I haven't seen anyone really touch on this but it's absolutely the case. Most people have really terrible sound systems in their cars but the one in mine is quite good. As such, I can hear the substantial difference in sound quality between sirius satellite radio (I used to have a starmate) and even horrible 128kbit mp3's. Even FM radio has way better sound quality. It's really sad. Couple that with when I was a sirius subscriber years ago, the alternative and techno/trance station I liked repeated songs over and over and over again until my ears bled. There are literally *thousands* of fantastic easy royalty trance song and I swore they played the same 5 over and over again. In the Philadelphia area, a new alternative station ran by clear channel just popped up and it's substantially better than anything sirius ever put out. And the really sad thing is that when I got my unit I did so because Sirius was reputed to have better sound quality than XM.
It's a great idea, and I'd pay for it... But if I am going to pay it better be good. Damn good. And they failed.
You know I read all of these comments about how people would kill for FIOS. And I've also heard bad things about comcast, but I'm here to tell you, Verizon's customer service and billing is THE WORST! I ordered fios a year ago, got it put in and all was well. Then I move to a new home where fios is also available. They charge me a $90 "installation charge" that 3 reps insist is right, but the 4th rep says is wrong and that it should be $30. They screwed the activation so I called to get the order number to do it online and the rep sent me a new router and added a $140 charge. So they autobilled my credit card something like $280 this month... FOR FIOS INTERNET ONLY! Both verizon tech support and billing were supposed to send me a return label to return the new router and NEITHER SUCCEEDED! They are AMAZINGLY incompetent. They will transfer you around time after time to the wrong department. They don't listen to a word you say. The hold times are better now, a month ago I was holding over an hour to get through to anyone. For what it's worth the installation was top notch at both homes as has been the service. Just hope you never need to call them for anything... ever. You'll be sorry.
For one thing, the article specified porn sites that would be attractive to someone seeking out males versus females. It's arguable that a lot of spyware would probably only want to target males looking to see females. Regardless of whether or not she was looking at porn, it's not her fault the computer got infected with spyware. It's a societal problem.
You know I was wondering when someone would say it. I share a similar sentiment to this. I've never seen one of these windmills in real life but on TV they look awesome. I'd love to have windmills in my view. I wish I could understand what's wrong with these people. Don't they have any sense of responsibility?
The day my DVD player MUST be hooked up to the internet and MUST talk to a DRM server is the day I simply WILL NOT USE that format - and WILL NOT buy that player. Others should follow that example. There's no good reason, and no excuse. We don't have shit for rights or voice anymore. What you do have is your dollar... spend it carefully. If 75% of americans buy a blu-ray player with this setup doesn't that implicitly say to these execs that 75% of americans don't mind insane DRM? It shouldn't, but it probably does. And remember, boycotting the players is a lot easier than boycotting RIAA music for instance. It's tough to attribute a lack of player sales to piracy. It speaks a much louder message in this case that isn't likely to be misinterpreted.
PS: An assumption is made that the player must be connected to the internet to function... otherwise.. WHY!?
This is most likely wrong and false. My mother has an amazon redhead parrot for over 10 years now and cooks with teflon coated cookware. The danger is not COOKING the food, but rather BURNING the food or heating an empty teflon pan. It's a real danger to obnoxious squawky parrots who scream at you when you use a phone... C'est la vie;-)
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.
I call bullshit on this one... here's why:
The hard drive in an iPod MINI is a standard 4/6 GIG CF microdrive, with the interface slightly modified, to produce a special less reliable drive just for this device would be idiotic. The normal iPod uses a slightly larger 1.8" (I believe) drive. For the sake of argument, I'll only talk about the 1" drive that I know about. 1" drives from Hitachi have a 1,000,000MTBF. For those who aren't good with math, you could leave the drive powered up and spinning for a long long long long long time before it would fail. However, they have just a 300,000 count MTBF for spin-ups. This reduces the practical life of hte drive extremely, but for iPod users, this translates into 300,000 songs probably, maybe more since there's a 32 MB buffer.. (or was that a lie too?). Now the discrepency.... This drive is not special. It's the same drive people are using in PDA's cameras, portable video players, etc. My Zaurus SL-C3000 has a 4gb microdrive embedded in it which it uses as a SYSTEM DISK and SWAP. This results in the disk powering up and spinning a LOT. That's a strong statement to make about the reliability of these disks - to not put the base system on flash memory. What's more, the iPod acts as a disk drive when hooked up to a USB port. I know two doofs who bought them and use them as dvd/divx transports between home and work. They'll play the movies straight from the iPod every day, day after day after day, and at a bitrate you wouldn't realistically have on a movie sized for portable viewing. You don't have to have HD content on a portable device and there is a such thing as compression. I can squeeze a feature length movie into 200MB and it's fantastic on a 640x480 pda screen. Why go from no portable video to HD portable video. It would make just about no sense. Since you're clearly wrong on this in terms of the drives having "10s of hours" of life when spinning constantly, I wonder how wrong you are on everything else you say?
Well it's completely subjective because it depends on the size of each record. But if you assume 2 pages of text data per record or so. We can say 1.5KB per customer. 1.2 million = 1,800,000 KB or 1.8 Gigs. Most likely a single tape was stolen with a single DB backup from a single old DB server.
Mmm.. bike I rode in japan on Miyajima island did this. It was a crazy experience.. It charged on an outlet and had a small battery and motor in the frame of the bike. It was heavier than most. I found myself using the motor all the time and going really fast and when I ran it dead the bike was awfully heavy;-) But it DID take 2 hours to kill the battery!
You know, you can sit here and claim stuff like this but the reality is that the rich white guys in their BMWz are probably much better at watching out for cops (because they have an awful lot more to lose), and black guys do really stupid things in their beat up cadillacs which the cops simply cannot ignore. As a Philadelphia resident I can vouch for this. And it's not a racial thing, plenty of white guys in beat up cadillacs do stupid shit and get pulled over too, and plenty of black guys in BMWs do just fine. The IRS probably goes after Joe Sixpack because the tax shelter is legal plain and simple and what Joe sixpack did (maybe not in this instance but others) blatantly violates tax laws. And as for the straight pipe. The noise is a dead giveaway, and the power company... well corporations in the US have something called pollution credits...oh nevermind.. Falling on deaf ears. Yeah I understand there is problems but lots of people get what's coming to them. Act like a victim, become a victim... Use your brain and beat the system. Jealousy is a bitch. I drove a massively beat up car with window tint for a long time and never had a problem and drove a much nicer car when I was younger and had all kinds of problems. Why? Because I did STUPID things that the cops noticed. One thing I learned about people is they don't like to learn from mistakes and they like to play dumb a little too often. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that hrm.. Downloading this music from the internet that I would otherwise have to buy might not be kosher. You have no reason to know that buying cocain down on the corner is illegal but you know it don't you? Not to defend the RIAA. They're wrong every way you can possibly look at it. But people whine way too much these days. Stop whining and do something.
They'd have to be really stupid (big oil that is) to think that they can extract more than a certain amount above what they already do from the people. At some point their plan will collapse in on itself. But sure, they could just be very short-sighted in that their money won't matter at all when civilization falls as we know it because of their greed. It just doesn't seem that plausible, but maybe I'm not giving enough credit to the stupidity of big business executives.
They will champion alternative fuels and dip their hand right in when they come to a realization that fossil fuels are running out. For the time being one can only concede that we are not in huge danger. These big oil companies don't tend to screw up when it comes to big $$. I'm not worried. There's too much intellect out there. What you really have to worry about is a mass destructive type of thing such as someone blowing up all the tankers that bring crude to the US. When all our reserves run out it'll be like the apocalypse. No fuel to put in trucks, without trucks our lives stop as we know it. If things run out slowly we'll have time to adapt (i.e. fossil prices keep climbing until they are absurd before we ever run out).
When things get old they become irreplaceable. I guarantee some mainframe in some bank or something out there somewhere has someone regularly soldering to it;-) In many cases people repair the motherboards of their old rare computers like Atari's and Amigas. People repair motherboards, but people have a tough time repairing today's technology due to the size. It presents a challenge even to my $200 soldering iron. And I bet you a lot of manufacturers do bother to repair components that come back one way or another - despite the fact that the end users aren't doing the work.
This has always been a tough issue in my mind. If you take a look at the Atari Jaguar, the failure was from more than one angle, and they bet the company on it which is why Atari went under (at least the Atari we used to know). The first problem is that it was sufficiently more complex than most of the systems out there. It felt like the games developers didn't know how to extract the power out of the system. This could be due to Atari not providing good dev systems and docs, or it could be due to inexperience with the hardware, DSP's and moto 68K's and such. More or less the result was a really terrible selection of games with the exception of a few VERY special titles (Jeff Minter is a god). The other aspect I was talking about is Atari's marketing campaign was pretty crappy. They just didn't have enough cash reserves to handle something like this. I heard they only had something like $50mil to bet on the jag. The games coming out for the Jag now are amazing, they really show the power of the system. We really could have used them 10 years ago;-) The Jaguar games actually CAN have good frame rates and graphics together unlike Trevor McSuckass or Checkered Flag.
As for the 3dO, I never heard of it for the longest time. Never saw it advertised, same with the CDI. Really bad marketing! I was the target market and I didn't even know it existed. Nuff said there. But I remember researching the 3dO after seeing a quite amazing game video, scoffing at the price and turning the other direction.
So. Lots of people around here will sit here and try to attribute prior failures due to trying to get the early release or this and that, but the story is always very much deeper and more complex for every company.
In fact the only one who did it right was Sega with the Dreamcast. Great games, fantastic system, they just got crushed... But hell, I'll ALWAYS own a dreamcast. Those are some fantastic games.
I just put HID Headlamps in my BMW M3 for $196. Not $3000. If the prices are so skewed when it comes to relating the other issues, than we can't exactly trust this article. Yes cars are getting more expensive to fix, but it's only because of manufacturer's strangehold over diagnostic data.
Oh yeah? I could just play it on one of my ST's or maybe on my CT60 Falcon;-) I actually do fairly regularly. Minter was for sure an Atari man in his early days. I've seen that the games for the most part seem better played on the original system. Not an emu, and not ported to another platform. The REAL machine feels better somehow.
The Atari ST worked in almost exactly the same manner. The 68000 would access the memory on even clock cycles and the video hardware would access the memory on odd clock cycles. The video memory was built into the main memory. This is part of what made the video on apple ii's and ataris so fast.
He built the speaker enclosure, big deal. And it's not even finished. Any idiot can build a speaker box, but he didn't even build it a specification for appropriate bass tuning. I thought he was building the driver - much more interesting;-)
In our industry, although we are state and government regulated and completely legitimate, we are considered an "online gambling website", and as such through the legislation if we accept online account deposits via visa or mastercard we will be shut down. We've had to be very careful as a result of this legislation and it makes life unfun.
Actually from what I hear the Prius can be modified to burn the rubber right off the wheels. Apparently the motor power is controlled very low of course so that you don't run the batteries down in a few seconds (and fry them as well since they are NiMH). This doesn't really add up though considering that these vehicles use the engine for extra power in addition to charging the batteries. Why would they do this if the electric motor power is more than sufficient to destroy those little EV car tires?;-)
Oh stop flattering me. I'll be the first to agree that this kind of stuff sucks. But it isn't "slamming". They didn't do anything more wrong then other companies. They should all burn.
What exactly is disgusting about it? I mean did you actually read the email? It's plain english that they are not trying to slam in any way. It doesn't say anywhere "we are your registrar". It's a solicitation of service that is targeted, no different from other mailing lists and everything else used. People should grow a clue and if they're going to bitch at least bitch about the right things.
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I haven't seen anyone really touch on this but it's absolutely the case. Most people have really terrible sound systems in their cars but the one in mine is quite good. As such, I can hear the substantial difference in sound quality between sirius satellite radio (I used to have a starmate) and even horrible 128kbit mp3's. Even FM radio has way better sound quality. It's really sad. Couple that with when I was a sirius subscriber years ago, the alternative and techno/trance station I liked repeated songs over and over and over again until my ears bled. There are literally *thousands* of fantastic easy royalty trance song and I swore they played the same 5 over and over again. In the Philadelphia area, a new alternative station ran by clear channel just popped up and it's substantially better than anything sirius ever put out. And the really sad thing is that when I got my unit I did so because Sirius was reputed to have better sound quality than XM.
It's a great idea, and I'd pay for it... But if I am going to pay it better be good. Damn good. And they failed.
You know I read all of these comments about how people would kill for FIOS. And I've also heard bad things about comcast, but I'm here to tell you, Verizon's customer service and billing is THE WORST! I ordered fios a year ago, got it put in and all was well. Then I move to a new home where fios is also available. They charge me a $90 "installation charge" that 3 reps insist is right, but the 4th rep says is wrong and that it should be $30. They screwed the activation so I called to get the order number to do it online and the rep sent me a new router and added a $140 charge. So they autobilled my credit card something like $280 this month... FOR FIOS INTERNET ONLY! Both verizon tech support and billing were supposed to send me a return label to return the new router and NEITHER SUCCEEDED! They are AMAZINGLY incompetent. They will transfer you around time after time to the wrong department. They don't listen to a word you say. The hold times are better now, a month ago I was holding over an hour to get through to anyone. For what it's worth the installation was top notch at both homes as has been the service. Just hope you never need to call them for anything... ever. You'll be sorry.
For one thing, the article specified porn sites that would be attractive to someone seeking out males versus females. It's arguable that a lot of spyware would probably only want to target males looking to see females. Regardless of whether or not she was looking at porn, it's not her fault the computer got infected with spyware. It's a societal problem.
You know I was wondering when someone would say it. I share a similar sentiment to this. I've never seen one of these windmills in real life but on TV they look awesome. I'd love to have windmills in my view. I wish I could understand what's wrong with these people. Don't they have any sense of responsibility?
The day my DVD player MUST be hooked up to the internet and MUST talk to a DRM server is the day I simply WILL NOT USE that format - and WILL NOT buy that player. Others should follow that example. There's no good reason, and no excuse. We don't have shit for rights or voice anymore. What you do have is your dollar... spend it carefully. If 75% of americans buy a blu-ray player with this setup doesn't that implicitly say to these execs that 75% of americans don't mind insane DRM? It shouldn't, but it probably does. And remember, boycotting the players is a lot easier than boycotting RIAA music for instance. It's tough to attribute a lack of player sales to piracy. It speaks a much louder message in this case that isn't likely to be misinterpreted.
PS: An assumption is made that the player must be connected to the internet to function... otherwise.. WHY!?
This is most likely wrong and false. My mother has an amazon redhead parrot for over 10 years now and cooks with teflon coated cookware. The danger is not COOKING the food, but rather BURNING the food or heating an empty teflon pan. It's a real danger to obnoxious squawky parrots who scream at you when you use a phone... C'est la vie ;-)
And the iPod is not repeat not gonna say it one more time not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours. I call bullshit on this one... here's why: The hard drive in an iPod MINI is a standard 4/6 GIG CF microdrive, with the interface slightly modified, to produce a special less reliable drive just for this device would be idiotic. The normal iPod uses a slightly larger 1.8" (I believe) drive. For the sake of argument, I'll only talk about the 1" drive that I know about. 1" drives from Hitachi have a 1,000,000MTBF. For those who aren't good with math, you could leave the drive powered up and spinning for a long long long long long time before it would fail. However, they have just a 300,000 count MTBF for spin-ups. This reduces the practical life of hte drive extremely, but for iPod users, this translates into 300,000 songs probably, maybe more since there's a 32 MB buffer.. (or was that a lie too?). Now the discrepency.... This drive is not special. It's the same drive people are using in PDA's cameras, portable video players, etc. My Zaurus SL-C3000 has a 4gb microdrive embedded in it which it uses as a SYSTEM DISK and SWAP. This results in the disk powering up and spinning a LOT. That's a strong statement to make about the reliability of these disks - to not put the base system on flash memory. What's more, the iPod acts as a disk drive when hooked up to a USB port. I know two doofs who bought them and use them as dvd/divx transports between home and work. They'll play the movies straight from the iPod every day, day after day after day, and at a bitrate you wouldn't realistically have on a movie sized for portable viewing. You don't have to have HD content on a portable device and there is a such thing as compression. I can squeeze a feature length movie into 200MB and it's fantastic on a 640x480 pda screen. Why go from no portable video to HD portable video. It would make just about no sense. Since you're clearly wrong on this in terms of the drives having "10s of hours" of life when spinning constantly, I wonder how wrong you are on everything else you say?
Well it's completely subjective because it depends on the size of each record. But if you assume 2 pages of text data per record or so. We can say 1.5KB per customer. 1.2 million = 1,800,000 KB or 1.8 Gigs. Most likely a single tape was stolen with a single DB backup from a single old DB server.
If you think about it carefully, the buttered toast has to be strapped to the cat's feet ;-)
Mmm.. bike I rode in japan on Miyajima island did this. It was a crazy experience.. It charged on an outlet and had a small battery and motor in the frame of the bike. It was heavier than most. I found myself using the motor all the time and going really fast and when I ran it dead the bike was awfully heavy ;-) But it DID take 2 hours to kill the battery!
You know, you can sit here and claim stuff like this but the reality is that the rich white guys in their BMWz are probably much better at watching out for cops (because they have an awful lot more to lose), and black guys do really stupid things in their beat up cadillacs which the cops simply cannot ignore. As a Philadelphia resident I can vouch for this. And it's not a racial thing, plenty of white guys in beat up cadillacs do stupid shit and get pulled over too, and plenty of black guys in BMWs do just fine. The IRS probably goes after Joe Sixpack because the tax shelter is legal plain and simple and what Joe sixpack did (maybe not in this instance but others) blatantly violates tax laws. And as for the straight pipe. The noise is a dead giveaway, and the power company... well corporations in the US have something called pollution credits...oh nevermind.. Falling on deaf ears. Yeah I understand there is problems but lots of people get what's coming to them. Act like a victim, become a victim... Use your brain and beat the system. Jealousy is a bitch. I drove a massively beat up car with window tint for a long time and never had a problem and drove a much nicer car when I was younger and had all kinds of problems. Why? Because I did STUPID things that the cops noticed. One thing I learned about people is they don't like to learn from mistakes and they like to play dumb a little too often. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that hrm.. Downloading this music from the internet that I would otherwise have to buy might not be kosher. You have no reason to know that buying cocain down on the corner is illegal but you know it don't you? Not to defend the RIAA. They're wrong every way you can possibly look at it. But people whine way too much these days. Stop whining and do something.
They'd have to be really stupid (big oil that is) to think that they can extract more than a certain amount above what they already do from the people. At some point their plan will collapse in on itself. But sure, they could just be very short-sighted in that their money won't matter at all when civilization falls as we know it because of their greed. It just doesn't seem that plausible, but maybe I'm not giving enough credit to the stupidity of big business executives.
That's ok. Goomail is better ;-)
They will champion alternative fuels and dip their hand right in when they come to a realization that fossil fuels are running out. For the time being one can only concede that we are not in huge danger. These big oil companies don't tend to screw up when it comes to big $$. I'm not worried. There's too much intellect out there. What you really have to worry about is a mass destructive type of thing such as someone blowing up all the tankers that bring crude to the US. When all our reserves run out it'll be like the apocalypse. No fuel to put in trucks, without trucks our lives stop as we know it. If things run out slowly we'll have time to adapt (i.e. fossil prices keep climbing until they are absurd before we ever run out).
When things get old they become irreplaceable. I guarantee some mainframe in some bank or something out there somewhere has someone regularly soldering to it ;-) In many cases people repair the motherboards of their old rare computers like Atari's and Amigas. People repair motherboards, but people have a tough time repairing today's technology due to the size. It presents a challenge even to my $200 soldering iron. And I bet you a lot of manufacturers do bother to repair components that come back one way or another - despite the fact that the end users aren't doing the work.
This has always been a tough issue in my mind. If you take a look at the Atari Jaguar, the failure was from more than one angle, and they bet the company on it which is why Atari went under (at least the Atari we used to know). The first problem is that it was sufficiently more complex than most of the systems out there. It felt like the games developers didn't know how to extract the power out of the system. This could be due to Atari not providing good dev systems and docs, or it could be due to inexperience with the hardware, DSP's and moto 68K's and such. More or less the result was a really terrible selection of games with the exception of a few VERY special titles (Jeff Minter is a god). The other aspect I was talking about is Atari's marketing campaign was pretty crappy. They just didn't have enough cash reserves to handle something like this. I heard they only had something like $50mil to bet on the jag. The games coming out for the Jag now are amazing, they really show the power of the system. We really could have used them 10 years ago ;-) The Jaguar games actually CAN have good frame rates and graphics together unlike Trevor McSuckass or Checkered Flag.
As for the 3dO, I never heard of it for the longest time. Never saw it advertised, same with the CDI. Really bad marketing! I was the target market and I didn't even know it existed. Nuff said there. But I remember researching the 3dO after seeing a quite amazing game video, scoffing at the price and turning the other direction.
So. Lots of people around here will sit here and try to attribute prior failures due to trying to get the early release or this and that, but the story is always very much deeper and more complex for every company.
In fact the only one who did it right was Sega with the Dreamcast. Great games, fantastic system, they just got crushed... But hell, I'll ALWAYS own a dreamcast. Those are some fantastic games.
Hey guys, I can't find this posted anywhere, but this is *good stuff*, DS Screenshots and renderings. Enjoy.
I just put HID Headlamps in my BMW M3 for $196. Not $3000. If the prices are so skewed when it comes to relating the other issues, than we can't exactly trust this article. Yes cars are getting more expensive to fix, but it's only because of manufacturer's strangehold over diagnostic data.
Oh yeah? I could just play it on one of my ST's or maybe on my CT60 Falcon ;-) I actually do fairly regularly. Minter was for sure an Atari man in his early days. I've seen that the games for the most part seem better played on the original system. Not an emu, and not ported to another platform. The REAL machine feels better somehow.
The Atari ST worked in almost exactly the same manner. The 68000 would access the memory on even clock cycles and the video hardware would access the memory on odd clock cycles. The video memory was built into the main memory. This is part of what made the video on apple ii's and ataris so fast.
He built the speaker enclosure, big deal. And it's not even finished. Any idiot can build a speaker box, but he didn't even build it a specification for appropriate bass tuning. I thought he was building the driver - much more interesting ;-)
In our industry, although we are state and government regulated and completely legitimate, we are considered an "online gambling website", and as such through the legislation if we accept online account deposits via visa or mastercard we will be shut down. We've had to be very careful as a result of this legislation and it makes life unfun.
Actually from what I hear the Prius can be modified to burn the rubber right off the wheels. Apparently the motor power is controlled very low of course so that you don't run the batteries down in a few seconds (and fry them as well since they are NiMH). This doesn't really add up though considering that these vehicles use the engine for extra power in addition to charging the batteries. Why would they do this if the electric motor power is more than sufficient to destroy those little EV car tires? ;-)
Oh stop flattering me. I'll be the first to agree that this kind of stuff sucks. But it isn't "slamming". They didn't do anything more wrong then other companies. They should all burn.
What exactly is disgusting about it? I mean did you actually read the email? It's plain english that they are not trying to slam in any way. It doesn't say anywhere "we are your registrar". It's a solicitation of service that is targeted, no different from other mailing lists and everything else used. People should grow a clue and if they're going to bitch at least bitch about the right things.