In the UK it's illegal to listen to anything other than brodcast, ham radio and CB (unless it's a frequency you're licenced to transmit on). So in theory you can't listen to air and marine frequencies with a scanner but as the RA (http://www.radio.gov.uk) admits, they aren't really wanting to take action. The police are only interested in whether a scanner user is listening to them and anybody who uses any sort of 'interesting' radio outdoors can expect to be asked questions about it at least once (all they usually do is check that what is coming out of your scanner is not the same as what they are hearing on their police radio). Within about 3 years the police forces in England and Wales will all be using digital encrypted radio systems (TETRA), basically a private cell phone network, some forces already use this. There was never any of this cell phone frequency blocking business here, it wouldn't be much use now, the analogue cellphones went off the air 3 years ago.
It might only take a minute to download a song with DSL but it takes even less to pick up a CD in the store and walk to the checkout. Sometimes people will pay because they have the money and want something that minute, because they're bored. That's why people will keep buying CDs and DVDs. Then there are books and CDs bought as presents. How many people would really want a text file of Harry Potter on a second hand floppy disk as a Christmas present? Where is the money going that isn't being spent on entertainment media because of piracy? It's going into new technology in general, if you spent all your money on music CDs, would there be any reason for them to improve the format?
Simple solution is not to use Hotmail for sending or receiving e-mail at all, there's no need for it. I use MSN Messenger but automatically delete everything in my Hotmail inbox because that isn't my e-mail address any more. Solution 2 would be for MS to do something about how messages are filtered and displayed in Hotmail. It must be obvious to them which messages carrying a hotmail.com "from" address were sent from the hotmail website but there is no way to block the fake ones. I'd imagine that the first messages the average Hotmail user would like to see were those sent by their friends who also used Hotmail.
Winamp 3 won't let you open a whole drive (as a directory). That means I can't put my entire mp3 collection on random play. It also means I don't use Winamp 3 any more. ICQ is a bit like Real Audio. The size of the latest software release is inversely proportional to its market share. The one thing which probably says the most about ICQ is the age selection in their Whitepages search. The ages begin with 18-22. The MSN member search starts with 13-19.
After 50 years if someone wants to have a go at duplicating a book for profit then I say let them do it, if the "pirate" can sell more than you after that time then the copyright should expire. You've had your chance, it's over, do something else to make a living. I don't think there's a big market for commercial piracy except in places like China anyway. Not now just about anybody can copy CDs and scan books. I don't think file sharing is what they had in mind when thinking of copyright periods in 1790 or whenever, it would have been mass copying of the kind we mainly see in Asia.
In the UK, all the popular "Top 40" albums (Hits 54 etc.) have no copy prevention system at all. So even if some Top 40 artist brings out a broken album, the singles will probably end up on one of these discs. This type of album is going to be copied a lot, some kid will get it for Christmas and all their friends will want copies. How do these copy prevention systems affect the discs with a zero length gap between tracks (mainly dance compilations and live recordings)? The CD player must accurately locate the start of tracks for these to work otherwise there could be gaps in the music.
The fraudulent subject lines work because once you have opened that message (thinking it could be important), you have probably downloaded a small image (very few spam messages are in plain text now). That download has been logged as a visit and the spammer's client is charged for it. How often do you get plain text spam with any sort of contact details or a description of the product? HTML e-mail with images, frames or tables is a starting point for spam filtering.
Like banner advertising, spam isn't really selling anything, it just tricks people into clicking on a link and visiting a web page (even if they would never buy anything). Why would any sane person buy from a business which advertises using false subject lines in e-mail (like "missed you last week")? They don't, spammers know that people won't buy but they are charging for visits to their client's web site.
As soon as the file is burned to CD, that's the end of the DRM. That master CD can be copied as many times as you like and the copies passed on to other people. Then someone will re-encode it as mp3 and this poor quality version will appear on Kazaa shortly afterwards.
95 was a big change because it was 32 bit. What applications need Windows XP? Which hardware only comes with XP drivers? If you went back to Windows 3.1 all your USB devices would stop working and it would be hard to find any 16 bit applications for things like CD burning and mp3s. Windows 95 v 2.5 was the last big change, FAT32 and USB. It's hard to go any further back than that now. That was 6 years ago.
In the last few days I've got spam advertising Hooked On Phonics (hop.com) and Lloyds TSB bank (UK). The bank advertising was made to sound respectable but it was nothing more than spam (sent by 247mail.com). Even if people stopped buying weight loss pills and sending their details to "Nigeria" (I don't mind getting those messages because there is never more than 1 per day and they are funny to read), they would still be getting spam from large companies, probably more often because they would know people were reading e-mail instead of deleting it all.
What's worse is when some P133 with 16 MB in your office has Office 2000 installed on it just because it's almost the newest version. I don't think most people learn the new features of applications when they upgrade.
* : _ @ should be promoted to non-shift status. The Insert key should be a shifted key because otherwise it gets pressed by accident, usually when pressing backspace. Caps Lock and Shift should be separated because Caps Lock gets knocked when pressing shift. Caps Lock is also annoying when it gets used. I never learned to use the caps lock key or the numeric keypad, I'll still hold down shift to type a sentence in capitals.
The spammer just sets up a web page which re-directs to the seller of the goods. They get paid for referrals. The penis enlargement kit seller claims to have no knowledge of what people were doing to get referrals.
Entire domain names like hotmail and yahoo.com should be added to a do not email list. They have to pay for their bandwidth (unless spammers are paying MSN not to do very much about the problem). Are Microsoft not interested in taking spammers to court? It's Microsoft which receives a large percentage of all spam since they own the hotmail domain, it's sent to them. Do Hotmail users buy products advertised to them by spam? Almost every single Hotmail address must be on a spammer's list, every name and dictionary word will have been added right from the start but a lot of those addresses must be spam catchers or just neglected.
to make a do call database because nobody would want to be in it. The "do not call" things don't affect telephone marketers so much because they have one chance to ring everybody first before anyone can complain. I don't really like the idea of businesses ringing residential numbers at all, if you've got a problem you'll phone them first. Too many forms ask for phone numbers and e-mail adddresses these days when there isn't any obvious reason why they would need to contact you.
All this "violent games" business is just to divert attention from other causes of crime like unemployment. Every so often some suburban kid might go crazy after seeing a horror movie but compared to crime in other areas it's nothing.
The credit card phones in the UK have a minimum charge of 50p. I can call a land line at weekends from my cellphone for 2p a minute (minimum charge 2p, no line rental). It costs more to phone a cellphone from a payphone than it does from another cellphone - it's about 40p a minute to call a cellphone from a payphone. Payphones aren't much use for making calls from, they are better for receiving calls on (instead of taking a long and expensive call on your cellphone you can go to a payphone, make a short cellphone call and then wait for them to ring back).
ATRAC3 is better quality than mp3 for the same bit rate but the whole minidisc thing is spoiled by all the weird (digital) copy prevention stuff Sony puts into its products. I don't know why they bother because minidisc sharing is nothing like as common as mp3 sharing. If you were going to give a friend a copy of a CD then you might as well give them a CDR rather than a lossy compressed minidisc (digital or analogue i/o).
Now that we have 24 bit 96 KHz (or even 192 KHz) digital recording, this kind of thing is a joke. The RMS noise caused by the 24 bit recording process is -155 dB. What level do you listen to music at? 0dB is almost impossible to hear in a totally sound-proof room and 150 dB can kill you. The dynamic range of a good condenser microphone is 135dB, the microphone and pre-amplifier (good old analogue valve type stuff) is more noisy and distorted than the digital recorder. The background noise of a power amplifier could be even worse because they are using high current transistors and not low noise type (there isn't much which can be done about this).
if everyone regularly downloaded Linux ISOs then the bandwidth required would be huge and it would probably be stopped by ISPs. it would be better if someone would swap the free ISP discs at the supermarket with popular software and mp3s
Burnproof drives make a difference, I've got a 40x one and it can be set at full speed, it has never made a coaster yet, it just slows down if I do something else when burning. The speed limit sems to be about 24x for a whole disc because of my hardware so I won't be needing a 52x drive at the moment. 24x is also the limit at which I can do audio extraction with a 52x CD-ROM so the actual speed of the CD drive doesn't seem as important (CD performance improved by about 50% by changing to a 7200 rpm ATA100 hard disk).
One thing internet advertising ignores is memory. Radio adverts give out phone numbers which people are supposed to remember (or they can keep listening until they hear the number again before writing it down). You don't order a pizza as soon as the adverts happens on the radio for local pizza shop so why should people click anything on a web advert? A better test of effectiveness would be for web ads to have no hyperlink but give a URL (as an image so it can't be copied into a browser). That's more like "real life" advertising, see who can be bothered to remember the URL. No paper, TV or roadside advert omits the brand, product name or logo.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK it's illegal to listen to anything other than brodcast, ham radio and CB (unless it's a frequency you're licenced to transmit on). So in theory you can't listen to air and marine frequencies with a scanner but as the RA (http://www.radio.gov.uk) admits, they aren't really wanting to take action. The police are only interested in whether a scanner user is listening to them and anybody who uses any sort of 'interesting' radio outdoors can expect to be asked questions about it at least once (all they usually do is check that what is coming out of your scanner is not the same as what they are hearing on their police radio). Within about 3 years the police forces in England and Wales will all be using digital encrypted radio systems (TETRA), basically a private cell phone network, some forces already use this.
There was never any of this cell phone frequency blocking business here, it wouldn't be much use now, the analogue cellphones went off the air 3 years ago.
It might only take a minute to download a song with DSL but it takes even less to pick up a CD in the store and walk to the checkout.
Sometimes people will pay because they have the money and want something that minute, because they're bored. That's why people will keep buying CDs and DVDs.
Then there are books and CDs bought as presents. How many people would really want a text file of Harry Potter on a second hand floppy disk as a Christmas present?
Where is the money going that isn't being spent on entertainment media because of piracy? It's going into new technology in general, if you spent all your money on music CDs, would there be any reason for them to improve the format?
Simple solution is not to use Hotmail for sending or receiving e-mail at all, there's no need for it. I use MSN Messenger but automatically delete everything in my Hotmail inbox because that isn't my e-mail address any more.
Solution 2 would be for MS to do something about how messages are filtered and displayed in Hotmail. It must be obvious to them which messages carrying a hotmail.com "from" address were sent from the hotmail website but there is no way to block the fake ones. I'd imagine that the first messages the average Hotmail user would like to see were those sent by their friends who also used Hotmail.
Winamp 3 won't let you open a whole drive (as a directory). That means I can't put my entire mp3 collection on random play. It also means I don't use Winamp 3 any more.
ICQ is a bit like Real Audio. The size of the latest software release is inversely proportional to its market share.
The one thing which probably says the most about ICQ is the age selection in their Whitepages search. The ages begin with 18-22. The MSN member search starts with 13-19.
After 50 years if someone wants to have a go at duplicating a book for profit then I say let them do it, if the "pirate" can sell more than you after that time then the copyright should expire. You've had your chance, it's over, do something else to make a living.
I don't think there's a big market for commercial piracy except in places like China anyway. Not now just about anybody can copy CDs and scan books. I don't think file sharing is what they had in mind when thinking of copyright periods in 1790 or whenever, it would have been mass copying of the kind we mainly see in Asia.
In the UK, all the popular "Top 40" albums (Hits 54 etc.) have no copy prevention system at all. So even if some Top 40 artist brings out a broken album, the singles will probably end up on one of these discs.
This type of album is going to be copied a lot, some kid will get it for Christmas and all their friends will want copies.
How do these copy prevention systems affect the discs with a zero length gap between tracks (mainly dance compilations and live recordings)? The CD player must accurately locate the start of tracks for these to work otherwise there could be gaps in the music.
The fraudulent subject lines work because once you have opened that message (thinking it could be important), you have probably downloaded a small image (very few spam messages are in plain text now). That download has been logged as a visit and the spammer's client is charged for it.
How often do you get plain text spam with any sort of contact details or a description of the product?
HTML e-mail with images, frames or tables is a starting point for spam filtering.
Like banner advertising, spam isn't really selling anything, it just tricks people into clicking on a link and visiting a web page (even if they would never buy anything).
Why would any sane person buy from a business which advertises using false subject lines in e-mail (like "missed you last week")? They don't, spammers know that people won't buy but they are charging for visits to their client's web site.
As soon as the file is burned to CD, that's the end of the DRM. That master CD can be copied as many times as you like and the copies passed on to other people. Then someone will re-encode it as mp3 and this poor quality version will appear on Kazaa shortly afterwards.
OK send me an mp3 so I can listen straight away but I want the uncompressed file as well, so you can snail me a CDR with it on within 28 days.
95 was a big change because it was 32 bit. What applications need Windows XP? Which hardware only comes with XP drivers?
If you went back to Windows 3.1 all your USB devices would stop working and it would be hard to find any 16 bit applications for things like CD burning and mp3s.
Windows 95 v 2.5 was the last big change, FAT32 and USB. It's hard to go any further back than that now. That was 6 years ago.
In the last few days I've got spam advertising Hooked On Phonics (hop.com) and Lloyds TSB bank (UK). The bank advertising was made to sound respectable but it was nothing more than spam (sent by 247mail.com).
Even if people stopped buying weight loss pills and sending their details to "Nigeria" (I don't mind getting those messages because there is never more than 1 per day and they are funny to read), they would still be getting spam from large companies, probably more often because they would know people were reading e-mail instead of deleting it all.
What's worse is when some P133 with 16 MB in your office has Office 2000 installed on it just because it's almost the newest version.
I don't think most people learn the new features of applications when they upgrade.
* : _ @ should be promoted to non-shift status. The Insert key should be a shifted key because otherwise it gets pressed by accident, usually when pressing backspace.
Caps Lock and Shift should be separated because Caps Lock gets knocked when pressing shift. Caps Lock is also annoying when it gets used.
I never learned to use the caps lock key or the numeric keypad, I'll still hold down shift to type a sentence in capitals.
The spammer just sets up a web page which re-directs to the seller of the goods. They get paid for referrals. The penis enlargement kit seller claims to have no knowledge of what people were doing to get referrals.
Entire domain names like hotmail and yahoo .com should be added to a do not email list. They have to pay for their bandwidth (unless spammers are paying MSN not to do very much about the problem). Are Microsoft not interested in taking spammers to court? It's Microsoft which receives a large percentage of all spam since they own the hotmail domain, it's sent to them.
Do Hotmail users buy products advertised to them by spam? Almost every single Hotmail address must be on a spammer's list, every name and dictionary word will have been added right from the start but a lot of those addresses must be spam catchers or just neglected.
to make a do call database because nobody would want to be in it. The "do not call" things don't affect telephone marketers so much because they have one chance to ring everybody first before anyone can complain.
I don't really like the idea of businesses ringing residential numbers at all, if you've got a problem you'll phone them first. Too many forms ask for phone numbers and e-mail adddresses these days when there isn't any obvious reason why they would need to contact you.
All this "violent games" business is just to divert attention from other causes of crime like unemployment. Every so often some suburban kid might go crazy after seeing a horror movie but compared to crime in other areas it's nothing.
The credit card phones in the UK have a minimum charge of 50p. I can call a land line at weekends from my cellphone for 2p a minute (minimum charge 2p, no line rental). It costs more to phone a cellphone from a payphone than it does from another cellphone - it's about 40p a minute to call a cellphone from a payphone.
Payphones aren't much use for making calls from, they are better for receiving calls on (instead of taking a long and expensive call on your cellphone you can go to a payphone, make a short cellphone call and then wait for them to ring back).
ATRAC3 is better quality than mp3 for the same bit rate but the whole minidisc thing is spoiled by all the weird (digital) copy prevention stuff Sony puts into its products.
I don't know why they bother because minidisc sharing is nothing like as common as mp3 sharing. If you were going to give a friend a copy of a CD then you might as well give them a CDR rather than a lossy compressed minidisc (digital or analogue i/o).
Now that we have 24 bit 96 KHz (or even 192 KHz) digital recording, this kind of thing is a joke. The RMS noise caused by the 24 bit recording process is -155 dB. What level do you listen to music at? 0dB is almost impossible to hear in a totally sound-proof room and 150 dB can kill you.
The dynamic range of a good condenser microphone is 135dB, the microphone and pre-amplifier (good old analogue valve type stuff) is more noisy and distorted than the digital recorder. The background noise of a power amplifier could be even worse because they are using high current transistors and not low noise type (there isn't much which can be done about this).
MS Office 4.3 (from 1994) is still good enough if you want to do word-processing (without HTML).
if everyone regularly downloaded Linux ISOs then the bandwidth required would be huge and it would probably be stopped by ISPs.
it would be better if someone would swap the free ISP discs at the supermarket with popular software and mp3s
Burnproof drives make a difference, I've got a 40x one and it can be set at full speed, it has never made a coaster yet, it just slows down if I do something else when burning. The speed limit sems to be about 24x for a whole disc because of my hardware so I won't be needing a 52x drive at the moment.
24x is also the limit at which I can do audio extraction with a 52x CD-ROM so the actual speed of the CD drive doesn't seem as important (CD performance improved by about 50% by changing to a 7200 rpm ATA100 hard disk).
One thing internet advertising ignores is memory. Radio adverts give out phone numbers which people are supposed to remember (or they can keep listening until they hear the number again before writing it down). You don't order a pizza as soon as the adverts happens on the radio for local pizza shop so why should people click anything on a web advert? A better test of effectiveness would be for web ads to have no hyperlink but give a URL (as an image so it can't be copied into a browser). That's more like "real life" advertising, see who can be bothered to remember the URL. No paper, TV or roadside advert omits the brand, product name or logo.