Or too little too late. Even if the record companies had reduced CD prices to more reasonable levels 10 years ago, I don't think things would be much different today. I haven't listened to a CD in a long time. Why would I want to be constantly shuffling CDs in an out of a CD player when I can rip everything to my hard drive or MP3 player and have hundreds of hours of music easily availble. Things have changed. Just as nobody uses 8-Track tapes anymore, the use of physical media is declining.
And for a _modest_ percentage of households, it can be a few hours of work a week that feeds that fourth kid.
It's the high pressure "make your friends into salespeople, that makes you money" that makes them an addictive and much hated pyramid scheme. But they've managed to stay in business because they actually sell a useful set of products, and they don't engage in the wholesale fraud of the "laundry balls" or the "Mangosteen Juice" or "Scientology E-Meters".
Feeds the fourth kid? Not hardly. A few months ago I saw an Amway commercial and when I did the math -- Amway's claimed revenue divided by the number of people they claim to have selling their products ("we help xx milion people own their own business") -- it works out to an average of $2600 per person PER YEAR ($216.66 per month). That's gross sales. What do you suppose their net is?
Why is a 3rd party involved when NewEgg wants to sell Intell CPUs?? Why do we need those endless supply chains from the producer to the reseller, each one taking their share and potentially increasing the chance of fraud? Do companies like Dell also get their CPUs from a 3rd party supplier?
I've wondered the same thing for a long time. Why buy from a "distributor" who is just a middle-man that drives up the price. BUT, it does sort of make from Newegg's perspective. They don't just buy Intel CPUs from the distributor. The distributor carries hundreds of products from many different companies, making it easy for Newegg to place one order from one compnay.
Seriously, how many stories are needed on this topic? It was a very minor, localized issue that has already been dealt with in a manner that has garnered almost universal Slashdot love; stories over, nothing to see here.
The real stroy is where exactly did the fakes come from. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create these fakes and I find it hard to beleive they only made 100-200 and then quit.
Imagine a person, in a casino, sitting at a slot machine. They're pumping coin into it and steadi;y losing everything. They know that they should walk away, but they can't. Walking away means admitting to themself and others that they lost. And so they keeping telling themself that if they keep playing long enough, they will win back enough to at least break even.
The same is true of Ubisoft, Microsoft and all the other companies who keep pumping money into the DRM slot machine. Year after year they keep coming up with new DRM schemes to replace all the previous ones that have failed (ie, all of them). They can't stop. To stop would be an admisison of failure. An admission that even if they created uncrackable DRM, the extra sales revenue wouldn't even come close to covering the cost of creating and maintainging new DRM schemes.
What's bizarre about the whole thing is the level of radiation leaks that started all this trouble weren't even that high, near the level we can measure accurately. There was no need to lie, unless they were trying to cover up something even bigger.
This is the problem with the Nuclear Industry. Although there have never been any major accidents or injuries, they have a 40 year history of:
Massive cost over-runs on almost every nuclear power plant built Poor management Poor maintenance Not fixing identified problems until forced by government action Getting caught lying about things big and small Having no plan for dealing with radioactive waste other than bury it in someone's backyard and let them deal with it when the containers start leaking.
Because: (a) Someone installed a P2P file-sharing program (deliberately)
(b) They accidently (or ignorantly) selected a folder to share that contained company data or they didn't specify which folders to share, so everything got shared by default
Just do a quick Google search and you can find all sorts of stuff that people have exposed to the Internet -- and you don't even have to secretly install any evil P2P software
The Domesday Book was commisioned in December 1085 by King William (aka William the Conqueror, who invaded ngland in 1066). The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time). It is a detailed statement of lands held by he king and by his tenants and of the resources that went with those lands. It records which manors rightfully belonged to which estates, thus ending years of confusion resulting from the gradual and sometimes violent dispossession of the Anglo-Saxons by their Norman conquerors.
In 1986, at a cost of £2.5 million, the UK compiled the contents of the Domesday Book into electronic form that was stored on laserdiscs. The information stored on the laserdiscs, which is the equivalent of several sets of encyclopedias, is now unreadable because the equipment needed to read the discs is no longer available. Meanwhile the original book is still readable after more than 900 years.
The irony is they took out the advertisement to oppose delays on replacing the existing bridge, and in turn doing so they are "against" another proposal that would add more mass transit.
No, the irony is that one of their justifications for opposing the alternative proposal is "Doing so would cause yet more delay, increase the cost to taxpayers,"
This from the company that has cheated the state of Washington out of Billions of dollars in taxes.
I'm not too concerned about software (most of them only need browser, IM, VLC, mail and a Powerpoint viewer for all those fascinating attachments)
Been there, done that. This is the classic mistake.
Yes, their needs are minmal now. And as long as they never change for the rest of their life, then things will be fine. But that rarely happens. People eventually want to do more. They will be in a store and see a program they would like to buy. OOPS, sorry. No run on Linux. They will want to buy a scanner so they can put all their old photos on their computer and maybe e-mail them to friends/family. So they go over to Best Buy. OOPS, sorry. No run on Linux.
Whether someone uses Windows or Linux is irrelevant. What matters is s software (apps) and hardware (drivers).
* you can install Linux even when there are multiple hard drives in your computer (you can only install Windows 7 if there is one and only one hard drive installed)
This is absolutely false. Windows 7 will install just fine on a computer with more than one hard drive (I have 3)
* you can choose to have your entire Linux partition encrypted - no need to buy Windows 7 Ultimate, or install truecrypt later
Non-Technical users (which is what this article is about) don't care about encryption
* Linux will support RAID - 0, 1, 1+0, etc - Windows 7 only supports RAID 0, and RAID 1 for those who buy Professional or Ultimate, and cannot do RAID 1+0
Non-Technical users (which is what this article is about) don't care about RAID
* Linux will not magically create a 100MB partition that you cannot erase and is essential to the operating system, unlike Windows 7 that will refuse to boot after removing the 100MB magic partition using Knoppix and cannot repair even with the original installation disks
False again. I have no 100MB partition on my Windows 7 computer. After doing several Win 7 installs it appears that the 100MB partion is only created if you have a new never formatted hard drive and tell Windows to format it for you before installing. If you format with a 3rd party program (I use an old bootbale CD from Seagate) then no 100MB partition is created and Windows 7 works just fine.
Since first releasing Windows XP almoss 9 years ago, Microsoft has repeatedly introduced new measures to combat "piracy", oblivious to the fact that each new measure is required because all previous measures have completely failed and typically are defeated within days (or hours) of being released. What is that old sayng about "doing the same thing over and over but expecting to get different results"?
All the people on the Windows hacking/cracking/pirating boards are laughing at Microsoft's latest announcement, particularly the "more than 70 activation exploits known to Microsoft" (hint: there aren't nearly that many). There is no reason to beleive that the latest attempt will be any more effective than their previous failures.
The author is a retard. There is no need to go to a "proxy site" filled with annoying ads (although AdBlocker takes care of them). Just Google for a list of proxy addreses and put one of them into your web browser's configuration settings. If you are too stupid and/or lazy to do this then you should just suffer.
"Having cut his programming teeth on an Apple ][e as a ten-year-old, Mark Pilgrim laments that Apple now seems to be doing everything in their power to stop his kids from finding the sense of wonder he did."
Apple may be worse than others, but there has been an overall change. I grew up in the era of the Commode-Door 64 and Radio Shit Color Computer. In those days I became intensely interested in programming and hacking because I had no choice. Things were really primitive back then. You had to hack your system just to make it to do useful things -- like read double-sided floppies instead of being limited to single-sided.
Over time I lost interest in that sort of thing. And that's mailnly because computers are so much more powerful und useful than they were "back in the day". Why spend untold hours creating an application when there are a hundred of them already out there for free (or cheap). Today, "hacking and programming" tends to involve stuff like getting Linux to run on an Xbox or getting your cellphone to do someting equally pointless.
France has a large number of reactors, yet I've never heard of them having problems with their radioactive waste products
Well, France has serious problems with its radioactive waste, as do *ALL* countires with nuclear power. Their storage areas are starting to decay and allow radioactive waste to leach into the ground. It's happening in the U.S. too, you just don't hear much about it. Right now a famous French vineyard is threatened by leaking radioactive waste. Proponents of nulcear power have zero credibility until they agree to allow nuclear waste to be stored in *THEIR* backyards.
I don't understand the need for Bootcamp. If you want to run Windows 7 then buy a PC -- it's considerably cheaper than a Mac. If there's some software that you *REALLY* need but only runs on Windows, then buy a PC -- it's considerably cheaper than a Mac.
"Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology"
OH NO!! He stole imaginary technology!!
I remember following this story back in 2002 and there was a report of Carl Tilley being hampered by a lawsuit -- some other guy was claiming that *HE* invented the imaginary perpetual motion battery charging technology.
Star Tobey Maguire and helmer Sam Raimi, who were both set for big paydays for "Spider Man 4," will no longer be involved in the franchise as Col moves forward with a high school-aged Peter Parker pic, which will bow theatrically in summer 2012.
Best Buy will make an extra $5 per PC? How many PCs do they sell in the course of a year? This would just barely cover the wages for one of their Geek Squad dorks.
You bought software containing DRM (ie, requries "activation"). You deserve to be screwed.
Seriously. Activation means you don't really own it. And if you don't own it, you can't control it. And if you can't control it then it *WILL* be take away from you eventually.
You would think people would have figured this out by now.
Well if my account was compromised, they'd only be spamming the spammers, since that's all that shows up to my hotmail account. It's my default email used when email is required for something.
I've found that Gmail does an excellent job of spam filtering and makes a good spam trap. Whenever I have to give out an email address I use my Gmail account, which I access via POP3 from Mozilla Thunderbird. I never see any spam unless I log in to the web interface and look at the spam folder.
Slashdot Mirror
Or too little too late. Even if the record companies had reduced CD prices to more reasonable levels 10 years ago, I don't think things would be much different today. I haven't listened to a CD in a long time. Why would I want to be constantly shuffling CDs in an out of a CD player when I can rip everything to my hard drive or MP3 player and have hundreds of hours of music easily availble. Things have changed. Just as nobody uses 8-Track tapes anymore, the use of physical media is declining.
CDs are the new buggy whips.
Feeds the fourth kid? Not hardly. A few months ago I saw an Amway commercial and when I did the math -- Amway's claimed revenue divided by the number of people they claim to have selling their products ("we help xx milion people own their own business") -- it works out to an average of $2600 per person PER YEAR ($216.66 per month). That's gross sales. What do you suppose their net is?
I've wondered the same thing for a long time. Why buy from a "distributor" who is just a middle-man that drives up the price. BUT, it does sort of make from Newegg's perspective. They don't just buy Intel CPUs from the distributor. The distributor carries hundreds of products from many different companies, making it easy for Newegg to place one order from one compnay.
The real stroy is where exactly did the fakes come from. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create these fakes and I find it hard to beleive they only made 100-200 and then quit.
Imagine a person, in a casino, sitting at a slot machine. They're pumping coin into it and steadi;y losing everything. They know that they should walk away, but they can't. Walking away means admitting to themself and others that they lost. And so they keeping telling themself that if they keep playing long enough, they will win back enough to at least break even.
The same is true of Ubisoft, Microsoft and all the other companies who keep pumping money into the DRM slot machine. Year after year they keep coming up with new DRM schemes to replace all the previous ones that have failed (ie, all of them). They can't stop. To stop would be an admisison of failure. An admission that even if they created uncrackable DRM, the extra sales revenue wouldn't even come close to covering the cost of creating and maintainging new DRM schemes.
It would be funny, it it wasn't so stupid.
This is the problem with the Nuclear Industry. Although there have never been any major accidents or injuries, they have a 40 year history of:
Massive cost over-runs on almost every nuclear power plant built
Poor management
Poor maintenance
Not fixing identified problems until forced by government action
Getting caught lying about things big and small
Having no plan for dealing with radioactive waste other than bury it in someone's backyard and let them deal with it when the containers start leaking.
Because:
(a) Someone installed a P2P file-sharing program (deliberately)
(b) They accidently (or ignorantly) selected a folder to share that contained company data or they didn't specify which folders to share, so everything got shared by default
Just do a quick Google search and you can find all sorts of stuff that people have exposed to the Internet -- and you don't even have to secretly install any evil P2P software
The Domesday Book was commisioned in December 1085 by King William (aka William the Conqueror, who invaded ngland in 1066). The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time). It is a detailed statement of lands held by he king and by his tenants and of the resources that went with those lands. It records which manors rightfully belonged to which estates, thus ending years of confusion resulting from the gradual and sometimes violent dispossession of the Anglo-Saxons by their Norman conquerors.
In 1986, at a cost of £2.5 million, the UK compiled the contents of the Domesday Book into electronic form that was stored on laserdiscs. The information stored on the laserdiscs, which is the equivalent of several sets of encyclopedias, is now unreadable because the equipment needed to read the discs is no longer available. Meanwhile the original book is still readable after more than 900 years.
No, the irony is that one of their justifications for opposing the alternative proposal is "Doing so would cause yet more delay, increase the cost to taxpayers,"
This from the company that has cheated the state of Washington out of Billions of dollars in taxes.
Been there, done that. This is the classic mistake.
Yes, their needs are minmal now. And as long as they never change for the rest of their life, then things will be fine. But that rarely happens. People eventually want to do more. They will be in a store and see a program they would like to buy. OOPS, sorry. No run on Linux. They will want to buy a scanner so they can put all their old photos on their computer and maybe e-mail them to friends/family. So they go over to Best Buy. OOPS, sorry. No run on Linux.
Whether someone uses Windows or Linux is irrelevant. What matters is s software (apps) and hardware (drivers).
This is absolutely false. Windows 7 will install just fine on a computer with more than one hard drive (I have 3)
Non-Technical users (which is what this article is about) don't care about encryption
Non-Technical users (which is what this article is about) don't care about RAID
False again. I have no 100MB partition on my Windows 7 computer. After doing several Win 7 installs it appears that the 100MB partion is only created if you have a new never formatted hard drive and tell Windows to format it for you before installing. If you format with a 3rd party program (I use an old bootbale CD from Seagate) then no 100MB partition is created and Windows 7 works just fine.
Since first releasing Windows XP almoss 9 years ago, Microsoft has repeatedly introduced new measures to combat "piracy", oblivious to the fact that each new measure is required because all previous measures have completely failed and typically are defeated within days (or hours) of being released. What is that old sayng about "doing the same thing over and over but expecting to get different results"?
All the people on the Windows hacking/cracking/pirating boards are laughing at Microsoft's latest announcement, particularly the "more than 70 activation exploits known to Microsoft" (hint: there aren't nearly that many). There is no reason to beleive that the latest attempt will be any more effective than their previous failures.
The author is a retard. There is no need to go to a "proxy site" filled with annoying ads (although AdBlocker takes care of them). Just Google for a list of proxy addreses and put one of them into your web browser's configuration settings. If you are too stupid and/or lazy to do this then you should just suffer.
I heard that PHP is good for Flooz.
Apple may be worse than others, but there has been an overall change. I grew up in the era of the Commode-Door 64 and Radio Shit Color Computer. In those days I became intensely interested in programming and hacking because I had no choice. Things were really primitive back then. You had to hack your system just to make it to do useful things -- like read double-sided floppies instead of being limited to single-sided.
Over time I lost interest in that sort of thing. And that's mailnly because computers are so much more powerful und useful than they were "back in the day". Why spend untold hours creating an application when there are a hundred of them already out there for free (or cheap). Today, "hacking and programming" tends to involve stuff like getting Linux to run on an Xbox or getting your cellphone to do someting equally pointless.
Well, France has serious problems with its radioactive waste, as do *ALL* countires with nuclear power. Their storage areas are starting to decay and allow radioactive waste to leach into the ground. It's happening in the U.S. too, you just don't hear much about it. Right now a famous French vineyard is threatened by leaking radioactive waste. Proponents of nulcear power have zero credibility until they agree to allow nuclear waste to be stored in *THEIR* backyards.
I don't understand the need for Bootcamp. If you want to run Windows 7 then buy a PC -- it's considerably cheaper than a Mac. If there's some software that you *REALLY* need but only runs on Windows, then buy a PC -- it's considerably cheaper than a Mac.
The first sentence cracked me up:
"Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology"
OH NO!! He stole imaginary technology!!
I remember following this story back in 2002 and there was a report of Carl Tilley being hampered by a lawsuit -- some other guy was claiming that *HE* invented the imaginary perpetual motion battery charging technology.
from the Variety article:
Star Tobey Maguire and helmer Sam Raimi, who were both set for big paydays for "Spider Man 4," will no longer be involved in the franchise as Col moves forward with a high school-aged Peter Parker pic, which will bow theatrically in summer 2012.
Best Buy will make an extra $5 per PC? How many PCs do they sell in the course of a year? This would just barely cover the wages for one of their Geek Squad dorks.
You bought software containing DRM (ie, requries "activation"). You deserve to be screwed.
Seriously. Activation means you don't really own it. And if you don't own it, you can't control it. And if you can't control it then it *WILL* be take away from you eventually.
You would think people would have figured this out by now.
Well boo fucking hoo. Hey fatass. Get off the couch and do something besides watch TV all day.
I've found that Gmail does an excellent job of spam filtering and makes a good spam trap. Whenever I have to give out an email address I use my Gmail account, which I access via POP3 from Mozilla Thunderbird. I never see any spam unless I log in to the web interface and look at the spam folder.
Can we mod this article -5 way too fucking long
"Hotmail claims to process 3 billion non-spam e-mails per day"
I don't beleive that there are 3 billion non-spam e-mails sent every day.