That would be because the levy on media is for music only. Movies, games, software, books etc.. do not fall under the blank media levy, and are still very much illegal.
I used Costco (Canada) to have my digital pictures developed. Their online service is very simple to use, and you can even directly import your pictures from Facebook and Picasa. The prices are very reasonable, at 8 cents for 4x6. If you want more than pictures, they also turn your photos into photobooks, canvases, etc... I've been using them for years and haven't had any issues whatsoever.
DC has a line of comics aimed specifically to kids called DC Nation. http://dcnationcomics.kidswb.com/. Young Justice, Superman Family, etc.. You can even read some of the comics free online, to see if your kid will like them before you start buying issues/TPBs. My son is 2, and I hope that he will have a similar love of comics that his old man does.
Or you know, stick the car in neutral. So what if you might blow the engine? It would give you time to pull the car to the side of the road and exit it long before things started to go bad.
At work we have over 600 servers spread across many cities, so we don't use any 'fun' names. The name has a standard of including city/location, function and number. Not our choice, this was enforced by a previous manager a few years ago. Even though location and such is all tracked in an inventory database, it is a little helpful to know where a server is located/function without having to look it up. Long ago, when we only had 50-60 servers and a different manager, they did have names based on celestial bodies and sports teams (weird combo, I know). Now with virtualization the function part isn't really useful, so we'll probably have to come up with something new, but meh, that's a story for another day.
At home however, my machines are named after the Endless/characters from Sandman. Destruction for my gaming rig, my SANs are named Lucious and Destiny, my main (non gaming) PC is Morpheus, wife's PC is Desire, etc.. etc.. I try to match the function with the appropriately matching character.
Having a 1 1/2 yr old son, I went thru the same questions you have. This is the working solution that I currently have in place.
1) Running a DLINK DNS323 SAN, in raid mode. This is the main repository. 2) Purchases 2 external 2TB USB drives. I keep one here at home. Every 2-3 months I copy pictures/videos to one, bring it to my parents place and bring back the other one. Rinse and repeat every couple of months. This also protects me from losing pictures if the house was robbed, caught fire, etc.. 3) Every 6 months or so I also get selected pictures professionally printed. Usually anywhere between 50-100 pictures. They are then stored in nice photobooks.
Last Xmas I also surprised my wife with a professionally done photobook, with pictures celebrating our first dates up to the first 6 months of my son's life. She really treasures that gift.It can get pretty expensive (100-200$), but oh so worth it.
Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.
A UPS isn't a choice where I live. Its a must, as we often get brownouts. So its not being affected by spikes and sags.
As far as my next upgrade, since our wonderful government has gone to time of use for electricty, and the rates are skyrocketing, I'll be going with a laptop instead of a desktop. 25-30w of power vs 750-800w is a no brainer. I no longer game much on the PC so upgrading isn't a requirement.
Wow, power supplies blow all the time. I've had to replace 4 for family members in the last 18 months or so.
I'll be looking for a replacement machine soon for myself as my motherboard is dying (Asus P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP, not a cheap mobo). The board is about 4 years old. Onboard sound is dead. 2 of the SATA controllers are crapping out. BIOS settings aren't saving on reboot (and I've tried changing the battery 3 times).
I haven't upgraded from XP for only one reason, really. There's no direct XP to Win 7 upgrade path. I have dozens upon dozens of apps that I use on a regular basis. I can't be bothered spending a week + reinstalling the apps until I absolutely need to.
I second this. I just bought my 2nd DNS 323 after the first one got full. (its cheaper to buy 2 DNS 323 which are 2 bays, compared to getting the 4 bay version). I shoot a lot of pics, and at 20-25 meg per RAW file, it adds up quickly.
The first is stacked with 2x1.5 TB drives, the 2nd with 2x2TB drives. I've got them running in RAID 1 for hardware redundancy. Great little devices and cheap (150$ Canadian). With the latest firmware you can even run NFS, and a native bittorrent client.
The ruling is that Bell can now also charge ISPs that lease the copper from them. The usage based billing that Bell has had in place for its customers for the last 1.5-2 years was never 'illegal'.
Not only use something like DenyHost or Fail2Ban, but firewall off all IP classes from Asia, South America and any other region that you know you'll never SSH from. I can easily get the/8s and such that are in use by each region (just look up Apnic, RIPE, etc...).
I upgraded a few days ago without any issues. The only app (so far) that stopped working for me is Handbrake. So far everything else has worked flawlessly.
Hmmm something I don't get. They want internet access to be treated like a utility. Let's see...
The more electricity I use, the higher my bill.
The more water I use, the higher my bill.
The more natural gas I use, the higher my bill.
By treating internet connectivity like a utility, that would mean that I would get billed according to usage... Which is what bandwidth caps mostly are (pay extra if you surpass a certain amount of utilization in a month). So how does this bill have any type of impact, other than ISPs having to prove to the FCC what the cost:utilization ratio is.
That has nothing to do with nor does it reflect the quality of flatscreens. Box stores are known to mess up the sharpness, brightness and contrast of their TVs on the showroom floor to make it 'pop' (heck, some TVs even have a demo or showroom setting that does it at the push of 1 button). I too personally think it looks like crap at those settings.
Its best to do your homework online, then when at the store ask the salesperson if you can adjust the settings to something that you find more acceptable. I've never been turned down when I've asked this. It gives you a better representation of the quality (but not a full representation, as the lighting at your house will be different).
Generally, flatscreens are better than CRTs when calibrated properly. I know you couldn't pry my DLP out of my cold, dead hands (though DLPs are not true flatscreens). For true flatscreen, you can't go wrong with a properly calibrated Sharp Aquos.
My ISP put in a 60 gig cap last year. I surf, download anime, work from home 4-5 days a week, listen to streaming music, watch videos on youtube, play X-Box live (includes downloading videos, demos and lots of RockBand/Guitar Hero DLCs), play World of Warcraft, am constantly uploading pictures to Flickr and my blog, do a lot of emails (receive 300-400 a day for work alone), download about a dozen weekly podcasts and do the occasional download. I also download updates for the multiple OSes that I'm running (Windows on 2 machines and Linux on another).
My wife surfs the net, does email, listens to streaming music and plays some online games.
And you know what? We average around 40 gigs a month. Some months its in the low 30s, some months its in the low 50s.
Once our kids are old enough to start using the internet I'm hoping that this cap will be a little higher, but even then an 80-100 gig cap would be acceptable.
I once worked a job that was 3x12.5, and it was great! It was overnight, and the boss didn't mind if we slept during the downtimes. The staggered schedule also made it that we had a full 7 days straight off every third week (followed by 6x12.5 in 7 days, that was a bit of a killer). Though being overnight in made family life hell for 3 days, the time off more than made up for it.
I second this post. Back when I had cable (Rogers in Canada), my Scientific Atlanta PVRs would die every 13-15 months. I had the option to buy one at 399$ or 499$ (I forget which) with a 1 yr warranty. I would have ended up spending thousands replacing them, instead of paying the 10$ a month rental fee. I also ended up getting a newer model every time I had to exchange it.
Now that I have satellite, I also rent my PVR. Its been going strong for almost 2 years now, and once my 2 yr contract is over, I get to exchange it for a newer, better model free of charge. OIr if it happens to die, I get a free replacement, no questions asked, and no money out of my pocket.
Now this is only for PVRs as they tend to not last as long. For regular boxes they've lasted for years without needing a replacement, so for those it makes a little more sense to buy if you plan staying with the same service longer than the associated cost of buying a box. Let's say the rental of a box is 5$ a month, and 199$ to buy. If you stick with the same service for more than 40 months in this case, and the box is reliable, then it makes more sense to buy as you'll at least break even on your purchase.
Nothing will last for decades without some monetary investments. You can get media that will last for decades, but will the computers 30 years from now be able to read them. The only way to get around that is to also pack away a PC with an OS and hopes it boots up 30 years from now. Or every 2-3 years you transfer the data to new media
If you have a DV tape based camcorder, you can use it as a backup drive and keep the tapes offsite. I'm not sure how much data a DV tape can hold other than its in the multi gigabit range. Being tape media its good for years. I've re-watched videos that I made 5+ years ago on DV tape and the quality was still as good as the day it was filmed.
For pictures, you can always get the ones you must absolutely keep printed (Walmart, Costco, etc..) and keep them offsite in an album or 2. If you want to re-digitize them after a loss, you can always re-scan them.
You can buy archival DVDs. Those are a lot more expensive (3-4$ a disc) but are guaranteed for a hundred years (at least mine are.. but I probably won't be around in 100 years to test them). But again, you have the problem of reading that media sometime down the road. DVD readers will one day become obsolete, as will the data format.
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That would be because the levy on media is for music only. Movies, games, software, books etc.. do not fall under the blank media levy, and are still very much illegal.
I used Costco (Canada) to have my digital pictures developed. Their online service is very simple to use, and you can even directly import your pictures from Facebook and Picasa. The prices are very reasonable, at 8 cents for 4x6. If you want more than pictures, they also turn your photos into photobooks, canvases, etc...
I've been using them for years and haven't had any issues whatsoever.
DC has a line of comics aimed specifically to kids called DC Nation. http://dcnationcomics.kidswb.com/. Young Justice, Superman Family, etc.. You can even read some of the comics free online, to see if your kid will like them before you start buying issues/TPBs. My son is 2, and I hope that he will have a similar love of comics that his old man does.
Or you know, stick the car in neutral. So what if you might blow the engine? It would give you time to pull the car to the side of the road and exit it long before things started to go bad.
At work we have over 600 servers spread across many cities, so we don't use any 'fun' names. The name has a standard of including city/location, function and number. Not our choice, this was enforced by a previous manager a few years ago. Even though location and such is all tracked in an inventory database, it is a little helpful to know where a server is located/function without having to look it up. Long ago, when we only had 50-60 servers and a different manager, they did have names based on celestial bodies and sports teams (weird combo, I know). Now with virtualization the function part isn't really useful, so we'll probably have to come up with something new, but meh, that's a story for another day.
At home however, my machines are named after the Endless/characters from Sandman. Destruction for my gaming rig, my SANs are named Lucious and Destiny, my main (non gaming) PC is Morpheus, wife's PC is Desire, etc.. etc.. I try to match the function with the appropriately matching character.
I thought Doctors didn't die, they just regenerated? Unless of course they were killed while regenerating.
Having a 1 1/2 yr old son, I went thru the same questions you have. This is the working solution that I currently have in place.
1) Running a DLINK DNS323 SAN, in raid mode. This is the main repository.
2) Purchases 2 external 2TB USB drives. I keep one here at home. Every 2-3 months I copy pictures/videos to one, bring it to my parents place and bring back the other one. Rinse and repeat every couple of months. This also protects me from losing pictures if the house was robbed, caught fire, etc..
3) Every 6 months or so I also get selected pictures professionally printed. Usually anywhere between 50-100 pictures. They are then stored in nice photobooks.
Last Xmas I also surprised my wife with a professionally done photobook, with pictures celebrating our first dates up to the first 6 months of my son's life. She really treasures that gift.It can get pretty expensive (100-200$), but oh so worth it.
Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.
It'll take some getting used to, but I don't mind the new design. Change != bad
Testing with a meter, my desktop was drawing 350w idle. Much much higher than the 25-30w used by a laptop.
A UPS isn't a choice where I live. Its a must, as we often get brownouts. So its not being affected by spikes and sags. As far as my next upgrade, since our wonderful government has gone to time of use for electricty, and the rates are skyrocketing, I'll be going with a laptop instead of a desktop. 25-30w of power vs 750-800w is a no brainer. I no longer game much on the PC so upgrading isn't a requirement.
Wow, power supplies blow all the time. I've had to replace 4 for family members in the last 18 months or so. I'll be looking for a replacement machine soon for myself as my motherboard is dying (Asus P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP, not a cheap mobo). The board is about 4 years old. Onboard sound is dead. 2 of the SATA controllers are crapping out. BIOS settings aren't saving on reboot (and I've tried changing the battery 3 times). I haven't upgraded from XP for only one reason, really. There's no direct XP to Win 7 upgrade path. I have dozens upon dozens of apps that I use on a regular basis. I can't be bothered spending a week + reinstalling the apps until I absolutely need to.
I second this. I just bought my 2nd DNS 323 after the first one got full. (its cheaper to buy 2 DNS 323 which are 2 bays, compared to getting the 4 bay version). I shoot a lot of pics, and at 20-25 meg per RAW file, it adds up quickly. The first is stacked with 2x1.5 TB drives, the 2nd with 2x2TB drives. I've got them running in RAID 1 for hardware redundancy. Great little devices and cheap (150$ Canadian). With the latest firmware you can even run NFS, and a native bittorrent client.
The only diskless OS booting I'm interested in and waiting for is booting from EEPROM. Near instant boot times. Why has this never really taken off?
The ruling is that Bell can now also charge ISPs that lease the copper from them. The usage based billing that Bell has had in place for its customers for the last 1.5-2 years was never 'illegal'.
Or for 5$ a month you can get 100 gigs instead of 60. http://www.bell.ca/shopping/Usage-Insurance-Plan/VasIntInsurance.details so well short of the extra 22.50$. If you continually bust 60 gigs but stay under 100 this is a much better deal.
Not only use something like DenyHost or Fail2Ban, but firewall off all IP classes from Asia, South America and any other region that you know you'll never SSH from. I can easily get the /8s and such that are in use by each region (just look up Apnic, RIPE, etc...).
I upgraded a few days ago without any issues. The only app (so far) that stopped working for me is Handbrake. So far everything else has worked flawlessly.
I'd love for Kings Quest or Space Quest making a comeback. Those were the best of the adventure games.
Hmmm something I don't get. They want internet access to be treated like a utility. Let's see...
The more electricity I use, the higher my bill.
The more water I use, the higher my bill.
The more natural gas I use, the higher my bill.
By treating internet connectivity like a utility, that would mean that I would get billed according to usage... Which is what bandwidth caps mostly are (pay extra if you surpass a certain amount of utilization in a month). So how does this bill have any type of impact, other than ISPs having to prove to the FCC what the cost:utilization ratio is.
That has nothing to do with nor does it reflect the quality of flatscreens. Box stores are known to mess up the sharpness, brightness and contrast of their TVs on the showroom floor to make it 'pop' (heck, some TVs even have a demo or showroom setting that does it at the push of 1 button). I too personally think it looks like crap at those settings.
Its best to do your homework online, then when at the store ask the salesperson if you can adjust the settings to something that you find more acceptable. I've never been turned down when I've asked this. It gives you a better representation of the quality (but not a full representation, as the lighting at your house will be different).
Generally, flatscreens are better than CRTs when calibrated properly. I know you couldn't pry my DLP out of my cold, dead hands (though DLPs are not true flatscreens). For true flatscreen, you can't go wrong with a properly calibrated Sharp Aquos.
Agreed completely.
My ISP put in a 60 gig cap last year. I surf, download anime, work from home 4-5 days a week, listen to streaming music, watch videos on youtube, play X-Box live (includes downloading videos, demos and lots of RockBand/Guitar Hero DLCs), play World of Warcraft, am constantly uploading pictures to Flickr and my blog, do a lot of emails (receive 300-400 a day for work alone), download about a dozen weekly podcasts and do the occasional download. I also download updates for the multiple OSes that I'm running (Windows on 2 machines and Linux on another).
My wife surfs the net, does email, listens to streaming music and plays some online games.
And you know what? We average around 40 gigs a month. Some months its in the low 30s, some months its in the low 50s.
Once our kids are old enough to start using the internet I'm hoping that this cap will be a little higher, but even then an 80-100 gig cap would be acceptable.
I once worked a job that was 3x12.5, and it was great! It was overnight, and the boss didn't mind if we slept during the downtimes. The staggered schedule also made it that we had a full 7 days straight off every third week (followed by 6x12.5 in 7 days, that was a bit of a killer). Though being overnight in made family life hell for 3 days, the time off more than made up for it.
I second this post. Back when I had cable (Rogers in Canada), my Scientific Atlanta PVRs would die every 13-15 months. I had the option to buy one at 399$ or 499$ (I forget which) with a 1 yr warranty. I would have ended up spending thousands replacing them, instead of paying the 10$ a month rental fee. I also ended up getting a newer model every time I had to exchange it.
Now that I have satellite, I also rent my PVR. Its been going strong for almost 2 years now, and once my 2 yr contract is over, I get to exchange it for a newer, better model free of charge. OIr if it happens to die, I get a free replacement, no questions asked, and no money out of my pocket.
Now this is only for PVRs as they tend to not last as long. For regular boxes they've lasted for years without needing a replacement, so for those it makes a little more sense to buy if you plan staying with the same service longer than the associated cost of buying a box. Let's say the rental of a box is 5$ a month, and 199$ to buy. If you stick with the same service for more than 40 months in this case, and the box is reliable, then it makes more sense to buy as you'll at least break even on your purchase.
Nothing will last for decades without some monetary investments. You can get media that will last for decades, but will the computers 30 years from now be able to read them. The only way to get around that is to also pack away a PC with an OS and hopes it boots up 30 years from now. Or every 2-3 years you transfer the data to new media
If you have a DV tape based camcorder, you can use it as a backup drive and keep the tapes offsite. I'm not sure how much data a DV tape can hold other than its in the multi gigabit range. Being tape media its good for years. I've re-watched videos that I made 5+ years ago on DV tape and the quality was still as good as the day it was filmed.
For pictures, you can always get the ones you must absolutely keep printed (Walmart, Costco, etc..) and keep them offsite in an album or 2. If you want to re-digitize them after a loss, you can always re-scan them.
You can buy archival DVDs. Those are a lot more expensive (3-4$ a disc) but are guaranteed for a hundred years (at least mine are.. but I probably won't be around in 100 years to test them). But again, you have the problem of reading that media sometime down the road. DVD readers will one day become obsolete, as will the data format.