The part that the RIAA doesn't tell you is that every time you play a particular recording, it's like a free advertisement for that recording. ( At least until you play it so bleeping much that everybody's too sick of it to even consider buying their own copy, but that's a different rant.) Granted airplay (or clubplay) will probably boost sales of -insert group of the week here- more than an old Streisand album cut, but Babs (or more accurately her label) might still pick up another shekel or two because of the exposure. This is a holdover from when records needed radio worse than the other way around. Now the record companies figure they're in a strong enough position (partly as a result of being part of mega-conglomerates that can stuff the songs they want to plug into whatever their TV and movie divisions are filming that week, or onto one of their cable channels) to demand payment for everything short of walking into the record shop to browse.
Your restaurant analogy fails because as many other restaurants (whether selling Evian exclusively or not) as capitalists are willing to risk money on can be opened in the same geographical area as the first one, but once all the radio station licenses for a particular area have been allocated by the FCC you can't put another one on the air in that same area. So even if all the stations in your area are playing the same old -insert records you hate most here-, you can't start up another station to offer an alternative because you can't get a license; they're all already taken.
I'm not sure, but that may be quite insightful. I've gotta think about it a lot more. One thing for sure, if I ever go back into radio, that's gonna be lurking there in the back of my mind just waiting to come to the surface at all the worst times.
"I'm curious as to how you (or anyone else who would care to comment) separate the wheat from the chaff."
Once upon a time, this function was actually performed by radio station music directors and program directors (when allowed to by owners and general managers). If you think the stuff you heard on the air was bad, you should hear the other 90% that showed up in the mail every week that we had to sort through. It's amazing how many people think they've got any business making a record.
Too bad whoever produces those ads couldn't be bothered to worry about the audio portion. Even knowing it's supposed to be "BlackRocket", I still hear it as "flatrock", and wind up thinking of cows instead of computers.
You can buy a Chilton or a Haynes for your automobile a lot cheaper than aftermarket books on MS software, and they're a *lot* more informative and helpful in fixing problems.
Lots of stuff on eBay is more expensive than it seems that it should be.
Part of the problem is that the buyers are pitted against each other. A particular type of item, say a 2 Gig hard drive, will get bid up to 25, 30 , even 35 dollars (US), and then those who didn't "win" the auction rush off to bid up the next 2 Gig drive, and then the next one, and the next one, and new would-be buyers get added to the mob as time passes.
Compare this to the retail environment where Staples and Circuit City and Office Depot and Best Buys and so forth keep offering larger and larger drives at around the $100 price point and the store across the street doesn't wait for the first store to sell out their stock before offering a similar product but offers it at the same time for a few dollars less or with a bigger rebate, or offers the next size up for the same price. They compete for the buyers. In an auction, the buyers compete with each other for the "privilege" of purchasing a particular item, even though there are a dozen or more just like it in auctions ending within 24 hours of each other.
Also, older hardware is competed for by people trying to upgrade older systems. Socket 7 233MHz Pentiums go for the same as or more than Slot 1 233MHz Pentium IIs, Intel Overdrive and Evergreen upgrade packages for Socket 3 486 machines go for prices for which you can buy a Socket 7 motherboard *and* faster Pentium. Hard drives that fit under the 2.3 Gig or 8.4 Gig limits go for more than they should considering what 15, 20, 30, and 40 Gig drives sell for these days. If you want a 10 Gig drive cheap, you get trampled by people who don't know that they could buy a new (as in faster and with a warranty) drive for not much more than what they'll wind up spending and just use as much of it as their system can see for the time being until they upgrade to a new motherboard and/or OS that'll let them use all of it.
Re: Galaxy Class Starships
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Voyager Eulogy
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When exorcising Windows it's understood that only a low level format will do.
As the unjustly modded down for being off-topic poster of the parent of this comment observed, "It truly is peerless because you can't use their drives with anyone else (without buying an adapter from Iomega) or use anyone else's hard drives with Iomega (without buying the hard drive from Iomega). At least they are honest in their product labelling. Iomega's new peerless drive truly is peerless. What a wonderful example of doublespeak."
When I saw the heading about insurance catastrophes I thought it was going to be about nearly bankrupt dotcoms selling all their hardware on the black market, replacing it with old 286s and such, and hiring your friendly neighborhood arsonist.
"1. How much petroleum (fertiliser and fuel) and land use does it take to make a gallon of used french-fry oil?"
No more than it takes if you pour it out of the fryer into the garbage can or drain or whatever. This way you take something that already exists and, instead of just throwing it away, get more use out of it and keep it from clogging up municipal sewage systems as well, which is a real problem anywhere you have a restaurant or three.
Not to mention that the exhaust smells like french fries:-) (Really)
What GO does is to basically put 2 VCRs into one box so any given tape only contacts the heads of one of them at any one time and has to be ejected and inserted into the other to come into contact with any of its heads.
This is not the same as having separate record and playback heads on one video head drum.
"All VCRs are capable of simultaneously recording and playing back information at the same time."
In order to do that the VCR would need 2 video head drums so that the second could read what the first had just recorded. Either that or one horribly complicated video head drum with the tape wrapped completely around it.
When you watch what you record at the time that it's being recorded the video and audio signals are split into two streams, on of which goes to the audio and video heads, and the other of which goes out to the television.
A video head drum with a playback head right next to the record head (like three head audio recorders) would theoretically be possible (and maybe there are some high end commercial braodcast machines with them), but trying to build a VHS consumer deck with that would be an expensive technilogical nightmare.
WD drives (but not Maxtor, annoyingly) will take a 10 pin socket (like on serial port header connectors) which will make it easier to get the wire length that you need, but why screw around with printed circuit boards, headers, etc., when you can just solder the other ends to a double-pole, double throw switch?
Check out hardware prices, and what users were willing or able to pay, and the state of the art at the time, and you'll see that those limitations weren't so arbitrary.
Of course that doesn't make them any less infuriating, but if Henry Ford had tried to design the Model T so that you could easily retrofit disc brakes, air bags, electronically controlled fuel injection, and emission control plumbing, he'd have burned through all his venture capital before he ever got any product out the door.
When they talk about direct conversion, do they mean going straight from modulated carrier to baseband, eliminating the I.F. strip, like the old TRF radios?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's a Slashcode thing.
The part that the RIAA doesn't tell you is that every time you play a particular recording, it's like a free advertisement for that recording.
( At least until you play it so bleeping much that everybody's too sick of it to even consider buying their own copy, but that's a different rant.)
Granted airplay (or clubplay) will probably boost sales of -insert group of the week here- more than an old Streisand album cut, but Babs (or more accurately her label) might still pick up another shekel or two because of the exposure.
This is a holdover from when records needed radio worse than the other way around.
Now the record companies figure they're in a strong enough position (partly as a result of being part of mega-conglomerates that can stuff the songs they want to plug into whatever their TV and movie divisions are filming that week, or onto one of their cable channels) to demand payment for everything short of walking into the record shop to browse.
Speaking of electronic tip jars, check out last Thursday's Cringely and the one from the week before that.
Your restaurant analogy fails because as many other restaurants (whether selling Evian exclusively or not) as capitalists are willing to risk money on can be opened in the same geographical area as the first one, but once all the radio station licenses for a particular area have been allocated by the FCC you can't put another one on the air in that same area. So even if all the stations in your area are playing the same old -insert records you hate most here-, you can't start up another station to offer an alternative because you can't get a license; they're all already taken.
Doesn't a dot matrix count as a "wierdo contraption" nowadays?
I'm not sure, but that may be quite insightful. I've gotta think about it a lot more. One thing for sure, if I ever go back into radio, that's gonna be lurking there in the back of my mind just waiting to come to the surface at all the worst times.
Once upon a time, this function was actually performed by radio station music directors and program directors (when allowed to by owners and general managers). If you think the stuff you heard on the air was bad, you should hear the other 90% that showed up in the mail every week that we had to sort through. It's amazing how many people think they've got any business making a record.
I suspect that Charlie Rose's politics are basically pro-Charlie Rose.
Never seemed to have stopped him before. Besides, he only uses guests as an excuse to talk about his own opinion on the subject at hand.
Too bad whoever produces those ads couldn't be bothered to worry about the audio portion. Even knowing it's supposed to be "BlackRocket", I still hear it as "flatrock", and wind up thinking of cows instead of computers.
Why are they angry?
You can buy a Chilton or a Haynes for your automobile a lot cheaper than aftermarket books on MS software, and they're a *lot* more informative and helpful in fixing problems.
Part of the problem is that the buyers are pitted against each other. A particular type of item, say a 2 Gig hard drive, will get bid up to 25, 30 , even 35 dollars (US), and then those who didn't "win" the auction rush off to bid up the next 2 Gig drive, and then the next one, and the next one, and new would-be buyers get added to the mob as time passes.
Compare this to the retail environment where Staples and Circuit City and Office Depot and Best Buys and so forth keep offering larger and larger drives at around the $100 price point and the store across the street doesn't wait for the first store to sell out their stock before offering a similar product but offers it at the same time for a few dollars less or with a bigger rebate, or offers the next size up for the same price. They compete for the buyers. In an auction, the buyers compete with each other for the "privilege" of purchasing a particular item, even though there are a dozen or more just like it in auctions ending within 24 hours of each other.
Also, older hardware is competed for by people trying to upgrade older systems. Socket 7 233MHz Pentiums go for the same as or more than Slot 1 233MHz Pentium IIs, Intel Overdrive and Evergreen upgrade packages for Socket 3 486 machines go for prices for which you can buy a Socket 7 motherboard *and* faster Pentium. Hard drives that fit under the 2.3 Gig or 8.4 Gig limits go for more than they should considering what 15, 20, 30, and 40 Gig drives sell for these days. If you want a 10 Gig drive cheap, you get trampled by people who don't know that they could buy a new (as in faster and with a warranty) drive for not much more than what they'll wind up spending and just use as much of it as their system can see for the time being until they upgrade to a new motherboard and/or OS that'll let them use all of it.
When exorcising Windows it's understood that only a low level format will do.
As the unjustly modded down for being off-topic poster of the parent of this comment observed, "It truly is peerless because you can't use their drives with anyone else (without buying an adapter from Iomega) or use anyone else's hard drives with Iomega (without buying the hard drive from Iomega). At least they are honest in their product labelling. Iomega's new peerless drive truly is peerless. What a wonderful example of doublespeak."
When I saw the heading about insurance catastrophes I thought it was going to be about nearly bankrupt dotcoms selling all their hardware on the black market, replacing it with old 286s and such, and hiring your friendly neighborhood arsonist.
No more than it takes if you pour it out of the fryer into the garbage can or drain or whatever. This way you take something that already exists and, instead of just throwing it away, get more use out of it and keep it from clogging up municipal sewage systems as well, which is a real problem anywhere you have a restaurant or three.
Not to mention that the exhaust smells like french fries :-) (Really)
This is not the same as having separate record and playback heads on one video head drum.
In order to do that the VCR would need 2 video head drums so that the second could read what the first had just recorded. Either that or one horribly complicated video head drum with the tape wrapped completely around it.
When you watch what you record at the time that it's being recorded the video and audio signals are split into two streams, on of which goes to the audio and video heads, and the other of which goes out to the television.
A video head drum with a playback head right next to the record head (like three head audio recorders) would theoretically be possible (and maybe there are some high end commercial braodcast machines with them), but trying to build a VHS consumer deck with that would be an expensive technilogical nightmare.
Could this be the next bandwagon? Anyone's Jon Katz detector buzzing yet?
Actually "...cause more problems than Win2K." makes just as much sense in that context, maybe more.
WD drives (but not Maxtor, annoyingly) will take a 10 pin socket (like on serial port header connectors) which will make it easier to get the wire length that you need, but why screw around with printed circuit boards, headers, etc., when you can just solder the other ends to a double-pole, double throw switch?
How many primary partitions can you have on a SCSI hard drive? How many extended? How many logical in an extended?
Check out hardware prices, and what users were willing or able to pay, and the state of the art at the time, and you'll see that those limitations weren't so arbitrary.
Of course that doesn't make them any less infuriating, but if Henry Ford had tried to design the Model T so that you could easily retrofit disc brakes, air bags, electronically controlled fuel injection, and emission control plumbing, he'd have burned through all his venture capital before he ever got any product out the door.
When they talk about direct conversion, do they mean going straight from modulated carrier to baseband, eliminating the I.F. strip, like the old TRF radios?