I used to be an anti-social geek until I discovered the internet. Upon discovering how easy it is to communicate with people when not face to face, I learned to like people and interact with them. I was able to hide any apprehension, and by subverting this I gained real confidence in myself. This of course translated over well to the real world, and now I consider myself a people person. And no one thinks I am a geek. So this article comes as no surprise to me, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this boat.
SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)
When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend!
This week: You can make a trade-off between latency and throughput! Next week: Cars that can haul less can be more fuel-effiecent! The week after: Algorithms that use more memory, but are faster to execute!
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like/., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
1. Start off by naming the previous number of times AOL has done something you dislike, noting that this particular incident is "the worst yet."
2. State your greivances about the topic. Explain, in near-irrevelant detail, how this will negatively effect you and others.
3. Throw random arguments in about how non-AOL services are far superior to AOL services.
4. Also imply that anyone who still uses AOL must be of inferior intellect that yourself.
5. Notate the sudden revelation that you don't use the services of AOL (in fact, can't recall any time at which you did use AOL) and, if you did, you and anyone else using AOL probably deserves the a forehand mentioned greviance and whatever similar issues they get.
6. Close with witty remark about poor service and/or "AOHell" reference and offer cliche signature of either "Step 1. AOL reference, Step 2. (blank), 3. Profit!" or "All your base..." adaption.
...the PI channel, a channel dedicated to dictating the sequencial numbers of pi, went off the air today. Apparently, their Neilson ratings dropped to zero five seconds after they went on the air. No later had the digits "1415926" been read before the plug was pulled.
"I don't understand," says Ira Tional, promotional manager of the PI channel. "I thought everyone loved pi, and they could now get it 24-7!" Tional thought that perhaps if they had started the channel with guest stars doing the reading, such as Drew Carey or Britany Spears, the PI channel wouldn't have come to such an abbrupt halt. "But for some reason, they told me I was being too irrational."
While the Sony's have lived in the modern world for awhile, and have gotten it, as well as being on both sides of it, Matsuhita electric is perhaps the most traditional and conservitive of Japanese companies. I have known these people (Matsushita) for much of my life, from some of their board members down. This is an organization so steeped in it's own traditions and dogma (yes, they really do have a "250 year" business plan, and never make fun of the founders light bulb socket:), with engineering departments so conservitivily organized, that for them to support open development of GPL software is really much like the Pope encouraging contraception!
We have your settlement money ready to deliver. Seven million dollars! Unfortunately, we're having trouble getting it out of Nigeria because the current government is corrupt and has frozen our assets. If you could give us your bank account number, we could wire the money to you directly. Congratulations on your win!
Mumar Zibutu Former King of Nigeria
Maybe people just aren't buying music
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I never bought a single CD before MP3s...I just didn't listen to music. Now, I have some MP3s that I listen to. If those MP3s went away, I'd just go back to not listening to music.
Because "10.1% of people downloading music are not buying music" does not mean that the music industry is losing sales from all those (though I'm sure it is from some).
I wonder how feasible it would be for someone like Borders (trying to compete with Amazon as a music retailer) to directly sign for tracks with artists. Then they maintain at each location a fat data pipe (if this isn't economically feasible, it will be -- small credit-check data lines are already in place and data gets cheaper and cheaper, whereas CDs stay the same). Then they have a really fancy burner or press or whatever at the location. They download losslessly compressed tracks from the Borders central server and cache them at local locations (to avoid retransferring popular tracks). Then people can simply say "I want a CD and I want track X, Y, and Z on it". The money goes directly to the artist, aside from Border's profit.
So lets see why this makes sense:
* Artist gets money, users have less incentive for piracy. * User gets to specify what tracks they want/don't want and get better quality than they would pirating MP3s. * The user can buy CDs more cheaply -- by eliminating the middleman, they pay maybe $3 to Borders per CD (you automate the thing, with a little Borders card reader, and there's very little per unit cost) and 10 cents to the artist per track (hell of a lot more than the artists are currently making), and you get a full-quality CD where you're supporting the artist for $5 tops. * Users would have a much broader selection, not limited to the few hundred titles that might be in the store. * Borders makes money -- I suspect unit costs after amortization would be about 50 cents per CD, so they get a healthy $2.50 in profit per CD, which is probably more than they currently make. * Borders risks far less than they currently do -- adding an artist to their central database is cheap cheap cheap. They don't have to risk warehousing and blowing shelf space on CDs that people don't want. * New artists can break into the market easily -- they simply register with Borders, send in their music to the main server, and start getting money. They don't have to convince much of anyone of their music quality, since there's no massive production/warehousing costs for all the CDs.
There are two drawbacks. One, you don't get extras in the CD. You might be able to print out the cover and the CD label, if this "Borders mini-CD maker" machine was fairly capable, but you might not get other stuff jammed in the case. Second, even with a hefty local cache, Borders still has to transfer 300MB per full CD (assuming lossless compression averaging 2:1) for infrequently requested CDs. This may not yet be feasible -- however, data lines keep getting cheaper, and CD prices stay the same.
Finally, a $100 80GB HD can store about 160 fairly full CDs, and 300 with lossless 2:1 compression. That's a one-time cost -- like incredibly cheaply expandable floor space. At those prices, Borders can afford to have enormous local caches -- one sale of a CD much more than makes back the cost of storing that CD locally.
Re:Cringely is becoming Crufty
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 1
I don't know about anybody else, but my purchasing habits have changed quite a bit as a result of having the ability to download music. I actually purchase fewer cds than I did before - not because I'm cheap, but because I now have the opportunity to listen to albums before I put my hard earned cash into them. So yes, the record industry gets less of my money from poor purchases - conversely, the bands I truly enjoy and wish to support get more money from me than they would have previously. I like to consider my money an investment into a band I support - the more money they have to spend, the more music I get from them in the future. And just like any investment, one must have research tools on hand to ensure that your money is going to get a good return - It just so happens that in my case, its gnutella. Its not piracy - its good business. Surely the RIAA understands that.
It's a broken business model
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.
I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete.mp3s
How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free? It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.
Got problems with the shows TiVo records as suggestions? Well, try these methods to fix it:
Edit your "Channels You Receive" to remove channels you aren't interested in at all.
Look at the "TiVo Suggestions" for upcoming shows and rate them using the thumbs up/dowm method. Give three thumbs-down to major mistakes.
Take a moment to rate shows it has recorded before deleting them.
Rate your season passes. TiVo will automatically give anything you record 1 thumb-up. If you've got a season pass for something in a genre, or with actors, you'd typically dislike, rate the season pass with multiple thumbs-down (it'll still be recorded.) Do this as well for the one-off items you record (especially if your recording for guests.)
If all else fails, punch the reset button. Somewhere in setup you can tell TiVo to start over in building it's profile.
I wish I could convince my Tivo that I don't speak Spanish! About 1/3 of its "automatic" recordings are in Spanish. I have even tried taking the Spanish channels off of the 'Channels You Receive' list and it still seems to record from them.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be an anti-social geek until I discovered the internet. Upon discovering how easy it is to communicate with people when not face to face, I learned to like people and interact with them. I was able to hide any apprehension, and by subverting this I gained real confidence in myself. This of course translated over well to the real world, and now I consider myself a people person. And no one thinks I am a geek. So this article comes as no surprise to me, and I'm sure that I'm not the only person in this boat.
SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)
When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend!
This week: You can make a trade-off between latency and throughput!
Next week: Cars that can haul less can be more fuel-effiecent!
The week after: Algorithms that use more memory, but are faster to execute!
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like /., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
How to post a negative AOL reply on Slashdot.org.
1. Start off by naming the previous number of times AOL has done something you dislike, noting that this particular incident is "the worst yet."
2. State your greivances about the topic. Explain, in near-irrevelant detail, how this will negatively effect you and others.
3. Throw random arguments in about how non-AOL services are far superior to AOL services.
4. Also imply that anyone who still uses AOL must be of inferior intellect that yourself.
5. Notate the sudden revelation that you don't use the services of AOL (in fact, can't recall any time at which you did use AOL) and, if you did, you and anyone else using AOL probably deserves the a forehand mentioned greviance and whatever similar issues they get.
6. Close with witty remark about poor service and/or "AOHell" reference and offer cliche signature of either "Step 1. AOL reference, Step 2. (blank), 3. Profit!" or "All your base..." adaption.
...the PI channel, a channel dedicated to dictating the sequencial numbers of pi, went off the air today. Apparently, their Neilson ratings dropped to zero five seconds after they went on the air. No later had the digits "1415926" been read before the plug was pulled.
"I don't understand," says Ira Tional, promotional manager of the PI channel. "I thought everyone loved pi, and they could now get it 24-7!" Tional thought that perhaps if they had started the channel with guest stars doing the reading, such as Drew Carey or Britany Spears, the PI channel wouldn't have come to such an abbrupt halt. "But for some reason, they told me I was being too irrational."
While the Sony's have lived in the modern world for awhile, and have gotten it, as well as being on both sides of it, Matsuhita electric is perhaps the most traditional and conservitive of Japanese companies. I have known these people (Matsushita) for much of my life, from some of their board members down. This is an organization so steeped in it's own traditions and dogma (yes, they really do have a "250 year" business plan, and never make fun of the founders light bulb socket :), with engineering departments so conservitivily organized, that for them to support open development of GPL software is really much like the Pope encouraging contraception!
We have your settlement money ready to deliver. Seven million dollars! Unfortunately, we're having trouble getting it out of Nigeria because the current government is corrupt and has frozen our assets. If you could give us your bank account number, we could wire the money to you directly. Congratulations on your win!
Mumar Zibutu
Former King of Nigeria
I never bought a single CD before MP3s...I just didn't listen to music. Now, I have some MP3s that I listen to. If those MP3s went away, I'd just go back to not listening to music.
Because "10.1% of people downloading music are not buying music" does not mean that the music industry is losing sales from all those (though I'm sure it is from some).
I wonder how feasible it would be for someone like Borders (trying to compete with Amazon as a music retailer) to directly sign for tracks with artists. Then they maintain at each location a fat data pipe (if this isn't economically feasible, it will be -- small credit-check data lines are already in place and data gets cheaper and cheaper, whereas CDs stay the same). Then they have a really fancy burner or press or whatever at the location. They download losslessly compressed tracks from the Borders central server and cache them at local locations (to avoid retransferring popular tracks). Then people can simply say "I want a CD and I want track X, Y, and Z on it". The money goes directly to the artist, aside from Border's profit.
So lets see why this makes sense:
* Artist gets money, users have less incentive for piracy.
* User gets to specify what tracks they want/don't want and get better quality than they would pirating MP3s.
* The user can buy CDs more cheaply -- by eliminating the middleman, they pay maybe $3 to Borders per CD (you automate the thing, with a little Borders card reader, and there's very little per unit cost) and 10 cents to the artist per track (hell of a lot more than the artists are currently making), and you get a full-quality CD where you're supporting the artist for $5 tops.
* Users would have a much broader selection, not limited to the few hundred titles that might be in the store.
* Borders makes money -- I suspect unit costs after amortization would be about 50 cents per CD, so they get a healthy $2.50 in profit per CD, which is probably more than they currently make.
* Borders risks far less than they currently do -- adding an artist to their central database is cheap cheap cheap. They don't have to risk warehousing and blowing shelf space on CDs that people don't want.
* New artists can break into the market easily -- they simply register with Borders, send in their music to the main server, and start getting money. They don't have to convince much of anyone of their music quality, since there's no massive production/warehousing costs for all the CDs.
There are two drawbacks. One, you don't get extras in the CD. You might be able to print out the cover and the CD label, if this "Borders mini-CD maker" machine was fairly capable, but you might not get other stuff jammed in the case. Second, even with a hefty local cache, Borders still has to transfer 300MB per full CD (assuming lossless compression averaging 2:1) for infrequently requested CDs. This may not yet be feasible -- however, data lines keep getting cheaper, and CD prices stay the same.
Finally, a $100 80GB HD can store about 160 fairly full CDs, and 300 with lossless 2:1 compression. That's a one-time cost -- like incredibly cheaply expandable floor space. At those prices, Borders can afford to have enormous local caches -- one sale of a CD much more than makes back the cost of storing that CD locally.
I don't know about anybody else, but my purchasing habits have changed quite a bit as a result of having the ability to download music. I actually purchase fewer cds than I did before - not because I'm cheap, but because I now have the opportunity to listen to albums before I put my hard earned cash into them. So yes, the record industry gets less of my money from poor purchases - conversely, the bands I truly enjoy and wish to support get more money from me than they would have previously.
I like to consider my money an investment into a band I support - the more money they have to spend, the more music I get from them in the future. And just like any investment, one must have research tools on hand to ensure that your money is going to get a good return - It just so happens that in my case, its gnutella. Its not piracy - its good business. Surely the RIAA understands that.
The interesting thing that came up in a conversation the other day was that there is an entire generation of people who are growing up not paying for music.
.mp3s
I come from a generation that has been totally used to paying for things. For me there is a "guilt" syndrome about knowing that the music is made with profit in mind. So I am more willing to make purchases or delete
How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free? It's a broken business model for sure and they are really fighting to stay alive in more ways than the average guy realizes.... It will be interesting to see what happens.
Got problems with the shows TiVo records as suggestions? Well, try these methods to fix it:
Edit your "Channels You Receive" to remove channels you aren't interested in at all.
Look at the "TiVo Suggestions" for upcoming shows and rate them using the thumbs up/dowm method. Give three thumbs-down to major mistakes.
Take a moment to rate shows it has recorded before deleting them.
Rate your season passes. TiVo will automatically give anything you record 1 thumb-up. If you've got a season pass for something in a genre, or with actors, you'd typically dislike, rate the season pass with multiple thumbs-down (it'll still be recorded.) Do this as well for the one-off items you record (especially if your recording for guests.)
If all else fails, punch the reset button. Somewhere in setup you can tell TiVo to start over in building it's profile.
I can see it now, /. starts automagically filtering comments based on those comments you've clicked on. Now all I can see is :
....
/. seems to have already implemented this ...
This is a dupe article
First Post!
Imagine a beowulf
Sony/M$ sux, OS rules
CmdrTaco can't spell
Oh wait,
I wish I could convince my Tivo that I don't speak Spanish! About 1/3 of its "automatic" recordings are in Spanish. I have even tried taking the Spanish channels off of the 'Channels You Receive' list and it still seems to record from them.
Here is a Hackles comic that I found which satires people's "real" use of broadband internet access at the office.
...that college dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects!