That may have been true, but in the last week, I've seen 3 different sites pop up a Mozilla installer dialog for toolbars and other browser extensions that were pretty much the same things as the IE spyware. It's not an ActiveX control, but users are just as prone to click OK if an XPI file comes across.
Cool. I haven't seen a URL from that site in a forum for a while. I was part of the team that re-built the 3M product catalog (the version they're still running apparently) and there's actually a lot of cool products buried in that application. Browse around in there and you may be surprised some of the exotic products that 3M makes.
Though you implied that people are getting their 10,000 songs by downloading them, I actually have about that many ripped from CD. I've bought all my CD's used for several years now. Aside from new stuff, the used CD's I buy average $4-5 each, so my $20-25 investment in music gets me 40-50 songs rather than 20-25.
Half.com and Amazon's used stuff make getting the real CD cheaper than any of the legitimate download services. Plus, I've got the actual album and can control the ripping.
I currently listen to quite a few audiobooks, but supplement it with audio of classic radio, Supreme Court arguments, etc.
Most of the oral arguments to the most important Supreme Court cases are available as MP3's from Oyez.com.
Thousands of old radio programs, including mysteries, comedies, political/historical audio, etc. are available for a small flat monthly fee ($7.50/month) at RUSC.com.
I've found it really interesting to be able to listen to *primary* sources for a lot of the cultural history of the United States. Think you understand Brown v. the Board of Education? Listen to the arguments and you'll see how much is missing from your high school telling of the story.
It tends to be a bit more meat for listening when compared to the candy that many modern audiobooks provide.
You're telling me that the 4 guys in my example are going to make $1750/year each? $3500 split 4 ways is $875.
Now it's you who reveals how little you know about filmmaking. Do you really think an independent film can be made in a few days? Or that it can all be written, shot and edited in "off" hours? Great filmmaking, like all great art requires sacrifice and isn't something you just do on 3 sequential Saturdays and call it "done".
Overall, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, you *can* self-produce art. Or, you can have someone else finance it, but you *will* lose some level of control of the result.
I was trying to be conservative in the number of shows per week. If I had said 5, someone would have gutted me saying, "There's no way you can get 5 shows per week."
My point is that if you can self-produce a CD with a print run of 1000 for $3400, you pay off that entire credit card bill after selling ~350 discs. That comes down to ~1.3 per show at 5 shows per week. If you did something like get a decent recording of one of the live shows, the costs to get a recording ready goes down.
My point isn't that it's "easy" to pay for it, just that it's not like there's absolutely no other way than selling your soul to a corporation. This isn't a binary game: either get a big contract or don't put out a CD of any sort. There's lots of room on the spectrum.
I mean, is $3500 on a couple of credit cards (which will be paid off by the CD sales themselves) worth having complete control over your music?
I mean, even a *dirt cheap* movie like Clerks still cost $15,000 and that's without distribution. If this model of self-financing wasn't workable, independent films wouldn't get made either.
Split 4 ways (for a 4 piece band), that's only $67 a month to put out a CD a year. Are you telling me that the only way 4 guys can finance that amount is to sell their soul to a corporation? If they can't, then they probably had a hard time buying their van, amps, pedals, cords and microphones as well. $3000-5000 is within the reach of many of the credit cards issued to college students. I had offers with credit limits of $3000 when I made $500 a month. With 4 guys, recording an album with the budget you laid out is easily within reach to finance privately, even if only on credit cards.
Plus, even just looking at oasiscd's prices, its $1200 for 500 CD's, but it only goes up to $1400 to double the number of discs. If they can move all 1000 CD's (which they should be able to do if they are touring constantly at 18 hours per day), they net $6500 on the CD's if they sell them at only $9.95. Is that enough to live on? Of course not, but it definitely isn't a negative cashflow on the project. The second 500 discs are practically free, netting $4800 of their total net.
Moving 1000 CD's in a year if you're actively touring isn't that hard. If you give 2 shows a week, you only need to sell 10 discs at a concert. And, if they sell faster, or the disc can continue to be sold for more than 1 year, their net profit per disc will go up.
I usually buy albums, but the burn using iTunes takes a couple of minutes and I rip and encode using ExactAudioCopy/LAME. The rip itself only takes about 2 minutes and then the disc can be freed up for another album while the encoding goes on in the background.
I usually only buy one album at a time from iTunes, but I use this basic approach to rip used CD's (which is actually how I get the vast majority of my CD's). In those cases, I've averaged 20 or so CD's an hour and then leave the machine up overnight.
As it's pretty brainless, and I use my laptop, I just take care of it while watching TV from the couch.
See, there are these discs called CD-RW, and . . . get this . . . you can erase them and use them again and again and again and again.
I keep a CD-RW in my laptop drive and have a nice rhythm to download, burn, rip and encode that only takes a few minutes after the purchase from iTMS. I'm sure eventually the disc won't work again, but I also think that if I'm paying $9.99 per album, I can spring for a $0.25 CR-RW every couple of months.
The waters get muddier when you note that Amazon has that album for sale *used* at $8.98 and Half.com has it for $7.99 or $7.00 (depending on censored version).
If you're a doctor with a 12 year old girl dying in the hospital, what in the world are you doing in the theater watching "Hellboy"?
I've had movies interrupted probably 20-30 times in the last year or 2 and it has NEVER been a doctor. Nor has the conversation EVER been important on the scale that everyone talks about in these discussions. Over half of the conversations have started something like this,
"Oh, nothing much, just watching a movie.". "Yeah, we can bring the beer." "No, it's no big deal. Some a**hole is telling me to get off the phone, so I'll have to call you later."
Most doctors carry pagers as their notification devices for medical emergencies. It allows them to be notified, but not have to drop what they're doing to know what's going on. Same with on-call ambulance drivers, firemen, etc. In almost every single emergency profession, all they really look for is notification that they need to get to the hospital/ambulance shed/firehouse immediately. They don't need to have an actual conversation.
Re:Sure, if you can dumb it down into a kisok...
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 1
1. I did say to use a piece of kiosk software. 2. Even setting that aside, there are actually ways of both disabling IE and pretty much locking it down. With the Group Policy editor in XP Pro, you can lock out all of the settings like changing security options, lock proxy settings, etc. If you set *everything* in IE to the strictest settings, the VAST majority of problems with it go away.
I've locked down XP boxes in computer labs for elementary schools and it CAN be done and it CAN work.
Re:Sure, if you can dumb it down into a kisok...
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 1
Come on. If you are setting up a sandbox, why would you still use IE? I'd lock it into a kiosk mode (there are a few packages out there to do this with Windows), install Mozilla and make it both the default browser and the only "Internet" icon on the locked down.
Additionally, I'd install a firewall with all outbound ports except 80 restricted as well as Mozilla being the only program allowed to access the Internet (ZoneAlarm can do this). I'd set up virus software that automatically downloads and patches without prompting.
Obviously some of this stuff is harder/not doable with Win98, but if you actually want control over the machines and still want Windows compatibility, XP Pro lets you pretty much lock the machines down.
It was the result of years of work, but clearly you didn't watch me slide through high school without taking a book home.
The simple reality is that my father worked harder than I've ever needed to at his business and farm, as did my grandfather's 65 years on *his* farm. They sacrificed more to try to keep those farm afloat than any IT geek I'll ever meet and it still didn't work. In my experience, some of the hardest working people aren't any closer to the reward and it's got jack squat to do with a lazy lifestyle, drinking or drugs.
I too have worked as a janitor in a college, worked in fast food, worked in retail stores and worked construction as well as in IT in small businesses, large businesses and schools. The thing is, that in both the "unskilled" jobs and the "skilled" jobs, I saw/see the same lazy attitudes everywhere. Most developers have no more ambition than auto mechanics.
Does our American economy value one more than the other? Yes. However, lets have no delusions that it's because the auto mechanics don't work as hard.
That's actually my point. The parent post claimed that if they just worked harder, they'd get the reward that the wealthy have clearly earned. Anyone who's observed the lack of correlation you describe would see that there is no link.
In a purely capitalistic view, there's no judgement about that fact, it just *is*.
Unbelievable. Only on Slashdot would I get called a Socialist. Of course, only on Slashdot would someone make gross assumptions about my entire world view based on a couple of paragraphs.
Nowhere did I say that the higher paying job isn't valued as such by a capitalist economy. That's just high school economics. What I was responding to was a comment indicating that directly linked the act of working hard (which many unskilled workers do for 30+ years) to the rewards of financial success. That's a false cause->effect link, hence my response.
Do I believe that my current situation (incidentally not at that highest rate) comes from the years leading up to my current situation and I know that our economy values that. I'm not complaining.
However, if I compare the amount of work I've put forth to the work my father has done, according to the post I responded to, he should have 10x my net worth. He's worked harder than anyone else I know and gained nearly none of the reward that the parent post claimed is linked.
You've got to be kidding me. The hardest work I've ever done in my life was done for $6/hour and the easiest was done for $45/hour. In pretty much any society on this blue marble, those that work the hardest are also those who get the least financial reward. And, those who have millions and who 'worked hard' for it may have done so, but not any harder than someone working in a pipe foundry for $10/hour. Those people can work as hard as possible at those jobs and never get any closer to the reward.
It may actually dramatically increase DVD rentals for a while as people start just ripping DVD's and sending them back/returning them. With a service like Netflix and a careful schedule, you could get movies in the mail, rip them and return them the next day, burn the ripped copies during the mail delay and start the cycle over, getting movies for $1 + your monthly fee. Even with Blockbuster pricing, you could rent a DVD for $4, rip and burn it to an $0.80 DVD-R and have a copy for under $5.
Where this process breaks down is if new DVD's themselves drop below that $5 mark. At that point, it's not worth the effort to make a copy.
I actually feel that way about music and don't download anything off of the p2p services, not necessarily because of any legal or moral issue (though they do exist), but because I can buy used CD's cheap enough that it's not worth the effort. I mean, if I can buy a disc for $4-6 and get the entire album, there's no way I'm going to find all of the songs on the album, consistently ripped and encoded on any of the available services in any reasonable amount of time that compares.
In many dorms, it's not a matter of whether or not you CAN plug something in, but whether you're ALLOWED to plug it in. Many dorms these days prohibit refrigerators, hotplates, microwaves, toaster ovens, etc. Originally it was a "fire prevention" issue, but it's moved from that and some of the restrictions no longer even make sense, but there it is. The whole way of dorm life is finding the loopholes that let you live life the way you want.
This is what I'm going to do for all of my new domains. Why? I don't want to provide innacurate information, but I'm sick of getting a predictable pile of junk mail a month or so after I register for every single domain that I register. All of the mail includes the new domain as the "company" on the envelope. It doesn't matter which registrar I use, the mail is always the same.
Depends on the metro area you're talking about. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the houses inside the city limits are much cheaper than anything in any suburbs closer than 35 miles of the cities themselves. There are lots of 3BR houses with a yard and a garage in St. Paul for under $175,000. For that price in the suburbs, you would be lucky to get a cookie-cutter townhouse.
There's more to the range of housing than downtown and the suburbs. My neighborhood in St. Paul looks like any residential neighborhood around here. Downtown it most definitely is not.
The suburbs *used* to be cheaper housing, but aren't necessarily anymore.
Your calculations would be fine, except you ignore the costs of the car itself, repairs or depreciation, maintenance, insurance, etc. While, at 40mpg, your costs are probably lower than average, there's a reason that the IRS gives ~$0.30/mile as the actual costs of driving. It's because most Americans have just taken for granted that they have a car payment and insurance payment every month and don't even consider those costs when making these kinds of comparisons.
Public transit is a great idea. Unfortunately, in the US, it's implemented at a local level and varies dramatically. Funding is almost always contentious and it's difficult to build an entirely new system. In most cities where tranist works well, it's been there for quite some time. Then you add in the variables like transit workers going on strike (like they are in Minneapolis right now) and relying on public transit can leave you stranded for months. The first light rail line (since they gutted the streetcar system) was set to go live this month and is now going to take several months after the strike is over before it returns.
If we're to rely on public transportation, it's probably going to take a major committment of money and effort. It took something like that to get a nationwide interstate highway system. There's no way that local or state governments would have gotten the interstate system built.
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That may have been true, but in the last week, I've seen 3 different sites pop up a Mozilla installer dialog for toolbars and other browser extensions that were pretty much the same things as the IE spyware. It's not an ActiveX control, but users are just as prone to click OK if an XPI file comes across.
Cool. I haven't seen a URL from that site in a forum for a while. I was part of the team that re-built the 3M product catalog (the version they're still running apparently) and there's actually a lot of cool products buried in that application. Browse around in there and you may be surprised some of the exotic products that 3M makes.
Though you implied that people are getting their 10,000 songs by downloading them, I actually have about that many ripped from CD. I've bought all my CD's used for several years now. Aside from new stuff, the used CD's I buy average $4-5 each, so my $20-25 investment in music gets me 40-50 songs rather than 20-25.
Half.com and Amazon's used stuff make getting the real CD cheaper than any of the legitimate download services. Plus, I've got the actual album and can control the ripping.
I had a VW Rabbit that I sold with 375,000 in 1996 and it's STILL being driven daily.
Most of the oral arguments to the most important Supreme Court cases are available as MP3's from Oyez.com.
Thousands of old radio programs, including mysteries, comedies, political/historical audio, etc. are available for a small flat monthly fee ($7.50/month) at RUSC.com.
I've found it really interesting to be able to listen to *primary* sources for a lot of the cultural history of the United States. Think you understand Brown v. the Board of Education? Listen to the arguments and you'll see how much is missing from your high school telling of the story. It tends to be a bit more meat for listening when compared to the candy that many modern audiobooks provide.
You're telling me that the 4 guys in my example are going to make $1750/year each? $3500 split 4 ways is $875.
Now it's you who reveals how little you know about filmmaking. Do you really think an independent film can be made in a few days? Or that it can all be written, shot and edited in "off" hours? Great filmmaking, like all great art requires sacrifice and isn't something you just do on 3 sequential Saturdays and call it "done".
Overall, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, you *can* self-produce art. Or, you can have someone else finance it, but you *will* lose some level of control of the result.
I was trying to be conservative in the number of shows per week. If I had said 5, someone would have gutted me saying, "There's no way you can get 5 shows per week."
My point is that if you can self-produce a CD with a print run of 1000 for $3400, you pay off that entire credit card bill after selling ~350 discs. That comes down to ~1.3 per show at 5 shows per week. If you did something like get a decent recording of one of the live shows, the costs to get a recording ready goes down.
My point isn't that it's "easy" to pay for it, just that it's not like there's absolutely no other way than selling your soul to a corporation. This isn't a binary game: either get a big contract or don't put out a CD of any sort. There's lots of room on the spectrum.
I mean, is $3500 on a couple of credit cards (which will be paid off by the CD sales themselves) worth having complete control over your music?
I mean, even a *dirt cheap* movie like Clerks still cost $15,000 and that's without distribution. If this model of self-financing wasn't workable, independent films wouldn't get made either.
Split 4 ways (for a 4 piece band), that's only $67 a month to put out a CD a year. Are you telling me that the only way 4 guys can finance that amount is to sell their soul to a corporation? If they can't, then they probably had a hard time buying their van, amps, pedals, cords and microphones as well. $3000-5000 is within the reach of many of the credit cards issued to college students. I had offers with credit limits of $3000 when I made $500 a month. With 4 guys, recording an album with the budget you laid out is easily within reach to finance privately, even if only on credit cards.
Plus, even just looking at oasiscd's prices, its $1200 for 500 CD's, but it only goes up to $1400 to double the number of discs. If they can move all 1000 CD's (which they should be able to do if they are touring constantly at 18 hours per day), they net $6500 on the CD's if they sell them at only $9.95. Is that enough to live on? Of course not, but it definitely isn't a negative cashflow on the project. The second 500 discs are practically free, netting $4800 of their total net.
Moving 1000 CD's in a year if you're actively touring isn't that hard. If you give 2 shows a week, you only need to sell 10 discs at a concert. And, if they sell faster, or the disc can continue to be sold for more than 1 year, their net profit per disc will go up.
I usually buy albums, but the burn using iTunes takes a couple of minutes and I rip and encode using ExactAudioCopy/LAME. The rip itself only takes about 2 minutes and then the disc can be freed up for another album while the encoding goes on in the background.
I usually only buy one album at a time from iTunes, but I use this basic approach to rip used CD's (which is actually how I get the vast majority of my CD's). In those cases, I've averaged 20 or so CD's an hour and then leave the machine up overnight.
As it's pretty brainless, and I use my laptop, I just take care of it while watching TV from the couch.
See, there are these discs called CD-RW, and . . . get this . . . you can erase them and use them again and again and again and again.
I keep a CD-RW in my laptop drive and have a nice rhythm to download, burn, rip and encode that only takes a few minutes after the purchase from iTMS. I'm sure eventually the disc won't work again, but I also think that if I'm paying $9.99 per album, I can spring for a $0.25 CR-RW every couple of months.
The waters get muddier when you note that Amazon has that album for sale *used* at $8.98 and Half.com has it for $7.99 or $7.00 (depending on censored version).
If you're a doctor with a 12 year old girl dying in the hospital, what in the world are you doing in the theater watching "Hellboy"?
I've had movies interrupted probably 20-30 times in the last year or 2 and it has NEVER been a doctor. Nor has the conversation EVER been important on the scale that everyone talks about in these discussions. Over half of the conversations have started something like this,
"Oh, nothing much, just watching a movie.".
"Yeah, we can bring the beer."
"No, it's no big deal. Some a**hole is telling me to get off the phone, so I'll have to call you later."
Most doctors carry pagers as their notification devices for medical emergencies. It allows them to be notified, but not have to drop what they're doing to know what's going on. Same with on-call ambulance drivers, firemen, etc. In almost every single emergency profession, all they really look for is notification that they need to get to the hospital/ambulance shed/firehouse immediately. They don't need to have an actual conversation.
1. I did say to use a piece of kiosk software.
2. Even setting that aside, there are actually ways of both disabling IE and pretty much locking it down. With the Group Policy editor in XP Pro, you can lock out all of the settings like changing security options, lock proxy settings, etc. If you set *everything* in IE to the strictest settings, the VAST majority of problems with it go away.
I've locked down XP boxes in computer labs for elementary schools and it CAN be done and it CAN work.
Come on. If you are setting up a sandbox, why would you still use IE? I'd lock it into a kiosk mode (there are a few packages out there to do this with Windows), install Mozilla and make it both the default browser and the only "Internet" icon on the locked down.
Additionally, I'd install a firewall with all outbound ports except 80 restricted as well as Mozilla being the only program allowed to access the Internet (ZoneAlarm can do this). I'd set up virus software that automatically downloads and patches without prompting.
Obviously some of this stuff is harder/not doable with Win98, but if you actually want control over the machines and still want Windows compatibility, XP Pro lets you pretty much lock the machines down.
It was the result of years of work, but clearly you didn't watch me slide through high school without taking a book home.
The simple reality is that my father worked harder than I've ever needed to at his business and farm, as did my grandfather's 65 years on *his* farm. They sacrificed more to try to keep those farm afloat than any IT geek I'll ever meet and it still didn't work. In my experience, some of the hardest working people aren't any closer to the reward and it's got jack squat to do with a lazy lifestyle, drinking or drugs.
I too have worked as a janitor in a college, worked in fast food, worked in retail stores and worked construction as well as in IT in small businesses, large businesses and schools. The thing is, that in both the "unskilled" jobs and the "skilled" jobs, I saw/see the same lazy attitudes everywhere. Most developers have no more ambition than auto mechanics.
Does our American economy value one more than the other? Yes. However, lets have no delusions that it's because the auto mechanics don't work as hard.
That's actually my point. The parent post claimed that if they just worked harder, they'd get the reward that the wealthy have clearly earned. Anyone who's observed the lack of correlation you describe would see that there is no link.
In a purely capitalistic view, there's no judgement about that fact, it just *is*.
Unbelievable. Only on Slashdot would I get called a Socialist. Of course, only on Slashdot would someone make gross assumptions about my entire world view based on a couple of paragraphs.
Nowhere did I say that the higher paying job isn't valued as such by a capitalist economy. That's just high school economics. What I was responding to was a comment indicating that directly linked the act of working hard (which many unskilled workers do for 30+ years) to the rewards of financial success. That's a false cause->effect link, hence my response.
Do I believe that my current situation (incidentally not at that highest rate) comes from the years leading up to my current situation and I know that our economy values that. I'm not complaining.
However, if I compare the amount of work I've put forth to the work my father has done, according to the post I responded to, he should have 10x my net worth. He's worked harder than anyone else I know and gained nearly none of the reward that the parent post claimed is linked.
You've got to be kidding me. The hardest work I've ever done in my life was done for $6/hour and the easiest was done for $45/hour. In pretty much any society on this blue marble, those that work the hardest are also those who get the least financial reward. And, those who have millions and who 'worked hard' for it may have done so, but not any harder than someone working in a pipe foundry for $10/hour. Those people can work as hard as possible at those jobs and never get any closer to the reward.
Sounds like a job for >Phunami</a>. It's a PHP script with a single purpose: caching pages when getting slashdotted. I wrote it as a proof of concept for a section in a book I'm working on, but released it under LGPL as I figured it might be useful since this error shows up in many slashdottings.
It may actually dramatically increase DVD rentals for a while as people start just ripping DVD's and sending them back/returning them. With a service like Netflix and a careful schedule, you could get movies in the mail, rip them and return them the next day, burn the ripped copies during the mail delay and start the cycle over, getting movies for $1 + your monthly fee. Even with Blockbuster pricing, you could rent a DVD for $4, rip and burn it to an $0.80 DVD-R and have a copy for under $5.
Where this process breaks down is if new DVD's themselves drop below that $5 mark. At that point, it's not worth the effort to make a copy.
I actually feel that way about music and don't download anything off of the p2p services, not necessarily because of any legal or moral issue (though they do exist), but because I can buy used CD's cheap enough that it's not worth the effort. I mean, if I can buy a disc for $4-6 and get the entire album, there's no way I'm going to find all of the songs on the album, consistently ripped and encoded on any of the available services in any reasonable amount of time that compares.
In many dorms, it's not a matter of whether or not you CAN plug something in, but whether you're ALLOWED to plug it in. Many dorms these days prohibit refrigerators, hotplates, microwaves, toaster ovens, etc. Originally it was a "fire prevention" issue, but it's moved from that and some of the restrictions no longer even make sense, but there it is. The whole way of dorm life is finding the loopholes that let you live life the way you want.
This is what I'm going to do for all of my new domains. Why? I don't want to provide innacurate information, but I'm sick of getting a predictable pile of junk mail a month or so after I register for every single domain that I register. All of the mail includes the new domain as the "company" on the envelope. It doesn't matter which registrar I use, the mail is always the same.
Depends on the metro area you're talking about. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the houses inside the city limits are much cheaper than anything in any suburbs closer than 35 miles of the cities themselves. There are lots of 3BR houses with a yard and a garage in St. Paul for under $175,000. For that price in the suburbs, you would be lucky to get a cookie-cutter townhouse.
There's more to the range of housing than downtown and the suburbs. My neighborhood in St. Paul looks like any residential neighborhood around here. Downtown it most definitely is not.
The suburbs *used* to be cheaper housing, but aren't necessarily anymore.
Your calculations would be fine, except you ignore the costs of the car itself, repairs or depreciation, maintenance, insurance, etc. While, at 40mpg, your costs are probably lower than average, there's a reason that the IRS gives ~$0.30/mile as the actual costs of driving. It's because most Americans have just taken for granted that they have a car payment and insurance payment every month and don't even consider those costs when making these kinds of comparisons.
Public transit is a great idea. Unfortunately, in the US, it's implemented at a local level and varies dramatically. Funding is almost always contentious and it's difficult to build an entirely new system. In most cities where tranist works well, it's been there for quite some time. Then you add in the variables like transit workers going on strike (like they are in Minneapolis right now) and relying on public transit can leave you stranded for months. The first light rail line (since they gutted the streetcar system) was set to go live this month and is now going to take several months after the strike is over before it returns.
If we're to rely on public transportation, it's probably going to take a major committment of money and effort. It took something like that to get a nationwide interstate highway system. There's no way that local or state governments would have gotten the interstate system built.