Well then, thanks and good night, you've won the argument.
And in the mean time, while you are learning, sharing and indulging in all that other free hippy shit you want to do, I'll just keep going out there and buying the stuff honestly so that it gives all these artists some income that justifies their continuing to make stuff in the first place.
And if you like, at the end of each financial year I'll send you statement showing precisely how much I'm subsidising your media collection.
Sorry, can you define what you mean by "corporate music"?
Because if you mean "big, popular artists", then you're just being a bigot.
Besides which, if a local independent band is able to survive by doing live gigs and selling CDs at those gigs, that's absolutely fantastic and exactly how good musicians should enter the music business - but what about people across the other side of the planet who may want to hear their music? If they sell their music on their web site, who's going to point me in their direction as maybe a band I would like? And what's to stop me going to one of the countless other bands doing the same thing?
Personally, I *JUST* like music. I like some huge bands, I also like a lot of local club bands - I buy CDs online from Amazon, I also buy them at gigs. There's a lot of good music out there and sometimes I end up buying (and really liking an album) because a big colourful advert placed by a huge evil record company has got my attention in the first place.
But guess what? I don't give a shit. As far as I'm aware, no children are exploited and no animals forced into extinction just because someone makes me a music CD - all I care about is whether or not it was worth the money I paid for it, whether that goes into Sony's coffers or under the mattress of "Pa Baker's Local Independent Record Label".
The movie was close enough to the level of being shit and not worth paying for, but probably worth a download.
Your argument fails because you assume incorrectly that the success of a movie is directly related to the success of its game tie-in - and if you've played games as long as I have, you'll know there have been countless successful movies with rubbish tie-ins; in a lot of cases, that can be explained by the fact that the game was rushed out in time for the movie release.
Also, The Chronicles Of Riddick Game ("Escape From Butcher Bay") was not based on the movie, but actually a prequel game leading up to the events in the movie - and was actually released a fair time after the movie, incidentally.
The game flopped simply because nobody bought it. Personally, I've no idea if that one was down to piracy as such because when it was released, I was playing a lot more games then than I am now and I actually remember seeing very little about it - so maybe it was a marketing problem.
But the fact was, I was trawling Gamespot one day and saw it listed in there rated 90+%, then went online to buy a copy and found it for a pittance price brand new for only a few pounds - and it turned out to be a great fun game.
Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it?
This is a totally meaningless statistic.
For the sake of argument, let's say there are currently 50 million PC-gaming FPS fans out there in the world at the moment. If only 1 million of them bought Crysis then Crytek would perhaps start wondering what they did wrong with Crysis such that 49 million potential buyers didn't buy it.
If there was no piracy, then their only course would be to do something different - either develop a different and better game next time, maybe throw some extras in the box or reduce the price of the game.
However, because they know there *IS* piracy and because activity on their support forums or elsewhere suggests that a lot more people are playing the game than actually bought in, then their focus would not be to produce better or cheaper games but to find ways to make it more difficult to copy the game such that more people buy it.
Therefore, piracy not only harms PC games sales but also harms the quality of them because the creators put more of their development costs into DRM protection than into better game quality.
So the naive people are the pirates - you've bought DRM protection down on yourselves and made "evil" corporations like Sony more richer because they can license their DRM to games companies and make huge profits from it.
Incidentally, I'm in no way connected with the games industry - I'm a PC gamer that ignores the marketing hype and brainwashing and just buys and plays games when they're at the price I'm prepared to pay for them.
Freeing artworks older than 30+ years *will* benefit mankind, just as freeing patents older than 30+ years will benefit mankind.
Very laudable and, from a computer games perspective, this probably covers a few "Pong" and "Space Invaders" ROMs from the late 1970s on BitTorrent and Usenet.
So how do you justify the Call of Duty, Bioshock and countless other modern game torrents?
Making a game and discovering that absolutely nobody is playing it (because nobody bought it) sends a far stronger message to the creator about poor quality than discovering lots of people are playing it (while only a few people bought it).
I'm not familiar with Kattoo's music and I'm not sure that the description of his style of music is of a type that appeals to my rock tastes, but I commend him nonetheless for trying.
Unfortunately, the problem is this.
I'm in my mid-40s, music & live concerts have always been my number one hobby and I started buying vinyl LPs and singles in the mid-1970s in my teens. I did occasionally tape stuff from friends' LPs or from the radio (and they from me) but a lot of the time, the only way to get to hear certain bands was to just get some money together and go buy the records. Sometimes, the record was a disappointment but most of the time it was great, not least because I had had to hand over hard-earned cash in order to get hold of it.
As I've gone through the years, I've continued to buy music because part of the enjoyment of it is a feeling of "victory" because you've come into possession of a great piece of music for a small sum of money.
Unfortunately, the teenagers and youth of today can amass large music collections without every having to hand over a single penny for it. Because it's so easy to come by, they don't appreciate it and just throw it away and download some more when they're bored with it.
The music industry has responded appropriately by catapulting cheap-to-produce, plasticized artists to the forefront who's only jobs are to churn out one or two fashionable singles before being thrown into obscurity again and before they start demanding too much money for what they do - this is why shows like "Pop Idol" exist in the first place.
Don't get me wrong. As a fan of good rock music from the 1960s to the present day, I think the record companies are doing a great job remastering and rereleasing a lot of old stuff that I missed the first time around, there's more than enough stuff out there for me to enjoy until my dying day, and I really have no problem handing over about £10 for a CD I may well be enjoying for the next 30 years or so - so all this talk about artists being ripped off by music companies is irrelevant to me. I just care about the good value for money from the final product, unless there's some humanitarian or ecological reason to not buy it.
So I'm afraid I don't know what the answer is for any musician struggling to create their music today, apart from perhaps trying to appeal to an older generation who are used to paying for their music, and probably have the inclination and disposable income to continue to do so.
I don't condone the way the RIAA does things, but why would a creator finance the RIAA middle-men in the first place if (s)he felt that (s)he was getting the justified revenue for what was created?
I'm a huge music fan, I have a huge CD collection of 1300+ CDs because music is my number one hobby and I probably buy around 10 new CDs a month because I really don't consider £10 or so (here in the UK) as being a great amount to pay for a piece of music I have possibly enjoyed over and over again for 30 years or more. I don't support piracy although I can't say I'm particularly a fan of Japanese music, apart from one or two Japanese hard & progressive rock groups I've come across over the years.
However, whilst I sympathise with the effect piracy is having on your business, ultimately digital music distribution will die anyway - either due to piracy or because it destroys the music industry full stop.
An fan of painting or sculpture can go stand in front of a piece of art and just gaze at it for hours in order to get a full appreciation of what it is. That person doesn't need to get a paintbrush or a chisel out to make that piece of art into something he or she feels would have been better, it is appreciated as much for its flaws as for its aristry.
Music is no different. A well-made music album is long enough to give the listener, if he or she listens carefully enough, a good impression of what was going through the musicians minds when the album was made, and to appreciate a good piece of music requires a good attention span and full attention.
Digital music turns good music into "Pick & Mix sweeties" - i.e. "I only like certain tracks, I don't have the attention span to listen to a whole album and I want to mix things up in a way that is different to the concept that the original artist had in mind."
People who buy digital downloads are not music fans. They are the "I want it here and I want it my way now" Internet generation who get bored with everything as easily as they get rabid about it - they lack attention spans and, possibly, self esteem as they jump from fashion to fashion, desperate to stay "cool" and to impress their peers while not standing out from them.
True music fans appreciate music and are therefore prepared to pay for it - unfortunately, your target audience are fickle, faddy people.
It failed because the guys at Commodore were fantastic at creating hardware and software but terrible at marketing.
Furthermore, for the time, the Commodore Amiga had *HUGE* & free software repositories like Fred Fish, 17-Bit and Aminet which suggests to me that there were a lot of people far more interested in free software rather than pirated software.
Sure, Amiga owners did copy software but no more (as a proportion of users) than on the PC, and the PC is still here despite the piracy.
I like your concept but you know as well as I do, these people *ALWAYS* call at the most inconvenient times - someone somewhere once told me that these call centres even go so far as to keep records as to when you did or didn't answer the phone before so they can build up a pattern of when you are likely to be at home or out of the house.
In my case (and I guess it's the same for many other people), I can pretty much guarantee that any calls to my home between 6pm and 7pm at night are from telemarketers - i.e. soon after I have got in from work and have either just stepped into the shower or, because I'm the cook in the house, when I'm in the middle of preparing dinner for me and the missus.
In any case, I'm really not in the mood to waste their time when I'm dripping wet with a towel wrapped around me or when something that's cooking in the kitchen is about to burn - I'm afraid my responses to them tend to be a little shorter, louder and emblazoned with old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon expletives...
I don't know how it is in other parts of the world but here in the UK, I don't know of any way of instructing telecoms providers to not route calls that have Calling Line ID withheld - and I assume they don't want to give that service to customers because they make a lot of money from telemarketing.
However, I do have a Linux-based media server that's on 24x7 underneath my TV in my lounge that is about a metre from the master telephone socket in the house. I was therefore thinking of installing Asterisk PBX onto it, bringing the phone line into it and then using Asterisk's intelligence to just play a long recorded message to any call where there is no CLI - I do get a lot of telemarketing calls despite being on the Telephone Preference List.
Incidentally, as someone who works in the telecoms industry, I can tell you of a reasonably good way of defeating automated calls that route you to a real person once you've picked up your phone. Unless you own a digital answering system on a completely digital network, the calling party (in this case the call-centre automated dialler) has no easy way of telling whether or not a human being or an answering machine has answered the call - obviously, from a call centre perspective, they want to drop any calls answered by an answering machine and route (to an agent) any calls answered by a human being.
The algorithms they use to detect the differences between human and answering machine are based on some simple assumptions:
1. If a human answers the phone, there will be a short burst of speech followed by a short pause, followed by another burst of speech. (e.g. "Hello?" [PAUSE] "Hello? Who's calling?")
2. If an answering machine answers, there will be a long burst of speech only. (e.g. "Hi, Fred and Barney aren't in at the moment but if you'd like to leave a message..." etc.)
Bearing in mind that a person who picks up a ringing phone will probably drop the call if they have silence beyond 4 or 5 seconds, the call centre only has a couple of seconds to make a decision as to whether the answering party is a human or machine.
Therefore, if you have a call with no CLI or from a number you do not recognise, if you pick up the phone and talk fast for a couple of seconds, maybe repeating your phone number, you can usually fool their detection algorithm into thinking you are an answering machine. (e.g. "This is Fred on 01234 567890, how can I help you?")
and if some corporate focknot in an overly tight necktie is going to nose around my business
Once again, have a look at phrases like the above as they probably say more about your employability than the fact you play WoW.
I don't fear my own childishness, but I'm frankly terrified by the feckless, irrational and idiotic nature of some of the people on this planet.
This may be a strange concept to you but people who do not play WoW are not lower in the food chain than you.
At least I can hold my head up as someone who tried the game for a month before deciding he didn't like it - but quite frankly, one of the reasons I didn't like it was the sheer number of feckless, irrational and idiotic people running around making nuisances of themselves and doing their best to ruin the gaming fun of everyone else.
Both inside and outside WoW there are clearly at least a few people with some dubious social and interaction skills.
I would suggest using opening sentences like the above probably does more damage to your employability than the fact you play WoW.
You need to turn off the "Holy Shield Of Arrogance & Suspicion" off for a few minutes and re-read my article - perhaps then you will see there was nothing in it justifying a retort like that.
I find it more amusing that you give other people ammunition by clearly feeling ashamed of being a WoW player.
After pressure from my friends, I tried WoW for a month, I thought it was "okay" but really not for me - so I dropped out, but my friends are still avid players & good luck to them.
But if someone asks me "Have you ever played WoW?", I'm not going to say "Oooh, no, never!", I shall say exactly what I've told you above - and if people want to consider me a loser for it, so be it - then they're probably not people I'd want to associate with in the first place.
I can understand someone not wanting an employer to find their name on pr0n sites or affiliated to some extreme political party - but WoW is entertainment, it's no different to standing on a terrace watching a football (soccer) match every Saturday.
The British comedian Ben Elton once asked the question how a bloke who spends £30 on a football shirt with the name of a Japanese computer company on the front of it can be considered "one of the lads" yet a bloke that goes round with his mates at a weekend dressed like a hobbit and bashing them over the head with a rubber sword is some kind of sad little man...
I really do wish people would just say "To hell with it" a bit more and go do the things they like doing without worrying what other's might think of them all of the time - if what they're doing isn't harming anyone else, what's the problem?
Maybe I'm not quite getting what you're saying but that's not what I understand SIP to be.
As far as the VoIP endpoints are concerned, all they care about is that they can comunicate the same protocol for their inter-communications - i.e. the same codecs for voice or video calls, same protocol for IM, etc. Whether those protocols do or don't work through NAT without specific ports open is irrelevant to SIP.
The purpose of SIP is to provide the "data signalling" portion of the connection - i.e. to communicate the availability of other endpoints and then to initiate, change the state of and finally tear down the communication by telling the endpoints what to do.
You cannot use the Skype client as a SIP softphone without going via Skype themselves - I cannot argue with your comments on what Skype actually does but that's not the point; it is still partly based on closed protocols (and I suspect closed codecs, though I could be wrong), whereas SIP is entirely open.
Oh, don't get me wrong - just because the connection is encrypted does not mean that you can't just hop onto the WLAN, hack a user account on a server somewhere and pull unencrypted credit card information from server itself!
Unfortunately, you've highlighted the major problem with business today.
No business nowadays is ever interested in striving towards ensuring every customer gets the best possible service from them, they just puff their chests out and crow when they achieve a particular statistical level of performance.
"95% of calls to us are answered within 10 seconds" - the 5% of callers who were cut off or who sat were sat listening to ringing tone for 10 minutes do not matter.
"Acme Disinfectant kills 99.9% of all germs" - so if you get food poisoning it's because of the 0.1% of germs that it left behind.
Credit card companies are no different - they predict they will have a maximum of a certain amount of fraud over a year and as long as it stays under that level, they can be sure the honest customers are covering the cost of it in their interest charges.
That's the problem with American-style management that has plagued our modern world - as long as the various management levels have some nicely coloured pie-charts to pass between themselves then they can justify their jobs and bonuses.
Of course an unecrypted WLAN is a *VERY BAD* idea but just because the WLAN isn't encrypted doesn't mean you'll be able to sniff anything on it if all the transmissions on it go over SSL or some other encryption method.
Personally, I'd hope that anything involving a credit card transaction anywhere goes over SSL by default.
My company insists we put business expenses on company-provided AMEX cards.
However, about four years ago, AMEX started requesting to do personal credit checks before they renewed expiring cards and I refused to let them do it; my credit rating is fine, I've nothing to hide, but I just don't like AMEX as a company and don't want my personal details on their's (or any other company I refuse to deal with) database.
The company couldn't force me to give them permission to do the credit check on me, so I now use my personal credit card and enjoy the loyalty bonuses as a result.
1. Windows is everywhere, at the home and in the office. People are accustomed to it, albeit it has limitations (as does _EVERY_ OS, BTW), most of them would find it difficult to change to anything else, whether that's Linux or OS X.
2. Most Joe Sixpacks don't care about viruses and malware because the odds are nothing will ever happen to them as a result. Many people don't change until something happens to them, but with millions and millions of infected PCs out there, there's not enough malicious crackers out there to go through all the information sent to them from these machines - besides which, crackers are after notoriety so want high profile targets for the fame, not Joe Sixpacks.
3. Yes, PCs are cheaper - cheap enough that a lot of people don't see a point to keeping their machines running fast or reinstalling it. They just buy another one every two years and throw the old one away.
4. Most people know someone who can fix a Windows PC problem so there's a sense of security about being a Joe Sixpack and buying one.
5. Linux PCs and Macs are not seen as machines that can play games.
6. Most people see computers as tools, not fashion accessories. If I said that the total of all Alienware gaming PCs and brightly coloured laptops sold were 1% of the total PC sales market, I'm sure that would be an over-estimate.
7. PCs are seen as platforms on which it's easy to get a lot of "free" software on - no, not Open Source but pirated stuff, copied disks and using corporate license keys for home installations.
The primary purpose of buying a Mac is elitism - and if you say otherwise then I challenge you to remove the little Apple logo from your box(es) to prove that it's not display of that logo is unimportant to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well then, thanks and good night, you've won the argument.
And in the mean time, while you are learning, sharing and indulging in all that other free hippy shit you want to do, I'll just keep going out there and buying the stuff honestly so that it gives all these artists some income that justifies their continuing to make stuff in the first place.
And if you like, at the end of each financial year I'll send you statement showing precisely how much I'm subsidising your media collection.
Corporate music is trash
Sorry, can you define what you mean by "corporate music"?
Because if you mean "big, popular artists", then you're just being a bigot.
Besides which, if a local independent band is able to survive by doing live gigs and selling CDs at those gigs, that's absolutely fantastic and exactly how good musicians should enter the music business - but what about people across the other side of the planet who may want to hear their music? If they sell their music on their web site, who's going to point me in their direction as maybe a band I would like? And what's to stop me going to one of the countless other bands doing the same thing?
Personally, I *JUST* like music. I like some huge bands, I also like a lot of local club bands - I buy CDs online from Amazon, I also buy them at gigs. There's a lot of good music out there and sometimes I end up buying (and really liking an album) because a big colourful advert placed by a huge evil record company has got my attention in the first place.
But guess what? I don't give a shit. As far as I'm aware, no children are exploited and no animals forced into extinction just because someone makes me a music CD - all I care about is whether or not it was worth the money I paid for it, whether that goes into Sony's coffers or under the mattress of "Pa Baker's Local Independent Record Label".
The movie was close enough to the level of being shit and not worth paying for, but probably worth a download.
Your argument fails because you assume incorrectly that the success of a movie is directly related to the success of its game tie-in - and if you've played games as long as I have, you'll know there have been countless successful movies with rubbish tie-ins; in a lot of cases, that can be explained by the fact that the game was rushed out in time for the movie release.
Also, The Chronicles Of Riddick Game ("Escape From Butcher Bay") was not based on the movie, but actually a prequel game leading up to the events in the movie - and was actually released a fair time after the movie, incidentally.
The game flopped simply because nobody bought it. Personally, I've no idea if that one was down to piracy as such because when it was released, I was playing a lot more games then than I am now and I actually remember seeing very little about it - so maybe it was a marketing problem.
But the fact was, I was trawling Gamespot one day and saw it listed in there rated 90+%, then went online to buy a copy and found it for a pittance price brand new for only a few pounds - and it turned out to be a great fun game.
Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it?
This is a totally meaningless statistic.
For the sake of argument, let's say there are currently 50 million PC-gaming FPS fans out there in the world at the moment. If only 1 million of them bought Crysis then Crytek would perhaps start wondering what they did wrong with Crysis such that 49 million potential buyers didn't buy it.
If there was no piracy, then their only course would be to do something different - either develop a different and better game next time, maybe throw some extras in the box or reduce the price of the game.
However, because they know there *IS* piracy and because activity on their support forums or elsewhere suggests that a lot more people are playing the game than actually bought in, then their focus would not be to produce better or cheaper games but to find ways to make it more difficult to copy the game such that more people buy it.
Therefore, piracy not only harms PC games sales but also harms the quality of them because the creators put more of their development costs into DRM protection than into better game quality.
So the naive people are the pirates - you've bought DRM protection down on yourselves and made "evil" corporations like Sony more richer because they can license their DRM to games companies and make huge profits from it.
Incidentally, I'm in no way connected with the games industry - I'm a PC gamer that ignores the marketing hype and brainwashing and just buys and plays games when they're at the price I'm prepared to pay for them.
Freeing artworks older than 30+ years *will* benefit mankind, just as freeing patents older than 30+ years will benefit mankind.
Very laudable and, from a computer games perspective, this probably covers a few "Pong" and "Space Invaders" ROMs from the late 1970s on BitTorrent and Usenet.
So how do you justify the Call of Duty, Bioshock and countless other modern game torrents?
Making a game and discovering that absolutely nobody is playing it (because nobody bought it) sends a far stronger message to the creator about poor quality than discovering lots of people are playing it (while only a few people bought it).
Fail = your argument.
I'm not familiar with Kattoo's music and I'm not sure that the description of his style of music is of a type that appeals to my rock tastes, but I commend him nonetheless for trying.
Unfortunately, the problem is this.
I'm in my mid-40s, music & live concerts have always been my number one hobby and I started buying vinyl LPs and singles in the mid-1970s in my teens. I did occasionally tape stuff from friends' LPs or from the radio (and they from me) but a lot of the time, the only way to get to hear certain bands was to just get some money together and go buy the records. Sometimes, the record was a disappointment but most of the time it was great, not least because I had had to hand over hard-earned cash in order to get hold of it.
As I've gone through the years, I've continued to buy music because part of the enjoyment of it is a feeling of "victory" because you've come into possession of a great piece of music for a small sum of money.
Unfortunately, the teenagers and youth of today can amass large music collections without every having to hand over a single penny for it. Because it's so easy to come by, they don't appreciate it and just throw it away and download some more when they're bored with it.
The music industry has responded appropriately by catapulting cheap-to-produce, plasticized artists to the forefront who's only jobs are to churn out one or two fashionable singles before being thrown into obscurity again and before they start demanding too much money for what they do - this is why shows like "Pop Idol" exist in the first place.
Don't get me wrong. As a fan of good rock music from the 1960s to the present day, I think the record companies are doing a great job remastering and rereleasing a lot of old stuff that I missed the first time around, there's more than enough stuff out there for me to enjoy until my dying day, and I really have no problem handing over about £10 for a CD I may well be enjoying for the next 30 years or so - so all this talk about artists being ripped off by music companies is irrelevant to me. I just care about the good value for money from the final product, unless there's some humanitarian or ecological reason to not buy it.
So I'm afraid I don't know what the answer is for any musician struggling to create their music today, apart from perhaps trying to appeal to an older generation who are used to paying for their music, and probably have the inclination and disposable income to continue to do so.
I don't condone the way the RIAA does things, but why would a creator finance the RIAA middle-men in the first place if (s)he felt that (s)he was getting the justified revenue for what was created?
Weren't a lot of artists now recognized as Greats destitute during their lives?
Vincent Van Gogh?
I'm a huge music fan, I have a huge CD collection of 1300+ CDs because music is my number one hobby and I probably buy around 10 new CDs a month because I really don't consider £10 or so (here in the UK) as being a great amount to pay for a piece of music I have possibly enjoyed over and over again for 30 years or more. I don't support piracy although I can't say I'm particularly a fan of Japanese music, apart from one or two Japanese hard & progressive rock groups I've come across over the years.
However, whilst I sympathise with the effect piracy is having on your business, ultimately digital music distribution will die anyway - either due to piracy or because it destroys the music industry full stop.
An fan of painting or sculpture can go stand in front of a piece of art and just gaze at it for hours in order to get a full appreciation of what it is. That person doesn't need to get a paintbrush or a chisel out to make that piece of art into something he or she feels would have been better, it is appreciated as much for its flaws as for its aristry.
Music is no different. A well-made music album is long enough to give the listener, if he or she listens carefully enough, a good impression of what was going through the musicians minds when the album was made, and to appreciate a good piece of music requires a good attention span and full attention.
Digital music turns good music into "Pick & Mix sweeties" - i.e. "I only like certain tracks, I don't have the attention span to listen to a whole album and I want to mix things up in a way that is different to the concept that the original artist had in mind."
People who buy digital downloads are not music fans. They are the "I want it here and I want it my way now" Internet generation who get bored with everything as easily as they get rabid about it - they lack attention spans and, possibly, self esteem as they jump from fashion to fashion, desperate to stay "cool" and to impress their peers while not standing out from them.
True music fans appreciate music and are therefore prepared to pay for it - unfortunately, your target audience are fickle, faddy people.
Rubbish!
It failed because the guys at Commodore were fantastic at creating hardware and software but terrible at marketing.
Furthermore, for the time, the Commodore Amiga had *HUGE* & free software repositories like Fred Fish, 17-Bit and Aminet which suggests to me that there were a lot of people far more interested in free software rather than pirated software.
Sure, Amiga owners did copy software but no more (as a proportion of users) than on the PC, and the PC is still here despite the piracy.
I like your concept but you know as well as I do, these people *ALWAYS* call at the most inconvenient times - someone somewhere once told me that these call centres even go so far as to keep records as to when you did or didn't answer the phone before so they can build up a pattern of when you are likely to be at home or out of the house.
In my case (and I guess it's the same for many other people), I can pretty much guarantee that any calls to my home between 6pm and 7pm at night are from telemarketers - i.e. soon after I have got in from work and have either just stepped into the shower or, because I'm the cook in the house, when I'm in the middle of preparing dinner for me and the missus.
In any case, I'm really not in the mood to waste their time when I'm dripping wet with a towel wrapped around me or when something that's cooking in the kitchen is about to burn - I'm afraid my responses to them tend to be a little shorter, louder and emblazoned with old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon expletives...
I don't know how it is in other parts of the world but here in the UK, I don't know of any way of instructing telecoms providers to not route calls that have Calling Line ID withheld - and I assume they don't want to give that service to customers because they make a lot of money from telemarketing.
However, I do have a Linux-based media server that's on 24x7 underneath my TV in my lounge that is about a metre from the master telephone socket in the house. I was therefore thinking of installing Asterisk PBX onto it, bringing the phone line into it and then using Asterisk's intelligence to just play a long recorded message to any call where there is no CLI - I do get a lot of telemarketing calls despite being on the Telephone Preference List.
Incidentally, as someone who works in the telecoms industry, I can tell you of a reasonably good way of defeating automated calls that route you to a real person once you've picked up your phone. Unless you own a digital answering system on a completely digital network, the calling party (in this case the call-centre automated dialler) has no easy way of telling whether or not a human being or an answering machine has answered the call - obviously, from a call centre perspective, they want to drop any calls answered by an answering machine and route (to an agent) any calls answered by a human being.
The algorithms they use to detect the differences between human and answering machine are based on some simple assumptions:
1. If a human answers the phone, there will be a short burst of speech followed by a short pause, followed by another burst of speech. (e.g. "Hello?" [PAUSE] "Hello? Who's calling?")
2. If an answering machine answers, there will be a long burst of speech only. (e.g. "Hi, Fred and Barney aren't in at the moment but if you'd like to leave a message..." etc.)
Bearing in mind that a person who picks up a ringing phone will probably drop the call if they have silence beyond 4 or 5 seconds, the call centre only has a couple of seconds to make a decision as to whether the answering party is a human or machine.
Therefore, if you have a call with no CLI or from a number you do not recognise, if you pick up the phone and talk fast for a couple of seconds, maybe repeating your phone number, you can usually fool their detection algorithm into thinking you are an answering machine. (e.g. "This is Fred on 01234 567890, how can I help you?")
and if some corporate focknot in an overly tight necktie is going to nose around my business
Once again, have a look at phrases like the above as they probably say more about your employability than the fact you play WoW.
I don't fear my own childishness, but I'm frankly terrified by the feckless, irrational and idiotic nature of some of the people on this planet.
This may be a strange concept to you but people who do not play WoW are not lower in the food chain than you.
At least I can hold my head up as someone who tried the game for a month before deciding he didn't like it - but quite frankly, one of the reasons I didn't like it was the sheer number of feckless, irrational and idiotic people running around making nuisances of themselves and doing their best to ruin the gaming fun of everyone else.
Both inside and outside WoW there are clearly at least a few people with some dubious social and interaction skills.
I'll try to use small words to explain this.
I would suggest using opening sentences like the above probably does more damage to your employability than the fact you play WoW.
You need to turn off the "Holy Shield Of Arrogance & Suspicion" off for a few minutes and re-read my article - perhaps then you will see there was nothing in it justifying a retort like that.
I find it more amusing that you give other people ammunition by clearly feeling ashamed of being a WoW player.
After pressure from my friends, I tried WoW for a month, I thought it was "okay" but really not for me - so I dropped out, but my friends are still avid players & good luck to them.
But if someone asks me "Have you ever played WoW?", I'm not going to say "Oooh, no, never!", I shall say exactly what I've told you above - and if people want to consider me a loser for it, so be it - then they're probably not people I'd want to associate with in the first place.
I can understand someone not wanting an employer to find their name on pr0n sites or affiliated to some extreme political party - but WoW is entertainment, it's no different to standing on a terrace watching a football (soccer) match every Saturday.
The British comedian Ben Elton once asked the question how a bloke who spends £30 on a football shirt with the name of a Japanese computer company on the front of it can be considered "one of the lads" yet a bloke that goes round with his mates at a weekend dressed like a hobbit and bashing them over the head with a rubber sword is some kind of sad little man...
I really do wish people would just say "To hell with it" a bit more and go do the things they like doing without worrying what other's might think of them all of the time - if what they're doing isn't harming anyone else, what's the problem?
Maybe I'm not quite getting what you're saying but that's not what I understand SIP to be.
As far as the VoIP endpoints are concerned, all they care about is that they can comunicate the same protocol for their inter-communications - i.e. the same codecs for voice or video calls, same protocol for IM, etc. Whether those protocols do or don't work through NAT without specific ports open is irrelevant to SIP.
The purpose of SIP is to provide the "data signalling" portion of the connection - i.e. to communicate the availability of other endpoints and then to initiate, change the state of and finally tear down the communication by telling the endpoints what to do.
You cannot use the Skype client as a SIP softphone without going via Skype themselves - I cannot argue with your comments on what Skype actually does but that's not the point; it is still partly based on closed protocols (and I suspect closed codecs, though I could be wrong), whereas SIP is entirely open.
Oh, don't get me wrong - just because the connection is encrypted does not mean that you can't just hop onto the WLAN, hack a user account on a server somewhere and pull unencrypted credit card information from server itself!
Unfortunately, you've highlighted the major problem with business today.
No business nowadays is ever interested in striving towards ensuring every customer gets the best possible service from them, they just puff their chests out and crow when they achieve a particular statistical level of performance.
"95% of calls to us are answered within 10 seconds" - the 5% of callers who were cut off or who sat were sat listening to ringing tone for 10 minutes do not matter.
"Acme Disinfectant kills 99.9% of all germs" - so if you get food poisoning it's because of the 0.1% of germs that it left behind.
Credit card companies are no different - they predict they will have a maximum of a certain amount of fraud over a year and as long as it stays under that level, they can be sure the honest customers are covering the cost of it in their interest charges.
That's the problem with American-style management that has plagued our modern world - as long as the various management levels have some nicely coloured pie-charts to pass between themselves then they can justify their jobs and bonuses.
Sad but true.
Just one observation...
Of course an unecrypted WLAN is a *VERY BAD* idea but just because the WLAN isn't encrypted doesn't mean you'll be able to sniff anything on it if all the transmissions on it go over SSL or some other encryption method.
Personally, I'd hope that anything involving a credit card transaction anywhere goes over SSL by default.
My company insists we put business expenses on company-provided AMEX cards.
However, about four years ago, AMEX started requesting to do personal credit checks before they renewed expiring cards and I refused to let them do it; my credit rating is fine, I've nothing to hide, but I just don't like AMEX as a company and don't want my personal details on their's (or any other company I refuse to deal with) database.
The company couldn't force me to give them permission to do the credit check on me, so I now use my personal credit card and enjoy the loyalty bonuses as a result.
I'm waiting for 4D PCs so I can download pirate copies of 3D movies two years before they are actually made.
Quite possibly, but it's a business decision to lock them down. SIP is an open protocol, Skype's protocol is (at least partly) proprietary.
and the British, not sure who else
Indeed, old chap. And we will tip our bowler hats at you when we've stopped having a jolly good laugh at it.
"Gor blimey, luv-a-duck, Mary Poppins! 'av ya seen the state of those header files for Minesweeper!"
It's a combination of a number of things:
1. Windows is everywhere, at the home and in the office. People are accustomed to it, albeit it has limitations (as does _EVERY_ OS, BTW), most of them would find it difficult to change to anything else, whether that's Linux or OS X.
2. Most Joe Sixpacks don't care about viruses and malware because the odds are nothing will ever happen to them as a result. Many people don't change until something happens to them, but with millions and millions of infected PCs out there, there's not enough malicious crackers out there to go through all the information sent to them from these machines - besides which, crackers are after notoriety so want high profile targets for the fame, not Joe Sixpacks.
3. Yes, PCs are cheaper - cheap enough that a lot of people don't see a point to keeping their machines running fast or reinstalling it. They just buy another one every two years and throw the old one away.
4. Most people know someone who can fix a Windows PC problem so there's a sense of security about being a Joe Sixpack and buying one.
5. Linux PCs and Macs are not seen as machines that can play games.
6. Most people see computers as tools, not fashion accessories. If I said that the total of all Alienware gaming PCs and brightly coloured laptops sold were 1% of the total PC sales market, I'm sure that would be an over-estimate.
7. PCs are seen as platforms on which it's easy to get a lot of "free" software on - no, not Open Source but pirated stuff, copied disks and using corporate license keys for home installations.
The primary purpose of buying a Mac is elitism - and if you say otherwise then I challenge you to remove the little Apple logo from your box(es) to prove that it's not display of that logo is unimportant to you.