I am now 32 years old, and I have bought over a thousand CD's which currently don my living room. I am a self proclaimed record buff. Funnily enough I have a few copied U2 discs, but never bothered to buy them because they as a band are not interesting, save maybe the Joshua Tree.
However, when I was a teenager, I had a very, very limited budget. I worked my ass off for my computer, and I had some money on the side for records and to a degree clothes. When I was 10, the first two albums I bought were Slade in Flame and Queen's self-titled. On vinyl. But I had many single-reel tapes that I got/inherited from my brother. With Jazz, Dixieland, Disco and Funk on them. The albums I bought with the Guilder pocket money I got from Grandma.
I bought some more records over time, but I copied much more stuff onto audio casettes. You could argue this is "stealing" but in reality I simply would not have bought more because I lacked the cash to do so. I bought what I could after exposing myself to a bigger array of artists via "illegal" means. By "Illegal means" I mean simple compilation tapes and things I or my sister taped from the Radio.
At the same time I was already using WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS 3.3. The former was a 1000-dollar word-processor that no teenager could ever afford. Damn, it took me 5 months to get the money for the AT I was running it on together. A WordPerfect employee I once spoke to commented that he thought it was swell and dandy that I exposed myself to their product by copying it, in the hopes that I liked it, and would urge my future employer to use the same software. Which is where they'd be making the money.
To cut a long story short, you can never, ever argue that what is on P2P networks or mix tapes is "Lost Revenue". Because it ain't. If it hadn't been available through Radio, Mix tapes, P2P or whatnot, the public would not have bought it, listened to it and therefore would not have shown up at the concert either.
So the notion of "stealing" could be replaced by "viral marketing" and "exposure" just as easily. The U2 tour grossed over 350 Million US Dollars. I'm quite sure there were people there who found out about their music through BitTorrent or eMule.
Nothing is simple. Smoke and mirrors aside, any argument can be turned around. Calling the record companies "Underpaid Enthusiasts" does however make me sick to my stomach.
If you really want to get hard-core about it, you should mention Meccano. My brother had some of that stuff, and it was cooler than shit. But the trouble was that I *was* a kid back in the day, and not a geek. A geeky kid, yes. And so I loved my space LEGO sets. I had a whole bunch of the gray and blue sets. They were so cool.
Another thing I remember were Fleischmann model trains. We had whole bunches of them. We laid yards and yards of intertwined railroad in the attic, with stations, "rangeerterreinen" and whatnot. Extraordinarily cool toys. To cut a long story short I have the sneaky suspicion that all manner of "building" toys are simply good for you.
Congratulations on not being a bigot and actually thinking about what you write. In the tiresome ocean of "Of course, Vista don't have any users" comments, "You can't trust statisticz" comments, "Microsoft is comparing Apples (no pun intended) to Oranges" comments and the obligatory "Linux has more code" remark, your balanced appraisal of the situation is refreshing.
It's a shame that I haven't bothered to find out how the moderation system works yet, otherwise my praise to you, Sir, would be in hard karma currency.
Funny you should mention the BBC. The BBC is pretty much one of the very, very few channels for which I would sincerely love to pay every cent / penny they tax me.
In Sweden, France, Germany, Italy and pretty much most countries I have been to, the TV is abominable, including the State-owned channels... The BBC 1, 2 and 3 are a beacon of hope for high quality TV.
And I'm not being nationalistic. I am from Holland. In Holland, the only thing that comes close to BBC quality or even noteworthiness is Nederland 3.
My Wii has performed flawlessly for countless hours. But the only thing I have heard from it is the soft whir of the game disc spinning inside it. And it don't get particularly hot.
Oh. Yeah. You're gonna complain it's a weak box now.
> the kind of animals who'll drive a mind to destruction are plentiful online, especially here on slashdot.
The fact that you actually think there is anyone on/. who might drive pretty much anyone to suicide says more about you than about the people on/.. If there's one thing I hate, it's this whining victim-mentality. I got bullied as a kid. Not with words only necessarily. I still have a lump on my forehead that covers a skull fracture to show for that. The reason I mention this is that I do know what it is like to be treated as a pariah. But never, ever has it driven me to contemplate suicide.
Suicide is a personal choice. Noone "puts you up to it". If you are mentally so weak that you feel you can be urged to kill yourself... Knock yourself out. But don't blame the guy in your high-school class who *did* get the Nike-sneakers and laughed at your shoes.
Like Bill Cosby said: Just because you're black and broke don't mean you have to hit your wife every night.
Seriously, the bashing-microsoft thing is getting ridiculous on this forum. I had an HP Pavilion PC for 2.5 years which I had to "reinstall" because the primary HDD went dead. The XP installation on it was running fine & dandy for all that time. Without Anti-Virus or Firewall software installed on it, for that matter. Never have stability issues in Win XP unless I'm running particular games where I *know* it's the game that's dodgy.
But all that aside, you claim to hate MicroSoft with a passion yet you run Windows, buy an Xbox 360 and own a Zune? Jezus. I *like* windows XP, but I still own a Wii and an iAudio 30XL. Curious world, this is.
Technically speaking there are people who might call that "instinct" rather than intelligence.
The entire scientific community hasn't yet figured out what they consider to be the ultimate defining properties of "intelligence". When they do, I'm quite sure they can reproduce it. But before you copy anything, you need to know what it is exactly you are copying.
So, it all reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How would *you* define "Quality"?
Typically people who proclaim their genius or the fact that they're smarter than most people... aren't. The average human also thinks it is not the average human.
"Supernatural technical insight" will not cause you to be troubled with the insanity of this world per se. Proof of this are the Orthodox Jewish people in Jerusalem that are complete technophobes (or the God-fearing Christian people of any bible belt) and still look at the rest of the world as a vast and incomprehensible mental asylum.
It is human nature that will make you think "the others" are purely insane or evil. So as much as this might sting, I welcome you to the statistically relevant group called "average humans".
Right. The high suicide rate, the unhealthy rape statistic, the alcohol issues (just wander around Stureplan or Medis at 0200 on any given night), the bloated government (~2500+ government organizations and the government itself doesn't know exactly how many there are and what for), the high taxes.... I'm not even talking about the fact that the average Swede don't take personal responsibility because he/she thinks the government should take care of you from Cradle to Grave.... Let's not be too proud of Sweden. There are many things wrong there.
Although they have excellent licorice, cheap cars (a SAAB for 24.000 euros!!! ) and indeed a liberal view on many topics. Sweden does indeed beat Iran and the US in terms of enlightened living conditions. Still... It ain't Holland.:-D
Other people have iterated similar views. "Wish Sony would die" and "what have they done for me lately" type statements crop up all too often.
Sony DOES have a rather fat patent portfolio, and they have brought us many things over the years. I've used Triniton CRT screens for years because they were excellent. My first discman was a Sony, and it was excellent. I did have a cybershot camera, and while the memory stick was not the best feature, the rest of the camera was very high quality.
With all they've done one the Walkman/Discman/CD-ROM specs, not to mention their achievements in video gaming.... You are a bit too quick to dismiss Sony. While they have made some dubious decisions in the past, they are and will be a solid electronics company. Ultimately, I have never owned any piece of sony equipment that was not good quality.
And no, I'm not a fanboy. I own a Wii and my TV is an LG. Just to make sure I don't get torched for that notion.
Think again there regarding "conversion kits". In Sweden I had a Saab 9-3 1.9 TiD with Alfa Romeo's Common Rail diesel engine in it. That thing would do 17 km per litre (by comparison the Tata does 20 km for every litre of regular gas), even while cruising the highway at 150kph. At 224 kph it would start using a bit more fuel (gasp!). You read that right. 224 kilometers / hour. Because it would deliver a staggering 150 bhp. Which is a lot from a Diesel engine. Think TORQUE.
On top of being a glorious ride, the thing was prepared for Bio diesel from the factory. I could drive it to any pump that had rape-seed oil and use that at 95% efficiency without further conversion. On top of that it was built like a tank.
By contrast I moved to Israel where I see a lot of chevvy's on the road. Nasty little lo-tech cars with bad steering and abominable mileage. Seems like the US ceased to be a developing country, er?
First computer I had. I was 7 at the time. Had a basic book of games, which I typed in to then play (playing the Vampire text adventure was always quicker than transcribing it, because the code already had the solution in it).
That thing was indeed bloody horrible. Had Acorn Electric, MSX, XT's, AT's and whatnot with pretty bad keyboards too, but the ZX-81 Sinclair was indeed by far the worst thing ever.
Still. I get tears in my eyes every time someone mentions it. And I mean that in the best of ways.:-D
Well, I just bought myself an LCD TV. 37" size. It's got two HDMI connectors on the back which are idling.
My set-top box is an older one, so I used an expensive SCART cable to route the vid to the TV. This provides a nice enough image, although some programs appear to be a bit pixelated. This was already the case on my 29" CRT though. The image quality however, is very nice. All audio runs through my receiver, this includes the Set-top box.
Then I connected my Wii and my DVD player to my receiver using component video, which is ample for support of 720p (or in the case of both devices, the 480p they provide). Now the image quality is still very nice, and the sound also gets routed (optical from DVD, stereo-jacks-to-Dolby-PLII for the Wii) through my trusty receiver.
As far as the Laptop is concerned, I connect that with a standard issue VGA cable to the VGA input connector on the back. The TV gets seen by the system, and images are crisp and clear at 1366x768 resolution. Possibly, my laptop gives the best image quality using that connection. Cable costs 5 Euros at the local HW store. Sound gets (again) routed through my trusty receiver.
You can tell me that none of this is a "true HD" setup because I "should be using HDMI with an HD DVD player at 1080p", but in the mean time I'm watching TV and playing games and movies on a nice size screen.
What I'm trying to say with all of this is that HDMI doesn't even need to enter the picture if you want a flat screen and a DVD player. 25 Dollar component-to-component cables will do you fine on the back of a normal DVD player. I promise.
This is why I live in Europe. Erm. Well, currently Israel, but it's close enough. In most European countries, your freedom of speech is much guaranteed, as is your privacy, by law. This works as long as you don't slander or incite to hate against "Demographic groups in the population", which is fair enough. Now on the other hand, your rights as a consumer, employee or tenant are also protected by law. On the downside: We pay a lot of taxes. But to me this is worth it.
In the Netherlands, I would argue that anyone can afford to say pretty much anything they damn well please off the job. There are no people who "Can't afford" to say certain things, unless you're the atheist entrepeneur who lives in the bible belt. That wouldn't be good for keeping your religious customers. On the bright side, 44% of the country's population is registered as having no religion, and if the atheist merchant is cheaper than the religious merchant, people don't tend to give a damn about the convictions of the cheaper merchant.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I had any form of religion, I would thank my Lord(s) or Lad(y/ies) on a daily basis for not being a US citizen. I pity you people.
Hear hear. The one thing I don't understand with this whole discussion is why anyone would say the iMac is a good computer. I can't run my games on it, the graphics card is still sucky even if I were to dual boot Windows on it, and it's not expandable.
All of these arguments say "bad computer" to me, and rather "Good web-surfing box for grandma who don't know shit". To cut a long story short, I've always thought mac hardware and software looks cool, but is not orthogonal enough for my taste.
You are obviously not an electronic mass storage professional, because your answer could not possibly be further from the truth. The fact that it got modded 2, Interesting) is interesting in that it proves that people on/. haven't got a clue either.
A hard drive is a mechanical part that will cease to function if the lubrication (I kid you not) goes dry. So sticking a whole bunch of hard drives in a safe for ten years most likely results in you scrapping 8 out of 10 disks for mechanical reasons. Then the magnetic information that is stored on those disks will degrade with time even under perfect conditions. This is why the shelf life of data on an inactive hard drive doesn't surpass 2 years.
DVD's and CD's supposedly should last for 20-100 years depending on whose marketing bullshit you are reading, but in practice up to 15 years is the maximum before the thing starts degrading. Tape suffers, albeit less, from the same ailment hard disks suffer from, even the current batch of LTO-3 and 4 WORM media.
The current generation of MO or UDO drives however use a laser to heat up particular clusters of particles after which it uses a magnet to create the 1 respectively the 0. This means that they are (nigh) impervious to magnetism or heat as long as those two are not combined. MO/UDO is therefore the only medium that will survive for long times on a shelf.
The obvious solution therefore, since HDD's are getting cheaper and bigger, is to stick all that data on active hard-disks, and keeping it alive. Keeping it alive means also having to do backups. All of this requires system administrators. And rules, management, business processes and whatnot, and at the end of the day you will have managed to build an expensive data center. It works, but not as cheaply as putting boxes of film in a basement for 50 years, sorted by title/alphabet.
Obviously, the physical survival of the media is not the only worry, we're also aware of the fact that the.mod file I could play out of my LPT-port-sound-contraption 18 years ago is now useless because mod players and those devices are far from ubiquitous (I found the.mod format converter, but can't find any schematics for that capacitor-LPT-sound-thingy I put together back in the day).
But all that aside, this article is a dupe. And so are the comments claiming it's a dupe. I'm getting a strange sense of Deja-Vu, because it's not the first time I see ignorance on the subject of electronic data management either.
All these people that are bitching and moaning about these "services" on "duh innernet" would be very wise to remember two things:
1) Never look a gift-horse in the mouth. 2) TANSTAAFL.
If you want more control, you're going to have to pay. I pay 6 Euro's a month for web hosting / e-mail / domain registration and I've never been bothered to read RSS feeds. Having said that, I control my data. Anything that I even deem to sensitive for having on my hosted server is either on my local hard disk or I simply do not keep it at all. I don't have "business contacts" in my private mail sphere either. I have a business mail address for that. Which is also not "Free".
Furthermore, with regards to that woman who posted the "boo-hoo, xmas broke down because of a political disagreement with mah brother" story... I have no words for that. If your collective conflict resolution skills are that poor, I'm not sure I would like to be in (or near) that family in the first place.
Once I explained to my mother, a Christian woman who is steadfast in her principals, why the stories of Job, Sodom and Gomorrah and the exodus from Egypt were proof to me that if God were to exist, (s)he would be the moral peer of Adolf Hitler. She disagreed and asked me if I wanted another cup of coffee. My point is this... Just because views differ doesn't mean you can't coexist as adults.
Then again, I would expect juveniles that don't to look gift horses in the mouth and expect Free Lunches (TM).
In other news: Some schmuck got awarded 7 mio dollars, payable by the city of New York for having slipped in a pile of pigeon-poo which he had seen before stepping in it anyway. Just goes to show that all of y'all are a bit funny in the head.
Slashdot Mirror
I am now 32 years old, and I have bought over a thousand CD's which currently don my living room. I am a self proclaimed record buff. Funnily enough I have a few copied U2 discs, but never bothered to buy them because they as a band are not interesting, save maybe the Joshua Tree.
However, when I was a teenager, I had a very, very limited budget. I worked my ass off for my computer, and I had some money on the side for records and to a degree clothes. When I was 10, the first two albums I bought were Slade in Flame and Queen's self-titled. On vinyl. But I had many single-reel tapes that I got/inherited from my brother. With Jazz, Dixieland, Disco and Funk on them. The albums I bought with the Guilder pocket money I got from Grandma.
I bought some more records over time, but I copied much more stuff onto audio casettes. You could argue this is "stealing" but in reality I simply would not have bought more because I lacked the cash to do so. I bought what I could after exposing myself to a bigger array of artists via "illegal" means. By "Illegal means" I mean simple compilation tapes and things I or my sister taped from the Radio.
At the same time I was already using WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS 3.3. The former was a 1000-dollar word-processor that no teenager could ever afford. Damn, it took me 5 months to get the money for the AT I was running it on together. A WordPerfect employee I once spoke to commented that he thought it was swell and dandy that I exposed myself to their product by copying it, in the hopes that I liked it, and would urge my future employer to use the same software. Which is where they'd be making the money.
To cut a long story short, you can never, ever argue that what is on P2P networks or mix tapes is "Lost Revenue". Because it ain't. If it hadn't been available through Radio, Mix tapes, P2P or whatnot, the public would not have bought it, listened to it and therefore would not have shown up at the concert either.
So the notion of "stealing" could be replaced by "viral marketing" and "exposure" just as easily. The U2 tour grossed over 350 Million US Dollars. I'm quite sure there were people there who found out about their music through BitTorrent or eMule.
Nothing is simple. Smoke and mirrors aside, any argument can be turned around. Calling the record companies "Underpaid Enthusiasts" does however make me sick to my stomach.
If you really want to get hard-core about it, you should mention Meccano. My brother had some of that stuff, and it was cooler than shit. But the trouble was that I *was* a kid back in the day, and not a geek. A geeky kid, yes. And so I loved my space LEGO sets. I had a whole bunch of the gray and blue sets. They were so cool.
Another thing I remember were Fleischmann model trains. We had whole bunches of them. We laid yards and yards of intertwined railroad in the attic, with stations, "rangeerterreinen" and whatnot. Extraordinarily cool toys. To cut a long story short I have the sneaky suspicion that all manner of "building" toys are simply good for you.
Congratulations on not being a bigot and actually thinking about what you write. In the tiresome ocean of "Of course, Vista don't have any users" comments, "You can't trust statisticz" comments, "Microsoft is comparing Apples (no pun intended) to Oranges" comments and the obligatory "Linux has more code" remark, your balanced appraisal of the situation is refreshing.
It's a shame that I haven't bothered to find out how the moderation system works yet, otherwise my praise to you, Sir, would be in hard karma currency.
Funny you should mention the BBC. The BBC is pretty much one of the very, very few channels for which I would sincerely love to pay every cent / penny they tax me.
In Sweden, France, Germany, Italy and pretty much most countries I have been to, the TV is abominable, including the State-owned channels... The BBC 1, 2 and 3 are a beacon of hope for high quality TV.
And I'm not being nationalistic. I am from Holland. In Holland, the only thing that comes close to BBC quality or even noteworthiness is Nederland 3.
Pretty much silent? How about completely?
My Wii has performed flawlessly for countless hours. But the only thing I have heard from it is the soft whir of the game disc spinning inside it. And it don't get particularly hot.
Oh. Yeah. You're gonna complain it's a weak box now.
> the kind of animals who'll drive a mind to destruction are plentiful online, especially here on slashdot.
/. who might drive pretty much anyone to suicide says more about you than about the people on /.. If there's one thing I hate, it's this whining victim-mentality. I got bullied as a kid. Not with words only necessarily. I still have a lump on my forehead that covers a skull fracture to show for that. The reason I mention this is that I do know what it is like to be treated as a pariah. But never, ever has it driven me to contemplate suicide.
The fact that you actually think there is anyone on
Suicide is a personal choice. Noone "puts you up to it". If you are mentally so weak that you feel you can be urged to kill yourself... Knock yourself out. But don't blame the guy in your high-school class who *did* get the Nike-sneakers and laughed at your shoes.
Like Bill Cosby said: Just because you're black and broke don't mean you have to hit your wife every night.
Seriously, the bashing-microsoft thing is getting ridiculous on this forum. I had an HP Pavilion PC for 2.5 years which I had to "reinstall" because the primary HDD went dead. The XP installation on it was running fine & dandy for all that time. Without Anti-Virus or Firewall software installed on it, for that matter. Never have stability issues in Win XP unless I'm running particular games where I *know* it's the game that's dodgy.
But all that aside, you claim to hate MicroSoft with a passion yet you run Windows, buy an Xbox 360 and own a Zune? Jezus. I *like* windows XP, but I still own a Wii and an iAudio 30XL. Curious world, this is.
Indeed. You *bought* a NeXTstation?
Technically speaking there are people who might call that "instinct" rather than intelligence.
The entire scientific community hasn't yet figured out what they consider to be the ultimate defining properties of "intelligence". When they do, I'm quite sure they can reproduce it. But before you copy anything, you need to know what it is exactly you are copying.
So, it all reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How would *you* define "Quality"?
Typically people who proclaim their genius or the fact that they're smarter than most people... aren't. The average human also thinks it is not the average human.
"Supernatural technical insight" will not cause you to be troubled with the insanity of this world per se. Proof of this are the Orthodox Jewish people in Jerusalem that are complete technophobes (or the God-fearing Christian people of any bible belt) and still look at the rest of the world as a vast and incomprehensible mental asylum.
It is human nature that will make you think "the others" are purely insane or evil. So as much as this might sting, I welcome you to the statistically relevant group called "average humans".
You ever get laid?
>> That's about as close to Greek Tragedy as you can get
Or did you mean "Geek Tragedy"?
Right. The high suicide rate, the unhealthy rape statistic, the alcohol issues (just wander around Stureplan or Medis at 0200 on any given night), the bloated government (~2500+ government organizations and the government itself doesn't know exactly how many there are and what for), the high taxes.... I'm not even talking about the fact that the average Swede don't take personal responsibility because he/she thinks the government should take care of you from Cradle to Grave.... Let's not be too proud of Sweden. There are many things wrong there.
:-D
Although they have excellent licorice, cheap cars (a SAAB for 24.000 euros!!! ) and indeed a liberal view on many topics. Sweden does indeed beat Iran and the US in terms of enlightened living conditions. Still... It ain't Holland.
Other people have iterated similar views. "Wish Sony would die" and "what have they done for me lately" type statements crop up all too often.
Sony DOES have a rather fat patent portfolio, and they have brought us many things over the years. I've used Triniton CRT screens for years because they were excellent. My first discman was a Sony, and it was excellent. I did have a cybershot camera, and while the memory stick was not the best feature, the rest of the camera was very high quality.
With all they've done one the Walkman/Discman/CD-ROM specs, not to mention their achievements in video gaming.... You are a bit too quick to dismiss Sony. While they have made some dubious decisions in the past, they are and will be a solid electronics company. Ultimately, I have never owned any piece of sony equipment that was not good quality.
And no, I'm not a fanboy. I own a Wii and my TV is an LG. Just to make sure I don't get torched for that notion.
Think again there regarding "conversion kits". In Sweden I had a Saab 9-3 1.9 TiD with Alfa Romeo's Common Rail diesel engine in it. That thing would do 17 km per litre (by comparison the Tata does 20 km for every litre of regular gas), even while cruising the highway at 150kph. At 224 kph it would start using a bit more fuel (gasp!). You read that right. 224 kilometers / hour. Because it would deliver a staggering 150 bhp. Which is a lot from a Diesel engine. Think TORQUE.
On top of being a glorious ride, the thing was prepared for Bio diesel from the factory. I could drive it to any pump that had rape-seed oil and use that at 95% efficiency without further conversion. On top of that it was built like a tank.
By contrast I moved to Israel where I see a lot of chevvy's on the road. Nasty little lo-tech cars with bad steering and abominable mileage. Seems like the US ceased to be a developing country, er?
So who died and gave you the exclusive right to sit in Gridlock in your Hummer on the Highway outside of L.A., Amsterdam or wherever you might be?
India is indeed a developing country. Which is more than most Western Nations can say for themselves at the moment.
We don't make terrible printers. In HP Russia, Terrible Printers make You!
Calling a FIAT golden is somewhat over the top though.
You are aware of what the acronym REALLY stands for?
Fix
It
Again
Tony
Yeah, and luckily enough the development of this one hasn't been sponsored involuntarily by my uncle Avi's golden teeth.
First computer I had. I was 7 at the time. Had a basic book of games, which I typed in to then play (playing the Vampire text adventure was always quicker than transcribing it, because the code already had the solution in it).
:-D
That thing was indeed bloody horrible. Had Acorn Electric, MSX, XT's, AT's and whatnot with pretty bad keyboards too, but the ZX-81 Sinclair was indeed by far the worst thing ever.
Still. I get tears in my eyes every time someone mentions it. And I mean that in the best of ways.
Well, I just bought myself an LCD TV. 37" size. It's got two HDMI connectors on the back which are idling.
My set-top box is an older one, so I used an expensive SCART cable to route the vid to the TV. This provides a nice enough image, although some programs appear to be a bit pixelated. This was already the case on my 29" CRT though. The image quality however, is very nice. All audio runs through my receiver, this includes the Set-top box.
Then I connected my Wii and my DVD player to my receiver using component video, which is ample for support of 720p (or in the case of both devices, the 480p they provide). Now the image quality is still very nice, and the sound also gets routed (optical from DVD, stereo-jacks-to-Dolby-PLII for the Wii) through my trusty receiver.
As far as the Laptop is concerned, I connect that with a standard issue VGA cable to the VGA input connector on the back. The TV gets seen by the system, and images are crisp and clear at 1366x768 resolution. Possibly, my laptop gives the best image quality using that connection. Cable costs 5 Euros at the local HW store. Sound gets (again) routed through my trusty receiver.
You can tell me that none of this is a "true HD" setup because I "should be using HDMI with an HD DVD player at 1080p", but in the mean time I'm watching TV and playing games and movies on a nice size screen.
What I'm trying to say with all of this is that HDMI doesn't even need to enter the picture if you want a flat screen and a DVD player. 25 Dollar component-to-component cables will do you fine on the back of a normal DVD player. I promise.
This is why I live in Europe. Erm. Well, currently Israel, but it's close enough. In most European countries, your freedom of speech is much guaranteed, as is your privacy, by law. This works as long as you don't slander or incite to hate against "Demographic groups in the population", which is fair enough. Now on the other hand, your rights as a consumer, employee or tenant are also protected by law. On the downside: We pay a lot of taxes. But to me this is worth it.
In the Netherlands, I would argue that anyone can afford to say pretty much anything they damn well please off the job. There are no people who "Can't afford" to say certain things, unless you're the atheist entrepeneur who lives in the bible belt. That wouldn't be good for keeping your religious customers. On the bright side, 44% of the country's population is registered as having no religion, and if the atheist merchant is cheaper than the religious merchant, people don't tend to give a damn about the convictions of the cheaper merchant.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I had any form of religion, I would thank my Lord(s) or Lad(y/ies) on a daily basis for not being a US citizen. I pity you people.
Hear hear. The one thing I don't understand with this whole discussion is why anyone would say the iMac is a good computer. I can't run my games on it, the graphics card is still sucky even if I were to dual boot Windows on it, and it's not expandable.
All of these arguments say "bad computer" to me, and rather "Good web-surfing box for grandma who don't know shit". To cut a long story short, I've always thought mac hardware and software looks cool, but is not orthogonal enough for my taste.
You are obviously not an electronic mass storage professional, because your answer could not possibly be further from the truth. The fact that it got modded 2, Interesting) is interesting in that it proves that people on /. haven't got a clue either.
.mod file I could play out of my LPT-port-sound-contraption 18 years ago is now useless because mod players and those devices are far from ubiquitous (I found the .mod format converter, but can't find any schematics for that capacitor-LPT-sound-thingy I put together back in the day).
A hard drive is a mechanical part that will cease to function if the lubrication (I kid you not) goes dry. So sticking a whole bunch of hard drives in a safe for ten years most likely results in you scrapping 8 out of 10 disks for mechanical reasons. Then the magnetic information that is stored on those disks will degrade with time even under perfect conditions. This is why the shelf life of data on an inactive hard drive doesn't surpass 2 years.
DVD's and CD's supposedly should last for 20-100 years depending on whose marketing bullshit you are reading, but in practice up to 15 years is the maximum before the thing starts degrading. Tape suffers, albeit less, from the same ailment hard disks suffer from, even the current batch of LTO-3 and 4 WORM media.
The current generation of MO or UDO drives however use a laser to heat up particular clusters of particles after which it uses a magnet to create the 1 respectively the 0. This means that they are (nigh) impervious to magnetism or heat as long as those two are not combined. MO/UDO is therefore the only medium that will survive for long times on a shelf.
The obvious solution therefore, since HDD's are getting cheaper and bigger, is to stick all that data on active hard-disks, and keeping it alive. Keeping it alive means also having to do backups. All of this requires system administrators. And rules, management, business processes and whatnot, and at the end of the day you will have managed to build an expensive data center. It works, but not as cheaply as putting boxes of film in a basement for 50 years, sorted by title/alphabet.
Obviously, the physical survival of the media is not the only worry, we're also aware of the fact that the
But all that aside, this article is a dupe. And so are the comments claiming it's a dupe. I'm getting a strange sense of Deja-Vu, because it's not the first time I see ignorance on the subject of electronic data management either.
All these people that are bitching and moaning about these "services" on "duh innernet" would be very wise to remember two things:
1) Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.
2) TANSTAAFL.
If you want more control, you're going to have to pay. I pay 6 Euro's a month for web hosting / e-mail / domain registration and I've never been bothered to read RSS feeds. Having said that, I control my data. Anything that I even deem to sensitive for having on my hosted server is either on my local hard disk or I simply do not keep it at all. I don't have "business contacts" in my private mail sphere either. I have a business mail address for that. Which is also not "Free".
Furthermore, with regards to that woman who posted the "boo-hoo, xmas broke down because of a political disagreement with mah brother" story... I have no words for that. If your collective conflict resolution skills are that poor, I'm not sure I would like to be in (or near) that family in the first place.
Once I explained to my mother, a Christian woman who is steadfast in her principals, why the stories of Job, Sodom and Gomorrah and the exodus from Egypt were proof to me that if God were to exist, (s)he would be the moral peer of Adolf Hitler. She disagreed and asked me if I wanted another cup of coffee. My point is this... Just because views differ doesn't mean you can't coexist as adults.
Then again, I would expect juveniles that don't to look gift horses in the mouth and expect Free Lunches (TM).
In other news: Some schmuck got awarded 7 mio dollars, payable by the city of New York for having slipped in a pile of pigeon-poo which he had seen before stepping in it anyway. Just goes to show that all of y'all are a bit funny in the head.