In my experience, that is christian thing to do -- using your friends against you, leveraging peer pressure to get you to convert.
That is definitely Christianity in a nutshell. A bunch of self-righteous busybodies. You have a problem with someone, you confront them about it. Only a snake would slither away and try to alienate his friends.
The sad fucking thing is, she didn't ask his friends to talk to him into not patronizing the restaurant. She told his friends to leave him. If ditching a wayward sheep is the Christian thing to do, then I am fucking glad I am an atheist.
It never ceases to amaze me how people like you feel the need to be self important, but do it as an Anonymous Coward. If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise you better get back to your fingerpainting.
Why when this happened did he not instantly start shopping around and then demand to speak with a manager and tell them that unless they got a clue about the diffrences between protocals that he was leaving?
Actually you are right. The real problem is people willing to put up with shitty customer service. If enough people stopped putting up with it, and did switch, we might actually see some corporate changes.
When my last ISP gave me crap about a similar problem, I immediately started looking for a new ISP and eventually switched to Speakeasy. It was the best move I could have made. I have been with Speakeasy for over 3 years now and I honestly could not be happier. I have customer service that listens to me and technical support that actually helps me.
I know of no blacklist that does not first verify that you are indeed an open relay. If you know which service did this, then please let the rest of us know so that we can be sure not to use them.
First off, mail-abuse.org is notorious for their response times.
That said, you left a relay open for 3 days, and potentially tens of thousands of spam emails, and you are going to sit their and complain that it took two weeks for you to be removed from the black list? What about all the individual admins that added you to their personal blacklists and just never bothered removing you?
Discarding mail is one thing, but blocking an IP address is quite another. What's the justification for this?
Null routing of address blocks with a significant number of known spammers has been done for years. This is hardly new so please do not act so shocked.
First of all, the idea of Verio blocking spammers is laughable. They have always been a haven for spammers and everyone here probably already knows that.
The real issue, however, seems to be this guys ISP. I mean honestly, what the hell is wrong with them? If I had called Speakeasy with this sort of problem, it would have been taken care of that day.
I'm glad to know people aren't simply flaming Mr. Strauss and are instead making valid arguments against his article.
The letter I wrote to him begins:
First let me say that I hope your rambling diatribe is not indicative of the writing abilities of the average Princeton employee. If it is, then Princeton has indeed fallen as a school.
I just could not resist the dig and, frankly, that is one of the most poorly written articles I have read in a long time.
(problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card)
What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).
I did get some panics when running -CURRENT with a Via Rhine on a high throughput firewall, but when I returned to 4.8, everything was fine. Serves me right for running -CURRENT on a production box.
I don't think many artists that have gotten signed onto an RIAA record label are poor or in debt.
I hope this is a joke. By the end of most record deals, the artists end up owing the record label money. The only way they make any money is through touring.
Yup, and your bandwidth calculations don't even take into account the amount of times users "preview" a song before actually downloading the purchased version. That costs bandwidth too.
Try actually doing the bandwidth calculations. The cost is TRIVIAL.
1 million purchases from PC users alone in 3.5 days. Yeah. clearly no demand for Apple's offering.
That is, frankly, pathetic. When you consider just how much music is traded on kazaa every day, 1 million songs is a pittance.
As far as I can tell, a capitalistic system is really about MAKING AS MUCH FREAKIN' MONEY AS YOU CAN.
"WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION" is the part you left off. Pure capitalism is a series of checks and balances, supply and demand. It does not survive in the face of ludicrous laws like the DMCA, and government sanctioned monopolies like RIAA.
The fact is, the RIAA could put an end to piracy once and for all by giving us what we want, not telling us what we want. Do you need DRM? Not if you give them an economic reason to stay legitimate.
It is exactly like the movie industry when the VCR came out. Video's cost $100 a piece. Everyone pirated them because they were too damned expensive. The same is currently true of music. Would you waste your time searching on kazaa or emule if you could get a perfect digital copy for 25 cents? Would you risk downloading a virus or otherwise waste your time trying to find the exact version of a song you want? Absolutely not.
I see nothing wrong with saying "Here, you can buy this thing from me but you can only use it in the following ways I think are acceptable."
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But if you think for one damned second I am going to accept those terms, you are out of your mind. And eventually, I really believe the rest of the world is going to feel that way.
Look what happened with TurboTax. Intuit added product activation. It wasn't draconian, it really wasn't nearly as evil as everyone made it out to be, and yet, it caused an uproar. Intuit lost thousands of sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were forced to not only remove the product activation, but even the license key as well.
When the person who is bending you over is 10 times your size and 10 times your weight, there isn't anything you can do about it.
When, exactly, did the buying public become 10 times smaller than the entertainment industry? The tech sector alone is many times larger than the entertainment industry. The buying power of US citizens is many times larger than that.
The real problem here, is that you believe you have no power. What you should be doing, just as I and my friends have done, is to convince people not to buy CD's. People have attributed the decline in CD sales to the economy and to piracy, but less frequently to what is likely the real culprit, a disgruntled buying public.
Bull shit it's uncompressed audio. What do you think digitizing music does?
Digital music on a CD is sampled not compressed. If you do not get the difference, then I can not help you.
Get a program takes the output from your sound card, and reencodes it to another sound type. Not that fucking hard.
It's not hard. The problem is the sound gets worse when you do this. You can't throw away information at every step and then expect the end result to sound as good as the original. Please stop being so snotty about it. Noone said iTMS isn't the best offering currently available. The problem is, some of us are waiting for something better.
just like a music store won't give you a free copy of a CD if you lose it?
If I lose a CD, it is my fault. If my hard drive dies, that isn't my fault. Let's not make stupid arguments and treat them like gospel.
I can buy jewel cases for the CD's I burn. And with iTMS, I get the album art. Liner notes, lyrics, etc haven't been the same since the switch from 12" LP to CD forced everyone to 6pt Arial.
By the time you have bought the CDR, the case, and printed the cover art, you might as well have bought the CD. Considering Universal suggested lowering the price of a CD to $10, it really doesn't make iTunes look like a good value anymore.
The fee supposedly compensates the industry for the illegal copying that goes on using CD-R's (and cassette tapes). The law imposing the fee did not make it legal to make copies that would otherwise be illegal.
Once again you miss the point. The previous post was talking about paying for fair use rights. He was mocking the idea of paying for a "right". He was not trying to say that paying the CDR surcharge made it legal to distribute music.
Furthermore, the surcharge in Canada does not give you the right to distribute cpied music any more than you are allowed to do it here in the states. The Canadians just have a much higher surcharge.
With iTMS, if I want it, 2 minutes later I own it.
Great, two minutes later I have a song I can't play on my SliMP3 or my nomad. I have a song that if it gets erased, I get to pay for again because there is no physical copy (yeah I could burn it but now my 2 minute download is 10 minutes and adds the cost of a CDR). A song I can't listen to is pretty worthless to me.
Wow. I'm just going to stop posting because you keep beating me to it. I feel the same way. Period. Some day the public is going to try to take back their rights. Let's hope it isn't too late by then.
Universal's new pricing I was just going to point out that Universal's new pricing has just made all of these online stores an even worse deal but you beat me to it.
In the US, no. In Canada, apparently so (for personal use only).
WRONG. There is a fee added to all AUDIO CDR purchases in the US and Canada (and probably elsewhere), and it goes right into the pockets of the RIAA (not the artists). The thing is, noone buys AUDIO CDR's. We all buy DATA CDR's and record audio to them. Because there is a substantial non-music use for data CDR's, there is no additional fee on them.
Also, the author of the previous post did not mean copying rights to include giving copies to friends, only within your own collection.
Right now, online music sales are the cheapest (or nearly the cheapest) legal way to get most music
Not even close. The cheapest method is, by far, going to one of the many used music stores around here (I live n NYC so this is easy) and buying the CD's I want for $5. I get lossless recordings, no DRM, and it costs less.
The recording industry has to get their head out of their ass. Just like the movie industry when the VCR came out, DRM-less digital music will not kill them but likely save them. Their customers are not inherently criminals, yet for some reason, we keep getting treated that way.
The real truth of the matter is that music isn't going to be cheap or free of restrictions until the RIAA goes away. That will happen someday, as artists become more savvy, but until then, some of us simply are not going to be buying music.
Part of the reason that the price is where it's at is the DRM, which helps alleviate the opportuniy cost of electronic downloads.
An opportunity cost is the loss of revenue a business experiences while shifting limited resources to pursue a new opportunity. What this has to do with DRM is beyond me. The correct word in this context would seem to be risk.
They are charging $1 per song. This is without manufacturing costs (albumn art, case and cd) and smaller distribution costs than a regular CD. This is with a lossy format instead of the higher quality original. And on top of this they are sticking DRM on there? Get real.
I want MP3's. That's what my SliMP3 understands and what I will use. I don't want to pay $1 for an inferior product either. Until songs hit 50 cents, and the DRM is gone, they are not going to see a real market explosion.
For some reason, corporations in this country seem to believe that they can tell the customer what to do, rather than the other way around.
When DirecTV or my cable company does something to tick me off, what can I do? I have no legal recourse; the government has seen to that. I do have an economic recourse however. I can choose to walk away. When enough people walk away, the company stops being quite so stupid.
Intuit learned their lesson with TurboTax. Cell phone companies actually have to listen to customer complaints because competition is so stiff. Eventually, the recording industry will catch on. Let's hope it comes sooner rather than later.
should i have to exhaustively learn the tuning parameters of each OS so i can get comparable benchmarks?
Would you try to compare sports cars if you could not figure out how to shift one past second gear? Of course not. So why the fuck would you try to benchmark operating systems if you can figure out how to configure one for high volume operation?
No matter how much tuning he DID do, there would always be more to do (and more experts on each system pointing out what he could do).
The problem here is not that the box wasn't tuned for performance, I can respect that. The real problem is that the box didn't work. He hit limits that prevented him from doing a real benchmark.
So, contribute instead of criticizing, and send him an email explaining how to better tune FreeBSD.
It's in the man page. I'm sorry but he should RTFM.
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In my experience, that is christian thing to do -- using your friends against you, leveraging peer pressure to get you to convert.
That is definitely Christianity in a nutshell. A bunch of self-righteous busybodies. You have a problem with someone, you confront them about it. Only a snake would slither away and try to alienate his friends.
The sad fucking thing is, she didn't ask his friends to talk to him into not patronizing the restaurant. She told his friends to leave him. If ditching a wayward sheep is the Christian thing to do, then I am fucking glad I am an atheist.
-siket
It never ceases to amaze me how people like you feel the need to be self important, but do it as an Anonymous Coward. If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise you better get back to your fingerpainting.
-sirket
Why when this happened did he not instantly start shopping around and then demand to speak with a manager and tell them that unless they got a clue about the diffrences between protocals that he was leaving?
Actually you are right. The real problem is people willing to put up with shitty customer service. If enough people stopped putting up with it, and did switch, we might actually see some corporate changes.
When my last ISP gave me crap about a similar problem, I immediately started looking for a new ISP and eventually switched to Speakeasy. It was the best move I could have made. I have been with Speakeasy for over 3 years now and I honestly could not be happier. I have customer service that listens to me and technical support that actually helps me.
-sirket
I know of no blacklist that does not first verify that you are indeed an open relay. If you know which service did this, then please let the rest of us know so that we can be sure not to use them.
-sirket
First off, mail-abuse.org is notorious for their response times.
That said, you left a relay open for 3 days, and potentially tens of thousands of spam emails, and you are going to sit their and complain that it took two weeks for you to be removed from the black list? What about all the individual admins that added you to their personal blacklists and just never bothered removing you?
-sirket
Discarding mail is one thing, but blocking an IP address is quite another. What's the justification for this?
Null routing of address blocks with a significant number of known spammers has been done for years. This is hardly new so please do not act so shocked.
-sirket
First of all, the idea of Verio blocking spammers is laughable. They have always been a haven for spammers and everyone here probably already knows that.
The real issue, however, seems to be this guys ISP. I mean honestly, what the hell is wrong with them? If I had called Speakeasy with this sort of problem, it would have been taken care of that day.
-sirket
MIT Janitors are smart not Princeton groudnskeepers. Get your facts straight :)
The problem is, Princeton groundskeepers do not go around writing articles in Syllabus. This guy did.
-sirket
I'm glad to know people aren't simply flaming Mr. Strauss and are instead making valid arguments against his article.
The letter I wrote to him begins:
First let me say that I hope your rambling diatribe is not indicative of the writing abilities of the average Princeton employee. If it is, then Princeton has indeed fallen as a school.
I just could not resist the dig and, frankly, that is one of the most poorly written articles I have read in a long time.
-sirket
(problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card)
What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).
I did get some panics when running -CURRENT with a Via Rhine on a high throughput firewall, but when I returned to 4.8, everything was fine. Serves me right for running -CURRENT on a production box.
-sirket
I don't think many artists that have gotten signed onto an RIAA record label are poor or in debt.
I hope this is a joke. By the end of most record deals, the artists end up owing the record label money. The only way they make any money is through touring.
-sirket
Yup, and your bandwidth calculations don't even take into account the amount of times users "preview" a song before actually downloading the purchased version. That costs bandwidth too.
Try actually doing the bandwidth calculations. The cost is TRIVIAL.
1 million purchases from PC users alone in 3.5 days. Yeah. clearly no demand for Apple's offering.
That is, frankly, pathetic. When you consider just how much music is traded on kazaa every day, 1 million songs is a pittance.
-sirket
As far as I can tell, a capitalistic system is really about MAKING AS MUCH FREAKIN' MONEY AS YOU CAN.
"WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION" is the part you left off. Pure capitalism is a series of checks and balances, supply and demand. It does not survive in the face of ludicrous laws like the DMCA, and government sanctioned monopolies like RIAA.
The fact is, the RIAA could put an end to piracy once and for all by giving us what we want, not telling us what we want. Do you need DRM? Not if you give them an economic reason to stay legitimate.
It is exactly like the movie industry when the VCR came out. Video's cost $100 a piece. Everyone pirated them because they were too damned expensive. The same is currently true of music. Would you waste your time searching on kazaa or emule if you could get a perfect digital copy for 25 cents? Would you risk downloading a virus or otherwise waste your time trying to find the exact version of a song you want? Absolutely not.
I see nothing wrong with saying "Here, you can buy this thing from me but you can only use it in the following ways I think are acceptable."
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But if you think for one damned second I am going to accept those terms, you are out of your mind. And eventually, I really believe the rest of the world is going to feel that way.
Look what happened with TurboTax. Intuit added product activation. It wasn't draconian, it really wasn't nearly as evil as everyone made it out to be, and yet, it caused an uproar. Intuit lost thousands of sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were forced to not only remove the product activation, but even the license key as well.
When the person who is bending you over is 10 times your size and 10 times your weight, there isn't anything you can do about it.
When, exactly, did the buying public become 10 times smaller than the entertainment industry? The tech sector alone is many times larger than the entertainment industry. The buying power of US citizens is many times larger than that.
The real problem here, is that you believe you have no power. What you should be doing, just as I and my friends have done, is to convince people not to buy CD's. People have attributed the decline in CD sales to the economy and to piracy, but less frequently to what is likely the real culprit, a disgruntled buying public.
-sirket
Bull shit it's uncompressed audio. What do you think digitizing music does?
Digital music on a CD is sampled not compressed. If you do not get the difference, then I can not help you.
Get a program takes the output from your sound card, and reencodes it to another sound type. Not that fucking hard.
It's not hard. The problem is the sound gets worse when you do this. You can't throw away information at every step and then expect the end result to sound as good as the original. Please stop being so snotty about it. Noone said iTMS isn't the best offering currently available. The problem is, some of us are waiting for something better.
just like a music store won't give you a free copy of a CD if you lose it?
If I lose a CD, it is my fault. If my hard drive dies, that isn't my fault. Let's not make stupid arguments and treat them like gospel.
-sirket
I can buy jewel cases for the CD's I burn. And with iTMS, I get the album art. Liner notes, lyrics, etc haven't been the same since the switch from 12" LP to CD forced everyone to 6pt Arial.
By the time you have bought the CDR, the case, and printed the cover art, you might as well have bought the CD. Considering Universal suggested lowering the price of a CD to $10, it really doesn't make iTunes look like a good value anymore.
-sirket
The fee supposedly compensates the industry for the illegal copying that goes on using CD-R's (and cassette tapes). The law imposing the fee did not make it legal to make copies that would otherwise be illegal.
Once again you miss the point. The previous post was talking about paying for fair use rights. He was mocking the idea of paying for a "right". He was not trying to say that paying the CDR surcharge made it legal to distribute music.
Furthermore, the surcharge in Canada does not give you the right to distribute cpied music any more than you are allowed to do it here in the states. The Canadians just have a much higher surcharge.
-sirket
With iTMS, if I want it, 2 minutes later I own it.
Great, two minutes later I have a song I can't play on my SliMP3 or my nomad. I have a song that if it gets erased, I get to pay for again because there is no physical copy (yeah I could burn it but now my 2 minute download is 10 minutes and adds the cost of a CDR). A song I can't listen to is pretty worthless to me.
-sirket
Wow. I'm just going to stop posting because you keep beating me to it. I feel the same way. Period. Some day the public is going to try to take back their rights. Let's hope it isn't too late by then.
-sirket
Universal's new pricing
I was just going to point out that Universal's new pricing has just made all of these online stores an even worse deal but you beat me to it.
-sirket
In the US, no. In Canada, apparently so (for personal use only).
WRONG. There is a fee added to all AUDIO CDR purchases in the US and Canada (and probably elsewhere), and it goes right into the pockets of the RIAA (not the artists). The thing is, noone buys AUDIO CDR's. We all buy DATA CDR's and record audio to them. Because there is a substantial non-music use for data CDR's, there is no additional fee on them.
Also, the author of the previous post did not mean copying rights to include giving copies to friends, only within your own collection.
-sirket
Right now, online music sales are the cheapest (or nearly the cheapest) legal way to get most music
Not even close. The cheapest method is, by far, going to one of the many used music stores around here (I live n NYC so this is easy) and buying the CD's I want for $5. I get lossless recordings, no DRM, and it costs less.
The recording industry has to get their head out of their ass. Just like the movie industry when the VCR came out, DRM-less digital music will not kill them but likely save them. Their customers are not inherently criminals, yet for some reason, we keep getting treated that way.
The real truth of the matter is that music isn't going to be cheap or free of restrictions until the RIAA goes away. That will happen someday, as artists become more savvy, but until then, some of us simply are not going to be buying music.
Part of the reason that the price is where it's at is the DRM, which helps alleviate the opportuniy cost of electronic downloads.
An opportunity cost is the loss of revenue a business experiences while shifting limited resources to pursue a new opportunity. What this has to do with DRM is beyond me. The correct word in this context would seem to be risk.
-sirket
I agree 100%
They are charging $1 per song. This is without manufacturing costs (albumn art, case and cd) and smaller distribution costs than a regular CD. This is with a lossy format instead of the higher quality original. And on top of this they are sticking DRM on there? Get real.
I want MP3's. That's what my SliMP3 understands and what I will use. I don't want to pay $1 for an inferior product either. Until songs hit 50 cents, and the DRM is gone, they are not going to see a real market explosion.
For some reason, corporations in this country seem to believe that they can tell the customer what to do, rather than the other way around.
When DirecTV or my cable company does something to tick me off, what can I do? I have no legal recourse; the government has seen to that. I do have an economic recourse however. I can choose to walk away. When enough people walk away, the company stops being quite so stupid.
Intuit learned their lesson with TurboTax. Cell phone companies actually have to listen to customer complaints because competition is so stiff. Eventually, the recording industry will catch on. Let's hope it comes sooner rather than later.
-sirket
should i have to exhaustively learn the tuning parameters of each OS so i can get comparable benchmarks?
Would you try to compare sports cars if you could not figure out how to shift one past second gear? Of course not. So why the fuck would you try to benchmark operating systems if you can figure out how to configure one for high volume operation?
you're being elitist.
And you're being a fucking idiot.
-sirket
No matter how much tuning he DID do, there would always be more to do (and more experts on each system pointing out what he could do).
The problem here is not that the box wasn't tuned for performance, I can respect that. The real problem is that the box didn't work. He hit limits that prevented him from doing a real benchmark.
So, contribute instead of criticizing, and send him an email explaining how to better tune FreeBSD.
It's in the man page. I'm sorry but he should RTFM.
-sirket
The really sad thing is, all of the information that the author could not find is in the tuning man page. It does not get any lazier than that folks.
-sirket