Building a large pool of money by getting everyone to pay what amounts to a tax is going to lead to abuses. One need only look at Medicaid, the UN, and well the Federal budget here in the US to see how that would work out. As you say - plenty of examples out there. I'm betting that taxes started out with "simple rules" too and now look at what we have:-( "Removing ambiguity" would become pretty difficult too considering how esoteric some patents are. . In a perfect world this might work, but I don't see such a Utopian world coming anytime soon. In the real world everyone seems to be trying to step on the backs of others to get ahead or get away with something - that's not going to change.
Intermittent wipers weren't on ANY vehicles until ONE guy figured it out. He apparently spent a good bit of time working on it too. Hindsight says that of COURSE it was obvious! Except it wasn't for many years. So, was it okay for car companies to steal the idea since DUH in hindsight it was obvious? As I recall the man who invented it demonstrated it, was blown off, and then the company STOLE the idea. Not cool...
I agree that some ideas are WAY ahead of their time. I don't know how best to reward them, I'm open to suggestions....
I agree that patents shouldn't be used to stop innovation by others or to fence off business areas. However I do not see any sort of "fund" idea working either - who would put money into it? how could it ever compensate someone for an idea that facilitated say a billion dollar product? Instead things should be changed to make patents harder to get and I think that there should be rules in place to encourage the use of patented ideas and to accelerate loss of the patent when the idea isn't put to use. I also believe that it shouldn't be allowed for minor tweaks to rest the "shot clock" and allow the idea to be protected for ever longer periods of time - I'm looking at YOU drug companies!
Things are broken, badly. The body of knowledge a patent examiner must cover when granting a patent is crazy. The period of time a patent may cover needs to be tweaked. Allowances need to somehow be made though so that if a little guy comes up with an idea, a solid one, that will take tons of money to realize that he doesn't get screwed. Likewise we should discourage big well funded companies from swapping around patents like baseball cards in order to fence off business areas and entrench themselves ever deeper.
I don't know what the solution is here but imagining everyone sitting down nicely for tea like adults to discuss how much or how little to compensate someone isn't going to fly well IMO. The companies will say give little, the owner will say give lots. Who decides?
I'm sorry but I still feel that this should be prosecuted lest we reward someone for evading the law. He should also be prosecuted for having fled. Had this been you or I we'd have been locked up and forced to appeal or somesuch. He should not be rewarded for having had the means to evade for so long. As I recall he even admitted guilt and was going to go for a plea bargain - he fled because he was told that the judge might not be allowing his sweet deal. Again, had that been you or I we would have been toast. I do not care how famous he has managed to become - he should not be given any special treatment. If he felt that he was getting something "special" due to who he was when this first went down then he should have gone through the same process you or I would have been forced to. I have no sympathy for him frankly....
I have a co-worker who's mother went in for outpatient surgery. The Dr. made a "mistake" and nicked her bowels - multiple times! The infection got VERY bad while the original Dr. kept dismissing it. Finally a DIFFERENT Dr. on staff looked at her and rushed her into surgery where the "mistakes" were found. The second Dr. claimed that she was just hours from death, the first Dr. admitted he made some errors. The woman has since been in and out of the hospital multiple times and has nearly died more than once. She may yet expire and she will probably NEVER be what she was - she can hardly get out of bed these days and she WAS a fairly active woman prior to this "simple" surgery.
Threat of litigation should (in theory) keep mistakes to a minimum. While the threat certainly didn't seem to work in this case perhaps having this guy's practice sued into the ground will get a lazy Dr. out of the business or force him to be a good bit more careful should he be working on YOU next.
Frivolous litigation should certainly be avoided but in cases where someone truly screws up, doesn't pay enough attention to the patient to realize it, and nearly results in death - and certainly resulted in debilitation - then I'm sorry but it should be used!
Do you REALLY believe that a large company, say Ford, has never stolen an idea from an inventor and tried to steamroll them? Intermittent wipers anyone?
I agree in this time of patent trolls that more and more shenanigans are occurring but that doesn't mean that some large company wouldn't take an idea and run with it - you make it sound like they are above this and that's crazy. It HAS happened in the past, it WILL happen in the future, and if you're the inventor you could easily go broke trying to defend yourself - something they count on. Particularly in a case where stopping the import would severely impact things and make headlines it wouldn't surprise me to see a company playing "chicken". If companies couldn't be protected by threats such as halting imports then we'd see WAY more of this going on - guaranteed! Might doesn't make right, that ought to be obvious.
Admittedly that doesn't sound like the case here but they've already lost once so there MIGHT be merit to it. Simply dismissing the idea that someone could out-innovate a large company though or that a large company is above stealing an idea from someone much smaller is foolish!
Why must this small company have to be some sort of hybrid leader in your eyes to have merit to their claim BTW? Why couldn't a small agile research firm create ideas or products to sell to much larger less innovative\agile companies? Honestly I'm on the fence with the idea that a company that patents something must build something with it since some ideas are simply too big or too hard to market for small research type companies that don't produce things. Selling ideas to others is a valid business model I think. I will admit that patenting iterative ideas or vague hand waving ideas is bad but that's the patent office's fault not the companies for trying...
Note that the spec sheet for this router lists a 2.4Ghz N radio. I also read a review on it http://gazguzla.com/linksys-wrt600n-overview/ that seems to indicate that it can be either N or G but not both - yuck. I too want to move to N but I want 5ghz, N and G at the same time, and I want to be able to load whatever firmware I desire on it. The USB port is nice but not a must have. Still looking...
I dunno' about killing anything but looking at the tech specs on this I do NOT see 5ghz as supported by N. Damn, I thought this would be my next router. My Tomato equipped WRT54GS is getting a little long in the tooth and locks up under heavy loads despite active cooling. I want to move to N but I want flexible firmware, a USB port, and a 5ghz radio
Biggest problem with them lately is pricing. Anytime something is the slightest bit popular they jack the price to the Moon. I understand supply and demand but I'm finding myself saving as much as $50 on items by buying them elsewhere. It would be one thing if this was occasional but it's happened to me several times in the last few months. CPUs, bare bone computers, printers.... I like them, they have an awesome WEB site (which is why they win out over Mwave), but I now find myself shopping around a great deal more even if it is a PITA.
Oh, DO use FatWallet to get 1% back. It used to be 2% but hey I'll take anything I can get out of these guys!
I might have liked that years ago when I first put together my collection. However iTunes wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye at the time and I did my own thing. Now 500+ GIGs later I'm not willing to let any program mess with my files! It has taken me ages to get the tags right, to get the album art correct, to get the folder tags right. Heck, half the programs that I have loaded up to look at my collection choke and DIE trying to index it let alone do anything with it. . MAYBE one of these days I'll make a backup and let iTunes go nuts with it but only if I can keep the files in place on my nice protected unRAID rather than having them copied to the too small drive on my Mini or to one of my PCs. That much music and work to organize it isn't something I'd ever trust to just one drive or to one backup either.... Hrm, iTunes doesn't like WMA either does it? I have a few songs in that format as well as FLAC and OGG - somehow I don't think letting iTunes manage this is going to be a great idea but maybe one day for a science experiment I'll try (lol).
I have found that Apple does things a bit differently for the Mac version of iTunes or seems to anyway. I have a Mac Mini and because of this I'd like to switch to using it to backup and synch my iPhone. Except when I try it gives me scary warnings about how in order to do so it will first have to remove all of my music and videos - gee thanks! . This whole one computer centric way of doing things with my phone pisses me off. I DID allow my Mini's copy of iTunes to look over my heyuge music collection and was happy to see it didn't puke. I FIRST made sure I corrected the DEFAULT setting that would have had it copying and renaming, and doing only who knows what to my music. Heaven forbid you should organize something yourself in the Mac world! . Their iPhoto picture app spent DAYS copying all of my damned pictures from my NAS to my Mini - seems the Mac wishes to be the center of all of my media and I really hate that aspect of it... . Anyway, yes it is possible to easily add in music to the iTunes library from other download sites. However I think the original poster thought it would require an added step and really it doesn't. You can use the Amazon app which is automatic or you can just drag\drop the file onto iTunes if you want - I've done both on Windows...
Honestly I've not tried synching my iPhone with more than one copy of iTunes - or rather I have but when I try to get it to synch music and video it tells me it will ERASE all of my music and video and put the selections from the second copy on my phone. So, I've never gone further than that! 99.9% of my music is my own MP3 with only maybe 3 songs from Apple so maybe theirs do get treated differently - I dunno'. . I too have been a bit irked that it doesn't just show up as a drive but that was to satisfy content owners who no doubt didn't want you taking your iPod to a friend's house and giving them your tunes and vice versa. I am sure it was also to lock you more solidly into their products, who knows what other reasons. that you didn't know this before buying is kind of amusing - this was my first "iPod" and I knew it beforehand. . That said - I do find iTunes to be a complete PITA to use. It's NOT intuitive to me at all and having to make playlists etc. to get music onto my phone is painful. Somehow I have even managed to put multiple copies of the SAME song on my phone - very odd. I deal with it though and my music is on there but I do really wish it was easier and more intuitive. I suppose it makes sense to someone somehow but for me it's just overly complicating getting files from one place to another and making backups!
WTF, not RIAA this time, instead it's ASCAP> WTF are they smoking?! Why does everyone have to have their hands out? Hey when some twits ringtone goes off are you going to find a way to charge for that "performance" too?! Man at some point these "content" folks are just going to get right out of control! Oh wait..... too late!
I use iTunes for my iPhone - and I never buy anything there, I buy it all on Amazon because I prefer the more portable MP3 format. You seem to think that purchasing from Amazon and importing into your collection is difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth!! Well, not if you are running Windows anyway. You see Amazon has an MP3 download application that will place the downloads in an area you designate AND it will import them into iTunes automatically. -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html/ref=sv_dmusic_3 This is a simple application and one that they displayed to me when I purchased an album in order to "help me". Honestly I really like using Amazon except for their new policy for pricing up more popular tunes. Seldom is it that I cannto find what I want and when that occurs I do sometimes turn to iTunes.
As for this current idea to charge for these samples. RIAA listen up - when I am browsing through a "store" and I think I've found what I want I listen to it briefly to see if it's the right song or more foten the right version of the song. If I could not do this I would go back to how I used to get music - swapping HDD with friends or perhaps using a Torrent. I have gone legit primarily because DRM has been dropped from purchased music and because the quality finally meets MY expectations (mostly). If you prevent various online stores from allowing me to listen to samples, and especially if you try to setup your OWN store and push out established companies - which I wouldn't put past you with dick moves like this - then I WILL go back to how I used to get music. Most likely, due to your stupid hounding of torrent sites, I will simply swap drives again and go back to buying used CD - which I will then sell right back after ripping. I'd prefer to stick to buying legit frankly but.....
I have a 4ghz C2D (overclocked). My x.264 encoding of BD rips takes as long as 18 hours - I keep the quality high. I am looking for more cores and more clock speed if I can get it in order to lower encoding time. I already know more cores will benefit me since a slightly slower 4 core I've "drag tested" has beaten my C2D by a couple of hours but runs hot as hell. I've been looking to move to an I-7 920 clocked to 4ghz but if I can get one of these 800 series CPUs for less, overclock it to nearly the same performance level as a 920, and use less power I'm VERY interested. . Since the two CPUs I'm considering use different damned sockets these tests are important to me. . Compiling code is another app where these CPU can come in handy. I frequently compile a fairly complex app in Linux (still more machines!) on both a C2D and a Atom 330 - the C2D STOMPS the Atom as you might imagine. An I-7 with additional cores would likewise stomp the C2D and if my compiled HTPC app could benefit I'd consider it but the Atom is good enough (thank you VDPAU!). The more complex the project the more potential time saved compiling obviously. I'm betting that some people do this activity often for a living? Distcc farm perhaps? Rendering maybe? Weirdly the Atom shows up as 4 cores in Ubuntu and I can actually task all 4, I guess the 330 got Hyperthreading? The C2D still wins that race though no matter what I do. (duh) The Atom is overclocked to over 2.1ghz too BTW:-) . So yeah - CPU performance for some folks is still a big deal. Your $600 Dell would be hating life for hours on end processing data like my desktop does. For gaming and lighter weight apps I'd agree that such power isn't needed. I own a netbook and a few other laptops that suit me fine day to day. My NAS all run underclocked Celeron as well. the right tool for the right job, if your Dell does the job be happy and enjoy it but please do not be so narrow minded as to not understand others need a different tool for their activities...
What do they anticipate a typical day will be like? Get a feel for the pace of work and how often things go haywire. Figure out what their expectations are for you - run around with hair on fire or work at a calm pace on known goals and projects....
It's also possible that the lack of ability has to do with not having had to use it. I am, let's say "older" than 26, and my cursive is pretty much nonexistent as well. I can print just fine but it's often a mix of upper and lower case characters. The truth of the matter is that unless I'm filling out a form or taking notes for myself I'm using a computer and not a pen or pencil. I can text like a madman too - yes with an iPhone touch screen. Actually kind of glad to hear it's not just me:-)
When I was in school we had cursive drilled into our heads. Hours of practice on those stupid mimeographed purple sheets - it sucked! The silly sheets were always too small too so I learned to write cramped cursive to fit on the pages. I was plenty happy to find that I didn't use it day to day when I got older and when I went into the computer field my use of it pretty much evaporated. I will agree that it's troubling to see a skill such as this die off and not see it taught to new students. But in the real world it's simply not needed for many jobs. It should still be taught, not everything is computerized, but I'm not going to be too upset to find out that people not using it are losing it. Seems natural to lose a skill if you don't keep up with it, especially one that can be as complicated as this one. Can we maybe focus more on spelling, keyboarding, and literacy perhaps?
Not something to be used in a workstation but its currently protecting 16TB worth of MY data and has proved to be damned reliable. I have suffered SEVERAL disk failures that did not result in data loss and I just have to buy disks as they fail or I need more space.
For a workstation though - software RAID for sure. Especially if the controller insists on putting strange formatting or other weirdness in there. The poster wants to be able to have his data PORTABLE so that pretty much rules out a hardware controller for me. Too many folks I know have had those crappy motherboard controllers flake out or do weirdness for me to really trust them with stuff I wish to save.
Mind you if this data is REALLY important than he shoudl also be backing it up elsewhere. All it will take is a careless delete or nasty virii to wipe out his files. There have already been ransomware programs released in the wild that encrypt documents and other programs that trash MP3. Even with my unRAID I backup my MP3s to standalone media. Sadly the movies are just too big, the ISO can be redownloaded thankfully.
Well the problem is you may discover, as I did, that you have two left feet! Actually, this was Salsa dancing and while the basic steps were okay and fun when it got more complex I'd have issues remember what was what and when to go where and wow - it was a mess. Still had fun but in the end it just ended up being more frustration than anything else asI tripped all over the place:-( Worth a shot though for others I'd guess!
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Building a large pool of money by getting everyone to pay what amounts to a tax is going to lead to abuses. One need only look at Medicaid, the UN, and well the Federal budget here in the US to see how that would work out. As you say - plenty of examples out there. I'm betting that taxes started out with "simple rules" too and now look at what we have :-( "Removing ambiguity" would become pretty difficult too considering how esoteric some patents are.
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In a perfect world this might work, but I don't see such a Utopian world coming anytime soon. In the real world everyone seems to be trying to step on the backs of others to get ahead or get away with something - that's not going to change.
50megs a video??! Are you high? Noo sorry, unless you are watching entire hour long vids you aren't eating up 50megs a pop! This is crap...
Intermittent wipers weren't on ANY vehicles until ONE guy figured it out. He apparently spent a good bit of time working on it too. Hindsight says that of COURSE it was obvious! Except it wasn't for many years. So, was it okay for car companies to steal the idea since DUH in hindsight it was obvious? As I recall the man who invented it demonstrated it, was blown off, and then the company STOLE the idea. Not cool...
I agree that some ideas are WAY ahead of their time. I don't know how best to reward them, I'm open to suggestions....
I agree that patents shouldn't be used to stop innovation by others or to fence off business areas. However I do not see any sort of "fund" idea working either - who would put money into it? how could it ever compensate someone for an idea that facilitated say a billion dollar product? Instead things should be changed to make patents harder to get and I think that there should be rules in place to encourage the use of patented ideas and to accelerate loss of the patent when the idea isn't put to use. I also believe that it shouldn't be allowed for minor tweaks to rest the "shot clock" and allow the idea to be protected for ever longer periods of time - I'm looking at YOU drug companies!
Things are broken, badly. The body of knowledge a patent examiner must cover when granting a patent is crazy. The period of time a patent may cover needs to be tweaked. Allowances need to somehow be made though so that if a little guy comes up with an idea, a solid one, that will take tons of money to realize that he doesn't get screwed. Likewise we should discourage big well funded companies from swapping around patents like baseball cards in order to fence off business areas and entrench themselves ever deeper.
I don't know what the solution is here but imagining everyone sitting down nicely for tea like adults to discuss how much or how little to compensate someone isn't going to fly well IMO. The companies will say give little, the owner will say give lots. Who decides?
I'm sorry but I still feel that this should be prosecuted lest we reward someone for evading the law. He should also be prosecuted for having fled. Had this been you or I we'd have been locked up and forced to appeal or somesuch. He should not be rewarded for having had the means to evade for so long. As I recall he even admitted guilt and was going to go for a plea bargain - he fled because he was told that the judge might not be allowing his sweet deal. Again, had that been you or I we would have been toast. I do not care how famous he has managed to become - he should not be given any special treatment. If he felt that he was getting something "special" due to who he was when this first went down then he should have gone through the same process you or I would have been forced to. I have no sympathy for him frankly....
I have a co-worker who's mother went in for outpatient surgery. The Dr. made a "mistake" and nicked her bowels - multiple times! The infection got VERY bad while the original Dr. kept dismissing it. Finally a DIFFERENT Dr. on staff looked at her and rushed her into surgery where the "mistakes" were found. The second Dr. claimed that she was just hours from death, the first Dr. admitted he made some errors. The woman has since been in and out of the hospital multiple times and has nearly died more than once. She may yet expire and she will probably NEVER be what she was - she can hardly get out of bed these days and she WAS a fairly active woman prior to this "simple" surgery.
Threat of litigation should (in theory) keep mistakes to a minimum. While the threat certainly didn't seem to work in this case perhaps having this guy's practice sued into the ground will get a lazy Dr. out of the business or force him to be a good bit more careful should he be working on YOU next.
Frivolous litigation should certainly be avoided but in cases where someone truly screws up, doesn't pay enough attention to the patient to realize it, and nearly results in death - and certainly resulted in debilitation - then I'm sorry but it should be used!
Do you REALLY believe that a large company, say Ford, has never stolen an idea from an inventor and tried to steamroll them? Intermittent wipers anyone?
I agree in this time of patent trolls that more and more shenanigans are occurring but that doesn't mean that some large company wouldn't take an idea and run with it - you make it sound like they are above this and that's crazy. It HAS happened in the past, it WILL happen in the future, and if you're the inventor you could easily go broke trying to defend yourself - something they count on. Particularly in a case where stopping the import would severely impact things and make headlines it wouldn't surprise me to see a company playing "chicken". If companies couldn't be protected by threats such as halting imports then we'd see WAY more of this going on - guaranteed! Might doesn't make right, that ought to be obvious.
Admittedly that doesn't sound like the case here but they've already lost once so there MIGHT be merit to it. Simply dismissing the idea that someone could out-innovate a large company though or that a large company is above stealing an idea from someone much smaller is foolish!
Why must this small company have to be some sort of hybrid leader in your eyes to have merit to their claim BTW? Why couldn't a small agile research firm create ideas or products to sell to much larger less innovative\agile companies? Honestly I'm on the fence with the idea that a company that patents something must build something with it since some ideas are simply too big or too hard to market for small research type companies that don't produce things. Selling ideas to others is a valid business model I think. I will admit that patenting iterative ideas or vague hand waving ideas is bad but that's the patent office's fault not the companies for trying...
Note that the spec sheet for this router lists a 2.4Ghz N radio. I also read a review on it http://gazguzla.com/linksys-wrt600n-overview/ that seems to indicate that it can be either N or G but not both - yuck. I too want to move to N but I want 5ghz, N and G at the same time, and I want to be able to load whatever firmware I desire on it. The USB port is nice but not a must have. Still looking...
Actually no it seems to be Linksys. It also looks like it can use the 2.4Ghz antenna OR the 5Ghz but not both at the same time. So close....
I dunno' about killing anything but looking at the tech specs on this I do NOT see 5ghz as supported by N. Damn, I thought this would be my next router. My Tomato equipped WRT54GS is getting a little long in the tooth and locks up under heavy loads despite active cooling. I want to move to N but I want flexible firmware, a USB port, and a 5ghz radio
He named it below "Overclockers". Not the egg, I'm a little surprised but pleasantly since I use NewEgg a bunch - when their prices don't suck.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391935&cid=29635949
He posted the site anyway - Overclockers. Not the Egg. Not really much information at all but more than we had.
You guys asked for it, here it is and stuck with a score of 1. Push it up please - it ain't the chicken place ;-)
Biggest problem with them lately is pricing. Anytime something is the slightest bit popular they jack the price to the Moon. I understand supply and demand but I'm finding myself saving as much as $50 on items by buying them elsewhere. It would be one thing if this was occasional but it's happened to me several times in the last few months. CPUs, bare bone computers, printers.... I like them, they have an awesome WEB site (which is why they win out over Mwave), but I now find myself shopping around a great deal more even if it is a PITA.
Oh, DO use FatWallet to get 1% back. It used to be 2% but hey I'll take anything I can get out of these guys!
Another good book to read on this subject - Nuclear Express
http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Express-Political-History-Proliferation/dp/0760335028/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254152895&sr=8-1
Yeah, it's pretty depressing...
I might have liked that years ago when I first put together my collection. However iTunes wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye at the time and I did my own thing. Now 500+ GIGs later I'm not willing to let any program mess with my files! It has taken me ages to get the tags right, to get the album art correct, to get the folder tags right. Heck, half the programs that I have loaded up to look at my collection choke and DIE trying to index it let alone do anything with it.
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MAYBE one of these days I'll make a backup and let iTunes go nuts with it but only if I can keep the files in place on my nice protected unRAID rather than having them copied to the too small drive on my Mini or to one of my PCs. That much music and work to organize it isn't something I'd ever trust to just one drive or to one backup either.... Hrm, iTunes doesn't like WMA either does it? I have a few songs in that format as well as FLAC and OGG - somehow I don't think letting iTunes manage this is going to be a great idea but maybe one day for a science experiment I'll try (lol).
I have found that Apple does things a bit differently for the Mac version of iTunes or seems to anyway. I have a Mac Mini and because of this I'd like to switch to using it to backup and synch my iPhone. Except when I try it gives me scary warnings about how in order to do so it will first have to remove all of my music and videos - gee thanks!
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This whole one computer centric way of doing things with my phone pisses me off. I DID allow my Mini's copy of iTunes to look over my heyuge music collection and was happy to see it didn't puke. I FIRST made sure I corrected the DEFAULT setting that would have had it copying and renaming, and doing only who knows what to my music. Heaven forbid you should organize something yourself in the Mac world!
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Their iPhoto picture app spent DAYS copying all of my damned pictures from my NAS to my Mini - seems the Mac wishes to be the center of all of my media and I really hate that aspect of it...
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Anyway, yes it is possible to easily add in music to the iTunes library from other download sites. However I think the original poster thought it would require an added step and really it doesn't. You can use the Amazon app which is automatic or you can just drag\drop the file onto iTunes if you want - I've done both on Windows...
Honestly I've not tried synching my iPhone with more than one copy of iTunes - or rather I have but when I try to get it to synch music and video it tells me it will ERASE all of my music and video and put the selections from the second copy on my phone. So, I've never gone further than that! 99.9% of my music is my own MP3 with only maybe 3 songs from Apple so maybe theirs do get treated differently - I dunno'.
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I too have been a bit irked that it doesn't just show up as a drive but that was to satisfy content owners who no doubt didn't want you taking your iPod to a friend's house and giving them your tunes and vice versa. I am sure it was also to lock you more solidly into their products, who knows what other reasons. that you didn't know this before buying is kind of amusing - this was my first "iPod" and I knew it beforehand.
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That said - I do find iTunes to be a complete PITA to use. It's NOT intuitive to me at all and having to make playlists etc. to get music onto my phone is painful. Somehow I have even managed to put multiple copies of the SAME song on my phone - very odd. I deal with it though and my music is on there but I do really wish it was easier and more intuitive. I suppose it makes sense to someone somehow but for me it's just overly complicating getting files from one place to another and making backups!
WTF, not RIAA this time, instead it's ASCAP> WTF are they smoking?! Why does everyone have to have their hands out? Hey when some twits ringtone goes off are you going to find a way to charge for that "performance" too?! Man at some point these "content" folks are just going to get right out of control! Oh wait..... too late!
I use iTunes for my iPhone - and I never buy anything there, I buy it all on Amazon because I prefer the more portable MP3 format. You seem to think that purchasing from Amazon and importing into your collection is difficult. Nothing could be further from the truth!! Well, not if you are running Windows anyway. You see Amazon has an MP3 download application that will place the downloads in an area you designate AND it will import them into iTunes automatically. -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html/ref=sv_dmusic_3 This is a simple application and one that they displayed to me when I purchased an album in order to "help me". Honestly I really like using Amazon except for their new policy for pricing up more popular tunes. Seldom is it that I cannto find what I want and when that occurs I do sometimes turn to iTunes.
As for this current idea to charge for these samples. RIAA listen up - when I am browsing through a "store" and I think I've found what I want I listen to it briefly to see if it's the right song or more foten the right version of the song. If I could not do this I would go back to how I used to get music - swapping HDD with friends or perhaps using a Torrent. I have gone legit primarily because DRM has been dropped from purchased music and because the quality finally meets MY expectations (mostly). If you prevent various online stores from allowing me to listen to samples, and especially if you try to setup your OWN store and push out established companies - which I wouldn't put past you with dick moves like this - then I WILL go back to how I used to get music. Most likely, due to your stupid hounding of torrent sites, I will simply swap drives again and go back to buying used CD - which I will then sell right back after ripping. I'd prefer to stick to buying legit frankly but.....
RIAA - get a freaking clue!
I have a 4ghz C2D (overclocked). My x.264 encoding of BD rips takes as long as 18 hours - I keep the quality high. I am looking for more cores and more clock speed if I can get it in order to lower encoding time. I already know more cores will benefit me since a slightly slower 4 core I've "drag tested" has beaten my C2D by a couple of hours but runs hot as hell. I've been looking to move to an I-7 920 clocked to 4ghz but if I can get one of these 800 series CPUs for less, overclock it to nearly the same performance level as a 920, and use less power I'm VERY interested. :-)
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Since the two CPUs I'm considering use different damned sockets these tests are important to me.
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Compiling code is another app where these CPU can come in handy. I frequently compile a fairly complex app in Linux (still more machines!) on both a C2D and a Atom 330 - the C2D STOMPS the Atom as you might imagine. An I-7 with additional cores would likewise stomp the C2D and if my compiled HTPC app could benefit I'd consider it but the Atom is good enough (thank you VDPAU!). The more complex the project the more potential time saved compiling obviously. I'm betting that some people do this activity often for a living? Distcc farm perhaps? Rendering maybe? Weirdly the Atom shows up as 4 cores in Ubuntu and I can actually task all 4, I guess the 330 got Hyperthreading? The C2D still wins that race though no matter what I do. (duh) The Atom is overclocked to over 2.1ghz too BTW
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So yeah - CPU performance for some folks is still a big deal. Your $600 Dell would be hating life for hours on end processing data like my desktop does. For gaming and lighter weight apps I'd agree that such power isn't needed. I own a netbook and a few other laptops that suit me fine day to day. My NAS all run underclocked Celeron as well. the right tool for the right job, if your Dell does the job be happy and enjoy it but please do not be so narrow minded as to not understand others need a different tool for their activities...
What do they anticipate a typical day will be like? Get a feel for the pace of work and how often things go haywire. Figure out what their expectations are for you - run around with hair on fire or work at a calm pace on known goals and projects....
It's also possible that the lack of ability has to do with not having had to use it. I am, let's say "older" than 26, and my cursive is pretty much nonexistent as well. I can print just fine but it's often a mix of upper and lower case characters. The truth of the matter is that unless I'm filling out a form or taking notes for myself I'm using a computer and not a pen or pencil. I can text like a madman too - yes with an iPhone touch screen. Actually kind of glad to hear it's not just me :-)
When I was in school we had cursive drilled into our heads. Hours of practice on those stupid mimeographed purple sheets - it sucked! The silly sheets were always too small too so I learned to write cramped cursive to fit on the pages. I was plenty happy to find that I didn't use it day to day when I got older and when I went into the computer field my use of it pretty much evaporated. I will agree that it's troubling to see a skill such as this die off and not see it taught to new students. But in the real world it's simply not needed for many jobs. It should still be taught, not everything is computerized, but I'm not going to be too upset to find out that people not using it are losing it. Seems natural to lose a skill if you don't keep up with it, especially one that can be as complicated as this one. Can we maybe focus more on spelling, keyboarding, and literacy perhaps?
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Not something to be used in a workstation but its currently protecting 16TB worth of MY data and has proved to be damned reliable. I have suffered SEVERAL disk failures that did not result in data loss and I just have to buy disks as they fail or I need more space.
For a workstation though - software RAID for sure. Especially if the controller insists on putting strange formatting or other weirdness in there. The poster wants to be able to have his data PORTABLE so that pretty much rules out a hardware controller for me. Too many folks I know have had those crappy motherboard controllers flake out or do weirdness for me to really trust them with stuff I wish to save.
Mind you if this data is REALLY important than he shoudl also be backing it up elsewhere. All it will take is a careless delete or nasty virii to wipe out his files. There have already been ransomware programs released in the wild that encrypt documents and other programs that trash MP3. Even with my unRAID I backup my MP3s to standalone media. Sadly the movies are just too big, the ISO can be redownloaded thankfully.
Well the problem is you may discover, as I did, that you have two left feet! Actually, this was Salsa dancing and while the basic steps were okay and fun when it got more complex I'd have issues remember what was what and when to go where and wow - it was a mess. Still had fun but in the end it just ended up being more frustration than anything else asI tripped all over the place :-( Worth a shot though for others I'd guess!