DRM with iTunes may seem fair, but their policies are definitely not.
One of my clients had an iPod and an Apple laptop. He got tired of lugging the laptop around with him and wanted something smaller and lighter. He purchased a tiny little Sony VAIO. When we got to plugging the iPod into it, we found that the battery was dead. Not only that, but iTunes on Windows said the iPod was unreadable and would do nothing until we formatted it. I tried using a variety of tools to get his songs off of the iPod but nothing worked. We ended up formatting it.
So he lost all his music.
Now, normally this wouldn't be so bad. You reformat the device then transfer..oh wait. There was no backup of his music since his Mac laptop was long gone. We both (stupidly I admit) assumed the iPod would just work and he wouldn't lose his music. He did. All of it.
The nail in the coffin that had him steaming mad was that the iTunes store, being fully aware of the fact that you paid for your music already, wouldn't let you download your songs again without paying again. If you're logged in, why not let you re-download something you already bought? Does Apple really think their software and hardware is so perfect as to never lose data?
Needless to say that iPod hit the trash can minutes after I left. I wanted to grab it from him, take it home and use a battery kit on it, but he was too pissed off to keep it. Turns out last Christmas he got the big black video iPod instead, so he turned it into an upgrade excuse. It's still bullshit that he had to pay twice for the same songs, but in an Apple world, that's how things work.
Yeah but you gotta love the icon choices. An egg for the installer and a feather for the Songbird player itself.
Too bad he doesn't have one theme that's worth a shit. Black or dark red? What is this, the vinyl choices for the interior in a 57 Chevy? Give us the iTunes gray, or a glossy white theme, anything but these dark, hard-to-read interfaces.
Supposedly, the HD boxes from Comcast and others have an optional firewire out where they send the decrypted streams...specifically for people that use Tivos and other boxen. I'm not clear on the details as to what cable boxes do this or the specific model numbers, but generally speaking, if you tell your cable company you want to use your Tivo with your digital box/hdtv box, they'll give you a special one with firewire out.
Not sure about them still supporting Unix/Linux, I haven't used Earthlink for years, but when I did, it was good.
As for them reselling Covad..yeah, sometimes they do. Apparently they partner with whoever is in the area, and if Covad isn't on board with them in whatever city you want service in, you don't get resold Covad. Plus, Covad may just be the conduit for connectivity between your house, the nearest CO, and an Earthlink node.
Anyone who knows more about this, feel free to clue me in, this is about as far as I go on this subject.:)
Bla bla bla, typical ISP nonsense, particularly in tiny communities.
I just wanted to throw in that in the past, Earthlink support actually *knew* that Linux was unsupported but that it uses standard PPP settings for dialup and regular PPPOE settings for DSL. The tech I spoke to even had the balls to discuss the particulars with me. I explained that while I don't expect Earthlink to know anything about or even support Linux, if one were to put a Linux box on the connection, what settings would be needed. He enthusiastically ran down the list. Bam, a week later I was an Earthlink customer.
There are some ISP's that seem to care, then there are some that implicitly don't care. Plus, there's always the odd chance that you get a native english speaker on the phone that knows more than what's written on a script. While I'd love to paint all ISP's with the bad brush, I simply can't based on experience with a few good ones. In my area, Comcast is awesome. No blocking, insane bandwidth at a reasonable price and exceptional uptime. The only thing that blows is upstream but it beats the crap out of the upstream of a comparably priced DSL connection. Guess people like myself won't be happy until A. we get symmetrical bandwidth or B. we get upstream better than 40KB/sec when we're pulling down 5mbit.
I'm sure Exxon and friends, with their 'oh snap look what's going on in the Middle East right now' speculative price hikes will manage to edge it closer to $200 this year. I mean, just take a look at the recordprofits these megacorps are raking in. All it will take this year is the threat of action against Iran, a few hurricanes here and there, and bam, another huge hike.
Keep in mind that Cheney is still sitting on the board at Halliburton, which has recorded record quarters since the beginning of the Iraq war, by winning closed-bidding contracts for reconstruction. Strangely enough the US military is tasked with keeping Halliburton contractors safe while they work..which isn't always successful. If you look carefully at the list, you'll see the majority of KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root, a Haliburton company) employees were involved in logistics, i.e. truck drivers. Convoys are popular targets for IEDs. KBR has been a thorn in the side for Halliburton, and they've considered selling it off for awhile, due to the PR nightmare and litigation that ended in a 4 billion dollar settlement over asbestos claims.
The first lady, well, I can tell you exactly how she broke the pin off the power cord. It was plugged in and she walked by, tripped over the cord, and bam, the power cord pin snapped off. I've seen this happen on quite a few laptops actually, and the fact that the newest MacBooks come with the magnetic power adapter tips just goes to show it's a real problem. Nevertheless, it was the girl's fault, not Apple's.
The third girl expected a laptop to last over 2 years. Dealing with alot of business people that have their laptops in the field on a daily basis, going through rough airport checks, etc. two years is a long life for a laptop, and they're clearly outdated by then. Paying $1000 for a laptop and getting two years out of it is a good deal in my opinion, your car won't even get you that kind of ROI, relatively speaking.
Anyone that has ever worked a support job knows that a certain percentage of 'it broke by itself' claims are nonsense. Dig a little deeper with users and you'll find what they did to break it. Now, this isn't a hard and fast rule, things are faulty sometimes, but many times you'll discover that PEBCAK was the real culprit.
Yeah, alot of companies like Gigabyte are taking a long time to debut their new motherboards, so I think you're right. Maybe AMD is preparing some devastating news, like quad core chips, and the new socket will take advantage of that. Plus, I know for a fact that AMD is speccing out new boards with DDR2 support, so a new chip is probably on the way.
I'm right there with you. When the Nvidia Ti series debuted, I jumped on a Ti4200 (still one of the best speed-wise). Later I upgraded to a GeforceFX 5900LE. Now I have a dual 6600 SLI-on-a-card (Gigabyte 3dv1). All of these choices are under $200 and are middle-of-the-road, but all of them, especially this 6600 SLI card, have performed wonderfully.
Just a side note, 2 gigs of ram for any Battlefield 2 player makes a huge difference.
You have to have a door that leads down a hallway to the Danger door. The original door will be placed in public, near a busy pedestrian intersection (like a mall entrance, subway entrance, etc.). The original door should have a variety of interchangeable labels that will be written by spammers. For example, "Sex l1fe missing spark? Look inside!". The door is to remain unlocked at all times. This trap will get two type of people, who scientists will find are one in the same.
1. People that actually open, read, and purchase from spam.
2. People that open random attachments from strangers.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Police can pull you over for suspicion, and there's an enormous umbrella of what suspicion entails. If your car looks old and crappy in the nice part of town, you may get pulled over. If you drive around near the bars at 2am closing time, you may get pulled over. Suspicion on the part of the officer knows no boundaries and he can explain it away in the report he files on your unfortunate self.
It was actually this undefined suspicion that led to the racial profiling accusations in many US states. Being a 'black driver' in the 'white part of town' will still get you pulled over more often than not in some states, particularly if you're in a beat-up car or are driving around very late at night. I wouldn't know about the racial profiling, but I've driven crappy cars before and have been pulled over just because.
One night I actually got pulled over, searched (including the trunk) and had all my friends that were with me cuffed and searched. What did I do wrong? I wasn't speeding. I had 2 beers in 2 hours time prior to getting behind the wheel. Eventually the officer informed me that a car matching mine's description was seen leaving the site of a home invasion in that part of town only hours earlier. What kind of car was I driving? A complete piece of shit, 1978 Toyota Corolla, dented, primered, rusted, and otherwise junk. I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt there was another car like mine anywhere in the state, based on make and model alone the odds were infinitely small. No, I was pulled over because I was driving a piece of crap in a nice part of town, because the officer thought it looked suspicious.
I know it's verboten to bitch about this, but I submitted this story yesterday, before Zugok did, and it got rejected. I'm 0 and 7 for submissions thanks to these jerky editors. Anyway, old news, Digg had it yesterday morning and Art Lebedev emailed all the list subscribers yesterday afternoon as well.
Seems like an interesting concept but like the Wankel engine in the 50's and 60's, the technology to make it work properly just isn't there yet. The measley lifetime of the OLEDs is laughable...I mean come on, who wants a 'screen saver' for the keys on their keyboard? This will be one of the premium items for a handful of first adopters, and hopefully they'll eat the development costs for the good model, probably due out next year or the year after.
If I were Lebedev, I'd just sell the design rights or license the tech to other companies like Logitech that build peripherals like crazy, sit back and collect the royalties and let someone else worry about developing product and getting it distributed. After all, they are a design house. You don't see Porsche F.A. building their own coffee machines or laptops.
The worst part about typing in Thai is that it takes multiple key presses for some characters. I suspect alot of Asian languages work this way. Remembering keys is one thing; remembering 'chords' is another. You never know how good you have it, typing with western character sets, until you are forced to type in another language.
Hmm, you make an interesting argument. It would explain why the fat guy on Lost never loses an ounce of heft despite being stranded on a desert island with a bunch of Ken and Barbie-thin people eating a severely restricted diet and sweating his ass off on a daily basis.
Either that or putting a fat guy on a show about people stranded on an island without having him lose weight for an entire season was just a really stupid idea. What is he eating anyway? Is there a secret cache of twinkies in the wreckage that only he has access to? Can a fat guy stay fat without eating his steady diet of greasy chicken for months on end?
You should apply as a Lost writer, god knows they need some creative staffers.
Yeah that's the sad thing about some cards. While the standard prism and prism2 chipsets do well with wlan and wlan-ng drivers, there are a thousand mutants out there based on that chipset that are crap implementations.
One of the best cards I had was a prism2-based netgear card. It was 20 bucks from fry's and worked fine under any distro and ran kismet like a champ.
Best card ever for linux is the orinoco gold card.
Just to add a few details to the DEC/Intel fiasco...
Compaq bought Alpha out a few years after Intel raped them, then turned around and sold the IP and tech to Intel. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/10/intels_tan glewood_pumped_full/ clearly shows the head Alpha guru working at Intel in 2003. Strangely enough, the article even mentions that it was part of Bannon's roadmap to integrate the Rambus architecture into Intel's Tanglewood design but The Register doubted it would happen. Of course, it did, it was a disaster and rambus ram is still worth more per ounce than gold. However, no one can fault the speed of the older P4's running with Rambus (if you have deep enough pockets to load it up with a gig or so of rambus).
Another weird fact is that Compaq was still selling Alpha workstations as of last year.
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DRM with iTunes may seem fair, but their policies are definitely not.
One of my clients had an iPod and an Apple laptop. He got tired of lugging the laptop around with him and wanted something smaller and lighter. He purchased a tiny little Sony VAIO. When we got to plugging the iPod into it, we found that the battery was dead. Not only that, but iTunes on Windows said the iPod was unreadable and would do nothing until we formatted it. I tried using a variety of tools to get his songs off of the iPod but nothing worked. We ended up formatting it.
So he lost all his music.
Now, normally this wouldn't be so bad. You reformat the device then transfer..oh wait. There was no backup of his music since his Mac laptop was long gone. We both (stupidly I admit) assumed the iPod would just work and he wouldn't lose his music. He did. All of it.
The nail in the coffin that had him steaming mad was that the iTunes store, being fully aware of the fact that you paid for your music already, wouldn't let you download your songs again without paying again. If you're logged in, why not let you re-download something you already bought? Does Apple really think their software and hardware is so perfect as to never lose data?
Needless to say that iPod hit the trash can minutes after I left. I wanted to grab it from him, take it home and use a battery kit on it, but he was too pissed off to keep it. Turns out last Christmas he got the big black video iPod instead, so he turned it into an upgrade excuse. It's still bullshit that he had to pay twice for the same songs, but in an Apple world, that's how things work.
Yeah but you gotta love the icon choices. An egg for the installer and a feather for the Songbird player itself.
Too bad he doesn't have one theme that's worth a shit. Black or dark red? What is this, the vinyl choices for the interior in a 57 Chevy? Give us the iTunes gray, or a glossy white theme, anything but these dark, hard-to-read interfaces.
Supposedly, the HD boxes from Comcast and others have an optional firewire out where they send the decrypted streams...specifically for people that use Tivos and other boxen. I'm not clear on the details as to what cable boxes do this or the specific model numbers, but generally speaking, if you tell your cable company you want to use your Tivo with your digital box/hdtv box, they'll give you a special one with firewire out.
Not sure about them still supporting Unix/Linux, I haven't used Earthlink for years, but when I did, it was good.
:)
As for them reselling Covad..yeah, sometimes they do. Apparently they partner with whoever is in the area, and if Covad isn't on board with them in whatever city you want service in, you don't get resold Covad. Plus, Covad may just be the conduit for connectivity between your house, the nearest CO, and an Earthlink node.
Anyone who knows more about this, feel free to clue me in, this is about as far as I go on this subject.
Bla bla bla, typical ISP nonsense, particularly in tiny communities.
I just wanted to throw in that in the past, Earthlink support actually *knew* that Linux was unsupported but that it uses standard PPP settings for dialup and regular PPPOE settings for DSL. The tech I spoke to even had the balls to discuss the particulars with me. I explained that while I don't expect Earthlink to know anything about or even support Linux, if one were to put a Linux box on the connection, what settings would be needed. He enthusiastically ran down the list. Bam, a week later I was an Earthlink customer.
There are some ISP's that seem to care, then there are some that implicitly don't care. Plus, there's always the odd chance that you get a native english speaker on the phone that knows more than what's written on a script. While I'd love to paint all ISP's with the bad brush, I simply can't based on experience with a few good ones. In my area, Comcast is awesome. No blocking, insane bandwidth at a reasonable price and exceptional uptime. The only thing that blows is upstream but it beats the crap out of the upstream of a comparably priced DSL connection. Guess people like myself won't be happy until A. we get symmetrical bandwidth or B. we get upstream better than 40KB/sec when we're pulling down 5mbit.
I'm sure Exxon and friends, with their 'oh snap look what's going on in the Middle East right now' speculative price hikes will manage to edge it closer to $200 this year. I mean, just take a look at the record profits these megacorps are raking in. All it will take this year is the threat of action against Iran, a few hurricanes here and there, and bam, another huge hike.
Keep in mind that Cheney is still sitting on the board at Halliburton, which has recorded record quarters since the beginning of the Iraq war, by winning closed-bidding contracts for reconstruction. Strangely enough the US military is tasked with keeping Halliburton contractors safe while they work..which isn't always successful. If you look carefully at the list, you'll see the majority of KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root, a Haliburton company) employees were involved in logistics, i.e. truck drivers. Convoys are popular targets for IEDs. KBR has been a thorn in the side for Halliburton, and they've considered selling it off for awhile, due to the PR nightmare and litigation that ended in a 4 billion dollar settlement over asbestos claims.
Uh....wtf?
Bah, half of those complaints are bullshit.
The first lady, well, I can tell you exactly how she broke the pin off the power cord. It was plugged in and she walked by, tripped over the cord, and bam, the power cord pin snapped off. I've seen this happen on quite a few laptops actually, and the fact that the newest MacBooks come with the magnetic power adapter tips just goes to show it's a real problem. Nevertheless, it was the girl's fault, not Apple's.
The third girl expected a laptop to last over 2 years. Dealing with alot of business people that have their laptops in the field on a daily basis, going through rough airport checks, etc. two years is a long life for a laptop, and they're clearly outdated by then. Paying $1000 for a laptop and getting two years out of it is a good deal in my opinion, your car won't even get you that kind of ROI, relatively speaking.
Anyone that has ever worked a support job knows that a certain percentage of 'it broke by itself' claims are nonsense. Dig a little deeper with users and you'll find what they did to break it. Now, this isn't a hard and fast rule, things are faulty sometimes, but many times you'll discover that PEBCAK was the real culprit.
Yeah, alot of companies like Gigabyte are taking a long time to debut their new motherboards, so I think you're right. Maybe AMD is preparing some devastating news, like quad core chips, and the new socket will take advantage of that. Plus, I know for a fact that AMD is speccing out new boards with DDR2 support, so a new chip is probably on the way.
I'm right there with you. When the Nvidia Ti series debuted, I jumped on a Ti4200 (still one of the best speed-wise). Later I upgraded to a GeforceFX 5900LE. Now I have a dual 6600 SLI-on-a-card (Gigabyte 3dv1). All of these choices are under $200 and are middle-of-the-road, but all of them, especially this 6600 SLI card, have performed wonderfully.
Just a side note, 2 gigs of ram for any Battlefield 2 player makes a huge difference.
You have to have a door that leads down a hallway to the Danger door. The original door will be placed in public, near a busy pedestrian intersection (like a mall entrance, subway entrance, etc.). The original door should have a variety of interchangeable labels that will be written by spammers. For example, "Sex l1fe missing spark? Look inside!". The door is to remain unlocked at all times. This trap will get two type of people, who scientists will find are one in the same.
1. People that actually open, read, and purchase from spam.
2. People that open random attachments from strangers.
That many batteries in a house? Must be a toddler nearby.
;)
Or one very lonely woman.
In Soviet Russia, Duke Nukem Forever waits for you!
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Police can pull you over for suspicion, and there's an enormous umbrella of what suspicion entails. If your car looks old and crappy in the nice part of town, you may get pulled over. If you drive around near the bars at 2am closing time, you may get pulled over. Suspicion on the part of the officer knows no boundaries and he can explain it away in the report he files on your unfortunate self.
It was actually this undefined suspicion that led to the racial profiling accusations in many US states. Being a 'black driver' in the 'white part of town' will still get you pulled over more often than not in some states, particularly if you're in a beat-up car or are driving around very late at night. I wouldn't know about the racial profiling, but I've driven crappy cars before and have been pulled over just because.
One night I actually got pulled over, searched (including the trunk) and had all my friends that were with me cuffed and searched. What did I do wrong? I wasn't speeding. I had 2 beers in 2 hours time prior to getting behind the wheel. Eventually the officer informed me that a car matching mine's description was seen leaving the site of a home invasion in that part of town only hours earlier. What kind of car was I driving? A complete piece of shit, 1978 Toyota Corolla, dented, primered, rusted, and otherwise junk. I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt there was another car like mine anywhere in the state, based on make and model alone the odds were infinitely small. No, I was pulled over because I was driving a piece of crap in a nice part of town, because the officer thought it looked suspicious.
I know it's verboten to bitch about this, but I submitted this story yesterday, before Zugok did, and it got rejected. I'm 0 and 7 for submissions thanks to these jerky editors. Anyway, old news, Digg had it yesterday morning and Art Lebedev emailed all the list subscribers yesterday afternoon as well.
Seems like an interesting concept but like the Wankel engine in the 50's and 60's, the technology to make it work properly just isn't there yet. The measley lifetime of the OLEDs is laughable...I mean come on, who wants a 'screen saver' for the keys on their keyboard? This will be one of the premium items for a handful of first adopters, and hopefully they'll eat the development costs for the good model, probably due out next year or the year after.
If I were Lebedev, I'd just sell the design rights or license the tech to other companies like Logitech that build peripherals like crazy, sit back and collect the royalties and let someone else worry about developing product and getting it distributed. After all, they are a design house. You don't see Porsche F.A. building their own coffee machines or laptops.
The worst part about typing in Thai is that it takes multiple key presses for some characters. I suspect alot of Asian languages work this way. Remembering keys is one thing; remembering 'chords' is another. You never know how good you have it, typing with western character sets, until you are forced to type in another language.
Hmm, you make an interesting argument. It would explain why the fat guy on Lost never loses an ounce of heft despite being stranded on a desert island with a bunch of Ken and Barbie-thin people eating a severely restricted diet and sweating his ass off on a daily basis.
Either that or putting a fat guy on a show about people stranded on an island without having him lose weight for an entire season was just a really stupid idea. What is he eating anyway? Is there a secret cache of twinkies in the wreckage that only he has access to? Can a fat guy stay fat without eating his steady diet of greasy chicken for months on end?
You should apply as a Lost writer, god knows they need some creative staffers.
Yeah, take Oliver Stone's JFK for instance.
Come on...say it with me...
ENRON
Not to say that Google is anything like Enron but Enron had a singular focus: it's stock value.
Yeah that's the sad thing about some cards. While the standard prism and prism2 chipsets do well with wlan and wlan-ng drivers, there are a thousand mutants out there based on that chipset that are crap implementations.
One of the best cards I had was a prism2-based netgear card. It was 20 bucks from fry's and worked fine under any distro and ran kismet like a champ.
Best card ever for linux is the orinoco gold card.
AFAIK prism chipsets shouldn't require ndiswrapper to begin with. Prism support has been in the kernel for years.
Dirt farmers grow dirt weed, usually in Mexico.
Not really, because the electricity bill offsets any savings you might have gleaned.
Just to add a few details to the DEC/Intel fiasco...
n glewood_pumped_full/ clearly shows the head Alpha guru working at Intel in 2003. Strangely enough, the article even mentions that it was part of Bannon's roadmap to integrate the Rambus architecture into Intel's Tanglewood design but The Register doubted it would happen. Of course, it did, it was a disaster and rambus ram is still worth more per ounce than gold. However, no one can fault the speed of the older P4's running with Rambus (if you have deep enough pockets to load it up with a gig or so of rambus).
Compaq bought Alpha out a few years after Intel raped them, then turned around and sold the IP and tech to Intel. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/10/intels_ta
Another weird fact is that Compaq was still selling Alpha workstations as of last year.
Actually there are companies that do this already. http://www.intechra.com/recycling/recycling_main.h tm/ is one and I'm sure there are dozens more throughout the US.