Based on everything green-lit from Slashdot over the past year about unwavering, unquestioning support for every scaremongering climate article they could get their hands on and every similarly scaremongering article about net-neutrality that only looks at the things from the MSM filtered left-wing perspective I'm glad to see a level-headed approach to a censorship issue.
The "Link Tax" is about the stupidest damned thing I ever heard of in my life.
If I'm publishing articles for a living I want people to link to those articles and drive traffic to my site so I can sell banner ads. In fact, there's entire bullshit sites built around the idea of going viral by getting your aunt to post links to feel-good stories on Facebook that could easily be the equivalent of a single legal-sized sheet of paper of content, but require you to hit "next" to load a new page with a new unrelated image a dozen times to read an incoherent string of facts and opinions that are only tangibly related to the subject of the "root link" - mostly to keep you clicking for page/banner loads. "Legitimate" news stories make money in a similar fashion - the "better" news sites put it all on one page, but some "legitimate news" sites use the bullshit article approach to keep you clicking. (slide-shows - how I hate ad-based slideshows, how I love legitimate add to the story well done slideshows with a wealth of images)
Nope, if I were a news source I would exempt myself from charging the link tax if it were an option just to make sure people actually shared my links, assuming the AI filters don't prevent it. This is why I'm moving to block-chain social networks. Fuck AI overlords on legacy media sites.
The EU is doing the right thing by having their Brexit. More nations should follow because of stupid shit like this. Sometimes it feels like we've all been duped, the Nazi's actually won WWII and their running the EU to get shit like this shoved down everyone's throats.
BTW - here at home in the US we're being threatened by an expansion of the Mickey Mouse protection act. JUST SAY NO to the automatic insanely long copyright extension here in the US.
By the very nature of podcasts they are open and available to literally anybody who wants to make one. The only barriers to entry are very basic technological ones and bandwidth to upload it with. I could literally make a reasonable podcasts that I could upload to the modern web on a Pentium 75 using no hardware components made after 1998 and I might even be able to get away with audio codecs from that era as well. I remember playing with MP3 for the first time in 1998, so that would work. If I wanted I could even upload that 1998 tech MP3 with an analog modem from the era, the server I uploaded it to would do all of the distribution work.
My point:
Why are we trying to arm-twist people who don't want to make podcasts into podcasting? I see it like I see the modern push for women in STEM - clubbing them over the head and trying to drag them into learning and doing things they're not interested in.
I've noticed that women stereo typically prefer something other than a sit in a chair and make a radio-style podcast format. Diamond and Silk are the first examples that spring into my mind. They produce lots of regular content, and it's their own style of commentary, but they tend to do video based content. Julie Borowski, again, lots of content, almost all video, and very high-quality self edited videos at that.
Instead of trying to force these very talented square pegs into round holes why don't they develop a new type of app that appeals to the way women commonly like to send out their message - in video?
I've covered women - yes I'm hetero white male giving commentary on what I've observed - rocks are to the right torches are to the left and pitchforks are available at the tractor supply store two blocks away. As for minorities - diversifying that way - I have no real input. If they're culturally American I don't consider them much different that I see myself or my friends or family. If they're culturally something else - well once again - Google is trying to claw their way into other cultures and beat the idea of making podcasts into their heads if their culture doesn't embrace it. Just make the tools available, offer help when asked, and continue to make the tools easier to use to increase accessibility on that front. You know, maybe try to invent something other than the modern podcast to appeal to people who don't like to podcast.
Seriously, I love Kodi. I've got over 1,000 DVD's and BluRays (fuck the DMC) ripped, compressed, and stored on my Kodi system, but I bought all of it. Granted a lot of my movies were those $3 deals from Big Lots, used bulk purchases on eBay, and used Red Box movies that a grocery store near where I used to live sold them, but they're still legal that way.
I've got my photo album on there and my music too. In fact I've got a cron job setup on my workstation that syncs my photos and ebooks (not actually in Kodi) up to my Kodi server as a make-shift backup, making sure I've got everything in at least two places.
I do very little streaming with Kodi. I have a couple of news stations - which I rarely watch - setup on there through their web API's, as well as some access to content from PBS and some local three-letter big name TV services - lots of classic content, some new content, but nothing all-encompassing like Netflix. All of that's 100% legal through public APIs.
Legal Kodi is incredibly awesome.
My wife and her friend scheduled a Sunday afternoon lunch at her friends house, her husband showed off his pirate Kodi Firestick to me like it was something obscure I've never heard of and showed me how cool it was for streaming movies. I told him I've been using it since at least XBMC Eden. Every time he tried to bring up a movie it gave a URL error, a blocky, low bitrate trash fest, or when he finally did get one to work it had subtitles and people coughing in the theater. Why would I want to pirate? I'm much happier ripping and compressing my own stuff. In fact I've done enough work with all the tools that even if I had all the storage space in the world and weren't re-compressing to save room I would consider running some of the straight- from disk stuff through the tools anyways, turns out that NLMeans filter can make some things pulled off of film, especially cartoons, look better than the source material.
Not pirating with Kodi is great.
BTW - I'm using a first gen Intel Mac Pro - a 1,1 running Ubuntu. Great tank of a machine that supports big hard drives. Screw that little Fire Stick, I want some storage! (I am contemplating moving to something that consumes less electricity and generates less heat - but it has to support lots of storage easily)
HP had a data breach and they've never talked about it publicly. I sent my daughter's cheap-ass little HP Stream in for repair, new mainboard. A few months later I started getting the occasional call from a guy obviously on a script trying to convince me it has a virus. First pull up the event view "Everything you see in there is a virus" and tried to convince me to do some other crap. My buddy and I generally string those idiots along, at first I started saying "No Windows, Linux!" and they still try to get me to open the event viewer. We've strung them on for as long as an hour and half not getting much further than the event-viewer step, we even have some of these calls recorded.
They've never hung up on us no matter how raunchy or off topic we've gotten, I'm not sure they're able to in whatever kind of little scam factory they work for. I would be nice to able to call him back.
If I could start calling him now that would be awesome.
has it really reached a point that we can call it a monopoly?
I admit - the tactics they used to get people to create accounts, from the early days that mostly consisted of not allowing people to view even "public" content without an account, were sort of underhanded, but they got people to create the accounts and those people kept coming back. There are plenty of other social networks out there, and plenty that compete with each of the ones above. They don't fit the proper definition of monopoly.
What keeps Facebook popular isn't the fact they're good, it's that other people are there - once they got a foothold they took off for the same reason Microsoft Office did - not because they're better than the competition, but because EVERYONE ELSE is using it.
I would argue Slashdot itself is a social network, from the early days of the Internet. I was/technically still am on LiveJournal, and despite the fact I don't use it anymore I think it's better than Facebook. I'm also on Minds, Steemit, and Google Plus. They aren't a monopoly.
I would love to see the company break apart, but the part of me that likes to do what's right doesn't want the government to do it. I want them to fall face down in a pile of crap and have everyone leave them of their own accord. Right now the pro-censorship charge being lead by Facebook, Google, and Twitter are driving some of the core participants from these platforms to the networks I've mentioned above and Gab.
As IPFS gains momentum and block-chain based social networks like Steemit as well as privatized nodes on the chains like https://akasha.world/ Facebook is going to fall apart simply because people will be moving onto platforms they know aren't being controlled by a core group of overlords. The only way to stop block-chain based networks is for governments to truly show their tyrannical faces and break down the nodes - that requires going past lines they've tip-toed up to but don't want to cross for obvious reasons.
Once the chain takes off Facebook will be all about your Grandma hitting "Love" on pictures of your kids and your aunt forwarding stupid meme's which are some sort of Internet astrology based on first names and likely hood to be good moms, dads, dancers, or sloppy whatever. In short, it will be nothing but old people who aren't going to learn to use something else.
Interesting - the preview showed the spelling of tsu (with a non-U.S. standard u) just fine, but now it's gone on the final posts. Guess it was the wrong encoding type somewhere.
I used to make posts on ts and then link to them on Facebook. Nobody seemed to care (save for one person). Then Facebook blocked ts, then ts went away.....
I might consider this, though I largely consider email useless, it's being killed by spam the same way usenet and good old-fashioned search engines like AltaVista were. Why bother using email if you have to sort through so much crap to get to the good messages?
I'm planning to make a nice-big write up about what it means to browse Facebook on a traditional browser while using a mobile phone, using screen-shots for reference. The amount of begging, strong-arming, and general "feature isolation" they pull when you use a mobile browser (that worked five years ago) is astounding. "Request Desktop Site" sometimes gets you around some of that, sometimes it causes other weird things to happen.
Facebook is evil. I want to jettison it outright and just move to Minds and Steemit. Unfortunately Facebook is where the people are, especially family. I make my family posts there and my general posts elsewhere. I really want to move the family away.....
I just tested - Google pulled their head out of their ass on this one. I asked Google to play Everybody Knows - momentarily I heard Concrete Blonde singing it.
I'm with you. I can't find a good battery anywhere.
I've got the microSD / Memory Stick adapter also.
I find it hilarious I actually have to use a "secure" memory stick to play back ripped and compressed movies, but I can play ripped (and compressed to CSO) games all day on any memory source I chose.
I've been using Kodi since it was XBMC. I don't really want Internet streaming - that was the whole point of my post. In the household other devices can stream from the Kodi server over the LAN, (movies, music, photos, TV shows, and from the same device but not in that software ebooks) but I don't really want Internet streaming. If I'm out somewhere with WiFi and a low storage device and I want to keep my kid entertained my Ultraviolet/Movies Anywhere accounts take care of that. Sort of - I found that pretty much all tire shops that have WiFi in their waiting areas have really crappy slow WiFi, seriously, I'm not even sure they're in ISDN speed ranges. Part of why I'm bias against streaming. My phone and my laptop each have all of my music. I do listen to podcasts, but I download those at once while on WiFi and listen to the downloaded files while driving, so I don't even stream those. (Thanks to mcgett for recommending a good downloader/player)
You've basically done what I've done. I've got about 20 GB's of OGG/Vorbis files from my own CDs, and yes I put audio books on there as well.
Pressing play isn't hard. Finding the right album, song, artist, whatever while driving on a Houston freeway is. Unfortunately public transit isn't a reasonable option where I live. If you work downtown it's fine, if you work in another area plan on six to eight hours a day on a bus.
In the early days of Android the built in music player sucked. There were some reasonable third party ones, and even some of the carriers and phone manufacturers came through with some reasonable ones, but the built in one sucked.
Then when the early version of the Play Music app (maybe it was called something else) came out it was awesome! It would take the music on my phone and make virtual stations out of them. It would catalog and categorize and make intelligent playlist, I loved it.
Then they introduced their stream service, they whored it out a little, but I ignored that and kept using it as is.
Then it started whoring a little stronger - to the point of making the app harder to use.
THEN it started streaming music over my metered mobile connection, I could manually set it back to local only, but it kept finding ways to stream. Any excuse it could make up it would stream instead of play local, even if the files were local to the device.
I tried to play nice with it. I uploaded all my OGG/Vorbis files to their cloud so it could be in both places. It would convert them to MP3s if I pulled them in on another device. Music I bought straight from the play store started to get truncated file names and double/tripple downloads, especially when using the Google created Linux music sync utility. I even opened tickets, they had me jump through hoops that went nowhere, they just scratched their head. Let me re-emphasize this for you:If I bought it from them it was much more likely to be hosed up than if I did it myself.
Yep, Power Amp it is.
Based on a history of unreliable bandwidth, metered connections, and lots of driving - especially in rural areas with no coverage I never could get on-board with streaming.
So - now that I have Power Amp, used to I could say "Okay Google Play Thunderstruck" and it would open PowerAmp my default player and play Thunderstruck for me. Now it demands I select a streaming service.
Yeah, and still ditching propriety media when the world adopted something else. Just like Beta, MD, UMD, ATRAC, Digital Audio Tape, Memory Stick, the other Memory Stick versions......
The mobile web experience on the PSP sucked butt in my opinion. I laughed so hard during the Brendan Fraser Journey to the Center of the Earth movie when the kid whipped out a PSP on an airplane that somehow or another magically connected to a non-existent access point to browse the web as easily as he had a mouse and keyboard at a reasonable speed. Having used a PSP on the web I know that just didn't happen.
I think the whole ability to use Skype on a PSP 3000 without any extra adapters was freaking cool, though I have a well hacked PSP 2000 so I didn't get to do that. I had the headset I could do it with but never bothered.
That's good, Comcast is who I'm about to go with and AT&T is the other option at the new place.
I just moved out of an area where Suddenlink had a regional monopoly and they blocked the shit out of everything. A buddy of mine, also in that area, and myself on occasion, would light them up on Twitter and other forums about their data caps. High level people in the company would actually have to do damage control after the two of us busted out our geek skills explaining how their low datacaps were bogus and the logic of how off-hours high-data use by individuals didn't impact squat for other home users. I think our campaign had an impact on their decision to lift the caps.
Most non-geek users have no concept of what port blocking means. Lighting them up on Twitter and everywhere else does no good because 95% of users have no concept of what that means and aren't consciously affected by the practice.
That's right #suddenlink - I'm lighting you up again assholes! Quit port blocking!
However China doesn't think that tariffs are the wrong approach to the U.S. Nor do they think intellectual property theft is a problem. In fact the tariffs Trump has levied are still tiny in comparison to the ones China has on us, they just seem bigger (an in raw, no percentages taken into account it does mean more money) due to the huge trade imbalance.
As a libertarian I'm against tariffs.
I'm also against slavery, and to one degree or another China engages in it. I would argue the income tax system is slavery to, so the U.S. engages in it, but it's a matter of degree, many non-libertarians would argue by their measuring sticks that the U.S. does not engage in slavery through income tax but China still enslaves their people by the same measure.
I don't think tariffs are the right approach, but we are playing a game where China has established the way they're playing that game. It's up to us to play with the rules they have established in mind, and our president has chosen to answer in kind, in percentages that are smaller than the ones they've presented against us. I can't fully fault Trump for his approach. My general approach to someone not playing by a rule set I agree with is to take my ball and go home, and I agree that probably isn't the right approach in this case.
In 10 years how significant will 2 TB of storage be? Per this chart the first 1.5 TB drive came out ten years ago. That was the huge drive most of us couldn't afford, many of us were running 500 GB drives (and a lot of laptop users still are). Already you could hold five 2TB accounts on a single HDD (not counting backups and everything) and that's not even the biggest drive available. How many accounts could you hold on a single drive in ten years? 20? In 30 years they'll be giggling about how they hold all their first year 2 TB subscribers on a single drive. This was brilliant, by the time 99 years rolls around no one will care about most of that original data and it will be hosted on a pocket calculator in a drawer somewhere.
This could totally work, especially if they pull the grandfather clause.
How many businesses have you seen start up with a reasonable deal like this (and right now it's on "sale"), then raise the price, then stop offering this to new subscribers but leaving the old guys grandfathered in? A company like this has a good chance of gaining traction if enough people like me get on-board at first. Once a critical mass of popularity happens, then they can turn into jerks, and as long as they don't piss off their original core group (at first) they can do what they want eventually.
Due to having just moved, changed jobs, etc... etc.. Heck, I moved so recently I don't even have Internet access at home at the moment (I should next week), so I'm not jumping on board with this just yet, but I'm going to watch and will seriously consider it next month - hoping they'll still give me the sale price.
I could totally get on board with this. An up-front costs for the space and then may $0.10 per GB of transfer after the first month. I could rsync everything up daily, once a week, whatever, keep my bandwidth down, while continuing to make use of my space.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on everything green-lit from Slashdot over the past year about unwavering, unquestioning support for every scaremongering climate article they could get their hands on and every similarly scaremongering article about net-neutrality that only looks at the things from the MSM filtered left-wing perspective I'm glad to see a level-headed approach to a censorship issue.
The "Link Tax" is about the stupidest damned thing I ever heard of in my life.
If I'm publishing articles for a living I want people to link to those articles and drive traffic to my site so I can sell banner ads. In fact, there's entire bullshit sites built around the idea of going viral by getting your aunt to post links to feel-good stories on Facebook that could easily be the equivalent of a single legal-sized sheet of paper of content, but require you to hit "next" to load a new page with a new unrelated image a dozen times to read an incoherent string of facts and opinions that are only tangibly related to the subject of the "root link" - mostly to keep you clicking for page/banner loads. "Legitimate" news stories make money in a similar fashion - the "better" news sites put it all on one page, but some "legitimate news" sites use the bullshit article approach to keep you clicking. (slide-shows - how I hate ad-based slideshows, how I love legitimate add to the story well done slideshows with a wealth of images)
Nope, if I were a news source I would exempt myself from charging the link tax if it were an option just to make sure people actually shared my links, assuming the AI filters don't prevent it. This is why I'm moving to block-chain social networks. Fuck AI overlords on legacy media sites.
The EU is doing the right thing by having their Brexit. More nations should follow because of stupid shit like this. Sometimes it feels like we've all been duped, the Nazi's actually won WWII and their running the EU to get shit like this shoved down everyone's throats.
BTW - here at home in the US we're being threatened by an expansion of the Mickey Mouse protection act. JUST SAY NO to the automatic insanely long copyright extension here in the US.
By the very nature of podcasts they are open and available to literally anybody who wants to make one. The only barriers to entry are very basic technological ones and bandwidth to upload it with. I could literally make a reasonable podcasts that I could upload to the modern web on a Pentium 75 using no hardware components made after 1998 and I might even be able to get away with audio codecs from that era as well. I remember playing with MP3 for the first time in 1998, so that would work. If I wanted I could even upload that 1998 tech MP3 with an analog modem from the era, the server I uploaded it to would do all of the distribution work.
My point:
Why are we trying to arm-twist people who don't want to make podcasts into podcasting? I see it like I see the modern push for women in STEM - clubbing them over the head and trying to drag them into learning and doing things they're not interested in.
I've noticed that women stereo typically prefer something other than a sit in a chair and make a radio-style podcast format. Diamond and Silk are the first examples that spring into my mind. They produce lots of regular content, and it's their own style of commentary, but they tend to do video based content. Julie Borowski, again, lots of content, almost all video, and very high-quality self edited videos at that.
Instead of trying to force these very talented square pegs into round holes why don't they develop a new type of app that appeals to the way women commonly like to send out their message - in video?
I've covered women - yes I'm hetero white male giving commentary on what I've observed - rocks are to the right torches are to the left and pitchforks are available at the tractor supply store two blocks away. As for minorities - diversifying that way - I have no real input. If they're culturally American I don't consider them much different that I see myself or my friends or family. If they're culturally something else - well once again - Google is trying to claw their way into other cultures and beat the idea of making podcasts into their heads if their culture doesn't embrace it. Just make the tools available, offer help when asked, and continue to make the tools easier to use to increase accessibility on that front. You know, maybe try to invent something other than the modern podcast to appeal to people who don't like to podcast.
I thought so from the start, but when they made it so you couldn't fully disable Cortana, then I knew it for sure.
Just like Office of the Clippy era, it's introducing vulnerabilities you can't fix unless you hack the system beyond Microsoft's specifications.
This is probably the most intelligent commentary I've read on this subject in quite a long time.
Seriously, I love Kodi. I've got over 1,000 DVD's and BluRays (fuck the DMC) ripped, compressed, and stored on my Kodi system, but I bought all of it. Granted a lot of my movies were those $3 deals from Big Lots, used bulk purchases on eBay, and used Red Box movies that a grocery store near where I used to live sold them, but they're still legal that way.
I've got my photo album on there and my music too. In fact I've got a cron job setup on my workstation that syncs my photos and ebooks (not actually in Kodi) up to my Kodi server as a make-shift backup, making sure I've got everything in at least two places.
I do very little streaming with Kodi. I have a couple of news stations - which I rarely watch - setup on there through their web API's, as well as some access to content from PBS and some local three-letter big name TV services - lots of classic content, some new content, but nothing all-encompassing like Netflix. All of that's 100% legal through public APIs.
Legal Kodi is incredibly awesome.
My wife and her friend scheduled a Sunday afternoon lunch at her friends house, her husband showed off his pirate Kodi Firestick to me like it was something obscure I've never heard of and showed me how cool it was for streaming movies. I told him I've been using it since at least XBMC Eden. Every time he tried to bring up a movie it gave a URL error, a blocky, low bitrate trash fest, or when he finally did get one to work it had subtitles and people coughing in the theater. Why would I want to pirate? I'm much happier ripping and compressing my own stuff. In fact I've done enough work with all the tools that even if I had all the storage space in the world and weren't re-compressing to save room I would consider running some of the straight- from disk stuff through the tools anyways, turns out that NLMeans filter can make some things pulled off of film, especially cartoons, look better than the source material.
Not pirating with Kodi is great.
BTW - I'm using a first gen Intel Mac Pro - a 1,1 running Ubuntu. Great tank of a machine that supports big hard drives. Screw that little Fire Stick, I want some storage! (I am contemplating moving to something that consumes less electricity and generates less heat - but it has to support lots of storage easily)
claiming to be from HP?
HP had a data breach and they've never talked about it publicly. I sent my daughter's cheap-ass little HP Stream in for repair, new mainboard. A few months later I started getting the occasional call from a guy obviously on a script trying to convince me it has a virus. First pull up the event view "Everything you see in there is a virus" and tried to convince me to do some other crap. My buddy and I generally string those idiots along, at first I started saying "No Windows, Linux!" and they still try to get me to open the event viewer. We've strung them on for as long as an hour and half not getting much further than the event-viewer step, we even have some of these calls recorded.
They've never hung up on us no matter how raunchy or off topic we've gotten, I'm not sure they're able to in whatever kind of little scam factory they work for. I would be nice to able to call him back.
If I could start calling him now that would be awesome.
has it really reached a point that we can call it a monopoly?
I admit - the tactics they used to get people to create accounts, from the early days that mostly consisted of not allowing people to view even "public" content without an account, were sort of underhanded, but they got people to create the accounts and those people kept coming back. There are plenty of other social networks out there, and plenty that compete with each of the ones above. They don't fit the proper definition of monopoly.
What keeps Facebook popular isn't the fact they're good, it's that other people are there - once they got a foothold they took off for the same reason Microsoft Office did - not because they're better than the competition, but because EVERYONE ELSE is using it.
I would argue Slashdot itself is a social network, from the early days of the Internet. I was/technically still am on LiveJournal, and despite the fact I don't use it anymore I think it's better than Facebook. I'm also on Minds, Steemit, and Google Plus. They aren't a monopoly.
I would love to see the company break apart, but the part of me that likes to do what's right doesn't want the government to do it. I want them to fall face down in a pile of crap and have everyone leave them of their own accord. Right now the pro-censorship charge being lead by Facebook, Google, and Twitter are driving some of the core participants from these platforms to the networks I've mentioned above and Gab.
As IPFS gains momentum and block-chain based social networks like Steemit as well as privatized nodes on the chains like https://akasha.world/ Facebook is going to fall apart simply because people will be moving onto platforms they know aren't being controlled by a core group of overlords. The only way to stop block-chain based networks is for governments to truly show their tyrannical faces and break down the nodes - that requires going past lines they've tip-toed up to but don't want to cross for obvious reasons.
Once the chain takes off Facebook will be all about your Grandma hitting "Love" on pictures of your kids and your aunt forwarding stupid meme's which are some sort of Internet astrology based on first names and likely hood to be good moms, dads, dancers, or sloppy whatever. In short, it will be nothing but old people who aren't going to learn to use something else.
Interesting - the preview showed the spelling of tsu (with a non-U.S. standard u) just fine, but now it's gone on the final posts. Guess it was the wrong encoding type somewhere.
I used to make posts on ts and then link to them on Facebook. Nobody seemed to care (save for one person). Then Facebook blocked ts, then ts went away.....
I might consider this, though I largely consider email useless, it's being killed by spam the same way usenet and good old-fashioned search engines like AltaVista were. Why bother using email if you have to sort through so much crap to get to the good messages?
I'm planning to make a nice-big write up about what it means to browse Facebook on a traditional browser while using a mobile phone, using screen-shots for reference. The amount of begging, strong-arming, and general "feature isolation" they pull when you use a mobile browser (that worked five years ago) is astounding. "Request Desktop Site" sometimes gets you around some of that, sometimes it causes other weird things to happen.
Facebook is evil. I want to jettison it outright and just move to Minds and Steemit. Unfortunately Facebook is where the people are, especially family. I make my family posts there and my general posts elsewhere. I really want to move the family away.....
I just tested - Google pulled their head out of their ass on this one. I asked Google to play Everybody Knows - momentarily I heard Concrete Blonde singing it.
Still - don't be Google.
I'm with you. I can't find a good battery anywhere.
I've got the microSD / Memory Stick adapter also.
I find it hilarious I actually have to use a "secure" memory stick to play back ripped and compressed movies, but I can play ripped (and compressed to CSO) games all day on any memory source I chose.
I've been using Kodi since it was XBMC. I don't really want Internet streaming - that was the whole point of my post. In the household other devices can stream from the Kodi server over the LAN, (movies, music, photos, TV shows, and from the same device but not in that software ebooks) but I don't really want Internet streaming. If I'm out somewhere with WiFi and a low storage device and I want to keep my kid entertained my Ultraviolet/Movies Anywhere accounts take care of that. Sort of - I found that pretty much all tire shops that have WiFi in their waiting areas have really crappy slow WiFi, seriously, I'm not even sure they're in ISDN speed ranges. Part of why I'm bias against streaming. My phone and my laptop each have all of my music. I do listen to podcasts, but I download those at once while on WiFi and listen to the downloaded files while driving, so I don't even stream those. (Thanks to mcgett for recommending a good downloader/player)
You've basically done what I've done. I've got about 20 GB's of OGG/Vorbis files from my own CDs, and yes I put audio books on there as well.
Pressing play isn't hard. Finding the right album, song, artist, whatever while driving on a Houston freeway is. Unfortunately public transit isn't a reasonable option where I live. If you work downtown it's fine, if you work in another area plan on six to eight hours a day on a bus.
In the early days of Android the built in music player sucked. There were some reasonable third party ones, and even some of the carriers and phone manufacturers came through with some reasonable ones, but the built in one sucked.
Then when the early version of the Play Music app (maybe it was called something else) came out it was awesome! It would take the music on my phone and make virtual stations out of them. It would catalog and categorize and make intelligent playlist, I loved it.
Then they introduced their stream service, they whored it out a little, but I ignored that and kept using it as is.
Then it started whoring a little stronger - to the point of making the app harder to use.
THEN it started streaming music over my metered mobile connection, I could manually set it back to local only, but it kept finding ways to stream. Any excuse it could make up it would stream instead of play local, even if the files were local to the device.
I tried to play nice with it. I uploaded all my OGG/Vorbis files to their cloud so it could be in both places. It would convert them to MP3s if I pulled them in on another device. Music I bought straight from the play store started to get truncated file names and double/tripple downloads, especially when using the Google created Linux music sync utility. I even opened tickets, they had me jump through hoops that went nowhere, they just scratched their head. Let me re-emphasize this for you :If I bought it from them it was much more likely to be hosed up than if I did it myself.
Yep, Power Amp it is.
Based on a history of unreliable bandwidth, metered connections, and lots of driving - especially in rural areas with no coverage I never could get on-board with streaming.
So - now that I have Power Amp, used to I could say "Okay Google Play Thunderstruck" and it would open PowerAmp my default player and play Thunderstruck for me. Now it demands I select a streaming service.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR STREAMING
Not in a SONY produced movie.
They didn't hoard that one to themselves, had they done so we would probably be running HD-DVD right now.
Yeah, and still ditching propriety media when the world adopted something else. Just like Beta, MD, UMD, ATRAC, Digital Audio Tape, Memory Stick, the other Memory Stick versions......
The mobile web experience on the PSP sucked butt in my opinion. I laughed so hard during the Brendan Fraser Journey to the Center of the Earth movie when the kid whipped out a PSP on an airplane that somehow or another magically connected to a non-existent access point to browse the web as easily as he had a mouse and keyboard at a reasonable speed. Having used a PSP on the web I know that just didn't happen.
I think the whole ability to use Skype on a PSP 3000 without any extra adapters was freaking cool, though I have a well hacked PSP 2000 so I didn't get to do that. I had the headset I could do it with but never bothered.
Making heavy loads oh so much less heavy.
How does that compare to a train?
That's good, Comcast is who I'm about to go with and AT&T is the other option at the new place.
I just moved out of an area where Suddenlink had a regional monopoly and they blocked the shit out of everything. A buddy of mine, also in that area, and myself on occasion, would light them up on Twitter and other forums about their data caps. High level people in the company would actually have to do damage control after the two of us busted out our geek skills explaining how their low datacaps were bogus and the logic of how off-hours high-data use by individuals didn't impact squat for other home users. I think our campaign had an impact on their decision to lift the caps.
Most non-geek users have no concept of what port blocking means. Lighting them up on Twitter and everywhere else does no good because 95% of users have no concept of what that means and aren't consciously affected by the practice.
That's right #suddenlink - I'm lighting you up again assholes! Quit port blocking!
However China doesn't think that tariffs are the wrong approach to the U.S. Nor do they think intellectual property theft is a problem. In fact the tariffs Trump has levied are still tiny in comparison to the ones China has on us, they just seem bigger (an in raw, no percentages taken into account it does mean more money) due to the huge trade imbalance.
As a libertarian I'm against tariffs.
I'm also against slavery, and to one degree or another China engages in it. I would argue the income tax system is slavery to, so the U.S. engages in it, but it's a matter of degree, many non-libertarians would argue by their measuring sticks that the U.S. does not engage in slavery through income tax but China still enslaves their people by the same measure.
I don't think tariffs are the right approach, but we are playing a game where China has established the way they're playing that game. It's up to us to play with the rules they have established in mind, and our president has chosen to answer in kind, in percentages that are smaller than the ones they've presented against us. I can't fully fault Trump for his approach. My general approach to someone not playing by a rule set I agree with is to take my ball and go home, and I agree that probably isn't the right approach in this case.
Everybody Knows
Another note:
In 10 years how significant will 2 TB of storage be? Per this chart the first 1.5 TB drive came out ten years ago. That was the huge drive most of us couldn't afford, many of us were running 500 GB drives (and a lot of laptop users still are). Already you could hold five 2TB accounts on a single HDD (not counting backups and everything) and that's not even the biggest drive available. How many accounts could you hold on a single drive in ten years? 20? In 30 years they'll be giggling about how they hold all their first year 2 TB subscribers on a single drive. This was brilliant, by the time 99 years rolls around no one will care about most of that original data and it will be hosted on a pocket calculator in a drawer somewhere.
Maybe, maybe not.
This could totally work, especially if they pull the grandfather clause.
How many businesses have you seen start up with a reasonable deal like this (and right now it's on "sale"), then raise the price, then stop offering this to new subscribers but leaving the old guys grandfathered in? A company like this has a good chance of gaining traction if enough people like me get on-board at first. Once a critical mass of popularity happens, then they can turn into jerks, and as long as they don't piss off their original core group (at first) they can do what they want eventually.
Due to having just moved, changed jobs, etc... etc.. Heck, I moved so recently I don't even have Internet access at home at the moment (I should next week), so I'm not jumping on board with this just yet, but I'm going to watch and will seriously consider it next month - hoping they'll still give me the sale price.
I could totally get on board with this. An up-front costs for the space and then may $0.10 per GB of transfer after the first month. I could rsync everything up daily, once a week, whatever, keep my bandwidth down, while continuing to make use of my space.