One, talking my mother through a Sound Blaster replacement over the phone -- and then realizing after the install was complete that she never shut the machine down. Card worked, machine worked, she still uses it as a home MP3 server today.
I once worked at a hospital as technical support. At one point, I had to replace a drive in a machine that stored critical patient data. I figured the best thing to do was hook up that drive as a slave, copy everything over, and then leave it as backup just in case. Well, I didn't pay attention to the screws I used to secure the drive in the case, and they were about a millimeter too long. Needless to say, when I fired the machine up, a lot of red smoke escaped the drive, and a small fire appeared near where the screw had penetrated the circuit board. I quickly shutdown power, fanned the smoke away before anyone could notice, and backed out the offending screw. I didn't know what I was going to do, as the data hadn't been transferred, and losing the data would pretty much mean losing my job. So, I said "what the hell" and fired the machine back up. Wonder of wonders, there was no smoke and the drive booted fine. I transferred the data as quickly as I could, removed the evidence, and put the computer back the way it was before, with no one ever the wiser.
I did eventually take that drive (and the destructive screws) home and mounted it in a bare chassis just to watch it burn. Took about fifteen seconds to turn into a fireball.
Re:Will there be CDs in the future?
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The record industry wonders how they can compete with "free". Evian seems to do it quite well. They do it by providing a product with more percieved value, convienence and quality than the product you can get for free at home.
The record industry does not seem to grasp this. If bottled water was harder to use -- say, if you had to have a licenesed opener that would only open certain bottles in certain places and times, they would have a hard time selling the product. Likewise, if consumers didn't think that the water was better (percieved value) than the stuff they got out of their tap, they would have a hard time convincing people to buy it. If they actually put poison in one out of every 100 bottles, they wouldn't be able to sell it at all.
The record companies are poisoning their product, making it harder to use, and the perceived value isn't much higher than mp3s and lower than comparably priced DVDs -- and they wonder why sales are declining. Please tell me these guys somehow missed Marketing 101 in college.
Sales were up during the rein of Napster, therefore the industry says they would have made even more money without Napster.
Sales went down after they shut it down, therefore, it's all the pirates on other P2P programs.
Reminds me of the global warming debate, no matter what the data says, you simply can't lose the argument.
Re:Somehow I don't quite buy that....
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
And why then, is the bottled water business doing so well?
The water out of my tap is pretty good, and the filtered water out of my refrigerator is even better. I could buy a super-expensive filter, or catch rain water and use that, but I don't. Why?
Because bottled water is all about convience. I can get it just about anywhere, and I don't have to worry about what the local water tastes like, or the off chance it might be contaminated. I don't have to buy a filter, and I don't like the way it looks hanging off my faucet, and it's expensive to boot. I could make the claim that bottled water tastes better, but I think that's a placebo effect.
The record companies won't be able to offer P2P with "perfect" files if they are going to charge a dollar a track like they want. But, if they offer a reasonable price for the product, give a product that is guarunteed to be as perfect as a variable bit-rate, reasonable size MP3 can be, and make it easy to find, I'm not even going to waste my time installing Kazaa. I don't want their spyware, I don't want to worry about the miscreants on the network, I don't want to waste an hour looking for a file at a decent bit rate and quality. My time is money, and it's worth $0.05 or $0.10 to have that song now and not worry about finding it.
It can be done, but it can't be done the way the RIAA wants to do it.
I think Metallica sold out a long time ago, but I also think they got hoodwinked on the whole Napster deal.
If you listen to Lars, he still doesn't care that average listener is trading Metallica bootlegs with his friends. He knows that there was a time when Metallica couldn't afford to hear the bands they liked and the only way they could hear them was to listen to "stolen" copies.
He was against a corporation making commerical profit off songs he wrote and produced without his permission. I don't think any of us have a problem prosecuting counterfeiters. He didn't understand Napster, didn't want to understand it, didn't bother to understand it, and his corporate masters made sure he didn't understand it.
Well, according to ASCAP,, you're looking at ~$2.04 per CD for royalties. That's before "recoupment" and all the other ways the record companies use to screw the artist out of their money. This is also an offical site, so you have to understand that they are going to inflate the figures as much as they can. So, $2.04 should be considered high, especially when directly below they state, "there are a bunch of additional issues" that affect the royalty rate, and all of the additional issues seem to negatively affect the money recieved by the artist.
So, even with ASCAP's figure, we're up on $3.80 a CD. That's a long, long way from the MSRP on a CD. If they could sell me a CD for an even $5.00, there should be plenty of money to go around to everyone, and I would honestly stop pirating completely. In fact, they'd see a lot more of money than they ever have in the past.
OK, so they are her words, but what I'm trying to say is that we have to recognise that that she's not just saying them because that's how she feels. She's saying those words because someone with lots of money that directly controls her job is telling her that this is the position she needs to take. They may not be handing her a script, but I can promise you that she's like every other lobbist, politician, or CEO. She says the words and holds the opinions that her bosses need to hear her say.
Copy a hundred cds and throw out 99. Then you'll start to get the picture of the economics of marketing music. Oh, and don't forget studio time, promotion, actually paying the artists, salaries of employees, printing costs, etc. Maybe it's not $18, but it's a lot more than $0.50, or whatever you pay for blank cd-r's put the cd burner divided by the number of cds you burn.
First off, if I can make a CD for $2.76 (including sending a dollar to the artist to cover the paltry royalty they get), it should be considerably less for the record company to do so. Why? Economy of scale. When you produce something in bulk, it costs a lot less. If you'll look at RV's on the road, you'll notice the headlamp and taillamp assemblies are taken from things like Mustangs and Crown Victorias and F-150 pickups. Why? Because it's too expensive to design and make when you're only going to make a few hundred copies. Look at the Panoz Esperante, which uses mostly Mustang GT running gear and trim pieces, or the Quvale Mangusta which also uses Mustang GT interior trim pieces -- and costs $90,000.
Since the record company is running off millions of copies of the same product, even with the R&D costs, they should be able crank out each copy for less than I can do it at home.
Also, why should I have to subsidize 99 crappy acts to get my one good one? No other business in the world operates on such a principle. If they did, they'd be out of business tomorrow. Can you imagine Toyota making 99 cars that didn't sell and then saying you have to pay a 1000% premium on your Camry because no one wanted to buy the other 99 models? If your failure rate is 99%, perhaps you don't deserve to be in business.
Don't be so sure. I just read the latest issue of Wired, which has a relatively good article on Hillary Rosen.
Now, I'm not going to say she isn't the monster we imagine her to be, but we have to understand that she is only the head of a massive organization that is funded by several massive corporations. The words that came out of Hillary's mouth were not nessessarily hers, and if the record companies can get you to think that the opinions of the RIAA are somehow different from the opinions of the major record labels, then they have won an important battle.
The record labels do not understand the internet, file trading, MP3s, or anything other than the carefully crafted way they've done business since the 1940's. There were many people paying the RIAA's bills who thought that Hillary Rosen was way too soft on piracy, and thought that the genie should (and could) be put back in the bottle.
We absolutely have to understand that the person to follow Hillary could just as likely be worse than she ever was.
We used to play that as well. However, our games typically only lasted about a week. But, we were ruthless, and almost nothing was forbidden. The only rules were that any attack had to be described to the GM before it happened, and it had to be something realistically buildable.
I must have been blown up by a half dozen "car bombs" my senior year in high school. Of course, this was 1992, I'm sure that in today's political climate, this game would be viewed as extremely dangerous.
Umm... the guy bangs the buckets on sixth street is not Leslie. I'm not even sure that guy dresses in drag.
Leslie is the dude that rides a bicycle that pulls a cardboard and metal contraption he calls a home. He does indeed cross-dress, usually in a bikini top and thong. Just another example that in Austin, there is always someone weirder than you.
of course, they could probably attempt to use it against you in civil court. If nothing else, they'll use it to scare you into a bank-account draining settlement offer.
I've used a computer 'infected' with lop.com. One of the worst things I've ever seen. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it either, I had to eventually just format the thing and just start over.
Tons of pop-ups, a lot of mis-redirection back to lop.com (like trying to go to google.com), and all kinds of "helper" lop.com applications. I'd love to know how to get rid of it if I ever run across it again.
No, they did not win. Napster ran out of money to fight, sold out to Bertlesmann, and there was no point in pursuing the case any further.
You make it sound like Napster actually went to court and was found guilty by a judge and a jury -- when in fact, they never got to the trial stage at all.
You don't have to be right when you have enough money to sue the other guy into bankruptcy.
In a nutshell, the jury has the right to say, "Yes, the defendant is guilty of the law in question, however, we feel the law is unjust, and therefore declare it null and void in this case."
A better analogy (because it actually exists) would be the classic "my office looks over the ballpark" situation.
So, is it immoral to sit in your office and watch the game (which is blacked out on local television and radio because it's not sold out) instead of going down to the park and paying $30 for a nosebleed seat?
Now, that doesn't mean that the ballpark can't build a huge, ugly fence so that I can't watch the game, or even build a dome over the whole stadium -- but it may negatively impact sales.
I remember K-Power. And Family Computing, which didn't completly go down the crapper until it become Family and Home Office Computing. I think that was when the code samples finally disappeared for good.
Do you remember a magazine (I believe by the same people) called Hacker? It was similar in format, but had tons of code samples, and was a bit more subversive.
Finding the CD, or worse, finding quality files online, should take much longer than five minutes. And, that's not time when you can be multitasking, you've got to be actively searching.
If it's one track, it's not so bad, but if you need to find several, it starts becoming a nightmare.
I would pay $5 for a CD and never complain at all, and I'd buy a ton of music. At $10, I'd only buy certain select titles, and it won't be anywhere near 50% of the amount I'd buy at $5. At $15, I won't buy any CD.
Or maybe, this product is being released precisely because it is in the public domain, and no one has to pay Id (or anyone else) royalties to use it. If they couldn't get Doom, it'd be some other piece of software that was GPL'd or freeware.
As it is, now people are playing Doom again, and talking about Id, so it really is like free advertisement. I'd say it's actually helping them more than if they'd kept it locked up all these long years.
I used to buy, on average, about 30-40 CDs a year. The last year I bought CDs, 1999, I purchased over 100 new CDs.
Last year I purchased zero new CDs, and I've not purchased any this year either. I'll scour the local used CD shop for what I want, but if I can't find it there, I'll just do without. If they move to copy-protected CDs across the board, I won't buy anything at all -- even supposedly non copy protected, because I won't be able to tell the difference.
The best part of all this is that I really don't miss music as much as I thought I would. I've simply found other things to fill my time, and other forms of entertainment. Wake up RIAA, you aren't losing profits because of piracy, you're losing profits because you are treating the customer like he's expendable and will put up with any crap product you force on him. Why don't you ask GM how well that policy worked for them?
Strangely enough, I remember this as well. I think it might have been in relation to the whole TicketMaster mess around that time. Don't quote me on that, but I'd be [i]very[/i] interested to find that quote.
This is exactly why I want one. That and my 2000 sq ft of hardwood floors.
I'm tired of sweeping the hardwoods every few days, and doing a doubly good job before I mop them, and I'm tired of all the kitty litter the cats track around, even if most of it is confined to laundry room.
I don't expect to be freed from vacuuming forever, but if this means that instead of vacuuming the whole house every week and sweeping the hardwoods every few days, I can just hit the hardwoods just before mopping and the carpets once in a blue moon, it's worth every penny.
I haven't purchased one yet, because I'm still a bit skeptical that it can actually get 90% of the floor under full automation -- but judging from the reviews, I'll have to get one soon.
and back then, well-regulated was synonomous with "well-armed". The founders fully intended that the general public would have access to all the weapons available to the country at large.
I'm not sure how I feel with the neighbor down the street possessing an atomic bomb, but the point was that the government couldn't wield a bigger stick to keep all the population in line. The founders fully intended the government to fear the population.
Slashdot Mirror
My two horror stories:
One, talking my mother through a Sound Blaster replacement over the phone -- and then realizing after the install was complete that she never shut the machine down. Card worked, machine worked, she still uses it as a home MP3 server today.
I once worked at a hospital as technical support. At one point, I had to replace a drive in a machine that stored critical patient data. I figured the best thing to do was hook up that drive as a slave, copy everything over, and then leave it as backup just in case. Well, I didn't pay attention to the screws I used to secure the drive in the case, and they were about a millimeter too long. Needless to say, when I fired the machine up, a lot of red smoke escaped the drive, and a small fire appeared near where the screw had penetrated the circuit board. I quickly shutdown power, fanned the smoke away before anyone could notice, and backed out the offending screw. I didn't know what I was going to do, as the data hadn't been transferred, and losing the data would pretty much mean losing my job. So, I said "what the hell" and fired the machine back up. Wonder of wonders, there was no smoke and the drive booted fine. I transferred the data as quickly as I could, removed the evidence, and put the computer back the way it was before, with no one ever the wiser.
I did eventually take that drive (and the destructive screws) home and mounted it in a bare chassis just to watch it burn. Took about fifteen seconds to turn into a fireball.
The record industry wonders how they can compete with "free". Evian seems to do it quite well. They do it by providing a product with more percieved value, convienence and quality than the product you can get for free at home.
The record industry does not seem to grasp this. If bottled water was harder to use -- say, if you had to have a licenesed opener that would only open certain bottles in certain places and times, they would have a hard time selling the product. Likewise, if consumers didn't think that the water was better (percieved value) than the stuff they got out of their tap, they would have a hard time convincing people to buy it. If they actually put poison in one out of every 100 bottles, they wouldn't be able to sell it at all.
The record companies are poisoning their product, making it harder to use, and the perceived value isn't much higher than mp3s and lower than comparably priced DVDs -- and they wonder why sales are declining. Please tell me these guys somehow missed Marketing 101 in college.
Sales went down after they shut it down, therefore, it's all the pirates on other P2P programs.
Reminds me of the global warming debate, no matter what the data says, you simply can't lose the argument.
The water out of my tap is pretty good, and the filtered water out of my refrigerator is even better. I could buy a super-expensive filter, or catch rain water and use that, but I don't. Why?
Because bottled water is all about convience. I can get it just about anywhere, and I don't have to worry about what the local water tastes like, or the off chance it might be contaminated. I don't have to buy a filter, and I don't like the way it looks hanging off my faucet, and it's expensive to boot. I could make the claim that bottled water tastes better, but I think that's a placebo effect.
The record companies won't be able to offer P2P with "perfect" files if they are going to charge a dollar a track like they want. But, if they offer a reasonable price for the product, give a product that is guarunteed to be as perfect as a variable bit-rate, reasonable size MP3 can be, and make it easy to find, I'm not even going to waste my time installing Kazaa. I don't want their spyware, I don't want to worry about the miscreants on the network, I don't want to waste an hour looking for a file at a decent bit rate and quality. My time is money, and it's worth $0.05 or $0.10 to have that song now and not worry about finding it.
It can be done, but it can't be done the way the RIAA wants to do it.
If you listen to Lars, he still doesn't care that average listener is trading Metallica bootlegs with his friends. He knows that there was a time when Metallica couldn't afford to hear the bands they liked and the only way they could hear them was to listen to "stolen" copies.
He was against a corporation making commerical profit off songs he wrote and produced without his permission. I don't think any of us have a problem prosecuting counterfeiters. He didn't understand Napster, didn't want to understand it, didn't bother to understand it, and his corporate masters made sure he didn't understand it.
So, even with ASCAP's figure, we're up on $3.80 a CD. That's a long, long way from the MSRP on a CD. If they could sell me a CD for an even $5.00, there should be plenty of money to go around to everyone, and I would honestly stop pirating completely. In fact, they'd see a lot more of money than they ever have in the past.
OK, so they are her words, but what I'm trying to say is that we have to recognise that that she's not just saying them because that's how she feels. She's saying those words because someone with lots of money that directly controls her job is telling her that this is the position she needs to take. They may not be handing her a script, but I can promise you that she's like every other lobbist, politician, or CEO. She says the words and holds the opinions that her bosses need to hear her say.
First off, if I can make a CD for $2.76 (including sending a dollar to the artist to cover the paltry royalty they get), it should be considerably less for the record company to do so. Why? Economy of scale. When you produce something in bulk, it costs a lot less. If you'll look at RV's on the road, you'll notice the headlamp and taillamp assemblies are taken from things like Mustangs and Crown Victorias and F-150 pickups. Why? Because it's too expensive to design and make when you're only going to make a few hundred copies. Look at the Panoz Esperante, which uses mostly Mustang GT running gear and trim pieces, or the Quvale Mangusta which also uses Mustang GT interior trim pieces -- and costs $90,000.
Since the record company is running off millions of copies of the same product, even with the R&D costs, they should be able crank out each copy for less than I can do it at home.
Also, why should I have to subsidize 99 crappy acts to get my one good one? No other business in the world operates on such a principle. If they did, they'd be out of business tomorrow. Can you imagine Toyota making 99 cars that didn't sell and then saying you have to pay a 1000% premium on your Camry because no one wanted to buy the other 99 models? If your failure rate is 99%, perhaps you don't deserve to be in business.
Don't be so sure. I just read the latest issue of Wired, which has a relatively good article on Hillary Rosen.
Now, I'm not going to say she isn't the monster we imagine her to be, but we have to understand that she is only the head of a massive organization that is funded by several massive corporations. The words that came out of Hillary's mouth were not nessessarily hers, and if the record companies can get you to think that the opinions of the RIAA are somehow different from the opinions of the major record labels, then they have won an important battle.
The record labels do not understand the internet, file trading, MP3s, or anything other than the carefully crafted way they've done business since the 1940's. There were many people paying the RIAA's bills who thought that Hillary Rosen was way too soft on piracy, and thought that the genie should (and could) be put back in the bottle.
We absolutely have to understand that the person to follow Hillary could just as likely be worse than she ever was.
Hey! For someone with such a low UID, you don't post often. Anyway, just saying hello... I've got karma to burn.
I must have been blown up by a half dozen "car bombs" my senior year in high school. Of course, this was 1992, I'm sure that in today's political climate, this game would be viewed as extremely dangerous.
Leslie is the dude that rides a bicycle that pulls a cardboard and metal contraption he calls a home. He does indeed cross-dress, usually in a bikini top and thong. Just another example that in Austin, there is always someone weirder than you.
of course, they could probably attempt to use it against you in civil court. If nothing else, they'll use it to scare you into a bank-account draining settlement offer.
Tons of pop-ups, a lot of mis-redirection back to lop.com (like trying to go to google.com), and all kinds of "helper" lop.com applications. I'd love to know how to get rid of it if I ever run across it again.
You make it sound like Napster actually went to court and was found guilty by a judge and a jury -- when in fact, they never got to the trial stage at all.
You don't have to be right when you have enough money to sue the other guy into bankruptcy.
In a nutshell, the jury has the right to say, "Yes, the defendant is guilty of the law in question, however, we feel the law is unjust, and therefore declare it null and void in this case."
So, is it immoral to sit in your office and watch the game (which is blacked out on local television and radio because it's not sold out) instead of going down to the park and paying $30 for a nosebleed seat?
Now, that doesn't mean that the ballpark can't build a huge, ugly fence so that I can't watch the game, or even build a dome over the whole stadium -- but it may negatively impact sales.
Do you remember a magazine (I believe by the same people) called Hacker? It was similar in format, but had tons of code samples, and was a bit more subversive.
If it's one track, it's not so bad, but if you need to find several, it starts becoming a nightmare.
I would pay $5 for a CD and never complain at all, and I'd buy a ton of music. At $10, I'd only buy certain select titles, and it won't be anywhere near 50% of the amount I'd buy at $5. At $15, I won't buy any CD.
As it is, now people are playing Doom again, and talking about Id, so it really is like free advertisement. I'd say it's actually helping them more than if they'd kept it locked up all these long years.
Last year I purchased zero new CDs, and I've not purchased any this year either. I'll scour the local used CD shop for what I want, but if I can't find it there, I'll just do without. If they move to copy-protected CDs across the board, I won't buy anything at all -- even supposedly non copy protected, because I won't be able to tell the difference.
The best part of all this is that I really don't miss music as much as I thought I would. I've simply found other things to fill my time, and other forms of entertainment. Wake up RIAA, you aren't losing profits because of piracy, you're losing profits because you are treating the customer like he's expendable and will put up with any crap product you force on him. Why don't you ask GM how well that policy worked for them?
Strangely enough, I remember this as well. I think it might have been in relation to the whole TicketMaster mess around that time. Don't quote me on that, but I'd be [i]very[/i] interested to find that quote.
"You looked a little distracted in that meeting today, Bob... what were you doing?"
"oh, just vacuuming my floors... chasing the cats... that sort of thing."
I'm tired of sweeping the hardwoods every few days, and doing a doubly good job before I mop them, and I'm tired of all the kitty litter the cats track around, even if most of it is confined to laundry room.
I don't expect to be freed from vacuuming forever, but if this means that instead of vacuuming the whole house every week and sweeping the hardwoods every few days, I can just hit the hardwoods just before mopping and the carpets once in a blue moon, it's worth every penny.
I haven't purchased one yet, because I'm still a bit skeptical that it can actually get 90% of the floor under full automation -- but judging from the reviews, I'll have to get one soon.
I'm not sure how I feel with the neighbor down the street possessing an atomic bomb, but the point was that the government couldn't wield a bigger stick to keep all the population in line. The founders fully intended the government to fear the population.