Since it'd be burned in circles rather than lines it'd probably be best specified in dots per square inch, and since burned dots on the label surface are likely much bigger than dots in the recording medium the effective resolution may be a lot less than on the data surface. The burning software would have to convert a scan-line square image into a circular representation.
...he told me to stick my fingers in my ears or to listen to music...I'm unable to concentrate on work when I have music playing : I love my tunes so much that I generally need to be able to dive into them fully. Impossible to concentrate on work...
Obviously you aren't giving his suggestion sufficient consideration. Have you tried listening to music you don't like? I thought not. Be more considerate of your colleague.
Cops would no longer have to catch someone speeding, they would just have to link the illegal speed with the vehical and send the ticket in the mail.
I'm having a hard time getting too upset over that possibility. Frankly, if it worked reliably, and only reported when there was a violation, I'd be all for it. And while we're at it, how 'bout ticketing people who drive too close to the vehicle in front of them. Or change lanes too often.
Amy
250 hours... a perspective
on
Borg Cube Case
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The average American will watch 250 hours of television in about 2 months.
Oh, but we're all too cultured and intelligent to watch TV, right? My ass. There's too much pop culture knowledge represented here for me to believe that.
Okay, a few of us really don't watch TV. Okay, but 250 hours / 9 months is still less than an hour per day. How many of us can say we wasted less than an hour per day in this and other stupid forums? Is slashdot really more useful than doing creative projects?
I was on the receiving end of the "doesn't have a life" comments when my LEGO project was slashdotted. The most flippant of the comments came from those with 2900 posts showing in their user profiles on various forums. Wanna know what that looks like outside the cyberdork universe?
I still have my search agents active. About half the emails I get contain a single job posting from Home Career Search. Not that my search agents are so restrictive that's all they find. They normally return dozens of hits over a large geographic area, and if I go to the site and run them manually, sure enough there are dozens of hits.
So why am I getting these single-posting results every other time I get agent emails? I asked Monster. Repeatedly. Finally they told me I was getting these because they match keyword searches specified in my agents, and they told me they allow work-at-home listings that meet their standards: a money-back guarantee, mention of their fee in the listing, and contact info.
Forgetting for a moment that the majority of the work-at-home listings (they're almost all herbalife, BTW) don't meet these requirements, the ones I get as email ads do. Mention of fee: check. Money-back guarantee: check. Contact info: check.
Still, why do I get these all by themselves? This one company (homecs.com--Home Career Search) apparently gets preferrential treatment.
This is what monster.com has become. A tool of the work-at-home hucksters.
I think Napster2's problem, and what will limit iTunes even within the iPod market, is simply how much the stuff costs relative to physical media. I know that many people, myself included, aren't really willing to pay $10+ for only the bits when the (higher quality) physical media is similarly priced.
It seems the norm here to assume what's true for me is true for everyone. On this point (value of bits vs value of full media) you are in the minority. For most people the mp3 (or aac) copy is just as good, particularly if the full media isn't around to compare to. The remaining issues are liner notes and instant gratification. The latter wins.
I'm also in the minority in that I'd rather pay (say) $14 for a CD (and rip it myself) than $10 for the compressed bits. It's my fear that the popularity of compressed formats may eventually make the uncompressed versions obsolete (from a market perspective) and unavailable.
But I do use iTunes. I use it to, for example, fill out "greatest hits" collections. If there are 3 tracks that should have made it to the greatest hits collection but didn't, and there's room, I'll burn a new disc with greatest hits plus three. In the value of media vs value of bits comparison here, it may be $3 vs $14-$42 (for 1-3 additional CDs).
Metallica_-_Ride_the_Lightning_01.mp3 can contain anything.
Perhaps, but if it's in a directory with seven similarly-named files, all about the size of 128K rock-tune-length mp3 files, in a directory called "Ride_the_Lightning" with other directories called "Master_of_Puppets" and "Kill_em_All", in a directory called "Metalica", accessed by 421 users through kaaza, it begins to look like you're serving music files.
IANAL but since these RIAA lawsuits are civil and not criminal
If these cases are civil and not criminal, the burden of proof is more likely than not rather than beyond a reasonable doubt.
If I own Metallica's Ride the Lightning album and my friend has already ripped it to mp3 for my player, its not illegal for me to download the mp3 from him.
That's your opinion. It isn't universally accepted. According to the letter of the law you are allowed to make copies of your media for your use. It doesn't allow for your friend to make copies of your media, even if the end result is that only you end up with a copy.
Your honor, my friend was going to delete it from his machine when he was done copying it for me just isn't very convincing. Remeber, in a civil case the burden of proof is only more likely than not.
My local UPN station (Detroit) preempts UPN programming more often than they play it. Seems they'd rather be a sports channel. Even if I didn't find the detox scenes and other fluff kinda silly I'd have a hard time getting into a program with an unpredictable schedule.
Amy
Most comments I've read seem to place "reasonable" at $200 and "ideal" at $150 or $100.
Most comments here (and similar sites) indicate more price sensitivity than Apple markets to. The demographic here includes a large component of un- or under-employed, and a lot of megahertz/gigabyte-for-the-dollar optimizers. That's not the Apple demographic.
For the gainfully employed $250 for a desirable tech gadget isn't unreasonable. $50 isn't a huge sum to Apple's demographic.
I ordered one in pink. $250 doesn't even qualify as a major purchase for me, so buying the smaller iPod I've been waiting for was a no-brainer. 4G is plenty to bring a week's worth of listening to work, and 40G wouldn't hold my entire collection, anyway.
Folks who wonder about the $250 price for the mini iPod just don't get it. Likely the same folks who wondered about the original iPod's price. Given its market share I think the naysayers are just going to have to scratch their heads and move on.
For $250 I get a week's worth of tunes at work in a player that integrates well with my Mac, works like an Apple, looks really sweet, and is tiny. I've been waiting for a smaller iPod. Apple delivered. What's not to love?
I ordered one in pink. Engraving was free. An unexpected bonus.
the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.
This would require the respondant to flag which part of the email he's responding to, no? And he'd have to do that multiple times to respond to multiple points, no? That's probably more effort than almost anyone will expend.
I've found that if you include multiple points in your message you'll get a response on only one. Generally the last. Even if it's not the most important. Odds of a useful response increase the more technical your conversation partner is, but almost nobody outside online forum junkies responds point-by-point. Very few even correctly identify what they're responding to even if they're responding to just one point. I don't see a piece of software, particularly a Microsoft piece of software, making this easy enough for the masses any time soon.
If they offered network shows without commercials, I'd be willing to pay like 50 cents to watch each one.
You're dicounting the probability of ad creep. Been to a movie lately? Despite paying $9 for the ticket you still get commercials. Not just for coming movies but for soft drinks and websites.
Why? Because the theater chains think that despite paying $9 for a ticket you'll be willing to watch a couple commercials. When you get used to that they'll find more ways to slip in some ads. When you get used to those they'll add a couple more. Repeat until the medium is useless.
Withness cable TV. It was supposed to have fewer ads because it wasn't free, right?
So they give you on-demand TV shows and you pay 50 cents per half-hour show. That'll last till they get some market share, and then there'll be an ad or two. Short at first, so you won't object too much. Then they'll get longer. Then there'll be a couple more. Soon enough you're paying 50 cents for 20 minutes of programming.
It's also only a matter of time before you must watch commercials from tivo. Not because broadcasters need you to watch them but because tivo can make another buck making you watch them.
There is a joint report on television "clutter" generated each year by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Association of National Advertisers, Inc. (ANA) entitled the Television Commercial Monitoring Report. The latest report I found was for 2002, reporting on 2001 television programming. If you look for the report you'll find a large PDF, but here's a summary.
"The report showed that on average, non-program minutes reached an all-time high. Of the six dayparts monitored, three set clutter records-early morning (18:02 minutes per hour from 17:44 in 2000), daytime (20:57 in 2001 from 20:03 in 2000), and local news (17:10 from 17:05 in 2000). Although not at record levels for their dayparts, non-program minutes were also high for late night and network news. Prime boasted the only decrease-down to 16:08 from 16:17 last year, the lowest it's been since 1998."
I've occaisionally wondered how advertisers think they can get their message accross in such a crowded commercial environment, and if you read the page you'll find that the advertisers have the same concern, and may actually be arresting the networks' drive toward more and more ad time.
Last year I timed the commercials and found the major networks (ABC, FOX, UPN, etc) all had 16 minutes of commercials per hour (or was it 18?), if you don't count the split screen during credits as commercials. I timed them again at the beginning of the fall season and found it hadn't changed.
So the timing didn't change this year, but in a Mash special last year I cought mention that episodes used to be 26 minutes and 20 seconds. And Mash isn't an ancient series.
This year I also checked the duration and timing of commercials within episodes and confirmed something that seemed obvious: the commercials get closer and closer together toward the end of the program. News programs are the worst, with programming segments at the end of the program being shorter than the commercials.
I've been meaning to set up a web site with history and statistical data on commercial TV but I couldn't really care less anymore. I've given up on TV.
Amy
There's still crap on my TV
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 4, Funny
This hasn't improved the programming any. Better luck next time?
Amy
I've never downloaded music. Ever. Still, I don't buy many CDs these days. I used to. I have 500 of them. At one point I was buying several per week.
I'm the ideal music consumer. I love music, I earn good money (well, sort of), and I recognize the value of intellectual property (I produce it), so I don't steal it.
Problem is, I've run out of stuff to buy. There isn't a single listenable commercial radio station on the air. They all play the same mediocre stuff, over and over, plus a lot of really crass, insulting commercials.
The online, officially-sanctioned music scene isn't much better. There are crappy, commercial-encumbered interfaces that make available a small number of highly-compressed, proprietary-format, selected-for-the-idiot-masses crap, and there are collections of MP3s of varying quality and completeness in a bazillion poorly-fornmatted, not-enough-information-to-make-good-selections, lucky-if-you-even-encounter them places.
In short, I don't have the patience of God, so my access to new music is limited. Music availability has been pop-cultured into mediocrity.
If record companies want me as a customer, and I used to be a very good customer, they need to fix this. I want a means of previewing available music without ads, spyware or hoops to jump through, and I'm not going to give my social security number, mother's maden name or a tissue sample to get it. Make it proprietary and less-than-audiophile quality to protect your sales, but make it easy to get at, and give me more than mass-market crap.
I'd also suggest fixing the homogenization of radio, but I believe all ad-supported media is beyond saving.
A quick search told me there were 4 billion CDRs purchased last year. The claim was that 250 million were used to copy music, and the portion that was piracy was not specified. 250 million out of 4 billion doesn't seem like an unreasonable claim.
This reply seems to indicate that the complaining customer claimed the CD didn't play in multiple players. If the players that won't play it really are a small minority (and that's not hard to believe) I'd also be tempted to think this complaint was nonsense and that the complaintant was a whiner. And if the complaintant really had difficulty but resorted to exaggeration, perhaps he'll recognize that it didn't help his credibility and will make his next complaint more reasoned and mature.
So where's the letter that prompted this?
For the record, I don't think "fair use" obligates record companies to make copying easy. As long as a real-time copy can still be made via a CD player's audio out, as it's been done for decades. I also don't think they're obligated to make their product work in all new products that come along (computers, game consoles, etc).
But if I bought a disc I couldn't play in a device it was intended for (an audio CD player) I'd want my money back. And if I couldn't make a *digital* copy, even if only in real-time, I'd buy fewer CDs. And if I complained I'd expect a more professional response.
Amy
The first time (and last time) I used paypal they attempted to steal $500. They ran some kind of mickey mouse security check on my account *after* the charge went through, incorrectly concluded it was fraudulent, and asked the seller to return the money. If they thought my card was used fraudulently, you'd think they'd want the money back so they could reverse the charge, right? That's not what they had in mind. They told the seller *I* was the criminal and kept the money for themselves. Not only did they ignore my requests for help, but as a delaying tactic they told the seller to tell me there was no problem with the transaction.
www.paypalwarning.com has hundreds of similar stories in their "wall of shame".
Amy
Slashdot Mirror
Amy
Amy
Amy
Amy
Oh, but we're all too cultured and intelligent to watch TV, right? My ass. There's too much pop culture knowledge represented here for me to believe that.
Okay, a few of us really don't watch TV. Okay, but 250 hours / 9 months is still less than an hour per day. How many of us can say we wasted less than an hour per day in this and other stupid forums? Is slashdot really more useful than doing creative projects?
I was on the receiving end of the "doesn't have a life" comments when my LEGO project was slashdotted. The most flippant of the comments came from those with 2900 posts showing in their user profiles on various forums. Wanna know what that looks like outside the cyberdork universe?
Amy
So why am I getting these single-posting results every other time I get agent emails? I asked Monster. Repeatedly. Finally they told me I was getting these because they match keyword searches specified in my agents, and they told me they allow work-at-home listings that meet their standards: a money-back guarantee, mention of their fee in the listing, and contact info.
Forgetting for a moment that the majority of the work-at-home listings (they're almost all herbalife, BTW) don't meet these requirements, the ones I get as email ads do. Mention of fee: check. Money-back guarantee: check. Contact info: check.
Still, why do I get these all by themselves? This one company (homecs.com--Home Career Search) apparently gets preferrential treatment.
This is what monster.com has become. A tool of the work-at-home hucksters.
Amy
Amy
It seems the norm here to assume what's true for me is true for everyone. On this point (value of bits vs value of full media) you are in the minority. For most people the mp3 (or aac) copy is just as good, particularly if the full media isn't around to compare to. The remaining issues are liner notes and instant gratification. The latter wins.
I'm also in the minority in that I'd rather pay (say) $14 for a CD (and rip it myself) than $10 for the compressed bits. It's my fear that the popularity of compressed formats may eventually make the uncompressed versions obsolete (from a market perspective) and unavailable.
But I do use iTunes. I use it to, for example, fill out "greatest hits" collections. If there are 3 tracks that should have made it to the greatest hits collection but didn't, and there's room, I'll burn a new disc with greatest hits plus three. In the value of media vs value of bits comparison here, it may be $3 vs $14-$42 (for 1-3 additional CDs).
Amy
Perhaps, but if it's in a directory with seven similarly-named files, all about the size of 128K rock-tune-length mp3 files, in a directory called "Ride_the_Lightning" with other directories called "Master_of_Puppets" and "Kill_em_All", in a directory called "Metalica", accessed by 421 users through kaaza, it begins to look like you're serving music files.
If these cases are civil and not criminal, the burden of proof is more likely than not rather than beyond a reasonable doubt.
Amy
That's your opinion. It isn't universally accepted. According to the letter of the law you are allowed to make copies of your media for your use. It doesn't allow for your friend to make copies of your media, even if the end result is that only you end up with a copy.
Your honor, my friend was going to delete it from his machine when he was done copying it for me just isn't very convincing. Remeber, in a civil case the burden of proof is only more likely than not.
Amy
Who do I dislike more than spammers and junk faxers? Suits. Forbes' readership.
Amy
My local UPN station (Detroit) preempts UPN programming more often than they play it. Seems they'd rather be a sports channel. Even if I didn't find the detox scenes and other fluff kinda silly I'd have a hard time getting into a program with an unpredictable schedule. Amy
Most comments I've read seem to place "reasonable" at $200 and "ideal" at $150 or $100.
Most comments here (and similar sites) indicate more price sensitivity than Apple markets to. The demographic here includes a large component of un- or under-employed, and a lot of megahertz/gigabyte-for-the-dollar optimizers. That's not the Apple demographic.
For the gainfully employed $250 for a desirable tech gadget isn't unreasonable. $50 isn't a huge sum to Apple's demographic.
I ordered one in pink. $250 doesn't even qualify as a major purchase for me, so buying the smaller iPod I've been waiting for was a no-brainer. 4G is plenty to bring a week's worth of listening to work, and 40G wouldn't hold my entire collection, anyway.
Amy
Folks who wonder about the $250 price for the mini iPod just don't get it. Likely the same folks who wondered about the original iPod's price. Given its market share I think the naysayers are just going to have to scratch their heads and move on.
For $250 I get a week's worth of tunes at work in a player that integrates well with my Mac, works like an Apple, looks really sweet, and is tiny. I've been waiting for a smaller iPod. Apple delivered. What's not to love?
I ordered one in pink. Engraving was free. An unexpected bonus.
Amy
This would require the respondant to flag which part of the email he's responding to, no? And he'd have to do that multiple times to respond to multiple points, no? That's probably more effort than almost anyone will expend.
I've found that if you include multiple points in your message you'll get a response on only one. Generally the last. Even if it's not the most important. Odds of a useful response increase the more technical your conversation partner is, but almost nobody outside online forum junkies responds point-by-point. Very few even correctly identify what they're responding to even if they're responding to just one point. I don't see a piece of software, particularly a Microsoft piece of software, making this easy enough for the masses any time soon.
Amy
You're dicounting the probability of ad creep. Been to a movie lately? Despite paying $9 for the ticket you still get commercials. Not just for coming movies but for soft drinks and websites.
Why? Because the theater chains think that despite paying $9 for a ticket you'll be willing to watch a couple commercials. When you get used to that they'll find more ways to slip in some ads. When you get used to those they'll add a couple more. Repeat until the medium is useless.
Withness cable TV. It was supposed to have fewer ads because it wasn't free, right?
So they give you on-demand TV shows and you pay 50 cents per half-hour show. That'll last till they get some market share, and then there'll be an ad or two. Short at first, so you won't object too much. Then they'll get longer. Then there'll be a couple more. Soon enough you're paying 50 cents for 20 minutes of programming.
It's also only a matter of time before you must watch commercials from tivo. Not because broadcasters need you to watch them but because tivo can make another buck making you watch them.
Amy
There is a joint report on television "clutter" generated each year by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Association of National Advertisers, Inc. (ANA) entitled the Television Commercial Monitoring Report. The latest report I found was for 2002, reporting on 2001 television programming. If you look for the report you'll find a large PDF, but here's a summary.
quoting http://www.ana.net/news/2002/02_14_02.cfm...
"The report showed that on average, non-program minutes reached an all-time high. Of the six dayparts monitored, three set clutter records-early morning (18:02 minutes per hour from 17:44 in 2000), daytime (20:57 in 2001 from 20:03 in 2000), and local news (17:10 from 17:05 in 2000). Although not at record levels for their dayparts, non-program minutes were also high for late night and network news. Prime boasted the only decrease-down to 16:08 from 16:17 last year, the lowest it's been since 1998."
I've occaisionally wondered how advertisers think they can get their message accross in such a crowded commercial environment, and if you read the page you'll find that the advertisers have the same concern, and may actually be arresting the networks' drive toward more and more ad time.
Amy
Last year I timed the commercials and found the major networks (ABC, FOX, UPN, etc) all had 16 minutes of commercials per hour (or was it 18?), if you don't count the split screen during credits as commercials. I timed them again at the beginning of the fall season and found it hadn't changed.
So the timing didn't change this year, but in a Mash special last year I cought mention that episodes used to be 26 minutes and 20 seconds. And Mash isn't an ancient series.
This year I also checked the duration and timing of commercials within episodes and confirmed something that seemed obvious: the commercials get closer and closer together toward the end of the program. News programs are the worst, with programming segments at the end of the program being shorter than the commercials.
I've been meaning to set up a web site with history and statistical data on commercial TV but I couldn't really care less anymore. I've given up on TV.
Amy
This hasn't improved the programming any. Better luck next time? Amy
I'm the ideal music consumer. I love music, I earn good money (well, sort of), and I recognize the value of intellectual property (I produce it), so I don't steal it.
Problem is, I've run out of stuff to buy. There isn't a single listenable commercial radio station on the air. They all play the same mediocre stuff, over and over, plus a lot of really crass, insulting commercials.
The online, officially-sanctioned music scene isn't much better. There are crappy, commercial-encumbered interfaces that make available a small number of highly-compressed, proprietary-format, selected-for-the-idiot-masses crap, and there are collections of MP3s of varying quality and completeness in a bazillion poorly-fornmatted, not-enough-information-to-make-good-selections, lucky-if-you-even-encounter them places.
In short, I don't have the patience of God, so my access to new music is limited. Music availability has been pop-cultured into mediocrity.
If record companies want me as a customer, and I used to be a very good customer, they need to fix this. I want a means of previewing available music without ads, spyware or hoops to jump through, and I'm not going to give my social security number, mother's maden name or a tissue sample to get it. Make it proprietary and less-than-audiophile quality to protect your sales, but make it easy to get at, and give me more than mass-market crap.
I'd also suggest fixing the homogenization of radio, but I believe all ad-supported media is beyond saving.
Amy
Does the right to make copies for personal use mandate that record companies facilitate making perfect copies?
I don't think it does.
Amy
Amy
Amy
This reply seems to indicate that the complaining customer claimed the CD didn't play in multiple players. If the players that won't play it really are a small minority (and that's not hard to believe) I'd also be tempted to think this complaint was nonsense and that the complaintant was a whiner. And if the complaintant really had difficulty but resorted to exaggeration, perhaps he'll recognize that it didn't help his credibility and will make his next complaint more reasoned and mature. So where's the letter that prompted this? For the record, I don't think "fair use" obligates record companies to make copying easy. As long as a real-time copy can still be made via a CD player's audio out, as it's been done for decades. I also don't think they're obligated to make their product work in all new products that come along (computers, game consoles, etc). But if I bought a disc I couldn't play in a device it was intended for (an audio CD player) I'd want my money back. And if I couldn't make a *digital* copy, even if only in real-time, I'd buy fewer CDs. And if I complained I'd expect a more professional response. Amy
The first time (and last time) I used paypal they attempted to steal $500. They ran some kind of mickey mouse security check on my account *after* the charge went through, incorrectly concluded it was fraudulent, and asked the seller to return the money. If they thought my card was used fraudulently, you'd think they'd want the money back so they could reverse the charge, right? That's not what they had in mind. They told the seller *I* was the criminal and kept the money for themselves. Not only did they ignore my requests for help, but as a delaying tactic they told the seller to tell me there was no problem with the transaction. www.paypalwarning.com has hundreds of similar stories in their "wall of shame". Amy