Ever since upgrading to 0.9 on Win2k Pro, I've had problems with my extensions (and now, on 0.9.1, with the Extension Manager). I was using only a few extensions on 0.8: AdBlock, NukeAnything and IEView. When I upgraded from 0.8 to 0.9, NukeAnything and IEView broke. I managed to get IEView back by uninstalling and reinstalling it, but doing that didn't help NukeAnything.
After hearing about BugMeNot, I'd decided to install it, and I'd also decided to try the flat bookmark editor. For some reason, I had problems with BugMeNot, but the flat bookmark editor appeared to work just fine.
Today, when I upgraded to 0.9.1, I started having problems with the Extension Manager itself. Because I had the default DOM inspector, the five other extensions were now too big to fit in default window of Extension Manager. Scrolling the window made my CPU utilization spike to 100% and the scrolling is dawg-slow.
As an experiment, I uninstalled all of my extensions, restarted FireFox, reinstalled my extensions and restarted FireFox again. The good news is that NukeAnything is finally working again. The bad news is that the Extension Manager still causes 100% utilization when scrolling.
I found it interesting that they did NOT mention the Internet or P2P file sharing as a cause for poor music sales.
Actually, Jeff Leeds--the guy from the LA Times--said, "This great boom almost turned inside out, because the very thing that led to it -- which was the idea that you could take music and turn it into a digital file and put it on a plastic disc -- that became really the unraveling of the business. Because those exact same digital files became something that you could take off of that disc, send to a friend or a million friends through the Internet. And that's why the business has the problem that it does right now."
He was immediately followed, however, by the manager for OutKast, Michael "Blue" Williams, who said, "In my opinion it's not downloading that's killing us, it's [that] we stopped putting out quality music. We stopped giving the public something to believe in. We started just giving them, 'Here take this, take this, take this.' And the public caught up to us and was like, 'Hey, we don't want to take it no more, and we get it someplace else.'"
I found it interesting that the show also attempted to contrast the creation of two new music acts: the young singer/songwriter; and the old-school "super group" formed by putting together the refugees from two formerly-great bands. But at the end of the show, while the "super group" was clearly a corporate creation, I didn't think the young singer/songwriter's songs were all that great, either. Sarah Hudson's songs clearly had been produced into the Avril Lavigne/Michelle Branch sort of sound. By contrast, Velvet Revolver's songs at least didn't sound like everything else on Clear Channel.
I've not worked outside the US, personally, but I have a hard time believing the US has a monopoly on evil, soulless corporations. Disney, Enron, et. al. are great examples, but there's no way they're the only ones. I'm sure people who work for Philips, Matsushita, Hyundai, etc. will report similar stories to those you hear from people toiling at GE, Exxon/Mobil or GM.
Besides, soon we'll all be working for soulless, globe-spanning megacorporations, living in company-owned housing, taking the company monorail to work, shopping at the company stores, rooting for the company sports teams and voting for company-endorsed political candidates.
That said, I actually like the company I work for. It's a privately-held company, which may have something to do with its generally employee-friendly ways. Publicly-held companies generally are enslaved by the Wall Street Analysts and large institutional investors.
I live in the greater Phoenix area, and I get about 33MPG on the highway. My commute is about 80% HWY to work and about 50% HWY on the way home from work (I use an asymmetrical route thanks to traffic patterns). The net result is that I average about 27-28MPG overall (I use a fuel log program to calculate my mileage with every fill-up).
My car? A 2002 Mercedes C230K Sport Coupe. That's right--a luxury sporty car that's got almost 200 horsepower. The car weighs about 3300 pounds (about 500 pounds more than a Civic Hybrid and 400 more than a Prius). My mileage doesn't seem to change much when it gets hot out, either. I seem to get close to the same mileage, regardless of whether I'm using the air conditioner or running the car in "EC" (economy) mode (A/C compressor is off in EC mode).
Granted, when I first got the car, I drove like a madman with a leadfoot and got about 19MPG, but as I settled into the car and learned to drive it properly, I also learned how to maximize my fuel economy. Keep in mind that the HWY driving I do is on a freeway where the posted speed limit is 65 MPH, and the actual speed driven by traffic is usually 75 MPH, with speeds occasionally topping out over 80 MPH.
So if I can get 27-28 MPG overall in a fancy, high-ish-performance luxury car that's loaded to the gills with safety features, what's so great about getting 32 MPG in a hybrid? Granted, you're getting almost 38 MPG, and that's nice, but it's disappointing. I was planning to sell my Mercedes and get something more economical, but I'm not so certain that I'll actually save much money at this point. Yes, there is the fact that my car is supercharged, and as such, requires premium gas, while the hybrids almost certainly run standard 87 octane gas, but still, I'm disappointed in the numbers I'm seeing. I was surprised to discover that my wife's CR-V gets 20% worse mileage than my Mercedes (on my same commute), but now I'm not so surprised. Just disappointed.
Given that my commute is about 45 miles round-trip, I'd love to find something that sips gas at a more miserly rate than my Mercedes (and uses cheaper gas, to boot), but recent news (coupled with my own experience driving my wife's CR-V) makes me skeptical. I think at this point, I'd rather drive my fun car that's not as relatively uneconomical as I'd thought.
I don't know how anybody can call "Unscrewed" one of their favorite shows. Martin Sargent is just not that funny, and Laura Swisher is too something. I tried to watch the show when it first came on, and it sucked. A few months went by and I thought, "Well, they haven't canceled it yet, so maybe it's gotten better." So I watched it again. It hadn't.
If you took everything funny out "The Man Show" and pointed it squarely at computer geeks, you'd have something sorta, kinda like "Unscrewed." But it would probably be funnier than "Unscrewed."
What? The original Baystar/RBC investment was $50 million combined, of which, Baystar's part was $20 million. RBC picked up the other $30 million. Today, RBC converted one-third of its investment into SCOX common stock. The remaining two-thirds was sold to Baystar for an undisclosed sum of money, but you can bet it's a helluvalot less than the original $20 million Baystar spent for the same quantity of Series A-1 shares in October.
To be blunt, RBC took it in the shorts on this investment. Baystar screwed them hard. Baystar hooked RBC up with the original PIPE, and then turned around and flushed the value down the toilet with their notice to SCO that they intended to get their money back. They didn't give any indication to RBC about the grounds they were using to justify their demand for the return of capital, so RBC had to stand by and watch their own deadline for making a similar demand expire.
Once that deadline passed, Baystar effectively had first-dibs on picking over SCO's carcass in an ensuing fight. RBC would have to wait until after Baystar got its money back (even though Baystar's investment was smaller) before making any attempt to recover its own investment. This forced RBC's hand. They could sit around and watch their entire $30 million get flushed down the drain, or they could sell (at a loss) most of their investment to Baystar and convert the rest to common stock (at a price that's nearly 2.5x the market price for those common stock shares) in the hopes that they'll get something if SCO wins the lottery.
Unless RBC never expected to make money on this deal for some obscure tax benefit, they got hosed badly. I'd expect to see the idiot at RBC who signed off on this deal resigning very soon to "pursue other opportunities."
Baystar, meanwhile, doubles their position in SCO's Series A-1 convertible preferred stock for a sum that's almost certainly a lot less than the $20 million they paid for the other 20,000 shares, thus reducing their average share price and giving them an ironclad fist around SCO's throat.
Baystar's not as stupid as we originally thought. RBC, meanwhile, comes off looking much stupider than we originally thought.
You catch on quick kemosabe... or you use THEIR DVR, which decides what you can record (if anything) or how long to keep it.. or how much to charge you every time you watch it...
Wrong. The CableCARD standard allows third-party set-top boxes to also contain decryptor cards, so DVRs are not only possible, they're on the way. Sony has announced two HD-compatible CableCARD-enabled set-top DVRs, in addition to a batch of CableCARD-enabled HDTV sets.
I also got my first CD player in 1985, and I remember CDs being $18 or so, but I probably lived in a more expensive part of town than you, figuratively speaking. Let's use your $12 number to save time. $12 in 1985 dollars is about $20 in 2004 dollars; if prices hadn't gone down, we'd be paying $20 per CD today.
I understand the concept of inflation. But please remember the CD player that I got in 1985 sold for $260. It held one CD at a time, wasn't portable, didn't have a remote control and didn't have anti-skip shock protection. Today, CD players with those specs cost $20. Why? Improvements in manufacturing, reduction in the cost to produce CD players and the biggest reason: economies of scale.
For some of the same reasons, the CDs themselves also cost less to produce today than they did in 1985. The difference between 1985 and 2004 retail pricing of CDs is other record industry costs. In 1985, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, et. al. weren't getting huge guaranteed contracts for albums that don't sell. Record companies today are paying Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera big bucks up front for records that are supposed to earn enough money to pay for all the marketing costs that get poured into marginal acts like Creed.
The problem is that record companies only know how to sell you what you bought last time, so innovation has been completely eliminated. They force-fed us more clones of Britney Spears until people stopped buying those CDs. In their rush to find the next Avril Lavigne, they completely missed out on the concept of finding quality artists recording quality music, so Norah Jones sneaked her way to selling 18 million CDs with virtually no promotion by her record company.
CDs cost more today because record companies changed their business models. Instead of finding and developing lots of inexpensive new artists and allowing the market to decide what's a hit, record companies today insist on pushing the same crap they sold us last year until we stop buying it, and they spend a fortune in promotions to try to reverse the inevitable declines. When we stop buying stuff we're tired of, the industry blames "piracy" for their decline in sales. But the real reason we stopped buying music is because they stopped publishing music we wanted to buy. How else do you explain the success of Norah Jones and the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou?
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
They have? That's news to me. When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
Does that excuse "piracy," or "theft" or whatever you want to call it? No, it doesn't, but let's ratchet down the level of nonsense in the rhetoric used here. "Stealing" isn't the right word for making an unauthorized copy of something. The original still exists and can be sold to someone, and "piracy" is a loaded word with completely inappropriate connotations. How about we just call it "unauthorized copying" or "copyright dilution"?
I've always had a problem with software and entertainment industry estimates of losses due to unauthorized copying. First, they assume that every copy illegally-made represents a lost sale, which is nonsense. If a 15-year-old kid has 8,000 songs on his hard drive, there's no chance in hell that he would have bought those 8,000 songs if he hadn't had access to them for free. He might have spent anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks on music, but there's no chance he'd have bought 600 CDs worth of music at $15-$18 a crack ($9,000-$11,000).
And here's another thing: Twenty years ago, my friends and I taped songs off of FM radio and played them in our walkmans. Or we'd dupe our LPs onto tape and trade copies with each other. I easily had access to ten times as much music as I could afford to buy, but in spite of record industry whining, I bought *more* music because of that practice, not less.
One study stated that that kids and adults alike who used the original Napster were more likely to buy music than people who didn't. Numerous studies have shown that there's zero correlation between "piracy" and the decline of sales for the music industry. Is it any surprise to people that the last year of sales increases for the music industry was the last year that the original Napster was in operation?
This is not an apologia for listening to music without paying for any of it. It's simply a realistic look at what's really going on. The record industry has its head up its ass and always has. Suing and prosecuting your customers is bad for business.
Software "piracy" is different, but not *that* different. Much of the software industry used to accept that "piracy" was just another form of marketing. Microsoft has always given lip service to stamping out "piracy," but until they had established a monopoly, they did virtually nothing to prevent it before the fact because they knew it was easier to convert a "pirate" into a paying customer than it was to get a skeptic to buy from you in the first place. Most people these days will automatically use MS products, so now Microsoft puts copy-protection technology in its products to force people to pay up-front.
Is making an unauthorized copy of music or software theft? According to the law, it is. However, there needs to be a middle ground between the "information wants to be free" left and the Ashcroft search-and-seizure right.
Most people would gladly reward artists and programmers for their work. That's how shareware works, and it made Phil Katz a substantial amount of money before his death. So how about we find new ways to reward creators of content, instead of finding new ways to criminalize what people have done for decades?
Don't misunderstand me. There are true criminals out there who are selling counterfeit or other illegally-copied versions of products (such as music and sof
As a Debian user, I prefer to install from Debian packages whenever possible. Why? Because Debian's QC is virtually unmatched. Of course, there are times when Debian's constitution or the applications' licenses (or both) forbid packaging certain kinds of applications (official Sun Java, for instance). In those cases, I either have to go get an RPM or a tarball and work through getting the app up and running manually.
It's much easier when I can count on Debian's package to install the app and ask me the appropriate questions required to get the app up and running. There's no comparison to the ease of getting MRTG up and running on Debian via packages vs. installing from a tarball.
However, my experiences with RPM-based distributions haven't been as good, and I'd be more tempted to build from source in those cases.
So, Jim, do you ever read alt.video.ptv.tivo? One of the regulars there posted an email he wrote to someone who asked him about your column. You may want to read it. Or you may not. He does call you a "complete ass."
Look. TiVo won't die. So the reviewer says he likes ReplayTV better and that TiVo won't dominate the market in years to come.
First off, the article states explicitly that the author prefers TiVo to Replay and all of its alternatives.
Secondly, he states that as much as he loves TiVo, he thinks they're doomed. As much as I love TiVo, I can't bury my head in the sand and assume they won't die just because I don't want them to.
The PVR market is already changing, and TiVo needs to get ahead of the trends in order to stay competitive. Standalone boxes will most likely go away in the next 3-5 years. TVs will come equipped with PVR functionality and have built-in cable tuners, thanks to the cable card specification.
TiVo has done a brilliant job with its UI and it's light-years ahead of other manufacturers in terms of partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers, and its deal with DirecTV is heavily driving growth in its customer base, but the future is about building PVR functionality into TVs or cable boxes, and TiVo has no cable-box partnerships and hasn't shown any signs of being able to penetrate that market.
Now, on to my criticisms of the article. Louderback assumes that the HD-capable DirecTV TiVo receiver will stay at $1000 for any length of time. He's clearly wrong on that. The price will come down quickly once DirecTV determines that HD TiVo ownership drives subscriptions to HD content. The manufacturing costs will decline as volume increases and the prices of 250GB HDs falls, which will encourage DirecTV to eventually subsidize the price of the receiver to drive sales of HD packages.
And likewise, the cable set-top box market might dry up and blow away entirely once cable card-enabled TVs start to hit the market. And TiVo will be able to sell standalone TiVos that could replace cable set-top boxes for customers who have older TVs. Yes, TiVo suffers a price disadvantage compared to the offerings of the cable companies, who are looking to "lock in" subscribers, but the advent of cable card will negate some of the lock-in advantage anyway.
At any rate, it's difficult to predict the future. I think Louderback's column was more intended as a shot across TiVo's bow than a true prediction of their death. I think he wants them to sit up and take notice of the threats that surround them so that they can devise adequate solutions to their problems, and I think he'd desperately like for them to return his calls or emails.
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodwill?
When I was a kid, my parents bought two sets of paper encyclopedias (one for grownups and one for kids). I read the kiddie one until I got to about 7th grade and needed the better info in the grownup set. Keep in mind that by the time I graduated high school, those encyclopedias were already 15 years old, and by the time my youngest brother graduated, they were almost 30 years old, but they STILL HAD SOME VALUE.
Clearly, you never thumbed through encyclopedias at random when you were a kid and stopped to read about tornadoes or the social life of ants. I want my kids to have that enjoyment, and I'm personally looking for a set of paper encyclopedias to share with my kids. Sure, we'll Google the Internet for current info on any topic they need to research, but nothing beats lying down on the floor and opening a random volume of the encyclopedia to a random page and reading something fascinating about the history of dogs.
I recently bought a house in a neighborhood where "free" (i.e., subsidized) cable is part of what your HOA dues pay for. I pay nothing extra for "extended basic" cable from my local cable company. Because of this, my cable modem service is discounted by $10 per month, and I could upgrade to digital cable for $11 a month.
However, I have DirecTV, and have had it for about 7 years now, and I'm very happy with it. I recently bought a couple of TiVo-integrated receivers, and the convenience and picture quality is excellent.
I've retasked my standalone TiVo (formerly connected to a Sony SAT-B2 DirecTV receiver) to connect to the "free" cable. This TiVo has been upgraded to 193 hours of basic quality, so I record nearly everything on Best quality. The picture quality still sucks. The picture I get from my cable company is significantly inferior to what I get from DirecTV. Before my wife and I got married, she had digital cable in her apartment, and its picture quality was not as consistently good as DirecTV's is.
I know that even by cable company standards, my lousy analog cable picture is abnormally bad. I also know that with Rupert Murdoch taking over at DirecTV, things are likely to go downhill in picture quality there. It's a tough call to make, but for now, I'm sticking with DirecTV and I'm not impressed with cable in my neighborhood.
What features does it have that a Tivo or ReplayTv doesn't have?
According to many reviews posted to alt.video.ptv.tivo, its primary advantages are bugs, bugs and more bugs. Some reviews have mentioned coming home to find the entire drive erased, or to find problems with the scheduler either not recording scheduled programs or recording only small snippets of shows (1-2 minutes).
There are apparently two major versions/codebases of software for the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVRs, and some revisions apparently work better than others, but for the most part, even the favorable reviews have concluded that the SA-8000 DVRs don't yet compare well to more mature DVRs from Tivo and ReplayTV.
I'm sure that over time, the SA-8000s and their derivatives will improve, but if you're comparing apples-to-apples today, you can do better than an SA-8000 from your cable company.
The sixty pages referred to in the original story are pages that SCO has promised to deliver to IBM when they get around to it.
Now, of course, the small font claim is something we shouldn't dismiss too lightly. SCO did originally try to meet its discovery obligations by providing IBM with something like 100 million lines of code printed out on paper.
My first 'puter was a Tandy TRS-80. It had 8 colors!
Even though Radio Shack called them all "TRS-80" for a while, the "true" "Trash-80" machines were b&w-only, Z80-based and ran TRS-DOS ("Trash DOS").
Methinks you had the Color Computer (forever known as the CoCo, thanks to the guys at Rainbow Magazine). That was the first computer my family ever owned, by the way. Dad brought it home with 4k and a cassette recorder. Later, he upgraded it himself to 16k. After that, he copied the "Extended BASIC" PROM from somebody else at Motorola and then he bumped us up to 32k by soldering another 16k of RAM onto the existing 16k chips. Finally, he replaced the soldered-together banks of RAM with 64k chips and since we had long since added a disk drive, we got a copy of OS-9, which I loved.
Speaking of OS-9, I suppose I should enumerate all my various "first" computers here:
First computer used in-person: Commodore PET
First computer ever played a game on: TRS-80 Model I
First computer ever programmed for money: TRS-80 Model III (at my high school)
First computer I ever bought with my own money: TRS-80 Model 100 (8k)
First multiuser computer ever used: Motorola Four-Phase Systems Model 204 (used 6809s and a Motorola version of OS-9 called ISOS)
First real UNIX experience: An Intel 286 machine running MS Xenix, with 10 ADDS terminals and one Epson dot-matrix printer attached. This was for a FORTRAN class in 1985. It was also my first experience with vi.
I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this.
I haven't seen RotK yet, but Gladiator?
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Ridley Scott, and I even liked GI Jane, but Gladiator was dreck, and the opening battle especially was lame. All throughout that battle, all I kept thinking was, "This was done sooo much better in Braveheart."
And it's not like Ridley Scott doesn't know how to make combat compelling. Blackhawk Down was riveting. Just gimme a break on that piece of claptrap Gladiator. Yech.
So one enhancement makes the features they took away previously OK?
I've owned a TiVo since the current version of software was 1.3 (the TiVo itself came with 1.2 and upgraded to 1.3 within a few days). I have never suffered from an upgrade. Every upgrade has added features or functionality, not removed them. The only feature I can think of that was ever affected by an upgrade was the ability for pre-2.0 standalone TiVos to continue to function as brain-dead VCRs without a subscription. Initially, the 2.0 upgrade broke that capability for unsubscribed users, but TiVo did fix it. Any TiVo that shipped with 2.0 or higher (Series 2, for starters) does not work at all without a subscription.
Anything else that's ever been disabled by a TiVo upgrade was never an official feature, anyway (TeachTiVo, for instance).
This practice does not surprise me. About 4 months ago, I purchased a TiVo refurb for $200.
Okay, let me get this straight. You bought a refurbished TiVo and it's been having problems. Keep in mind that you bought a refurbished TiVo. Most likely, you didn't buy that machine directly from TiVo--you probably bought if from an authorized TiVo service center. While you are right to be upset, and in some way TiVo is ultimately responsible (after all, they authorized that service center), the problem you're having is directly caused by the refurbisher sending you improperly refurbished machines, not some unscrupulous behavior on TiVo's part.
You tried to save money and got burned. You have my sympathies. However, please don't try to make this into a conspiracy of evil by TiVo. More likely, you're just the poor bastard who got three or four bad ones in a row. If I were you, I would demand my money back from the refurbisher, though.
Sheesh. Obsolete implies that something is being replaced by something newer or superior. What Intel is describing is the end of Moore's Law, not its obsolescence. Somebody got a little too wordsmithy.
As a Dell customer, I have recently experienced many problems with Dell's tech support. One of my end users recently went through a major fiasco with Dell tech support, attempting to replace a hard drive. It took an hour and a half on the phone before the guys in India would finally agree to send a new hard drive to the end user. Mind you, we pay for next business day onsite service, so sending a replacement drive without a tech to install it was unacceptable. The user finally convinced the guys on the other end to send a tech, too. It only took three business days for the tech to show up, and we still don't know why. The tech worked for another outsourcer (NCR), and their call center also appears to have been in India.
At any rate, I gave my Dell salesreps an earful about the awful tech support and service, and by the time our field rep came out to see us the next month, he had the good news that Dell was moving support for the Optiplex and Latitude lines back to the US. We were by far not the only customers to complain vociferously about the poor quality of Dell's tech support.
Mind you, it's not specifically the fact that the tech support had moved to India that we were complaining about: It was that you couldn't understand the people at the other end, and they were reading from scripts and had no real ability to solve problems. There's still a strong possibility that Dell's US-based tech support reps will be just as clueless as the poor drones in India. Just because I can understand them doesn't mean they're giving me better service.
Actually, it's been shown that psychological pain causes the exact same portion of the brain to react as from physical pain. In other words, your brain can't tell the difference. And let's face it: Physical trauma (up to a point), doesn't leave the lasting emotional pain that psychological trauma can.
And you can stand up to a bully who's threatening you physically and get him to leave you alone (at least, it worked that way for me when I was in 7th grade). How do you stop anonymous rumors and character assassination?
I know the old joke about God not thinking he's Larry Ellison seems like an exaggeration, but Ellison's ego is uncontainable. I'd never seen him speak until I saw the segment about him on Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds PBS series. I was immediately repulsed by him. The man is obsessed with not only winning, but showing up his competitors. That's the difference between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Gates doesn't (publicly, at least) give a shit about Ellison. Ellison's obsessed with beating Gates.
There are a lot of huge egos in the computer industry, but none are larger than Larry Ellison's.
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Ever since upgrading to 0.9 on Win2k Pro, I've had problems with my extensions (and now, on 0.9.1, with the Extension Manager). I was using only a few extensions on 0.8: AdBlock, NukeAnything and IEView. When I upgraded from 0.8 to 0.9, NukeAnything and IEView broke. I managed to get IEView back by uninstalling and reinstalling it, but doing that didn't help NukeAnything.
After hearing about BugMeNot, I'd decided to install it, and I'd also decided to try the flat bookmark editor. For some reason, I had problems with BugMeNot, but the flat bookmark editor appeared to work just fine.
Today, when I upgraded to 0.9.1, I started having problems with the Extension Manager itself. Because I had the default DOM inspector, the five other extensions were now too big to fit in default window of Extension Manager. Scrolling the window made my CPU utilization spike to 100% and the scrolling is dawg-slow.
As an experiment, I uninstalled all of my extensions, restarted FireFox, reinstalled my extensions and restarted FireFox again. The good news is that NukeAnything is finally working again. The bad news is that the Extension Manager still causes 100% utilization when scrolling.
I found it interesting that they did NOT mention the Internet or P2P file sharing as a cause for poor music sales.
Actually, Jeff Leeds--the guy from the LA Times--said, "This great boom almost turned inside out, because the very thing that led to it -- which was the idea that you could take music and turn it into a digital file and put it on a plastic disc -- that became really the unraveling of the business. Because those exact same digital files became something that you could take off of that disc, send to a friend or a million friends through the Internet. And that's why the business has the problem that it does right now."
He was immediately followed, however, by the manager for OutKast, Michael "Blue" Williams, who said, "In my opinion it's not downloading that's killing us, it's [that] we stopped putting out quality music. We stopped giving the public something to believe in. We started just giving them, 'Here take this, take this, take this.' And the public caught up to us and was like, 'Hey, we don't want to take it no more, and we get it someplace else.'"
I found it interesting that the show also attempted to contrast the creation of two new music acts: the young singer/songwriter; and the old-school "super group" formed by putting together the refugees from two formerly-great bands. But at the end of the show, while the "super group" was clearly a corporate creation, I didn't think the young singer/songwriter's songs were all that great, either. Sarah Hudson's songs clearly had been produced into the Avril Lavigne/Michelle Branch sort of sound. By contrast, Velvet Revolver's songs at least didn't sound like everything else on Clear Channel.
I've not worked outside the US, personally, but I have a hard time believing the US has a monopoly on evil, soulless corporations. Disney, Enron, et. al. are great examples, but there's no way they're the only ones. I'm sure people who work for Philips, Matsushita, Hyundai, etc. will report similar stories to those you hear from people toiling at GE, Exxon/Mobil or GM.
Besides, soon we'll all be working for soulless, globe-spanning megacorporations, living in company-owned housing, taking the company monorail to work, shopping at the company stores, rooting for the company sports teams and voting for company-endorsed political candidates.
That said, I actually like the company I work for. It's a privately-held company, which may have something to do with its generally employee-friendly ways. Publicly-held companies generally are enslaved by the Wall Street Analysts and large institutional investors.
I live in the greater Phoenix area, and I get about 33MPG on the highway. My commute is about 80% HWY to work and about 50% HWY on the way home from work (I use an asymmetrical route thanks to traffic patterns). The net result is that I average about 27-28MPG overall (I use a fuel log program to calculate my mileage with every fill-up).
My car? A 2002 Mercedes C230K Sport Coupe. That's right--a luxury sporty car that's got almost 200 horsepower. The car weighs about 3300 pounds (about 500 pounds more than a Civic Hybrid and 400 more than a Prius). My mileage doesn't seem to change much when it gets hot out, either. I seem to get close to the same mileage, regardless of whether I'm using the air conditioner or running the car in "EC" (economy) mode (A/C compressor is off in EC mode).
Granted, when I first got the car, I drove like a madman with a leadfoot and got about 19MPG, but as I settled into the car and learned to drive it properly, I also learned how to maximize my fuel economy. Keep in mind that the HWY driving I do is on a freeway where the posted speed limit is 65 MPH, and the actual speed driven by traffic is usually 75 MPH, with speeds occasionally topping out over 80 MPH.
So if I can get 27-28 MPG overall in a fancy, high-ish-performance luxury car that's loaded to the gills with safety features, what's so great about getting 32 MPG in a hybrid? Granted, you're getting almost 38 MPG, and that's nice, but it's disappointing. I was planning to sell my Mercedes and get something more economical, but I'm not so certain that I'll actually save much money at this point. Yes, there is the fact that my car is supercharged, and as such, requires premium gas, while the hybrids almost certainly run standard 87 octane gas, but still, I'm disappointed in the numbers I'm seeing. I was surprised to discover that my wife's CR-V gets 20% worse mileage than my Mercedes (on my same commute), but now I'm not so surprised. Just disappointed.
Given that my commute is about 45 miles round-trip, I'd love to find something that sips gas at a more miserly rate than my Mercedes (and uses cheaper gas, to boot), but recent news (coupled with my own experience driving my wife's CR-V) makes me skeptical. I think at this point, I'd rather drive my fun car that's not as relatively uneconomical as I'd thought.
I don't know how anybody can call "Unscrewed" one of their favorite shows. Martin Sargent is just not that funny, and Laura Swisher is too something. I tried to watch the show when it first came on, and it sucked. A few months went by and I thought, "Well, they haven't canceled it yet, so maybe it's gotten better." So I watched it again. It hadn't.
If you took everything funny out "The Man Show" and pointed it squarely at computer geeks, you'd have something sorta, kinda like "Unscrewed." But it would probably be funnier than "Unscrewed."
Baystar has what, $80 million in SCO?
What? The original Baystar/RBC investment was $50 million combined, of which, Baystar's part was $20 million. RBC picked up the other $30 million. Today, RBC converted one-third of its investment into SCOX common stock. The remaining two-thirds was sold to Baystar for an undisclosed sum of money, but you can bet it's a helluvalot less than the original $20 million Baystar spent for the same quantity of Series A-1 shares in October.
To be blunt, RBC took it in the shorts on this investment. Baystar screwed them hard. Baystar hooked RBC up with the original PIPE, and then turned around and flushed the value down the toilet with their notice to SCO that they intended to get their money back. They didn't give any indication to RBC about the grounds they were using to justify their demand for the return of capital, so RBC had to stand by and watch their own deadline for making a similar demand expire.
Once that deadline passed, Baystar effectively had first-dibs on picking over SCO's carcass in an ensuing fight. RBC would have to wait until after Baystar got its money back (even though Baystar's investment was smaller) before making any attempt to recover its own investment. This forced RBC's hand. They could sit around and watch their entire $30 million get flushed down the drain, or they could sell (at a loss) most of their investment to Baystar and convert the rest to common stock (at a price that's nearly 2.5x the market price for those common stock shares) in the hopes that they'll get something if SCO wins the lottery.
Unless RBC never expected to make money on this deal for some obscure tax benefit, they got hosed badly. I'd expect to see the idiot at RBC who signed off on this deal resigning very soon to "pursue other opportunities."
Baystar, meanwhile, doubles their position in SCO's Series A-1 convertible preferred stock for a sum that's almost certainly a lot less than the $20 million they paid for the other 20,000 shares, thus reducing their average share price and giving them an ironclad fist around SCO's throat.
Baystar's not as stupid as we originally thought. RBC, meanwhile, comes off looking much stupider than we originally thought.
You catch on quick kemosabe... or you use THEIR DVR, which decides what you can record (if anything) or how long to keep it.. or how much to charge you every time you watch it...
Wrong. The CableCARD standard allows third-party set-top boxes to also contain decryptor cards, so DVRs are not only possible, they're on the way. Sony has announced two HD-compatible CableCARD-enabled set-top DVRs, in addition to a batch of CableCARD-enabled HDTV sets.
I also got my first CD player in 1985, and I remember CDs being $18 or so, but I probably lived in a more expensive part of town than you, figuratively speaking. Let's use your $12 number to save time. $12 in 1985 dollars is about $20 in 2004 dollars; if prices hadn't gone down, we'd be paying $20 per CD today.
I understand the concept of inflation. But please remember the CD player that I got in 1985 sold for $260. It held one CD at a time, wasn't portable, didn't have a remote control and didn't have anti-skip shock protection. Today, CD players with those specs cost $20. Why? Improvements in manufacturing, reduction in the cost to produce CD players and the biggest reason: economies of scale.
For some of the same reasons, the CDs themselves also cost less to produce today than they did in 1985. The difference between 1985 and 2004 retail pricing of CDs is other record industry costs. In 1985, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, et. al. weren't getting huge guaranteed contracts for albums that don't sell. Record companies today are paying Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera big bucks up front for records that are supposed to earn enough money to pay for all the marketing costs that get poured into marginal acts like Creed.
The problem is that record companies only know how to sell you what you bought last time, so innovation has been completely eliminated. They force-fed us more clones of Britney Spears until people stopped buying those CDs. In their rush to find the next Avril Lavigne, they completely missed out on the concept of finding quality artists recording quality music, so Norah Jones sneaked her way to selling 18 million CDs with virtually no promotion by her record company.
CDs cost more today because record companies changed their business models. Instead of finding and developing lots of inexpensive new artists and allowing the market to decide what's a hit, record companies today insist on pushing the same crap they sold us last year until we stop buying it, and they spend a fortune in promotions to try to reverse the inevitable declines. When we stop buying stuff we're tired of, the industry blames "piracy" for their decline in sales. But the real reason we stopped buying music is because they stopped publishing music we wanted to buy. How else do you explain the success of Norah Jones and the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou?
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
They have? That's news to me. When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
Does that excuse "piracy," or "theft" or whatever you want to call it? No, it doesn't, but let's ratchet down the level of nonsense in the rhetoric used here. "Stealing" isn't the right word for making an unauthorized copy of something. The original still exists and can be sold to someone, and "piracy" is a loaded word with completely inappropriate connotations. How about we just call it "unauthorized copying" or "copyright dilution"?
I've always had a problem with software and entertainment industry estimates of losses due to unauthorized copying. First, they assume that every copy illegally-made represents a lost sale, which is nonsense. If a 15-year-old kid has 8,000 songs on his hard drive, there's no chance in hell that he would have bought those 8,000 songs if he hadn't had access to them for free. He might have spent anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks on music, but there's no chance he'd have bought 600 CDs worth of music at $15-$18 a crack ($9,000-$11,000).
And here's another thing: Twenty years ago, my friends and I taped songs off of FM radio and played them in our walkmans. Or we'd dupe our LPs onto tape and trade copies with each other. I easily had access to ten times as much music as I could afford to buy, but in spite of record industry whining, I bought *more* music because of that practice, not less.
One study stated that that kids and adults alike who used the original Napster were more likely to buy music than people who didn't. Numerous studies have shown that there's zero correlation between "piracy" and the decline of sales for the music industry. Is it any surprise to people that the last year of sales increases for the music industry was the last year that the original Napster was in operation?
This is not an apologia for listening to music without paying for any of it. It's simply a realistic look at what's really going on. The record industry has its head up its ass and always has. Suing and prosecuting your customers is bad for business.
Software "piracy" is different, but not *that* different. Much of the software industry used to accept that "piracy" was just another form of marketing. Microsoft has always given lip service to stamping out "piracy," but until they had established a monopoly, they did virtually nothing to prevent it before the fact because they knew it was easier to convert a "pirate" into a paying customer than it was to get a skeptic to buy from you in the first place. Most people these days will automatically use MS products, so now Microsoft puts copy-protection technology in its products to force people to pay up-front.
Is making an unauthorized copy of music or software theft? According to the law, it is. However, there needs to be a middle ground between the "information wants to be free" left and the Ashcroft search-and-seizure right.
Most people would gladly reward artists and programmers for their work. That's how shareware works, and it made Phil Katz a substantial amount of money before his death. So how about we find new ways to reward creators of content, instead of finding new ways to criminalize what people have done for decades?
Don't misunderstand me. There are true criminals out there who are selling counterfeit or other illegally-copied versions of products (such as music and sof
As a Debian user, I prefer to install from Debian packages whenever possible. Why? Because Debian's QC is virtually unmatched. Of course, there are times when Debian's constitution or the applications' licenses (or both) forbid packaging certain kinds of applications (official Sun Java, for instance). In those cases, I either have to go get an RPM or a tarball and work through getting the app up and running manually.
It's much easier when I can count on Debian's package to install the app and ask me the appropriate questions required to get the app up and running. There's no comparison to the ease of getting MRTG up and running on Debian via packages vs. installing from a tarball.
However, my experiences with RPM-based distributions haven't been as good, and I'd be more tempted to build from source in those cases.
So, Jim, do you ever read alt.video.ptv.tivo? One of the regulars there posted an email he wrote to someone who asked him about your column. You may want to read it. Or you may not. He does call you a "complete ass."
http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=U TF-8&threadm=2g0m50t0or4f92ho788crq4ges10kokpb3%40 4ax.com&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF- 8%26group%3Dalt.video.ptv.tivo
Look. TiVo won't die. So the reviewer says he likes ReplayTV better and that TiVo won't dominate the market in years to come.
First off, the article states explicitly that the author prefers TiVo to Replay and all of its alternatives.
Secondly, he states that as much as he loves TiVo, he thinks they're doomed. As much as I love TiVo, I can't bury my head in the sand and assume they won't die just because I don't want them to.
The PVR market is already changing, and TiVo needs to get ahead of the trends in order to stay competitive. Standalone boxes will most likely go away in the next 3-5 years. TVs will come equipped with PVR functionality and have built-in cable tuners, thanks to the cable card specification.
TiVo has done a brilliant job with its UI and it's light-years ahead of other manufacturers in terms of partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers, and its deal with DirecTV is heavily driving growth in its customer base, but the future is about building PVR functionality into TVs or cable boxes, and TiVo has no cable-box partnerships and hasn't shown any signs of being able to penetrate that market.
Now, on to my criticisms of the article. Louderback assumes that the HD-capable DirecTV TiVo receiver will stay at $1000 for any length of time. He's clearly wrong on that. The price will come down quickly once DirecTV determines that HD TiVo ownership drives subscriptions to HD content. The manufacturing costs will decline as volume increases and the prices of 250GB HDs falls, which will encourage DirecTV to eventually subsidize the price of the receiver to drive sales of HD packages.
And likewise, the cable set-top box market might dry up and blow away entirely once cable card-enabled TVs start to hit the market. And TiVo will be able to sell standalone TiVos that could replace cable set-top boxes for customers who have older TVs. Yes, TiVo suffers a price disadvantage compared to the offerings of the cable companies, who are looking to "lock in" subscribers, but the advent of cable card will negate some of the lock-in advantage anyway.
At any rate, it's difficult to predict the future. I think Louderback's column was more intended as a shot across TiVo's bow than a true prediction of their death. I think he wants them to sit up and take notice of the threats that surround them so that they can devise adequate solutions to their problems, and I think he'd desperately like for them to return his calls or emails.
2 months later, when they never came to pick them up, I threw them out.
No offense, but paper books have value, even if only as relics of a bygone age. But to think that you threw out a set of encyclopedias breaks my heart. Okay, so much of the information would be hopelessly out of date (geography, for certain), but there's still a LOT of useful info in even a 20-year-old encyclopedia, and it's criminal that you just threw it out. Didn't you at least think about donating to the Salvation Army or Goodwill?
When I was a kid, my parents bought two sets of paper encyclopedias (one for grownups and one for kids). I read the kiddie one until I got to about 7th grade and needed the better info in the grownup set. Keep in mind that by the time I graduated high school, those encyclopedias were already 15 years old, and by the time my youngest brother graduated, they were almost 30 years old, but they STILL HAD SOME VALUE.
Clearly, you never thumbed through encyclopedias at random when you were a kid and stopped to read about tornadoes or the social life of ants. I want my kids to have that enjoyment, and I'm personally looking for a set of paper encyclopedias to share with my kids. Sure, we'll Google the Internet for current info on any topic they need to research, but nothing beats lying down on the floor and opening a random volume of the encyclopedia to a random page and reading something fascinating about the history of dogs.
Actually, since it affects all versions of NT and 2000 before service pack 3 it could have existed since about 1985.
I think you perhaps meant 1995, not 1985, which predates Windows by some time.
I recently bought a house in a neighborhood where "free" (i.e., subsidized) cable is part of what your HOA dues pay for. I pay nothing extra for "extended basic" cable from my local cable company. Because of this, my cable modem service is discounted by $10 per month, and I could upgrade to digital cable for $11 a month.
However, I have DirecTV, and have had it for about 7 years now, and I'm very happy with it. I recently bought a couple of TiVo-integrated receivers, and the convenience and picture quality is excellent.
I've retasked my standalone TiVo (formerly connected to a Sony SAT-B2 DirecTV receiver) to connect to the "free" cable. This TiVo has been upgraded to 193 hours of basic quality, so I record nearly everything on Best quality. The picture quality still sucks. The picture I get from my cable company is significantly inferior to what I get from DirecTV. Before my wife and I got married, she had digital cable in her apartment, and its picture quality was not as consistently good as DirecTV's is.
I know that even by cable company standards, my lousy analog cable picture is abnormally bad. I also know that with Rupert Murdoch taking over at DirecTV, things are likely to go downhill in picture quality there. It's a tough call to make, but for now, I'm sticking with DirecTV and I'm not impressed with cable in my neighborhood.
What features does it have that a Tivo or ReplayTv doesn't have?
According to many reviews posted to alt.video.ptv.tivo, its primary advantages are bugs, bugs and more bugs. Some reviews have mentioned coming home to find the entire drive erased, or to find problems with the scheduler either not recording scheduled programs or recording only small snippets of shows (1-2 minutes).
There are apparently two major versions/codebases of software for the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVRs, and some revisions apparently work better than others, but for the most part, even the favorable reviews have concluded that the SA-8000 DVRs don't yet compare well to more mature DVRs from Tivo and ReplayTV.
I'm sure that over time, the SA-8000s and their derivatives will improve, but if you're comparing apples-to-apples today, you can do better than an SA-8000 from your cable company.
The sixty pages referred to in the original story are pages that SCO has promised to deliver to IBM when they get around to it.
Now, of course, the small font claim is something we shouldn't dismiss too lightly. SCO did originally try to meet its discovery obligations by providing IBM with something like 100 million lines of code printed out on paper.
My first 'puter was a Tandy TRS-80. It had 8 colors!
Even though Radio Shack called them all "TRS-80" for a while, the "true" "Trash-80" machines were b&w-only, Z80-based and ran TRS-DOS ("Trash DOS").
Methinks you had the Color Computer (forever known as the CoCo, thanks to the guys at Rainbow Magazine). That was the first computer my family ever owned, by the way. Dad brought it home with 4k and a cassette recorder. Later, he upgraded it himself to 16k. After that, he copied the "Extended BASIC" PROM from somebody else at Motorola and then he bumped us up to 32k by soldering another 16k of RAM onto the existing 16k chips. Finally, he replaced the soldered-together banks of RAM with 64k chips and since we had long since added a disk drive, we got a copy of OS-9, which I loved.
Speaking of OS-9, I suppose I should enumerate all my various "first" computers here:
Ah, the good old days.
I would place the opening of "Saving Private Ryan", the first Coliseum scene in "Gladiator", or the massacre in "Last of the Mohicans" well above this.
I haven't seen RotK yet, but Gladiator?
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Ridley Scott, and I even liked GI Jane, but Gladiator was dreck, and the opening battle especially was lame. All throughout that battle, all I kept thinking was, "This was done sooo much better in Braveheart."
And it's not like Ridley Scott doesn't know how to make combat compelling. Blackhawk Down was riveting. Just gimme a break on that piece of claptrap Gladiator. Yech.
So one enhancement makes the features they took away previously OK?
I've owned a TiVo since the current version of software was 1.3 (the TiVo itself came with 1.2 and upgraded to 1.3 within a few days). I have never suffered from an upgrade. Every upgrade has added features or functionality, not removed them. The only feature I can think of that was ever affected by an upgrade was the ability for pre-2.0 standalone TiVos to continue to function as brain-dead VCRs without a subscription. Initially, the 2.0 upgrade broke that capability for unsubscribed users, but TiVo did fix it. Any TiVo that shipped with 2.0 or higher (Series 2, for starters) does not work at all without a subscription.
Anything else that's ever been disabled by a TiVo upgrade was never an official feature, anyway (TeachTiVo, for instance).
This practice does not surprise me. About 4 months ago, I purchased a TiVo refurb for $200.
Okay, let me get this straight. You bought a refurbished TiVo and it's been having problems. Keep in mind that you bought a refurbished TiVo. Most likely, you didn't buy that machine directly from TiVo--you probably bought if from an authorized TiVo service center. While you are right to be upset, and in some way TiVo is ultimately responsible (after all, they authorized that service center), the problem you're having is directly caused by the refurbisher sending you improperly refurbished machines, not some unscrupulous behavior on TiVo's part.
You tried to save money and got burned. You have my sympathies. However, please don't try to make this into a conspiracy of evil by TiVo. More likely, you're just the poor bastard who got three or four bad ones in a row. If I were you, I would demand my money back from the refurbisher, though.
Sheesh. Obsolete implies that something is being replaced by something newer or superior. What Intel is describing is the end of Moore's Law, not its obsolescence. Somebody got a little too wordsmithy.
As a Dell customer, I have recently experienced many problems with Dell's tech support. One of my end users recently went through a major fiasco with Dell tech support, attempting to replace a hard drive. It took an hour and a half on the phone before the guys in India would finally agree to send a new hard drive to the end user. Mind you, we pay for next business day onsite service, so sending a replacement drive without a tech to install it was unacceptable. The user finally convinced the guys on the other end to send a tech, too. It only took three business days for the tech to show up, and we still don't know why. The tech worked for another outsourcer (NCR), and their call center also appears to have been in India.
At any rate, I gave my Dell salesreps an earful about the awful tech support and service, and by the time our field rep came out to see us the next month, he had the good news that Dell was moving support for the Optiplex and Latitude lines back to the US. We were by far not the only customers to complain vociferously about the poor quality of Dell's tech support.
Mind you, it's not specifically the fact that the tech support had moved to India that we were complaining about: It was that you couldn't understand the people at the other end, and they were reading from scripts and had no real ability to solve problems. There's still a strong possibility that Dell's US-based tech support reps will be just as clueless as the poor drones in India. Just because I can understand them doesn't mean they're giving me better service.
Actually, it's been shown that psychological pain causes the exact same portion of the brain to react as from physical pain. In other words, your brain can't tell the difference. And let's face it: Physical trauma (up to a point), doesn't leave the lasting emotional pain that psychological trauma can.
And you can stand up to a bully who's threatening you physically and get him to leave you alone (at least, it worked that way for me when I was in 7th grade). How do you stop anonymous rumors and character assassination?
I know the old joke about God not thinking he's Larry Ellison seems like an exaggeration, but Ellison's ego is uncontainable. I'd never seen him speak until I saw the segment about him on Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds PBS series. I was immediately repulsed by him. The man is obsessed with not only winning, but showing up his competitors. That's the difference between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Gates doesn't (publicly, at least) give a shit about Ellison. Ellison's obsessed with beating Gates.
There are a lot of huge egos in the computer industry, but none are larger than Larry Ellison's.