"All in all, this looks like more effort (you've got to visit the post office with a heavy pile of 1000 CDs) rather than less to me."
duh! Pay someone to do that for you too.
I ripped all of my CDs myself. I don't have a huge collection (just under 100) so it wasn't that big of a deal and now that's the first thing I do when I buy a new CD. I could see if I had 1000 CDs, maybe I'd look into one of these services but personally, I don't see that it's worth it for the average person.
I always like arguments about how much someone's time is worth. If the grandparent's time is worth too much to rip a CD, wtf are they posting on slashdot for?
From what I've heard, your small company making steady profit gets interested in Walmart because they see how much money they could make if Walmart stocked their items. You have to keep in mind the number of Walmarts in this country (and even worldwide) that your product could be sold.
It's very easy for Walmart to become your number 1 buyer and you find yourself expanding to just so you can produce all of your product that they want to stock on their shelves.
Then when Walmart is 95% of your business, that happy bouncing smiling faces pays you a visit and says 'Hi, I'm the happy bouncing face and I want to rollback prices for my customers so you need to sell this to me cheaper or I'll just stop buying completely. Have a nice day:)'
So now you have all of this new production capacity and are faced with losing 95% of your business and probably have a nice big loan to still pay off from new equipment and buildings that you purchased to meet Walmart's needs. Better to take a smaller loss and hope things get better than go out of business right away and be in debt that much more.
Whether or not things really work out like that, I can't say from experience.. that's just the type of thing I've heard and it seems to make sense.
I'll give Best Buy one thing over Circuit City.. at least they still stock PC software. My local Circuit Shitty stopped doing that at least a year ago, dunno about others.
They also seem to do a better job of stocking PC games than my local gamestop. I recently went to pick up BF2 Special Forces and while gamestop was sold out (didn't know for sure when more were coming in), Best Buy had about 10 copies for $5 less even.
Other than that, I don't really care for Best Buy. Back before I went to college several years ago, it used to be one of my favorite stores and I was disappointed that my college town didn't have one. After that, one of us changed because stopped missing Best Buy completely until just when I couldn't find Special Forces:)
Linksys must be a popular brand one to have issues with.
I got a WRT54GS a while back and a wireless card to go with it because, well, that's kinda handy when you buy a wireless router.
Anyway, there were 3 or 4 rebates involved.
- 1 for the router from Circuit City, went through fine and relatively quick
- 1 for the router from Linksys, went through fine (I think) but took forever
- 1 for the WMP54GS from Linksys, they denied this and said it was a duplicate claim (of the router)
There may have been another for the WMP54GS from Circuit City but I don't recall for sure. If so, it went through without problems.
Now, when I called up to complain, they were actually pretty nice and helpful. They gave me info on how to resubmit it even though this was the one that required the original UPC. I don't think I ever did get it. I kind of lost track because I bought a WMP54G to use with my DS a couple weeks later which also had a rebate offer and I think I just got that last one. I decided it wasn't worth any more of my time to fight over since it was only for $10 but it did lead me to the decision that I don't plan on buying anything else from Circuit City where the rebate is a deciding factor.
Kinda reminds me of the plot of Resident Evil 4.:) I'm sure I read some research notes in that game that mentioned something like this as validation of the palagas taking over people's minds.
I'm pretty sure I saw a tower case in the picture of his desk but I can't get to it now. Surely he could sell one of them.
I had the same thoughts when I saw the pictures... looks like he needs to prioritize but I guess if you can build some cool furniture out of free fedex boxes, why bother spending money.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Kind of off topic but since this thread is about giving people unwanted criticism, shouldn't that be 10 types of people?:)
Anyway, I'm with the grandparent. Computer languages have far less exceptions than English. I have a huge list of confusing bits of the English language at work. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is "The buck does funny things when it sees the does". Same spelling, entirely different meaning based on the context.
I guess the assignment/equals operator issue of some languages would fall into that type of category but that's the only one I can think of.
I saw a story about this on yahoo last night (can't find it now but I think I have the link at home).
I thought that once said it was 6.99 per month or $60 annualy (didn't mention the 4.99 price) and it also said something about the files expiring after a month so you would have to renew them.
It sounded like a really crappy deal compared to how it comes off in this article.
Did anyone else see that or was I just halucinating?
Why are you sending sensitive information over email presumably unencrypted?
Because it's supposed to be secure as long as it doesn't leave the server (i.e. communication with co-workers). Plus, people store documents and such in Groupwise, it's not just email messages.
"To achieve this, the copyright holder can either upload the file to the guy (entrapment), or download from the guy (the guy does nothing wrong in this case as explained above), or obtain the cooperation of the user's ISP to do massively intrusive monitoring."
I may be wrong but I thought the issue was distributing the work without permission. So in your example, when the copyright holder uploads the file to the guy, he's done nothing wrong. The copyright holder is distributing their work. Whether they do it for free or collect money should be irrelevant.
The problem is when they "download from the guy" because then he is redistributing their work without their permission. It doesn't matter if he's redistributing it back to them or his friend down the street.
"If "Random Blockbuster-Wannabee with No Plot or Acting" movie were leaked, people download it, and word-of-mouth spreads that sitting through it is worse than catching herpes from an morbidly-obese partner with deadly body odor so that many people that would have risked buying tickets movie-unseen decide not to, that's real damage."
So if a movie gets a bad review, we should lock up the reviewer because that deprived the movie company of some profit? That's a pretty shaky argument in my opinion. You could just as easily say a good movie is leaked, creating positive word-of-mouth so more people go watch the movie in the theater. The real damage is people who download the movie and like it but have no need to pay for it since they just saw it for free.
"One of the reasons I quit was dealing with unrealistic expectations. Customers would often live far from civilization and complain they had poor reception."
Two points:
1. Where do you think people got those expectations (from the company's advertising)
2. "Far from civilization" is where I may need my cell phone the most. Say my car breaks down on the interstate in the middle of nowhere.
I was reading a joke/story about that the other day. A family was watching tv when a Viagra commercial came on. It showed some guy running down the street with a big smile on his face.
So the kid asks his dad 'Dad, would you be that happy if you got rid of your heartburn?'
Sudden lack of respect you say? Have you been forgetting to shower lately?
On a more serious note, it sounds like some of the companies you support are cheap and maybe not willing to pay up to really fix things. Whether it's from the company being stingy or incompetence, I can't really say but if you continuously show up to fix things when they break, people may start to get the impression that you're not completely fixing their problems.
"Why does a school need our SSNs? Why does anybody outside the government?"
I believe in many cases (e.g. student worker, financial aid recipient), they need it for tax reporting purposes.
Do you honestly thing the thumb stylus is better than an anlog stick or is this just flame bait?
Not only is it lacking in feedback but it's also awkward (at least for me) to have my thumb placed in the middle of the DS while I'm also trying to hold it and keep a finger on the left shoulder button.
I used it through most of Mario DS and definitely preferred it to the digital pad but I'd take a good analog stick any day.
You know, you could've left out great and that statement would still be true. My biggest gripe is that there aren't really that many games and only a few that I'm interested.
Then take a look at a lot of the games (e.g. WarioWare Touched and Yoshi's Touch and Go), they're so short and simple that they hardly even feel like a full game.
Mario is an obvious exception but every other DS game I've played left me feeling like it was slapped together and rushed out so they would have something to release but didn't have the depth that a good game should have.
Slashdot Mirror
"All in all, this looks like more effort (you've got to visit the post office with a heavy pile of 1000 CDs) rather than less to me."
duh! Pay someone to do that for you too.
I ripped all of my CDs myself. I don't have a huge collection (just under 100) so it wasn't that big of a deal and now that's the first thing I do when I buy a new CD. I could see if I had 1000 CDs, maybe I'd look into one of these services but personally, I don't see that it's worth it for the average person.
I always like arguments about how much someone's time is worth. If the grandparent's time is worth too much to rip a CD, wtf are they posting on slashdot for?
From what I've heard, your small company making steady profit gets interested in Walmart because they see how much money they could make if Walmart stocked their items. You have to keep in mind the number of Walmarts in this country (and even worldwide) that your product could be sold. :)'
It's very easy for Walmart to become your number 1 buyer and you find yourself expanding to just so you can produce all of your product that they want to stock on their shelves.
Then when Walmart is 95% of your business, that happy bouncing smiling faces pays you a visit and says 'Hi, I'm the happy bouncing face and I want to rollback prices for my customers so you need to sell this to me cheaper or I'll just stop buying completely. Have a nice day
So now you have all of this new production capacity and are faced with losing 95% of your business and probably have a nice big loan to still pay off from new equipment and buildings that you purchased to meet Walmart's needs. Better to take a smaller loss and hope things get better than go out of business right away and be in debt that much more.
Whether or not things really work out like that, I can't say from experience.. that's just the type of thing I've heard and it seems to make sense.
I'll give Best Buy one thing over Circuit City.. at least they still stock PC software. My local Circuit Shitty stopped doing that at least a year ago, dunno about others.
:)
They also seem to do a better job of stocking PC games than my local gamestop. I recently went to pick up BF2 Special Forces and while gamestop was sold out (didn't know for sure when more were coming in), Best Buy had about 10 copies for $5 less even.
Other than that, I don't really care for Best Buy. Back before I went to college several years ago, it used to be one of my favorite stores and I was disappointed that my college town didn't have one. After that, one of us changed because stopped missing Best Buy completely until just when I couldn't find Special Forces
Linksys must be a popular brand one to have issues with.
I got a WRT54GS a while back and a wireless card to go with it because, well, that's kinda handy when you buy a wireless router.
Anyway, there were 3 or 4 rebates involved.
- 1 for the router from Circuit City, went through fine and relatively quick
- 1 for the router from Linksys, went through fine (I think) but took forever
- 1 for the WMP54GS from Linksys, they denied this and said it was a duplicate claim (of the router)
There may have been another for the WMP54GS from Circuit City but I don't recall for sure. If so, it went through without problems.
Now, when I called up to complain, they were actually pretty nice and helpful. They gave me info on how to resubmit it even though this was the one that required the original UPC. I don't think I ever did get it. I kind of lost track because I bought a WMP54G to use with my DS a couple weeks later which also had a rebate offer and I think I just got that last one. I decided it wasn't worth any more of my time to fight over since it was only for $10 but it did lead me to the decision that I don't plan on buying anything else from Circuit City where the rebate is a deciding factor.
I wouldn't hold my breath. It seems that every group that tried tunneling the DS has given up.
I like the comparison to the UMD.. still haven't figured out the point of the comparison to chewed gum though.
That's "Professional Edition". Someone at MS just got the acronym wrong.
Kinda reminds me of the plot of Resident Evil 4. :) I'm sure I read some research notes in that game that mentioned something like this as validation of the palagas taking over people's minds.
I'm pretty sure I saw a tower case in the picture of his desk but I can't get to it now. Surely he could sell one of them. I had the same thoughts when I saw the pictures... looks like he needs to prioritize but I guess if you can build some cool furniture out of free fedex boxes, why bother spending money.
Speaking of problems, when I installed Mandriva2005 on my PC, it detected my monitor as CMC 17" LCD or some crap like that.
:)
So I ended up with
Modelname "CMC 17" LCD"
in xorg.conf. That didn't work so well.
Other than that, everything else worked fine.
Oh, and I was a little disappointed that postgres didn't seem to come with the dvd download edition any more.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
:)
Kind of off topic but since this thread is about giving people unwanted criticism, shouldn't that be 10 types of people?
Anyway, I'm with the grandparent. Computer languages have far less exceptions than English. I have a huge list of confusing bits of the English language at work. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is "The buck does funny things when it sees the does". Same spelling, entirely different meaning based on the context.
I guess the assignment/equals operator issue of some languages would fall into that type of category but that's the only one I can think of.
Maybe you should check a few pictures in his post... he's not talking about someone that's 15lbs over their supposedly ideal weight.
That sounds like a good deal then. I haven't used iTunes or anything else before so I don't really know all the specifics of how some parts work.
I can't find the article I saw yesterday, just a quote from it. So maybe it was poorly written/misleading and has been corrected.
I saw a story about this on yahoo last night (can't find it now but I think I have the link at home).
I thought that once said it was 6.99 per month or $60 annualy (didn't mention the 4.99 price) and it also said something about the files expiring after a month so you would have to renew them.
It sounded like a really crappy deal compared to how it comes off in this article.
Did anyone else see that or was I just halucinating?
Why are you sending sensitive information over email presumably unencrypted?
Because it's supposed to be secure as long as it doesn't leave the server (i.e. communication with co-workers). Plus, people store documents and such in Groupwise, it's not just email messages.
How's that work exactly? I've heard people at my school mention that but I assume there has to be some kind of good reason.
Surely someone can't just call up and say 'hey, I want to see all of this person's email'.
I can guarantee that there's all kinds of sensetive information floating around on our email servers that shouldn't be given to the public.
Where do you draw the line? If email is public information, what about everything stored on file servers and in databases.. is that public too?
"To achieve this, the copyright holder can either upload the file to the guy (entrapment), or download from the guy (the guy does nothing wrong in this case as explained above), or obtain the cooperation of the user's ISP to do massively intrusive monitoring."
I may be wrong but I thought the issue was distributing the work without permission. So in your example, when the copyright holder uploads the file to the guy, he's done nothing wrong. The copyright holder is distributing their work. Whether they do it for free or collect money should be irrelevant.
The problem is when they "download from the guy" because then he is redistributing their work without their permission. It doesn't matter if he's redistributing it back to them or his friend down the street.
"If "Random Blockbuster-Wannabee with No Plot or Acting" movie were leaked, people download it, and word-of-mouth spreads that sitting through it is worse than catching herpes from an morbidly-obese partner with deadly body odor so that many people that would have risked buying tickets movie-unseen decide not to, that's real damage."
So if a movie gets a bad review, we should lock up the reviewer because that deprived the movie company of some profit? That's a pretty shaky argument in my opinion. You could just as easily say a good movie is leaked, creating positive word-of-mouth so more people go watch the movie in the theater. The real damage is people who download the movie and like it but have no need to pay for it since they just saw it for free.
"One of the reasons I quit was dealing with unrealistic expectations. Customers would often live far from civilization and complain they had poor reception."
Two points:
1. Where do you think people got those expectations (from the company's advertising)
2. "Far from civilization" is where I may need my cell phone the most. Say my car breaks down on the interstate in the middle of nowhere.
I was reading a joke/story about that the other day.
A family was watching tv when a Viagra commercial came on. It showed some guy running down the street with a big smile on his face.
So the kid asks his dad 'Dad, would you be that happy if you got rid of your heartburn?'
I don't think they'll have any long-winding trademark lawsuits over Mandriva.
Sudden lack of respect you say? Have you been forgetting to shower lately?
On a more serious note, it sounds like some of the companies you support are cheap and maybe not willing to pay up to really fix things. Whether it's from the company being stingy or incompetence, I can't really say but if you continuously show up to fix things when they break, people may start to get the impression that you're not completely fixing their problems.
"Why does a school need our SSNs? Why does anybody outside the government?"
I believe in many cases (e.g. student worker, financial aid recipient), they need it for tax reporting purposes.
Do you honestly thing the thumb stylus is better than an anlog stick or is this just flame bait?
Not only is it lacking in feedback but it's also awkward (at least for me) to have my thumb placed in the middle of the DS while I'm also trying to hold it and keep a finger on the left shoulder button.
I used it through most of Mario DS and definitely preferred it to the digital pad but I'd take a good analog stick any day.
"The DS has these few great games"
You know, you could've left out great and that statement would still be true. My biggest gripe is that there aren't really that many games and only a few that I'm interested.
Then take a look at a lot of the games (e.g. WarioWare Touched and Yoshi's Touch and Go), they're so short and simple that they hardly even feel like a full game.
Mario is an obvious exception but every other DS game I've played left me feeling like it was slapped together and rushed out so they would have something to release but didn't have the depth that a good game should have.