in a month anyway, so MovieFlix would actually end up a little cheaper than the $20 mail-order services if I stuck to the $3 and below movies.
Thanks for the link! A $5 online movie rental is a bit much, but a 99-cent rental, I like. And I really like their fast servers. I'm getting almost 2Mbps (on my 3Mbps DSL connection). My first movie should be done in about half an hour. Not bad at all...
What strikes me as odd about the offer, though, is that it's supposedly for RealNetworks "customers", which I am not, but it still let me get a movie for 99 cents. Wonder if they're planning to implement tighter security or verification for this offer instead of just a different URL in the future? Sure hope not...an occasional $1 movie ain't worth signing up for (and paying for!) RealNetworks crap...
You can store the movie for 30 days without watching it, but as soon as you begin playing the file, you have 24 hours to watch it before it expires.
I tried their little free movie download to see how their stuff works. I think the 30-day limit may be a function of MovieLink's software, actually, as the media file itself just seems to have a 24-hour limit from the time it was first opened. So you might be able to keep the unplayed file longer by copying it to another location (so that the MovieLink software doesn't delete the copy), but the 24-hour playback limit is built into the file.
Their service might actually be worthwhile if their prices were lower, but $5 is a bit steep for renting a movie. Yeah, I know, that's what Blockbuster charges too, but that's why I haven't been to Blockbuster in a long time... Still, they have some half-decent flicks for $2-$3. I might give 'em a try sometime if I'm hankering for a movie to watch...
Back when I was in college, there were a few computers in the labs that I would use regularly, but it had nothing to do with "humanizing" them...it had to do with the fact that, of all the systems there, most of their monitors were in terrible condition...dark, and usually so fuzzy and out of alignment that it was literally impossible to read 10pt or smaller fonts at 800x600. Not to mention the fact that a lot of these systems were locked at a migrane-inducing vertical refresh rate of 60hz. The few that had decent monitors and higher refresh rates (or unprotected desktop settings) were worth waiting for...
Probably a lot of them are getting pressured from their bosses to make these adjustments, i.e. "Make sure payroll expenses stay under $X/wk, whatever it takes, or else...but don't let it affect prodution!" I suppose that in many cases, it comes down to making illegal "corrections" to the employee's hours, or getting disciplined or fired. Doesn't make it right in any way, but with the economy the way it is, I suppose there are more people out there who are willing to compromise their morals to keep a steady paycheck.
Of course, if the company gets caught and a complaint is ever filed, upper management denies all knowledge of the practice and blames it all on the manager(s) who actually made the alterations, so they get screwed in the end anyway. Can't say I feel very sorry for 'em, though...
DennyK