Their stores were what killed them. They spent a pile of money and put stores up everywhere, with little to no thought about whether any given location made sense or not.
It had to do with the fact that suddenly they had retail stores that still required you to do mail order to get the stuff *and* you now had to pay sales-tax!
How that made any sense I'll never know. Back then, the reason for going to the mail order places was to avoid sales tax. Yeah, you took a hit on shipping but you got a near custom built machine (if you so desired) for less or the same price as an in-store brand before sales tax.
Once they had you paying both shipping and sales tax for a third rate computer dumbed down to below consumer level, it wasn't worth it anymore.
no more of that 30 second preview nonsense- listen to the song if you like it you add it- no restrictions on the number of songs/artist like finetune either. hmmm guess the RIAA can't do shit about it now can they?
I tried a couple of albums at work late last week and then at home on Friday morning. Both connections (work routinely allows for 3MB/s from Apple -- just for reference and I have a 4200/500 DSL connection at home) were laggy with the music frequently pausing during the stream. I felt like I was using RealAudio back in 1999.
I wasn't impressed at all. My co-workers all use free.napster.com which works much better. YMMV.
First they need to open the message. It should have gotten filtered into a junk folder (if not blocked altogether) so the user must be actually going through their junk mail folder and reading things. Who has time to waste on that?
Neither SpamAssassin nor GMail's mail filters are nabbing a lot of this stuff at first. I've marked about 15 of them as spam on my website's GMail account and yet similar messages are *still* getting through. I can certainly understand how people are being infected in the first message wave.
I never understood why every distro can't just use the same install method.
Because none of them are setup the same way and honestly, I don't want them to be? apt-get update ; apt-get install foo. Looks like a two step method where I don't have to think all that much and I still feel like I have control over my system.
Let's not fuck up the way things are just because some believe it would be better. Choice is a big part of the draw to Linux, why make it more like Windows when a lot of people want it to be anything but?
We think we can make a ton more cash by charging for each channel extra. Basically, what we're gonna do is reduce the nominal fee by a good 20 percent, cut channels in half and if you want anything but the propaganda, you'll pay extra.
Of course they'll make more cash this way. Why wouldn't you be expected to pay more to have a special setup different than everyone else?
I don't see what the necessity for cable/satellite is anyway. My wife is obsessed with TV and that's the only reason we have it in the house. I was perfectly happy, when I was living in MN waiting for her to finish college, w/o anything more than an antenna and DVDs.
If it were up to me, we'd be back to rabbit ears and reading books or watching a movie every night. Unfortunately we have one TV hooked up to the receiver and she's in control of it.
I hate phones for the same reason I hate instant messengers. I don't like things that demand my instant attention and interrupt what I'm doing.
I use bitlbee for IM (I use GTalk and AIM primarily) and those don't interrupt me at all. In fact, they can sit there infinitely just like an e-mail if I choose.
We'll they're better off doing it that way then by phone. It's not like I answer my phone for any number I don't recognize.
For just about anything I prefer chatting, e-mail, or any other electronic method as my time isn't 100% devoted to a single person. I can do 100 other things while responding to electronic messages. With a phone call my attention is solely with one person and that's just not a good way to operate for MOST functions of my day.
This isn't weird. This makes perfect sense. Why create new holes and new pathways when others already exist? Makes perfect financial sense to me.
I just wish that the fiber that's running next to my house (less than 100 feet away) would find its way to my doorstep. I'll happily handle it from there.
One room over, however, was my first computer, the Commodore Vic-20, a 2K masterpiece on which a friend of mine and I would sit and write incredible programs in BASIC to do things like ask you your name and then print it on the screen an infinite number of times.
He could be my twin brother, if I had one, as the Vic-20 was the first computer I used and I was programming in BASIC before I could knowingly spell or read (just imitating my father's keystrokes) and what I remember doing the most was printing my name over and over again.
My second computer was the C-64 (not the fat box with dark brown keys but instead the sleeker one built a few years later) and while we used cartridges almost solely with the Vic-20, we only had one cartridge for the C64 (Spyhunter!)
This article, while it may be filled with date inaccuracies, is still fitting my history nearly to the "T".
How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?
I wish I had taken a screenshot of last night's Google News default page. Dead Miners, Death Trap on I-35W, Vick is a Dog Killer, Los Angels Man Dies of West Nile, Firefighters die at Ground Zero Fire, Passengers tell of coming close to death, Breastfeeding moms taking codeine could kill their babies, and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.
This is just YAHTTAD (Yet Another Headline to Talk About Death). It's tiring, it really really is. But remember kids, thankfully the FCC is out there looking out for your best interests and keeping smut off the airwaves.
Is this an indicator that CableCard really is awful, and should be avoided like the spawn of Satan?
Or is this an indicator that Alienware has been completely absorbed by Dell, and has nothing left of what once made it good?
Its an indicator of both of those things including the simple fact that Dell doesn't want to deal with any customer calling up to complain about the thing not working. Regardless of how many people can actually get it to work just fine, means that a good number of people won't and will call up and waste their CSRs call time fixing problems caused by clueless owners.
Our state system is 8 digits but the college I attended for undergrad was 9 (it started with a P but that doesn't really count, eh?) We also keep record of SSN if the student provides it (it isn't required for anything except work study or financial aid -- for obvious reasons). Most people don't know their student ID even when they're a current student so we end up using SSN or wildcard search for name.
or ripped them (which is still legal in some countries)
I hope you aren't insinuating that it's not legal in the United States because regardless of what the RIAA's media machine campaign has been trying to say, it is legal.
Please don't muddy the waters. They are doing a good enough job of that themselves.
It's Russia we're talking about here. More corrupt than a NBA Basketball game. The last line of the article should also say "two more criminal trial dismissals are scheduled..."
It's Russia we're talking about here. A country that doesn't have the same rules and regulations that the United States' has and just because the government here (because of pressure from the industry here) is pressuring Russia to go against its own laws, doesn't mean it will happen.
Whether or not what allofmp3 broke American rules does not necessarily mean that it broke Russian rules. As long as those people stay out of the US, they'll be fine. Now, whether Americans broke the rules of the United States by using allofmp3 (and they probably did regardless of the reasons allofmp3 alluded to on their site) is another story.
You got off easy. I wasn't home during the installation, someone else was. They put the dish on the roof, laid the line down the side of the house, drilled into the side of my garage and stapled the line to the wall that ran around the garage to the wall nearest to the house's cable box inside the kitchen closet. He drilled another hole into the closet (getting shit all over the jackets that were hanging in there) and then ran the wires into the box w/o thinking that now I cannot put the cover back over the panel because he just ran it right in.
And the aerial photo (maps.live.com) can't be more than one or two years old. I only notice a couple of missing buildings, and they have the Sam's Club they just built on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Main St. (North and slightly East).
For my home I can date them to April or May 2006 based on the for sale sign in my neighbor's yard and the color of the grass w/a lack of snow.
It used to be that google maps had the edge with its hybrid and satellite views, but yahoo has all that now too.
Fuck Yahoo and Google. As shitty as it is for me to say this, Microsoft's Live Maps' (in many areas) aerial photos (taken very recently from less than 100 yards and 360 degrees) blows Yahoo, Ask, Google, etc away.
I still use Google Maps/Earth, especially w/topo via GPSVisualizer, plotting shit for work, and viewing converted ARCView files (shapefiles) but when I'm researching a place to camp, a house to buy, or to quickly survey an area we will be visiting, it's Microsoft's Live Maps. I'm very disappointed that Google hasn't kept up and I'm not sure why.
No worries! If you want high quality stuff, like sound board recordings of live shows of decent artists that aren't controlled by the RIAA, it's out there in SHN/FLAC (lossless codecs). It's just not what most of the consumer market wants for a variety of reasons including size constraints, the fact that the music has little depth as it is, and it takes too long to download.
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Their stores were what killed them. They spent a pile of money and put stores up everywhere, with little to no thought about whether any given location made sense or not.
It had to do with the fact that suddenly they had retail stores that still required you to do mail order to get the stuff *and* you now had to pay sales-tax!
How that made any sense I'll never know. Back then, the reason for going to the mail order places was to avoid sales tax. Yeah, you took a hit on shipping but you got a near custom built machine (if you so desired) for less or the same price as an in-store brand before sales tax.
Once they had you paying both shipping and sales tax for a third rate computer dumbed down to below consumer level, it wasn't worth it anymore.
no more of that 30 second preview nonsense- listen to the song if you like it you add it- no restrictions on the number of songs/artist like finetune either. hmmm guess the RIAA can't do shit about it now can they?
I tried a couple of albums at work late last week and then at home on Friday morning. Both connections (work routinely allows for 3MB/s from Apple -- just for reference and I have a 4200/500 DSL connection at home) were laggy with the music frequently pausing during the stream. I felt like I was using RealAudio back in 1999.
I wasn't impressed at all. My co-workers all use free.napster.com which works much better. YMMV.
First they need to open the message. It should have gotten filtered into a junk folder (if not blocked altogether) so the user must be actually going through their junk mail folder and reading things. Who has time to waste on that?
Neither SpamAssassin nor GMail's mail filters are nabbing a lot of this stuff at first. I've marked about 15 of them as spam on my website's GMail account and yet similar messages are *still* getting through. I can certainly understand how people are being infected in the first message wave.
Let's skip the pointless blog promotion and go straight to the real article here.
I never understood why every distro can't just use the same install method.
Because none of them are setup the same way and honestly, I don't want them to be? apt-get update ; apt-get install foo. Looks like a two step method where I don't have to think all that much and I still feel like I have control over my system.
Let's not fuck up the way things are just because some believe it would be better. Choice is a big part of the draw to Linux, why make it more like Windows when a lot of people want it to be anything but?
Why do people use that crap?
Because everyone else does and no one wants to deal with a bunch of interoperability issues. Even long-time Linux users like myself.
Sounds like you need a better wife.
Yes, just like your blow-up doll? No thanks.
We think we can make a ton more cash by charging for each channel extra. Basically, what we're gonna do is reduce the nominal fee by a good 20 percent, cut channels in half and if you want anything but the propaganda, you'll pay extra.
Of course they'll make more cash this way. Why wouldn't you be expected to pay more to have a special setup different than everyone else?
I don't see what the necessity for cable/satellite is anyway. My wife is obsessed with TV and that's the only reason we have it in the house. I was perfectly happy, when I was living in MN waiting for her to finish college, w/o anything more than an antenna and DVDs.
If it were up to me, we'd be back to rabbit ears and reading books or watching a movie every night. Unfortunately we have one TV hooked up to the receiver and she's in control of it.
But people should also stop taking advantage of the ignorance of other people, too.
Then Microsoft and Apple should issue immediate patches to their operating systems that disable that from occurring.
Oh, those two companies already take advantage of the ignorance of other people. Sorry.
I hate phones for the same reason I hate instant messengers. I don't like things that demand my instant attention and interrupt what I'm doing.
I use bitlbee for IM (I use GTalk and AIM primarily) and those don't interrupt me at all. In fact, they can sit there infinitely just like an e-mail if I choose.
Hopefully you're not opening a lot of emails from addresses you don't recognize, either.
Unfortunately it's the nature of my job.
Let me guess. They did the survey via e-mail.
We'll they're better off doing it that way then by phone. It's not like I answer my phone for any number I don't recognize.
For just about anything I prefer chatting, e-mail, or any other electronic method as my time isn't 100% devoted to a single person. I can do 100 other things while responding to electronic messages. With a phone call my attention is solely with one person and that's just not a good way to operate for MOST functions of my day.
They run fiber through a lot of weird places.
This isn't weird. This makes perfect sense. Why create new holes and new pathways when others already exist? Makes perfect financial sense to me.
I just wish that the fiber that's running next to my house (less than 100 feet away) would find its way to my doorstep. I'll happily handle it from there.
One room over, however, was my first computer, the Commodore Vic-20, a 2K masterpiece on which a friend of mine and I would sit and write incredible programs in BASIC to do things like ask you your name and then print it on the screen an infinite number of times.
He could be my twin brother, if I had one, as the Vic-20 was the first computer I used and I was programming in BASIC before I could knowingly spell or read (just imitating my father's keystrokes) and what I remember doing the most was printing my name over and over again.
My second computer was the C-64 (not the fat box with dark brown keys but instead the sleeker one built a few years later) and while we used cartridges almost solely with the Vic-20, we only had one cartridge for the C64 (Spyhunter!)
This article, while it may be filled with date inaccuracies, is still fitting my history nearly to the "T".
How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?
I wish I had taken a screenshot of last night's Google News default page. Dead Miners, Death Trap on I-35W, Vick is a Dog Killer, Los Angels Man Dies of West Nile, Firefighters die at Ground Zero Fire, Passengers tell of coming close to death, Breastfeeding moms taking codeine could kill their babies, and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.
This is just YAHTTAD (Yet Another Headline to Talk About Death). It's tiring, it really really is. But remember kids, thankfully the FCC is out there looking out for your best interests and keeping smut off the airwaves.
Is this an indicator that CableCard really is awful, and should be avoided like the spawn of Satan?
Or is this an indicator that Alienware has been completely absorbed by Dell, and has nothing left of what once made it good?
Its an indicator of both of those things including the simple fact that Dell doesn't want to deal with any customer calling up to complain about the thing not working. Regardless of how many people can actually get it to work just fine, means that a good number of people won't and will call up and waste their CSRs call time fixing problems caused by clueless owners.
Our state system is 8 digits but the college I attended for undergrad was 9 (it started with a P but that doesn't really count, eh?) We also keep record of SSN if the student provides it (it isn't required for anything except work study or financial aid -- for obvious reasons). Most people don't know their student ID even when they're a current student so we end up using SSN or wildcard search for name.
or ripped them (which is still legal in some countries)
I hope you aren't insinuating that it's not legal in the United States because regardless of what the RIAA's media machine campaign has been trying to say, it is legal.
Please don't muddy the waters. They are doing a good enough job of that themselves.
It's Russia we're talking about here. More corrupt than a NBA Basketball game. The last line of the article should also say "two more criminal trial dismissals are scheduled..."
It's Russia we're talking about here. A country that doesn't have the same rules and regulations that the United States' has and just because the government here (because of pressure from the industry here) is pressuring Russia to go against its own laws, doesn't mean it will happen.
Whether or not what allofmp3 broke American rules does not necessarily mean that it broke Russian rules. As long as those people stay out of the US, they'll be fine. Now, whether Americans broke the rules of the United States by using allofmp3 (and they probably did regardless of the reasons allofmp3 alluded to on their site) is another story.
You got off easy. I wasn't home during the installation, someone else was. They put the dish on the roof, laid the line down the side of the house, drilled into the side of my garage and stapled the line to the wall that ran around the garage to the wall nearest to the house's cable box inside the kitchen closet. He drilled another hole into the closet (getting shit all over the jackets that were hanging in there) and then ran the wires into the box w/o thinking that now I cannot put the cover back over the panel because he just ran it right in.
And the aerial photo (maps.live.com) can't be more than one or two years old. I only notice a couple of missing buildings, and they have the Sam's Club they just built on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Main St. (North and slightly East).
For my home I can date them to April or May 2006 based on the for sale sign in my neighbor's yard and the color of the grass w/a lack of snow.
It used to be that google maps had the edge with its hybrid and satellite views, but yahoo has all that now too.
Fuck Yahoo and Google. As shitty as it is for me to say this, Microsoft's Live Maps' (in many areas) aerial photos (taken very recently from less than 100 yards and 360 degrees) blows Yahoo, Ask, Google, etc away.
I still use Google Maps/Earth, especially w/topo via GPSVisualizer, plotting shit for work, and viewing converted ARCView files (shapefiles) but when I'm researching a place to camp, a house to buy, or to quickly survey an area we will be visiting, it's Microsoft's Live Maps. I'm very disappointed that Google hasn't kept up and I'm not sure why.
They are already doing it with Dodgeball which they never did much with and could have provided them with free access to this data.
No worries! If you want high quality stuff, like sound board recordings of live shows of decent artists that aren't controlled by the RIAA, it's out there in SHN/FLAC (lossless codecs). It's just not what most of the consumer market wants for a variety of reasons including size constraints, the fact that the music has little depth as it is, and it takes too long to download.
A million dollars.