I use DiscSox http://www.discsox.com/ for my audio CDs and spindles for most of my data discs. The DiscSox are so much more compact and light than jewel cases (even slim) to you can put a lot of discs in a small space. They are easy to flip through like old LP bins.
B
Many of us live in places where cable, even digital cable, is just lame compared to the DBS offerings. Where I am it costs more and offers less than DTV or Dish.
If DirecTV and Dish Network would support CableCard, we'd have a winner, but there is no indication that this will happen. This is also a big deal for CableCard ready HDTVs. It sure would be nice if CableCard extends to DBS.
I love by DTiVos...
B
You are not a typical music "consumer." Most people can't tell the difference between 128kbps and vinyl or just don't care. Also, I'm sure you enjoy your LPs while in he car, at the gym etc...;-)
That said, I had some what of a similar experience as you. I started with a sizeable LP collection in the early 80s and started buying CDs in the mid-80s, ultimately amassing a 450 CD over 10 years or so. In the late 90s, I just stopped listening to my CDs and also stopped buying any more. Where I used to buy almost one CD a week, I now bought less than one a month. That was until I bought into the whole iPod thing and rediscovered my exisiting CD collection. Now I am buying ~3 CDs per month, and am also buying individual tracks from iTMS or Rhapsody.
You may ask why pay $0.99 for a compressed track? The answer is simple, not all good songs are worth the outrageous prices the RIAA member companies want for an "album" that includes them. A long time ago, there were these things called singles which came on smaller vinyl discs. The $0.99 download model brings back this old business model, except now every track can be a single, including the huge back catalog.
Who says the CPU has to do all the work? Hardware acceleration via CODEC chips or in the GPU is waht allowed MPEG-2 to take hold. For example, the stand-alone TiVo units do MPEG-2 coding/decoding this way with underpowered CPUs. Before that everyone was using MPEG-1 which was inexpensive to decode. Doesn't fix your iPaq though.
Can you be sure that Apple didn't develop or buy up a whole bunch of H.264 hardware accelerators for their new device, whatever it might be, to keep the price low... They sure did that with Samsung flash memory for the iPod nano.
More importantly: PDF files will generally retain formatting, even if you open them on widely different machines. DOC files just won't.
Re the Mac, I find it more important that PS/PDF is built in to the the system at a very low level. This helps keep the Mac WYSIWYG, where Windows can only hope to by WYSIHCTWYMG. "What you see is hopefully close to what you might get". On Windows embedding an EPS file into a Word document shows you a ridiculous TIFF preview file as a placeholder and will only print it properly on a PS printer.
Only one problem with this. We're not talking about TWX, we're taling about WMG. TWX spun off WMG earlier this year.
Unlike TWX, WMG is about a $3B revenue company that is losing money, or to be generous is breaking even. They lost $90M in their last reported quarter.
B
I guess it's a problem with the way I have iTunes configured since the last two weeks I have only got about 10 minutes, but I checked and you are right there are other parts online, just not in my iTunes Library.
While zlib doesn't support deflate64, such support is already available in info-zip unzip. If clamd were to use unzip instead this particular problem would not be an issue.
Hence the shuffle terminology, not random play. It's like shuffling a deck of cards and going through it in that new random order, rather than picking songs at random from a hat and putting them back when you are done.
$9.99 for a new release on disc does seem reasonable. Particularly since at least one label seems to be happy selling stuff direct at $5.99 including shipping! http://www.yourmusic.com/ from BMG has a wide selection, although not the latest hits, many releases were hits 6-12 months ago, and it's a far cry from $15.99 or $17.99 they want retail.
I used to buy all my CDs at Newbury Comics in the Boston area throughout grad school from 1989-1996. They often had $10.88 sales and it was easy to find $2-$3 coupons that would generally allow you to get mosts discs for less than $10. I amassed at 500 CD collection over these years. I stopped buying music for years afterwards, not because I could not afford it, but simply because I didn't feel I was getting a good value for my money. I would buy
Fast forward to 2005, I'm now once again buying typically 4-6 new albums of music per month. Why? I can impulse buy an album on iTMS for under $10, or if it's a more poular release and BestBuy has it for ~$10 I might get the physical CD. Or, I can buy an older release I liked but didn't think was a good value at $15+ for under $6 delivered from yourmusic. If yourmusic offered $3.99 downloads in an iPod compatible no heavy DRM format, I'd buy even more in a heartbeat. For any album over $15 I'll keep shopping or just wait until I can get one used cheaper.
I had its baby brother the S30S as my first MP3 player, and you're also right it's no iPod.:-)
I agree with you on the pros (battery life, expandability, etc...), but what really sold me on the iPod was the UI. iTunes is just so much easier to use than anything else. (IMHO of course). I started using iTunes and that got me to buy an iPod. Funny thing is I originally bought it to listen to audiobooks, but am now listening to more music than ever.
The overall experience of iTunes and iPod convinced me to give a Mac a chance for the first time in 15 years. I can't wait for the Intel Macs!
I'm a tech type, the most recent addition to the computing arsenal was an iBook G4. Why?
For one thing, I realized that most of what I needed the laptop for was web/email/Office based and that I could run all of those apps natively on a Mac. Many of the other apps I want to run fit in the engineering/IT stuff category you mention, and those I can run as well on the Mac as on linux since OS X is essentially BSD at the core.
For example, I rebuilt a custom app from work (that had already been ported from Windows to Linux) over to OS X in about 5 minutes after I got the iBook. For the few remaining commercial apps I use at work that don't have Mac versions (mainly microwave simulation stuff) I just VPN to work and use remote desktop from my office PC.
Granted with Crossover Office I probably could have done the same running the Windows version of Office on Linux, but I would still have to run the Windows version of Office and would not have gained the smoothness of user experience that is OS X:-(.
As ckaminski also points, out published prior art can only be used to invalidate a patent outright if it was published > 12 months before the patent in question was applied for, and it must contain ALL of the elements of the patent. e.g. if version 1.0 of the iPod interface didn't include all of the elements of the MS patent, but a later version did it could mean trouble. For most of the rest of the world, the fact that the iPod was sold in Nov 2001 means that its interface at that time can no longer be patented, by anyone.
Actually DP Review is where I came to the conclusion that Costco was fine for my purposes. Most of the articles on printing there end up with "I just take them to Costco" or "just take them to Costco".;-)
For 4x6 prints of the pictures I take of my little ones it's hard to beat the quality/price I get at Costco. Remember the OP was asking about the drugstore chains, and in my albeit limited experience Costco give better quality at much cheaper prices.
I should note however that for providing scanned photos on CD from 35 mm negatives, Costco sucks. They deliver low resolution highly compressed JPEGs. For that job, I find my local Longs drugs does a better job with their Frontier. I'm sure a pro lab could do even better, but my pictures usually aren't up to that standard.
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You can use any iPod with multiple computers. Just set it to manually manage music and it'll work fine with any machine you throw at it.
B
Flushed Away was 100% CG, in a typically Aardman style.
B
Not to mention RAM, an HDD, otpical drive, WiFi, etc... and a 10x shrink ray. All for that same $50.
B
I use DiscSox http://www.discsox.com/ for my audio CDs and spindles for most of my data discs. The DiscSox are so much more compact and light than jewel cases (even slim) to you can put a lot of discs in a small space. They are easy to flip through like old LP bins. B
I can state that I saw two HD-DVD players on the sales floor at my local Best Buy today, there was no price on them, but they were there... B
Many of us live in places where cable, even digital cable, is just lame compared to the DBS offerings. Where I am it costs more and offers less than DTV or Dish. If DirecTV and Dish Network would support CableCard, we'd have a winner, but there is no indication that this will happen. This is also a big deal for CableCard ready HDTVs. It sure would be nice if CableCard extends to DBS. I love by DTiVos... B
The iMacs are shipping today, not in Feb. B
You are not a typical music "consumer." Most people can't tell the difference between 128kbps and vinyl or just don't care. Also, I'm sure you enjoy your LPs while in he car, at the gym etc... ;-)
That said, I had some what of a similar experience as you. I started with a sizeable LP collection in the early 80s and started buying CDs in the mid-80s, ultimately amassing a 450 CD over 10 years or so. In the late 90s, I just stopped listening to my CDs and also stopped buying any more. Where I used to buy almost one CD a week, I now bought less than one a month. That was until I bought into the whole iPod thing and rediscovered my exisiting CD collection. Now I am buying ~3 CDs per month, and am also buying individual tracks from iTMS or Rhapsody.
You may ask why pay $0.99 for a compressed track? The answer is simple, not all good songs are worth the outrageous prices the RIAA member companies want for an "album" that includes them. A long time ago, there were these things called singles which came on smaller vinyl discs. The $0.99 download model brings back this old business model, except now every track can be a single, including the huge back catalog.
B
Who says the CPU has to do all the work? Hardware acceleration via CODEC chips or in the GPU is waht allowed MPEG-2 to take hold. For example, the stand-alone TiVo units do MPEG-2 coding/decoding this way with underpowered CPUs. Before that everyone was using MPEG-1 which was inexpensive to decode. Doesn't fix your iPaq though.
Can you be sure that Apple didn't develop or buy up a whole bunch of H.264 hardware accelerators for their new device, whatever it might be, to keep the price low... They sure did that with Samsung flash memory for the iPod nano.
B
More importantly: PDF files will generally retain formatting, even if you open them on widely different machines. DOC files just won't.
Re the Mac, I find it more important that PS/PDF is built in to the the system at a very low level. This helps keep the Mac WYSIWYG, where Windows can only hope to by WYSIHCTWYMG. "What you see is hopefully close to what you might get". On Windows embedding an EPS file into a Word document shows you a ridiculous TIFF preview file as a placeholder and will only print it properly on a PS printer.
B
Only one problem with this. We're not talking about TWX, we're taling about WMG. TWX spun off WMG earlier this year. Unlike TWX, WMG is about a $3B revenue company that is losing money, or to be generous is breaking even. They lost $90M in their last reported quarter. B
Yeah, that's 'cause by the time it was released it didn't have half the features originally planned for Habitat. ;-)
B
Somewhere around here I have a clear QLink paperweight with my screen name on it. Can't remember what I did to earn it though after all these years...
Saw an old box for PC-Link in a pile of junk in my garage the other day too.
Ah Q-link and BBSes, those were the days...
B
You are right Office only showed up in 1990, however Word and Excel for the Mac were originally released in 1985.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel
I should know as I extensively used them in my first love affair with the Mac platform in undergraduate school 1984-1989.
B
I guess it's a problem with the way I have iTunes configured since the last two weeks I have only got about 10 minutes, but I checked and you are right there are other parts online, just not in my iTunes Library.
Thanks!
B
The Science Friday podcast is just a short excerpt. The full show is still only available through audible.com.
B
While zlib doesn't support deflate64, such support is already available in info-zip unzip. If clamd were to use unzip instead this particular problem would not be an issue.
BIt would seem that the incremental cost is particularly low if the delivery is a digital download with no middle man. Then, more volume=pure profit.
BHence the shuffle terminology, not random play. It's like shuffling a deck of cards and going through it in that new random order, rather than picking songs at random from a hat and putting them back when you are done.
BI used to buy all my CDs at Newbury Comics in the Boston area throughout grad school from 1989-1996. They often had $10.88 sales and it was easy to find $2-$3 coupons that would generally allow you to get mosts discs for less than $10. I amassed at 500 CD collection over these years. I stopped buying music for years afterwards, not because I could not afford it, but simply because I didn't feel I was getting a good value for my money. I would buy
Fast forward to 2005, I'm now once again buying typically 4-6 new albums of music per month. Why? I can impulse buy an album on iTMS for under $10, or if it's a more poular release and BestBuy has it for ~$10 I might get the physical CD. Or, I can buy an older release I liked but didn't think was a good value at $15+ for under $6 delivered from yourmusic. If yourmusic offered $3.99 downloads in an iPod compatible no heavy DRM format, I'd buy even more in a heartbeat. For any album over $15 I'll keep shopping or just wait until I can get one used cheaper.
B
I had its baby brother the S30S as my first MP3 player, and you're also right it's no iPod. :-)
I agree with you on the pros (battery life, expandability, etc...), but what really sold me on the iPod was the UI. iTunes is just so much easier to use than anything else. (IMHO of course). I started using iTunes and that got me to buy an iPod. Funny thing is I originally bought it to listen to audiobooks, but am now listening to more music than ever.
The overall experience of iTunes and iPod convinced me to give a Mac a chance for the first time in 15 years. I can't wait for the Intel Macs!
BI'm a tech type, the most recent addition to the computing arsenal was an iBook G4. Why?
For one thing, I realized that most of what I needed the laptop for was web/email/Office based and that I could run all of those apps natively on a Mac. Many of the other apps I want to run fit in the engineering/IT stuff category you mention, and those I can run as well on the Mac as on linux since OS X is essentially BSD at the core.
For example, I rebuilt a custom app from work (that had already been ported from Windows to Linux) over to OS X in about 5 minutes after I got the iBook. For the few remaining commercial apps I use at work that don't have Mac versions (mainly microwave simulation stuff) I just VPN to work and use remote desktop from my office PC.
Granted with Crossover Office I probably could have done the same running the Windows version of Office on Linux, but I would still have to run the Windows version of Office and would not have gained the smoothness of user experience that is OS X :-( .
BAs ckaminski also points, out published prior art can only be used to invalidate a patent outright if it was published > 12 months before the patent in question was applied for, and it must contain ALL of the elements of the patent. e.g. if version 1.0 of the iPod interface didn't include all of the elements of the MS patent, but a later version did it could mean trouble. For most of the rest of the world, the fact that the iPod was sold in Nov 2001 means that its interface at that time can no longer be patented, by anyone.
BActually DP Review is where I came to the conclusion that Costco was fine for my purposes. Most of the articles on printing there end up with "I just take them to Costco" or "just take them to Costco". ;-)
For 4x6 prints of the pictures I take of my little ones it's hard to beat the quality/price I get at Costco. Remember the OP was asking about the drugstore chains, and in my albeit limited experience Costco give better quality at much cheaper prices.
I should note however that for providing scanned photos on CD from 35 mm negatives, Costco sucks. They deliver low resolution highly compressed JPEGs. For that job, I find my local Longs drugs does a better job with their Frontier. I'm sure a pro lab could do even better, but my pictures usually aren't up to that standard.
B