The flak jacket itself will not stop a rifle round (I'm not entirely sure about a handgun round), however when worn with a "trauma plate" it will. The plates are steel -- or more recently, some sort of ceramic 'Chobham' composite -- inserts that fit into pockets over the center of the chest and back. The steel ones at least are no fun at all, they're very heavy and I doubt that most guys who aren't really expecting to get shot at wear them. The ceramic ones I've heard are a big improvement but I don't know how widely distributed they are, or what people think of them.
The kevlar helmet is supposedly able to stop a 7.62mm rifle round, although I'm not sure at exactly what distance. It does not stop the 5.56mm round fired by the M-16. In fact the ammunition in the M-16 was designed specifically to penetrate the kevlar, among other things (it has a steel core as opposed to the older solid lead bullets).
I'm aware of this; however, the post that I was responding to was talking about the US (and Canada, although I can't respond to that part, being totally unfamiliar with their system) and whether or not a person in a similar situation here could have just ignored the notice, since it was sent through the post.
The only time I've ever seen or heard of anyone getting anything mailed to them that told them to appear in court is for small claims. For everything else, someone goes in person to present them with the subpoena. Where I live it's the county sheriff (It's about the only thing the Sheriff's Office does besides transport prisoners) or a private process server.
I suppose you could just try to deny that you were ever served, but I don't think you'd win that game when it came to your word versus the Sheriff's.
Maybe they mail subpoenas in situations where the person who's being required to appear isn't going to be hostile, but if you were a potential criminal or civil defendant in the U.S., you probably wouldn't have the opportunity to just 'not pick something up at the post office,' because somebody would come to your house or workplace and give you the paper.
You're correct that the FCC rules require the BPL providers to have the capability to "notch" out frequencies that interfere with existing services, but based on reports of areas where BPL has been rolled out, I've heard that power companies are not doing this, or are claiming they don't have the capability, or the FCC is not being very aggressive in making them do it. At any rate, regardless of where you pass the buck for responsibility, the interference-reduction measures don't seem to be working yet. And things like that are only going to get worse -- not better -- as the rollout gets bigger.
The Motorola BPL system is fairly neat, and probably would be acceptable to everyone involved; it's too bad that nobody (to my knowledge, and I've been following this issue fairly closely) is using it.
As to the people arguing about the signal strength from BPL (not you, but other responses), they obviously don't know anything about HF radio transmissions. It's not like the signals BPL is competing with are from 10,000-watt transmitters like the ones that drive your local radio station, we're talking about small (sub-kilowatt) transmitters, in some cases thousands of miles away. The interference produced by BPL lines is orders of magnitude higher than the signals that HF equipment is designed to pick out of the background noise -- it completely obliterates them.
As both a radio geek and a computer geek, I can totally appreciate the allure of BPL. "Hey -- we've got wires, let's run some data down 'em." But the technology has a lot of problems that need to be solved, which the power companies are not going to do if they're not made to. And right now the FCC hasn't been taking a very hard line. This is something that could potentially give them a vast new source of revenue, as well as cost reductions via remote monitoring: they can afford to build a system that doesn't interfere with existing legitimate operations.
Except what you didn't hear is the rest of the story:
Bill Gates picks up the bundle from the doorstep and passes it to his butler, Steve Ballmer. "Take this to the river and drown it," he says, and goes back to sipping a mimosa.
I am in the midst of experimenting with Linux as an alternative to Mac OS, for financial reasons mostly. I need a newer computer but I can't afford a new Mac right now, and want to wait for the OS X/86 boxes anyway. So I got a refurbished 3.2GHz P4 and put Ubuntu on it.
I played around with Gnome for a while, but I couldn't stand it. I don't care how many self-proclaimed GUI "experts" have endorsed it, everything feels too limited. The control panels in particular didn't seem to have as many options as the KDE equivalents. (I understand that to 'true' Linux users this isn't an issue because 'real users' modify the config files directly, but coming from a Mac I want good GUI utilities wherever possible.)
KDE is very Windows-ish, and I dislike that, but it didn't feel quite as much like some sort of crippled sandbox as Gnome did. Maybe I'll play around with some alternative skins and see if I can find ones that are less MSian than the default. But it pains me that nobody has picked up on some of the things that Apple does right, and instead they just blindly replicate Redmond, or follow HID dogma to the detriment of real-world usebility.
Getting offtopic for a moment: The weirdest thing to me is that from an experience with Linux back a few years ago, I recalled that it was possible to bring up a terminal window in KDE by right-clicking on the desktop and doing New:Terminal. Maybe I just imagined this -- but it would be damn useful, because I've found myself constantly digging through the menu system to get a new Konsole started. I'm sure there must be a way to edit that menu, I just have to find it.
It's a pity that Shuttleworth et al don't send out free CDs with Kubuntu on them; right now you either have to download and burn your own install CD, or install Ubuntu and then install the kubuntu-desktop package (what I did). The second option in theory gives you the best of both worlds, but at least in my situation, leaves a bunch of apps in KDE that won't work, because they're apparently GNOME only (e.g. Synaptic is broken under KDE, and other people seem to have the same problem).
Funny you should mention this, because I saw that someone had posted the idea of porting Cedega to OSX/86 on the forums over at Transgaming. It's in whatever passes for a queue over there, waiting to receive 10 'seconds' and get into real voting.
Frankly I think that's a bit of a big strategic decision for TransGaming to leave up to their subscribers in the voting system, but it doesn't make it any less of a good idea.
There could potentially be a HUGE market for something like Cedega on the Mac. In fact I bet if they played their cards right they might even be able to get some support from Apple for it (although I'm sure MacSoft wouldn't appreciate the competition any). With Mac users, you wouldn't have nearly as much unwillingness to pay for software that you do with Linux users. In fact, Mac users are basically trained from the moment they buy Apple that they're going to pay a premium for stuff. Getting them to shell out $35-50 for something that would let them play WoW wouldn't be much of an issue.
What TG would have to do though is clean up their produce immensely. Mac users are willing to pay cold hard cash, but they're not willing in my experience (and I say this as a longtime Mac user who just recently came over to Linux) to tweak stuff in the way that Linux or even Windows users are. Stuff better work, and work well, the first time; that's what people pay for.
What perhaps TG could do, either in addition to or as an alternative to porting Cedega as-is, would be to sell the compatibility layer in some form that other companies could use to roll together with a PC version of a game, and turn out a standalone Mac version with less expense and time investment. And the compatibility layer could be tweaked on a game-by-game basis for stability and speed. If I was TG, that's what I'd be thinking about.
The Mac gaming market is in a lull right now, but a lack of games at any particular time doesn't indicate a lack of a demand. There is a huge untapped market right there, and an even bigger market of people who would switch to Mac, if such a product existed and worked well. (That's where you could get Apple support.)
I think this is an idea who's time will really have come once we start seeing OSX/86 iMacs and Minis.
What about the ones who aren't idiots? The ones who reinstalled from the disks without calling you?
Dell: You mean, we have users out there somewhere, who aren't complete and utter wastes of space? Ha...hahahahhah. That's a good one.
Seriously though, I agree with your point. However, Dell seems pretty convinced that all of their users are retards. And although that may be partially true, I think at least part of the problem is due to the fact (and this is true for any company, not just Dell) that the people you come in contact with most often may not be representative of your average consumer. I.e., you might get a lot of tech support calls from a fairly small percentage of your base, and lots of them may never call at all. That doesn't mean that you can get rid of tech support, because lots of people may have chosen your brand because of the availability (even if they never use it).
But Dell has struck me on more than one occasion as a place that's gotten quite out of touch with everything but its business users. Or rather that is only in touch with it's consumer-level users through tech support, and has a stilted view of them because of this. We all like to make fun of clueless computer users, and god knows they're an easy target, but not all consumers are morons or unable to use an install CD.
Also, I think it's still worth pointing out that local computer stores (becoming sort of a rare commodity, depending on where you are) still have a lot of value to add.
At least at the one I used to frequent -- they had a great used-parts bin that you could pick through -- they did a lot of business for local people, building and supporting custom systems. Basically people would bring in a Dell or Compaq ad, and they would tell them how much an equivalent system from them, fully supported, would cost. Generally they could do it for about the same, or only slightly more.
Then they'd build the system up from OEM parts -- pretty much the same ones you or I would get on NewEgg -- install Windows and set up the software and config it all out.
The problem places like this run into though is how Microsoft licenses Windows. They give such a steep discount to the big manufacturers (to keep them locked in to Windows) that it's tough to compete when you're buying individual licenses on a small scale. The owners were constantly complaining about this.
Anyway, when I hear non-technical users telling me how messed up their current computer is, and how badly they need to upgrade to a faster machine, I always tell them to look in the phone book and find a local shop that's been around for a while and see if they can buy one through them. It may not be 24/7 support, but it'll be a lot better than what you're going to get from Dell these days.
Honestly, that's ridiculous. If that's what you believe, than... well, have fun doing whatever it is you do, in whatever world you live in. It must be a nice place, pity you can't get there from the Universe I apparently inhabit.
Practically everything that's ever been done has been out of some sort of profit motive or another. I won't say 'everything,' because certainly there have been some things done from various altruistic motives, but they pale in comparison to things that were done for profit. And that's profit both on a personal and corporate/institutional/national level. In fact a lot of people who do "charitable" work are doing it for personal profit of some sort. You can argue whether that's their chief motivation or not, but it's undeniably quite strong.
Just because I'm aiming to make a profit off of you, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. In fact the basis of a truly 'free' economy in the sense that free-marketers talk of it, is that every interaction is a win-win. That is, for you and me to do business together, BOTH of us have to be getting some sort of profit out of it. Does that always happen in our real world? Probably not; but it happens a lot more often than you'd realize.
The owner of the pizza parlor down the street from me is quite wealthy. He doesn't stay in the business he's in because he really enjoys enriching other people's lives by serving them pizza, he does it because he's good at it and makes more money running a pizza shop than he would in an alternative career at this point in his life, given his education. His business, on paper, is ripping off its customers. After all, it sells what is probably less than a dollar of raw ingredients (probably the cardboard box is the most expensive thing) and a few cents worth of gas for the oven, and a few dollars for overhead of the store and employee wages, for $10. And I happily pay it, because I'd rather pay him to do this, even if he's making money hand over fist, than do it myself. It's a win-win transaction.
Just because you're in the business of making money for yourself doesn't mean that you're harming anyone else. As long as the transaction is not coerced in any way, everyone ought to be able to go about their profit-motivated ways and be fine. It's not a perfect system, but it's a damn sight better than anything else I've heard offered up as an alternative.
Yeah, especially because drawing out the magnet wire is a real bitch.:)
You do make a good point though -- "homebuilt" equipment of today is really the "kit built" of the past, which was probably "easy assembly" a generation before.
Although compared to computers or any kind of video equipment, audio gear is one of the few things that a person with a basic technical education can assemble and get anywhere near the 'bare metal' anymore. Or at least down to the level of discrete components which by themselves can be understood, although in concert they can be startlingly complex. (E.g. a hobbyist might understand capacitors and resistors and even a little linear network analysis, but it's a big jump from there to understanding a complicated harmonic filter arrangement. But the lack of the theory isn't a showstopper if you're just building a schematic.)
What I find most disappointing about the tendency away from open and documented interconnects (and in general, the move away from analog interconnects) is that it makes understanding the equipment a lot harder for the non-engineer. And with proprietary digital busses, even for an engineer that hasn't signed some sort of NDA. In an analog system you have a basic suite of test equipment that will help you get insight into a lot of stuff: for audio I use a 1955 Tektronix oscilloscope and some little function generators put together on breadboards. For video I'd need a faster scope, maybe a commerial signal analyzer and generator and a good monitor, but one suite of test equipment would work pretty much everywhere.
The move to digital video and the progression in the future to digital television with DRM is going to end all that -- the analysis and testing tools are going to become specific to the type of digital interface (probably brand specific too), cost thousands, and will be so complicated that a normal person won't be able to understand how they work. I realize that hobbyists and tinkerers aren't a significant market for anything -- even test equipment -- so we really have no right to make demands as to the future direction of TV or video or audio (although the audio hobbyist market isn't wholly insignificant), but it doesn't stop me from being rather disappointed.
Sure, watching 1080p on a giant plasma screen is fun, but I wonder if we'll still think it's worthwhile when we realize that we've handed over the ability to even understand what's going on in our televisions (regardless of how many people want to / care) to people who have strong competing interests to ours.
The back issues for QST were (and I think are still available) sold by the ARRL as sets on CD-Rom as PDF files, going all the way back to the 1915. I've heard that the quality varies somewhat between the different collections, in some cases the scans aren't too great and the small print (contest results especially) can be hard to read.
There are some product reviews dating into the 1980s available to ARRL members online through their web site, but not feature articles I don't think.
Do you think they're a member of the Universal Postal Union yet? I wonder how much an International Reply Coupon is going to cost... somehow I don't think $1.75 is going to cut it.
You do know that the license exam is -- for anyone with a basic understanding of electricity -- pretty simple these days. In fact it's probably somewhat easier than the one you studied for in the past, especially if you spent a lot of time practicing the Morse code. You'd just need to memorize the band plan and you'd probably be able to go down and take the test. You could do it in a weekend, quite easily.
I'm very surprised that more geeks don't go and take the test, if you're even moderately interested in messing around with radio or wifi stuff. At the very least, you can legally boost the power on your 802.11b setup (on certain channels).
Although I'm not sure if it's totally up to date, here is a site where you can take sample tests: http://www.qrz.com/testing.html
The question pools aren't that big, so if you take it a few times over you can basically exhaust all the available questions for any given test (or at least you'll start seeing repeats or very similar questions).
You're correct, but they're working on the distribution end also -- by suing people who share files, etc. etc. The MPAA is just starting to get into this arena, and based on how many bittorrent trackers they've had shut down, they're having a lot more success than the RIAA did in going after P2P.
Their strategy is multi-fold: first, they make it hard for you to copy media yourself, or timeshift it, locking you into watching their media on their schedule using their approved equipment. Second, they make it dangerous for a law-abiding person to easily download pirated content, or at least appear dangerous to do so, by aggressively suing people who share files and ruining them financially. There will always be alternative methods of sharing files, and perhaps at some point we'll have a truly anonymized/encrypted system that's practical for the average user, but this takes a big chunk out of the college-student-downloader segment. By getting the 'average user' to disable uploads, they can easily pick out and target the remaining big uploaders, which are assumedly the sources of the files.
Usenet is about the last place that the **AA's haven't gone after, mostly because it's too confusing for a lot of people to use, but its time will come eventually. There, they'll just go after the providers of the newsfeeds that include binaries groups, rather than the users. Since the system wasn't ever really set up to deal with a hostile envionment it's trivial to shut down if you could cut those groups out of the big backbone feeds (or inject bad / dummy content). It would at least balkanize the groups so that a file posted in one place wouldn't propagate very far.
Also they're working with authorities to prevent the physical importation of pirated goods, which is about the only thing they do that I can't find too much fault with, but these goods don't really reach people outside of big cities anyway.
They're coming at people from both ends -- and their plan is for 'average users' to end up firmly locked-in when their various plans meet in the middle.
That's why the next generation of DRM will actually be a small microchip implanted into your brain that does the last step of decoding, taking the scrambled analog inputs from your ears and driving the impulses directly into your somatic sensory cortex. It will probably also have a mandatory "copyright enforcement anti-circumvention device" consisting of a few tenths of a gram of plastic explosive, just in case you try to mod-chip it.
It's the logical next step, really. Where else are you going to go?
Make it more convenient. AllofMP3.com exists and apparently makes money, because it's easier to use, has a better selection, and offers faster downloads than peer-to-peer. Sure, it may not be legal in the U.S., but that hasn't stopped anybody (that I've heard of). I know for a fact of people who basically use it as an alternative to P2P at places where filesharing is blocked (e.g. most universities). Especially when they were only charging $0.01/MB, the cost was low enough that even cheap college students would pay for it. (Now it's $0.02/MB, I think.)
There are services out there that are competing with filesharing and winning, and as the filesharing networks get more and more difficult to use safely, or have to use more computationally-intensive encryption algorithms to stay anonymous and prevent users from getting sued, then paid services will become more attractive. That said, the current price points for paid services are orders of magnitude higher than what they need to be, in order to compete with P2P. There are lots of people out there who don't value their time very highly who will always download, but by reducing the prices of legitimate alternatives and increasing their quality, you make the segment of the market that will pirate smaller and smaller.
I'm in the same boat as you are. I used to buy quite a bit of music, because I could only fit a few CDs in my car's glove compartment at a time, and I listened to the radio, and refreshed the CDs both by swapping them with ones from home but also by buying new ones. I don't do that anymore.
Partly it might be because I've outgrown the buying-music stage of my life, but I really don't think so. I know people who built up massive music collections when they were in their 20s and 30s, back 10 years ago. I don't see many 20-somethings doing that anymore, myself included.
What happened is I got an iPod, which I now keep in the car, and I can use to listen to anything I want out of my entire collection that I've built up since highschool (not that I'd ever want to listen to some of it -- urgh). But having that much music always available really eliminates much of my desire to buy new stuff. I can just make a randomized playlist and jump through it when I want variety. It's like a radio station playing only music I know I at least find inoffensive, if I don't necessarily love all of it.
My personal objection to buying CDs is the music stores. The last few I've bought have all been online, and that's because I can't stand going into record shops. They all seem to be targeting either punked-out 14-year-olds or gangsta wannabes, and I'm not interested in hearing either of those groups' music. If I was designing a record store, it would be QUIET. Let people who want to listen to a CD do it at a listening station, instead of blasting it through a shitty PA system. The last place I've been to that I liked shopping at was the music section of Borders Books and Music, but my most recent experience there wasn't even very positive (why is it louder than the book section?). That pretty much relegates me to Amazon.com and other online stores, which unfortunately don't really browse very well. (Although Amazon's suggestions features work eerily well, at least for me.)
Actually the most pleasant place I've found music recently was in the audio section of my regional library. The selection is fairly impressive, the organization is intuitive and sensible, and while the atmosphere isn't anything special, it doesn't exactly assault your senses. And you can't beat the price.:)
Maybe somewhere there's a "music store for adults" that I just haven't encountered yet, someplace where you can sit and listen to anything in the store and would actually be a pleasant shopping experience. I wouldn't be against buying a lot more CDs, in fact I prefer them to buying digital files, but the combination of the lack of new selection in genres that I like, unwelcoming brick-and-mortar stores, and the knowledge that the majority of the profits from what I'm buying are going to companies that I find reprehensible, has pretty much driven me away.
Very cool system -- thanks for the response. Any chance you'll choose to distribute those scripts of yours?
It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd like to get working, someday when I have more time.
Right now I have all of my music stored on a 60GB drive stuck in my Power Mac, because it's the only way I can find to serve it up to other iTunes clients and to sync it with my iPod. Unfortunately Apple has crippled the first thing so badly in recent versions that the internal DAAP server in iTunes is basically useless (the 3 connections per day or whatever it is), so something like MT-DAAPD would be perfect. Sadly I haven't found anything though yet for Linux that will manage an iPod.
Oh, well, it's not like disk space is expensive these days. Maybe I'll just keep the two libraries syncronized with each other using rsync and have the DAAP from the Linux box and iPod syncing through the Mac.
Yeah that's interesting. I'm seeing the same thing, all the other links have the domain in brackets after them, but that one doesn't. Odd, I thought it was a setting on my end to choose that, not on the poster's.
Well at least one of them will put the resulting files on a hard drive for you (I assume you supply the drive), so if you were truly lazy then you could just send them a FireWire hard drive and plug it in to your computer when it was returned to you.
Or if you can bear to part with it for a week or so, and trust the ripping company with it, send them your iPod itself and have the files loaded directly onto that. You know that's what most people who get a service like this are going to be doing with the music as soon as they get it home (as other people have pointed out, if you use your desktop computer like a stereo system this doesn't make much sense, because you can just rip+play at the same time, as you listen to each disc), so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that most people would just get the music preloaded onto their iPod.
If a lot of people do just get it loaded onto their iPods though, I could forsee a big interest in tools that let you get the music off of the iPod easily -- since otherwise you're carrying around your $1 a disc investment in ripping in your pocket without a backup. If the iPod were to die, you'd have to get all the CDs re-ripped.
The online music services have convenience going for them, but that's about all. As long as they insist on charging more than 50% of what a physical CD costs, I'll take the physical CD.
It's too bad because I really like the iTMS concept (except for the DRM), but it's just too expensive.
I'm also not cool with "renting" my music from Napster or a service like it, either. If I buy a CD a month, and happen to be short money one month, I just don't get a new CD. If I'm short paying my Napster bill, my music gets repo'ed. No, thanks, but I'll own my music -- or at least the permanent media that it's stored on.
I have lately been using everyone's favorite franchise of the Russian Mob, allofmp3.com, when I want something that's old enough that it exists in their catalog. However I listen mainly to classical music, and they sort of suck when it comes to that. However other music services should take a look at them as a model for how to operate -- pick your format (MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC too I think) and get billed by the MB. You want shit quality, fine; it's cheap. You want something you can listen to through a pair of Grados without wanting to kill yourself, you can get that too.
Could you perhaps elaborate on what this "task oriented" interface is? I'm not trolling, I just have no idea what you're talking about. If it has something to do with those auto-hiding menu options, then I heartily disagree. I think they hurt everyone, but in particular new users, since they never get the opportunity to see the full range of options available to them in a program. How is someone using Excel supposed to know that there is a "Text to Columns" menu option if they never see it? Frankly it seems to lead to a rather elitist situation -- you only can get to functionality easily and quickly if you use it often, and you'll only learn about things (without going out of your way) if you already know that they're there.
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The flak jacket itself will not stop a rifle round (I'm not entirely sure about a handgun round), however when worn with a "trauma plate" it will. The plates are steel -- or more recently, some sort of ceramic 'Chobham' composite -- inserts that fit into pockets over the center of the chest and back. The steel ones at least are no fun at all, they're very heavy and I doubt that most guys who aren't really expecting to get shot at wear them. The ceramic ones I've heard are a big improvement but I don't know how widely distributed they are, or what people think of them.
The kevlar helmet is supposedly able to stop a 7.62mm rifle round, although I'm not sure at exactly what distance. It does not stop the 5.56mm round fired by the M-16. In fact the ammunition in the M-16 was designed specifically to penetrate the kevlar, among other things (it has a steel core as opposed to the older solid lead bullets).
I'm aware of this; however, the post that I was responding to was talking about the US (and Canada, although I can't respond to that part, being totally unfamiliar with their system) and whether or not a person in a similar situation here could have just ignored the notice, since it was sent through the post.
That's why we send process servers.
The only time I've ever seen or heard of anyone getting anything mailed to them that told them to appear in court is for small claims. For everything else, someone goes in person to present them with the subpoena. Where I live it's the county sheriff (It's about the only thing the Sheriff's Office does besides transport prisoners) or a private process server.
I suppose you could just try to deny that you were ever served, but I don't think you'd win that game when it came to your word versus the Sheriff's.
Maybe they mail subpoenas in situations where the person who's being required to appear isn't going to be hostile, but if you were a potential criminal or civil defendant in the U.S., you probably wouldn't have the opportunity to just 'not pick something up at the post office,' because somebody would come to your house or workplace and give you the paper.
You're correct that the FCC rules require the BPL providers to have the capability to "notch" out frequencies that interfere with existing services, but based on reports of areas where BPL has been rolled out, I've heard that power companies are not doing this, or are claiming they don't have the capability, or the FCC is not being very aggressive in making them do it. At any rate, regardless of where you pass the buck for responsibility, the interference-reduction measures don't seem to be working yet. And things like that are only going to get worse -- not better -- as the rollout gets bigger.
The Motorola BPL system is fairly neat, and probably would be acceptable to everyone involved; it's too bad that nobody (to my knowledge, and I've been following this issue fairly closely) is using it.
As to the people arguing about the signal strength from BPL (not you, but other responses), they obviously don't know anything about HF radio transmissions. It's not like the signals BPL is competing with are from 10,000-watt transmitters like the ones that drive your local radio station, we're talking about small (sub-kilowatt) transmitters, in some cases thousands of miles away. The interference produced by BPL lines is orders of magnitude higher than the signals that HF equipment is designed to pick out of the background noise -- it completely obliterates them.
As both a radio geek and a computer geek, I can totally appreciate the allure of BPL. "Hey -- we've got wires, let's run some data down 'em." But the technology has a lot of problems that need to be solved, which the power companies are not going to do if they're not made to. And right now the FCC hasn't been taking a very hard line. This is something that could potentially give them a vast new source of revenue, as well as cost reductions via remote monitoring: they can afford to build a system that doesn't interfere with existing legitimate operations.
Well, that's still better than Rapid Syphilis Spreading.
Except what you didn't hear is the rest of the story:
Bill Gates picks up the bundle from the doorstep and passes it to his butler, Steve Ballmer. "Take this to the river and drown it," he says, and goes back to sipping a mimosa.
I agree.
I am in the midst of experimenting with Linux as an alternative to Mac OS, for financial reasons mostly. I need a newer computer but I can't afford a new Mac right now, and want to wait for the OS X/86 boxes anyway. So I got a refurbished 3.2GHz P4 and put Ubuntu on it.
I played around with Gnome for a while, but I couldn't stand it. I don't care how many self-proclaimed GUI "experts" have endorsed it, everything feels too limited. The control panels in particular didn't seem to have as many options as the KDE equivalents. (I understand that to 'true' Linux users this isn't an issue because 'real users' modify the config files directly, but coming from a Mac I want good GUI utilities wherever possible.)
KDE is very Windows-ish, and I dislike that, but it didn't feel quite as much like some sort of crippled sandbox as Gnome did. Maybe I'll play around with some alternative skins and see if I can find ones that are less MSian than the default. But it pains me that nobody has picked up on some of the things that Apple does right, and instead they just blindly replicate Redmond, or follow HID dogma to the detriment of real-world usebility.
Getting offtopic for a moment:
The weirdest thing to me is that from an experience with Linux back a few years ago, I recalled that it was possible to bring up a terminal window in KDE by right-clicking on the desktop and doing New:Terminal. Maybe I just imagined this -- but it would be damn useful, because I've found myself constantly digging through the menu system to get a new Konsole started. I'm sure there must be a way to edit that menu, I just have to find it.
It's a pity that Shuttleworth et al don't send out free CDs with Kubuntu on them; right now you either have to download and burn your own install CD, or install Ubuntu and then install the kubuntu-desktop package (what I did). The second option in theory gives you the best of both worlds, but at least in my situation, leaves a bunch of apps in KDE that won't work, because they're apparently GNOME only (e.g. Synaptic is broken under KDE, and other people seem to have the same problem).
Funny you should mention this, because I saw that someone had posted the idea of porting Cedega to OSX/86 on the forums over at Transgaming. It's in whatever passes for a queue over there, waiting to receive 10 'seconds' and get into real voting.
Frankly I think that's a bit of a big strategic decision for TransGaming to leave up to their subscribers in the voting system, but it doesn't make it any less of a good idea.
There could potentially be a HUGE market for something like Cedega on the Mac. In fact I bet if they played their cards right they might even be able to get some support from Apple for it (although I'm sure MacSoft wouldn't appreciate the competition any). With Mac users, you wouldn't have nearly as much unwillingness to pay for software that you do with Linux users. In fact, Mac users are basically trained from the moment they buy Apple that they're going to pay a premium for stuff. Getting them to shell out $35-50 for something that would let them play WoW wouldn't be much of an issue.
What TG would have to do though is clean up their produce immensely. Mac users are willing to pay cold hard cash, but they're not willing in my experience (and I say this as a longtime Mac user who just recently came over to Linux) to tweak stuff in the way that Linux or even Windows users are. Stuff better work, and work well, the first time; that's what people pay for.
What perhaps TG could do, either in addition to or as an alternative to porting Cedega as-is, would be to sell the compatibility layer in some form that other companies could use to roll together with a PC version of a game, and turn out a standalone Mac version with less expense and time investment. And the compatibility layer could be tweaked on a game-by-game basis for stability and speed. If I was TG, that's what I'd be thinking about.
The Mac gaming market is in a lull right now, but a lack of games at any particular time doesn't indicate a lack of a demand. There is a huge untapped market right there, and an even bigger market of people who would switch to Mac, if such a product existed and worked well. (That's where you could get Apple support.)
I think this is an idea who's time will really have come once we start seeing OSX/86 iMacs and Minis.
What about the ones who aren't idiots? The ones who reinstalled from the disks without calling you?
Dell: You mean, we have users out there somewhere, who aren't complete and utter wastes of space? Ha...hahahahhah. That's a good one.
Seriously though, I agree with your point. However, Dell seems pretty convinced that all of their users are retards. And although that may be partially true, I think at least part of the problem is due to the fact (and this is true for any company, not just Dell) that the people you come in contact with most often may not be representative of your average consumer. I.e., you might get a lot of tech support calls from a fairly small percentage of your base, and lots of them may never call at all. That doesn't mean that you can get rid of tech support, because lots of people may have chosen your brand because of the availability (even if they never use it).
But Dell has struck me on more than one occasion as a place that's gotten quite out of touch with everything but its business users. Or rather that is only in touch with it's consumer-level users through tech support, and has a stilted view of them because of this. We all like to make fun of clueless computer users, and god knows they're an easy target, but not all consumers are morons or unable to use an install CD.
Also, I think it's still worth pointing out that local computer stores (becoming sort of a rare commodity, depending on where you are) still have a lot of value to add.
At least at the one I used to frequent -- they had a great used-parts bin that you could pick through -- they did a lot of business for local people, building and supporting custom systems. Basically people would bring in a Dell or Compaq ad, and they would tell them how much an equivalent system from them, fully supported, would cost. Generally they could do it for about the same, or only slightly more.
Then they'd build the system up from OEM parts -- pretty much the same ones you or I would get on NewEgg -- install Windows and set up the software and config it all out.
The problem places like this run into though is how Microsoft licenses Windows. They give such a steep discount to the big manufacturers (to keep them locked in to Windows) that it's tough to compete when you're buying individual licenses on a small scale. The owners were constantly complaining about this.
Anyway, when I hear non-technical users telling me how messed up their current computer is, and how badly they need to upgrade to a faster machine, I always tell them to look in the phone book and find a local shop that's been around for a while and see if they can buy one through them. It may not be 24/7 support, but it'll be a lot better than what you're going to get from Dell these days.
What?
... well, have fun doing whatever it is you do, in whatever world you live in. It must be a nice place, pity you can't get there from the Universe I apparently inhabit.
Honestly, that's ridiculous. If that's what you believe, than
Practically everything that's ever been done has been out of some sort of profit motive or another. I won't say 'everything,' because certainly there have been some things done from various altruistic motives, but they pale in comparison to things that were done for profit. And that's profit both on a personal and corporate/institutional/national level. In fact a lot of people who do "charitable" work are doing it for personal profit of some sort. You can argue whether that's their chief motivation or not, but it's undeniably quite strong.
Just because I'm aiming to make a profit off of you, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. In fact the basis of a truly 'free' economy in the sense that free-marketers talk of it, is that every interaction is a win-win. That is, for you and me to do business together, BOTH of us have to be getting some sort of profit out of it. Does that always happen in our real world? Probably not; but it happens a lot more often than you'd realize.
The owner of the pizza parlor down the street from me is quite wealthy. He doesn't stay in the business he's in because he really enjoys enriching other people's lives by serving them pizza, he does it because he's good at it and makes more money running a pizza shop than he would in an alternative career at this point in his life, given his education. His business, on paper, is ripping off its customers. After all, it sells what is probably less than a dollar of raw ingredients (probably the cardboard box is the most expensive thing) and a few cents worth of gas for the oven, and a few dollars for overhead of the store and employee wages, for $10. And I happily pay it, because I'd rather pay him to do this, even if he's making money hand over fist, than do it myself. It's a win-win transaction.
Just because you're in the business of making money for yourself doesn't mean that you're harming anyone else. As long as the transaction is not coerced in any way, everyone ought to be able to go about their profit-motivated ways and be fine. It's not a perfect system, but it's a damn sight better than anything else I've heard offered up as an alternative.
Yeah, especially because drawing out the magnet wire is a real bitch. :)
You do make a good point though -- "homebuilt" equipment of today is really the "kit built" of the past, which was probably "easy assembly" a generation before.
Although compared to computers or any kind of video equipment, audio gear is one of the few things that a person with a basic technical education can assemble and get anywhere near the 'bare metal' anymore. Or at least down to the level of discrete components which by themselves can be understood, although in concert they can be startlingly complex. (E.g. a hobbyist might understand capacitors and resistors and even a little linear network analysis, but it's a big jump from there to understanding a complicated harmonic filter arrangement. But the lack of the theory isn't a showstopper if you're just building a schematic.)
What I find most disappointing about the tendency away from open and documented interconnects (and in general, the move away from analog interconnects) is that it makes understanding the equipment a lot harder for the non-engineer. And with proprietary digital busses, even for an engineer that hasn't signed some sort of NDA. In an analog system you have a basic suite of test equipment that will help you get insight into a lot of stuff: for audio I use a 1955 Tektronix oscilloscope and some little function generators put together on breadboards. For video I'd need a faster scope, maybe a commerial signal analyzer and generator and a good monitor, but one suite of test equipment would work pretty much everywhere.
The move to digital video and the progression in the future to digital television with DRM is going to end all that -- the analysis and testing tools are going to become specific to the type of digital interface (probably brand specific too), cost thousands, and will be so complicated that a normal person won't be able to understand how they work. I realize that hobbyists and tinkerers aren't a significant market for anything -- even test equipment -- so we really have no right to make demands as to the future direction of TV or video or audio (although the audio hobbyist market isn't wholly insignificant), but it doesn't stop me from being rather disappointed.
Sure, watching 1080p on a giant plasma screen is fun, but I wonder if we'll still think it's worthwhile when we realize that we've handed over the ability to even understand what's going on in our televisions (regardless of how many people want to / care) to people who have strong competing interests to ours.
Maybe if they were running a story comparing the penis sizes of various Linux vendors?
The back issues for QST were (and I think are still available) sold by the ARRL as sets on CD-Rom as PDF files, going all the way back to the 1915. I've heard that the quality varies somewhat between the different collections, in some cases the scans aren't too great and the small print (contest results especially) can be hard to read.
There are some product reviews dating into the 1980s available to ARRL members online through their web site, but not feature articles I don't think.
Back issues on CD-Rom:
http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=QSTV#QSTV
Do you think they're a member of the Universal Postal Union yet? I wonder how much an International Reply Coupon is going to cost... somehow I don't think $1.75 is going to cut it.
You do know that the license exam is -- for anyone with a basic understanding of electricity -- pretty simple these days. In fact it's probably somewhat easier than the one you studied for in the past, especially if you spent a lot of time practicing the Morse code. You'd just need to memorize the band plan and you'd probably be able to go down and take the test. You could do it in a weekend, quite easily.
I'm very surprised that more geeks don't go and take the test, if you're even moderately interested in messing around with radio or wifi stuff. At the very least, you can legally boost the power on your 802.11b setup (on certain channels).
Although I'm not sure if it's totally up to date, here is a site where you can take sample tests:
http://www.qrz.com/testing.html
The question pools aren't that big, so if you take it a few times over you can basically exhaust all the available questions for any given test (or at least you'll start seeing repeats or very similar questions).
You're correct, but they're working on the distribution end also -- by suing people who share files, etc. etc. The MPAA is just starting to get into this arena, and based on how many bittorrent trackers they've had shut down, they're having a lot more success than the RIAA did in going after P2P.
Their strategy is multi-fold: first, they make it hard for you to copy media yourself, or timeshift it, locking you into watching their media on their schedule using their approved equipment. Second, they make it dangerous for a law-abiding person to easily download pirated content, or at least appear dangerous to do so, by aggressively suing people who share files and ruining them financially. There will always be alternative methods of sharing files, and perhaps at some point we'll have a truly anonymized/encrypted system that's practical for the average user, but this takes a big chunk out of the college-student-downloader segment. By getting the 'average user' to disable uploads, they can easily pick out and target the remaining big uploaders, which are assumedly the sources of the files.
Usenet is about the last place that the **AA's haven't gone after, mostly because it's too confusing for a lot of people to use, but its time will come eventually. There, they'll just go after the providers of the newsfeeds that include binaries groups, rather than the users. Since the system wasn't ever really set up to deal with a hostile envionment it's trivial to shut down if you could cut those groups out of the big backbone feeds (or inject bad / dummy content). It would at least balkanize the groups so that a file posted in one place wouldn't propagate very far.
Also they're working with authorities to prevent the physical importation of pirated goods, which is about the only thing they do that I can't find too much fault with, but these goods don't really reach people outside of big cities anyway.
They're coming at people from both ends -- and their plan is for 'average users' to end up firmly locked-in when their various plans meet in the middle.
That's why the next generation of DRM will actually be a small microchip implanted into your brain that does the last step of decoding, taking the scrambled analog inputs from your ears and driving the impulses directly into your somatic sensory cortex. It will probably also have a mandatory "copyright enforcement anti-circumvention device" consisting of a few tenths of a gram of plastic explosive, just in case you try to mod-chip it.
It's the logical next step, really. Where else are you going to go?
Make it more convenient. AllofMP3.com exists and apparently makes money, because it's easier to use, has a better selection, and offers faster downloads than peer-to-peer. Sure, it may not be legal in the U.S., but that hasn't stopped anybody (that I've heard of). I know for a fact of people who basically use it as an alternative to P2P at places where filesharing is blocked (e.g. most universities). Especially when they were only charging $0.01/MB, the cost was low enough that even cheap college students would pay for it. (Now it's $0.02/MB, I think.)
There are services out there that are competing with filesharing and winning, and as the filesharing networks get more and more difficult to use safely, or have to use more computationally-intensive encryption algorithms to stay anonymous and prevent users from getting sued, then paid services will become more attractive. That said, the current price points for paid services are orders of magnitude higher than what they need to be, in order to compete with P2P. There are lots of people out there who don't value their time very highly who will always download, but by reducing the prices of legitimate alternatives and increasing their quality, you make the segment of the market that will pirate smaller and smaller.
I couldn't agree more.
:)
I'm in the same boat as you are. I used to buy quite a bit of music, because I could only fit a few CDs in my car's glove compartment at a time, and I listened to the radio, and refreshed the CDs both by swapping them with ones from home but also by buying new ones. I don't do that anymore.
Partly it might be because I've outgrown the buying-music stage of my life, but I really don't think so. I know people who built up massive music collections when they were in their 20s and 30s, back 10 years ago. I don't see many 20-somethings doing that anymore, myself included.
What happened is I got an iPod, which I now keep in the car, and I can use to listen to anything I want out of my entire collection that I've built up since highschool (not that I'd ever want to listen to some of it -- urgh). But having that much music always available really eliminates much of my desire to buy new stuff. I can just make a randomized playlist and jump through it when I want variety. It's like a radio station playing only music I know I at least find inoffensive, if I don't necessarily love all of it.
My personal objection to buying CDs is the music stores. The last few I've bought have all been online, and that's because I can't stand going into record shops. They all seem to be targeting either punked-out 14-year-olds or gangsta wannabes, and I'm not interested in hearing either of those groups' music. If I was designing a record store, it would be QUIET. Let people who want to listen to a CD do it at a listening station, instead of blasting it through a shitty PA system. The last place I've been to that I liked shopping at was the music section of Borders Books and Music, but my most recent experience there wasn't even very positive (why is it louder than the book section?). That pretty much relegates me to Amazon.com and other online stores, which unfortunately don't really browse very well. (Although Amazon's suggestions features work eerily well, at least for me.)
Actually the most pleasant place I've found music recently was in the audio section of my regional library. The selection is fairly impressive, the organization is intuitive and sensible, and while the atmosphere isn't anything special, it doesn't exactly assault your senses. And you can't beat the price.
Maybe somewhere there's a "music store for adults" that I just haven't encountered yet, someplace where you can sit and listen to anything in the store and would actually be a pleasant shopping experience. I wouldn't be against buying a lot more CDs, in fact I prefer them to buying digital files, but the combination of the lack of new selection in genres that I like, unwelcoming brick-and-mortar stores, and the knowledge that the majority of the profits from what I'm buying are going to companies that I find reprehensible, has pretty much driven me away.
Very cool system -- thanks for the response. Any chance you'll choose to distribute those scripts of yours?
It sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd like to get working, someday when I have more time.
Right now I have all of my music stored on a 60GB drive stuck in my Power Mac, because it's the only way I can find to serve it up to other iTunes clients and to sync it with my iPod. Unfortunately Apple has crippled the first thing so badly in recent versions that the internal DAAP server in iTunes is basically useless (the 3 connections per day or whatever it is), so something like MT-DAAPD would be perfect. Sadly I haven't found anything though yet for Linux that will manage an iPod.
Oh, well, it's not like disk space is expensive these days. Maybe I'll just keep the two libraries syncronized with each other using rsync and have the DAAP from the Linux box and iPod syncing through the Mac.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
Yeah that's interesting. I'm seeing the same thing, all the other links have the domain in brackets after them, but that one doesn't. Odd, I thought it was a setting on my end to choose that, not on the poster's.
Well at least one of them will put the resulting files on a hard drive for you (I assume you supply the drive), so if you were truly lazy then you could just send them a FireWire hard drive and plug it in to your computer when it was returned to you.
Or if you can bear to part with it for a week or so, and trust the ripping company with it, send them your iPod itself and have the files loaded directly onto that. You know that's what most people who get a service like this are going to be doing with the music as soon as they get it home (as other people have pointed out, if you use your desktop computer like a stereo system this doesn't make much sense, because you can just rip+play at the same time, as you listen to each disc), so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that most people would just get the music preloaded onto their iPod.
If a lot of people do just get it loaded onto their iPods though, I could forsee a big interest in tools that let you get the music off of the iPod easily -- since otherwise you're carrying around your $1 a disc investment in ripping in your pocket without a backup. If the iPod were to die, you'd have to get all the CDs re-ripped.
I'm with you.
The online music services have convenience going for them, but that's about all. As long as they insist on charging more than 50% of what a physical CD costs, I'll take the physical CD.
It's too bad because I really like the iTMS concept (except for the DRM), but it's just too expensive.
I'm also not cool with "renting" my music from Napster or a service like it, either. If I buy a CD a month, and happen to be short money one month, I just don't get a new CD. If I'm short paying my Napster bill, my music gets repo'ed. No, thanks, but I'll own my music -- or at least the permanent media that it's stored on.
I have lately been using everyone's favorite franchise of the Russian Mob, allofmp3.com, when I want something that's old enough that it exists in their catalog. However I listen mainly to classical music, and they sort of suck when it comes to that. However other music services should take a look at them as a model for how to operate -- pick your format (MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC too I think) and get billed by the MB. You want shit quality, fine; it's cheap. You want something you can listen to through a pair of Grados without wanting to kill yourself, you can get that too.
Could you perhaps elaborate on what this "task oriented" interface is? I'm not trolling, I just have no idea what you're talking about. If it has something to do with those auto-hiding menu options, then I heartily disagree. I think they hurt everyone, but in particular new users, since they never get the opportunity to see the full range of options available to them in a program. How is someone using Excel supposed to know that there is a "Text to Columns" menu option if they never see it? Frankly it seems to lead to a rather elitist situation -- you only can get to functionality easily and quickly if you use it often, and you'll only learn about things (without going out of your way) if you already know that they're there.