The RIAA never offered any of this money to the artists. The money acquired through their legal extortion was never promised, offered or even intended to go to the artists. It was to bolster their legal attack against piracy.
The RIAA is a record label trade association that represents the labels but, it is the individual labels (see link below) that represent artists -- not the RIAA. The RIAA is a house of lawyers that serve the RIAA to insure the RIAA's survival. There are many (read: most) domestic record labels that are members of the RIAA - more than just the "Big 4" labels. This is why the law suits are NOT the RIAA v. some_innocent_person. It is the individual labels named as plaintiffs in the suits (EMI, Sony, Warner, Artista, etc.)
The RIAA is also not a royalty collection agency like ASCAP & BMI, Harry Fox Agency, SoundExchange, SoundScan,... so, the money they make doesn't really have a pot to be put into and then distributed. If it did, the money would be distributed between all the record labels they represent and it would then be up to the labels to divvy the pot.
You are correct in assuming that the RIAA is not interested in the artists. They are not. It isn't their purpose or charter. They are a bureaucracy that breeds upon itself. This is why they want to actually reduce the royalties that artists make. This is why they never get involved directly with the artists. It isn't their business.
So, this shouldn't be surprising that the RIAA is keeping all the money they extort. If the labels touched it, they could be accused of "unclean hands".
After all the complaints by digruntled customers after Yahoo Downgrades MusicMatch Jukebox and removed many of the features of that application, failed to get it working 100%, and a host of other problems, one might ask why they just didn't give the customer what they want? That was the return of the MusicMatch Jukebox program the way it was in its last release.
It seems that the music business is in the business of denying customers what they want. Just as the RIAA is seeing drastic declines in music sales because of similar tactics and a blatant refusal to monetize the net, Yahoo! music did the same thing - refusing to satisfy their customers and give them value for their dollar. This is what happens.
One must ask, "why they never learn?" There are better and more value-for-your-dollar options out there. All Yahoo Music had to do was give the consumer value for their dollar.
The big 4 labels ALL decided to pull the plug at the same time? Circumstantial? NOT. This is just another way that the labels and keep themselves and artists from making any money. How many billions of dollars has the music industry thrown away because they adamantly refuse to monetize music on the Internet? After all, it was a computer company -- Apple, that figured out the model and made it work. The music cartel had absolutely zero to do with that and, in fact, were the ones who tried to kill the entire idea. So, is anybody really surprised that they would try and kill this too?
I was trying to determine the weather so I could decide if I wanted to drive 60 miles north. The sky was very cloudy and dark. It was cold and it looked like snow would fall any minute. The Weather Channel and Weather.com both said it was clear skies all the way. I checked the forcasts on Accuweather and weather.com. Same thing -- nothing but clear skies all day. There was just one problem. You couldn't see a clear sky anywhere.
I really suggest that before these services post data like this that they look out the window first.
Computers, data, NEXRAD and all are fine but, they often are blind too. I would guess that along the Rocky Mountains that the weather service is correct about 65% of the time. The other 35% they are so far off that it is amazing. We've had an inch of rain when it is reported clear skies and good weather. We've had snow on clear days. We've had clear days when the weather service reports cloudy...
My dad was piloting a plane out of Kansas City when he was told to take a heading directly into a huge thunderhead. He told the center that there was a huge thunderhead in front of him on that heading. The center told him there wasn't -- nothing on the radar. My dad asked the controller to...Look Out The Window. He was given directions around the storm. It's no wonder that weather is a part of learning to fly.
Wired's TV series Audio Files did a story on, well, Audio files. They had two recording engineers, a band and two people with "golden ears" for their test.
The interesting part was that the digital engineer said there was no difference except that editing in digital was a whole world easier. He said you couldn't hear the difference.
The analog recording engineer said that analog was the way to go for purity and clean sound.
Then they did a test where they did a song with changes from analog to digital to analog to digital... The band and the golden ears were to tell which was which. Basically at around 50% for each, neither the band or the golden ears could tell the difference.
Then at the end of the clip, they mentioned that the fancy digital recording board had a button on it to emulate or simulate the analog sound from analog recordings.
I thought it very strange that a digital board that made recordings so accurately that you couldn't tell the difference needed a button to make them sound the same.
I recently did a study of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss "Raising Sand" LP and CD. They were made from the same master but they are a world apart. The digital on the CD is clipped resulting in clipped analog out of the CD Player. The CD is also heavily compressed compared to the LP. The result was that the LP was a lot more natural but, only because of what the engineer did to the CD in the post mastering process.
What? Windows Explorer is malicious code. In Vista, just try and move a file to another device and you can wait for the rest of your life for the copy/delete functions to take place;)
MS is known as the company that purchases other innovative companies and assimilates them into the collective that is Microsoft. Is Microsoft really innovative? Not really. Look at all their innovations from Windows ME, Robert, Barney, Plays for Sure, Origami handheld PC, SPOT watch and on and on. Even Zune, Vista and the Table Surface PC are not being accepted into the marketplace. Shoot, even XP has been touted as an UPgrade to Vista.
Innovation has be be an improvement or a usable new product that makes sense to both the vendor and the consumer. While Microsoft has accesses to some of the best, they are a lot like Boeing Aircraft that bought up all the cool innovative military companies like North American Aviation (F-86, F-100, P-51, XB-70, etc) and killed off most of America's competitive fighter aircraft manufacturers. Only Lockheed/Lockheed Martin remains. Is Boeing more innovative or did they purchase their innovations? Maybe but at what cost?
Spending millions on research doesn't mean anything really, Look at Xerox and their PARC facility. How much of that innovation made it to market? Probably less than 10%, if that. Did all that research make Xerox into an innovative company? Maybe but, Canon, Sharp and other copiers are taking over the world.
MS can be innovative but, I would much rather they become ethical. That's how to become a good corporate citizen and a company that people like and respect. Xerox is such a company. Microsoft is not. Apple is. Halliburton is not. It all has to do with ethics -- not innovation.
There have been various studies about chips throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal and doing better than some analysts. Are they just lucky?
On average, if eight blindfolded chimpanzees threw darts at the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal for three years, one of them would end up beating the market.
Humans and chimps share roughly 98 percent of the same genes, but that doesn't make it a good idea to give your money to a stock picker who munches on bananas and termites. Our chimp isn't a great investor -- he's just lucky. - money.cnn.com
So, was the chimp lucky, smarter or is this some trait we don't, as of yet, comprehend?
In the entire history of Microsoft, has this company ever done one ethical thing? Why can't they be fair? Why can't they be ethical? why can't they be honest? What is it with this company?
Now, intel is apparently going to follow the high standards set by Microsoft.
Because of this kind of immoral behavior, I run AMD, ATI and Linux. I can't support an unethical company because doing so would make me unethical too.
Electric cars need energy and where does it come from? In a large part of America, that is from coal-fired power plants. But do you understand how much coal it takes to do this? How many power plants consume how much coal over how many years?
The Appalachian mountain range with their mountain top removal has the same problem as here in the west...Wyoming has several HUGE open pit coal mines and, for example, Colorado has a moderate sized coal fired power plant near Pueblo. The Commanche Power Generating Plant was built when I was at the University in the mid '70s. The power plant consumes coal -- LOTS OF IT! They're expanding it by 50% and adding another power unit now.
* Trains have been running to the Commanche Power station since 1976 * There are a minimum of 8 trains of coal each day to the power plant. Often 12 or more. * Each Train has between 100 and 125 cars of coal * Each car holds between 286,000 - 315,000 pounds of coal
30 Years = 10950 days 8 trains x 100 cars x 10950 days yields 8,760,000 cars of coal 8,760,000 cars x 286,000 lbs per car = 2,505,360,000,000 Pounds of coal One could assume that 2.5 trillion pounds of coal have been burned. That's 1,211,753,400 tons! Now there's 45 cu ft per ton for hard coal So just this one power plant has consumed 54,528,903,000 cu ft of coal.
That's just one power plant. That's one hell of a big hole! That's also only for one small power plant. Almost 7 times that number of trains run through here and who knows how many in other directions from the mines. That same mine in Wyoming is also sending about the same amount of coal to Utah and other states. The hole above is just to keep one power plant running. Wyoming Some day I'm going to head up there because I want to see the hole that has produced over a trillion cubic feet of coal..
27 trains a day come through here (and 27 empty trains return through here) every day. Each of the 54 trains has six engines smoking away as they go back and forth for hundreds of miles. If North, East, West and SouthWest all have comparable train volumes from just this one mine, and there are many similar mines in Wyoming, we are consuming coal in mass quantities and stripping the land of its features in the process.
So, now what does it cost to run your little green car?
I consult with various big insurance companies and from call centers to data centers, Windows 2000 is everywhere today. A major new medical center opened up near my home and I had injured my shoulder trying to stay healthy;) and the X-ray room, doctors office and reception were all running Windows 2000 Pro. I went downtown to a government office last month and saw Windows 2000 running there. Some of the military installations also run Win2K. Most IT departments and IT/Telecom/Computing businesses run XP but outside of that, I still see tons of Win2K boxes happily chugging along.
Win2K is everywhere even though Microsoft claims its end-of-life. Obviously, there are a lot of businesses that don't see it as DOA yet and they never made the switch to XP. If after XP has been out this long and these companies and corporations didn't have a need to upgrade, what makes Microsoft think they would upgrade to Vista or Windows 7?
I think about the only way some of these institutions would upgrade would be if Microsoft remotely disabled their products. The old product still works and the old applications are running fine so many of my clients don't want the risk of changing anything. While some run every other OS release, many don't change until forced to. That means their IT staff need to support multiple versions of the OS.
One company runs hundreds of X-Terms to three Sun 6500s on large RAID systems and a small group of Citrix Windows servers (Suns are the drives and Citrix is the OS and applications) There isn't a real PC anywhers! Everything is X-Terms and thin clients.
By the time Windows 7 comes out, it is possible that computers on every desk will be obsolete. Look at where Google is headed.
Well, I think laptops can do without the battery for now. When they're new, the battery may give you a few hours but, they die quickly. My IBM laptop had a battery that may give you 10 minutes. I finally removed the extra weight as it served no other useful purpose. Why have a battery if you need to plug it in anyway? Even my boss has to keep his 1-year old Vaio plugged in all the time or he can't get any work done.
For battery life to be useful, they need to run 10 hours and not be heavy That way they can get you through a normal work day. We're not there yet. Maybe fuel cells will get us there someday. I like the concept of a power storage and portability but I think our dreams are ahead of technology at this point. Battery design hasn't really changed much over the years. Fuel cells, super capacitors and bio-hydrogen may get us somewhere but batteries don't live up to their promise anymore.
Drives use less and less power, are getting smaller and now solid-state memory may replace drives all together. Video is certainly getting more efficient but we keep asking it to do more. WiFi and encryption are standard now. About the only part of the computer that isn't making rapid advances is the power supply -- the battery. Until that problem is solved, we won't have a truely portable PC.
This is the American Judicial System we're talking about so anything can happen. I mean this is the system that arrested an elerly woman, hand cuffed her and tossed her down to the street cutting her face for the heinous crime of not watering her lawn but, that let a repeat sex offender out on the streets the same day.
After my last hardware upgrade with the new ASUS motherboard, 2.4 GHz AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, ATI graphics card... I tried the Vista tool to see if my system was compatible. It's only about 6 months old and the tool told me I was not capable of running Vista. It couldn't even id the video card! No problem. If the software doesn't want to run on this latest hardware, I'll keep Win2K. It's perfectly happy there.
It's like when I visit a site that says I need to install Microsoft's DRM package. I say, "No I don't" and run over to another site to watch or hear the program. They aren't the only game in town.
As for IE7... I don't know. I use Opera. MS Office? I use OO. VLC is a great app too. I keep waiting on MS to IMPROVE their product but they are intent on going the other way.
Send Balmer some new chairs.... Vista sales are below plan and XP is back on new systems.
Microsoft has fallen into a rut where they are telling the consumer what the consumer wants. Microsoft is no longer listening to what the consumer is telling Microsoft. Microsoft knows best. The problem is that this time, the consumer isn't happy. They don't like all the control, invasion of privacy, DRM, heavy burden on the hardware and many other things.
The consumer wants their XP and, twice now, Microsoft has had to offer it. Even today, they refuse to admit that they missed the mark with Vista. Now, the tech community has spread their opinion of Vista wide and far and it will take Microsoft a while to recover from that. Maybe by SP 4.
Me? I'm still running Windoze 2000 Pro and am very happy with it. ALL my applications run. No DRM or other weird limitations. I've changed almost all the hardware (CPU, mother board, power supply, CD, DVD, Memory, Video Card, Sound card, network card...) and the system just prompts for news drivers...a reboot...I'm up. No reinstalls in years. Why would I change? Everything works. I am not aware of anything that XP or Vista gives me in added functionality, stability or compatibility. Other than eye-candy and a few bells and whistles, there is nothing that I'm aware of that XP or Vista gives me that I need or can't do with Win2K. If it ain't broke -- don't fix it.
What a Crock! Comtrash techs that visited my home confirmed that ComTrash was throttling my network. They were charging me for 6 MBit and delivering 1 MBit. Finally, after numerous complaints, they fessed up that they were, in fact, throttling EVERYBODY here to make bandwidth available for their new TV and Telephone digital services. They were suprised that I noticed but, they also refused to correct the situation. So, I dropped their over priced less-than-T1 service and got DSL at 1.5 MBit for about 1/3 the price of ComTrash's rip-off for their falsly advertised 6 Mbit.
I know that calculators killed me. I used to be able to do all kinds of math in my head but found I was losing it. Now, I only use a calculator if I really need to. I try and do more in my head or on paper. Seeing it is different than punching buttons on a calc. Now, I'm finally able to again add up the entire shopping cart of goods so I know what to pay at check out. Division and multiplication are again a snap. Trig still requires the rule or calc but I try and use my ole slide rule again because it forces you to do more in your head. I also find that when somebody else uses a calculator and makes a mistake that I see it almost immediately while they trust the number on the display. Calculators ruined math for me but, by not using them much, it does come back.
Only the consumer can stop this insanity. Stop buying the music -- ALL of it! Stop listening to the radio! Stop going to concerts! Stop the revenue flow to the industry. If you cut off their economics, they will have to go away with no money to fund their extortion activities.
Make your own music for a few years. Listen to what you already have for a few years. They will respond to a total lack of money coming in but, the consumer can't expect somebody else to do it -- all consumers need to do it!
I was a manager of a VLSI lab in California many years ago. I hired this MIT graduate with a Masters in Semiconductor Engineering. I fired her a week later because he had no clue how a FET worked! How can MIT graduate a person with a degree in semiconductors that doesn't know how a basic semiconductor works?!? I had asked her to put some probes on a chip test circuit and to measure the rise/fall times of the transistor. She didn''t know how. Bye Bye. I never hired a graduate from another top university after that and my teams achieved some outstanding designs and concepts. That was in the 80s and 90s. I guess things are still bad when it comes to the quality of education in US graduates.
But...Pickett never made an Analon Rule! The Analysis Rule was a K&E only device and, quite possibly one of the rarest rules in existence. The Analon came with a leather carry case, hard-bound user guide and a paper leaflet. I bought mine for around $35 back in the late '70s.
I have slide rules and use them today. For some tasks, they are easier and faster than a calculator. My K&E Analon rule also helps you to remember formulas and the Pickett is light weight and durable (even if it is an ugly green).
Knowing how to use a rule also helps you realize if a calculator answer is right or wrong. Since so much of using a rule is in your head, sharing that with a calculator is beneficial.
Yes, I also have a pair of electronic rules -- HP-35 and HP-67 calculators. Oops. Just dated myself;)
Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA is a record label trade association that represents the labels but, it is the individual labels (see link below) that represent artists -- not the RIAA. The RIAA is a house of lawyers that serve the RIAA to insure the RIAA's survival. There are many (read: most) domestic record labels that are members of the RIAA - more than just the "Big 4" labels. This is why the law suits are NOT the RIAA v. some_innocent_person. It is the individual labels named as plaintiffs in the suits (EMI, Sony, Warner, Artista, etc.)
The RIAA is also not a royalty collection agency like ASCAP & BMI, Harry Fox Agency, SoundExchange, SoundScan, ... so, the money they make doesn't really have a pot to be put into and then distributed. If it did, the money would be distributed between all the record labels they represent and it would then be up to the labels to divvy the pot.
You are correct in assuming that the RIAA is not interested in the artists. They are not. It isn't their purpose or charter. They are a bureaucracy that breeds upon itself. This is why they want to actually reduce the royalties that artists make. This is why they never get involved directly with the artists. It isn't their business.
So, this shouldn't be surprising that the RIAA is keeping all the money they extort. If the labels touched it, they could be accused of "unclean hands".
I'm shocked, shocked to find that the RIAA is lying to the courts here.
apologies to Casablanca
After all the complaints by digruntled customers after Yahoo Downgrades MusicMatch Jukebox and removed many of the features of that application, failed to get it working 100%, and a host of other problems, one might ask why they just didn't give the customer what they want? That was the return of the MusicMatch Jukebox program the way it was in its last release.
It seems that the music business is in the business of denying customers what they want. Just as the RIAA is seeing drastic declines in music sales because of similar tactics and a blatant refusal to monetize the net, Yahoo! music did the same thing - refusing to satisfy their customers and give them value for their dollar. This is what happens.
One must ask, "why they never learn?" There are better and more value-for-your-dollar options out there. All Yahoo Music had to do was give the consumer value for their dollar.
The big 4 labels ALL decided to pull the plug at the same time? Circumstantial? NOT. This is just another way that the labels and keep themselves and artists from making any money. How many billions of dollars has the music industry thrown away because they adamantly refuse to monetize music on the Internet? After all, it was a computer company -- Apple, that figured out the model and made it work. The music cartel had absolutely zero to do with that and, in fact, were the ones who tried to kill the entire idea. So, is anybody really surprised that they would try and kill this too?
I was trying to determine the weather so I could decide if I wanted to drive 60 miles north. The sky was very cloudy and dark. It was cold and it looked like snow would fall any minute. The Weather Channel and Weather.com both said it was clear skies all the way. I checked the forcasts on Accuweather and weather.com. Same thing -- nothing but clear skies all day. There was just one problem. You couldn't see a clear sky anywhere.
I really suggest that before these services post data like this that they look out the window first.
Computers, data, NEXRAD and all are fine but, they often are blind too. I would guess that along the Rocky Mountains that the weather service is correct about 65% of the time. The other 35% they are so far off that it is amazing. We've had an inch of rain when it is reported clear skies and good weather. We've had snow on clear days. We've had clear days when the weather service reports cloudy...
My dad was piloting a plane out of Kansas City when he was told to take a heading directly into a huge thunderhead. He told the center that there was a huge thunderhead in front of him on that heading. The center told him there wasn't -- nothing on the radar. My dad asked the controller to...Look Out The Window. He was given directions around the storm. It's no wonder that weather is a part of learning to fly.
Best advice - look out the window.
Wired's TV series Audio Files did a story on, well, Audio files. They had two recording engineers, a band and two people with "golden ears" for their test.
The interesting part was that the digital engineer said there was no difference except that editing in digital was a whole world easier. He said you couldn't hear the difference.
The analog recording engineer said that analog was the way to go for purity and clean sound.
Then they did a test where they did a song with changes from analog to digital to analog to digital... The band and the golden ears were to tell which was which. Basically at around 50% for each, neither the band or the golden ears could tell the difference.
Then at the end of the clip, they mentioned that the fancy digital recording board had a button on it to emulate or simulate the analog sound from analog recordings.
I thought it very strange that a digital board that made recordings so accurately that you couldn't tell the difference needed a button to make them sound the same.
I recently did a study of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss "Raising Sand" LP and CD. They were made from the same master but they are a world apart. The digital on the CD is clipped resulting in clipped analog out of the CD Player. The CD is also heavily compressed compared to the LP. The result was that the LP was a lot more natural but, only because of what the engineer did to the CD in the post mastering process.
Digital Downloads May Signal the End of High Fidelity was written in Jan 2006, amost two years ago.
It has been discussed on other forums and on Wired and High-Fidelty sites too.
It's always good to see something new on the subject and a fresh perspective.
What? Windows Explorer is malicious code. In Vista, just try and move a file to another device and you can wait for the rest of your life for the copy/delete functions to take place ;)
MS is known as the company that purchases other innovative companies and assimilates them into the collective that is Microsoft. Is Microsoft really innovative? Not really. Look at all their innovations from Windows ME, Robert, Barney, Plays for Sure, Origami handheld PC, SPOT watch and on and on. Even Zune, Vista and the Table Surface PC are not being accepted into the marketplace. Shoot, even XP has been touted as an UPgrade to Vista.
Innovation has be be an improvement or a usable new product that makes sense to both the vendor and the consumer. While Microsoft has accesses to some of the best, they are a lot like Boeing Aircraft that bought up all the cool innovative military companies like North American Aviation (F-86, F-100, P-51, XB-70, etc) and killed off most of America's competitive fighter aircraft manufacturers. Only Lockheed/Lockheed Martin remains. Is Boeing more innovative or did they purchase their innovations? Maybe but at what cost?
Spending millions on research doesn't mean anything really, Look at Xerox and their PARC facility. How much of that innovation made it to market? Probably less than 10%, if that. Did all that research make Xerox into an innovative company? Maybe but, Canon, Sharp and other copiers are taking over the world.
MS can be innovative but, I would much rather they become ethical. That's how to become a good corporate citizen and a company that people like and respect. Xerox is such a company. Microsoft is not. Apple is. Halliburton is not. It all has to do with ethics -- not innovation.
So, was the chimp lucky, smarter or is this some trait we don't, as of yet, comprehend?
In the entire history of Microsoft, has this company ever done one ethical thing? Why can't they be fair? Why can't they be ethical? why can't they be honest? What is it with this company?
Now, intel is apparently going to follow the high standards set by Microsoft.
Because of this kind of immoral behavior, I run AMD, ATI and Linux. I can't support an unethical company because doing so would make me unethical too.
Electric cars need energy and where does it come from? In a large part of America, that is from coal-fired power plants. But do you understand how much coal it takes to do this? How many power plants consume how much coal over how many years?
The Appalachian mountain range with their mountain top removal has the same problem as here in the west...Wyoming has several HUGE open pit coal mines and, for example, Colorado has a moderate sized coal fired power plant near Pueblo. The Commanche Power Generating Plant was built when I was at the University in the mid '70s. The power plant consumes coal -- LOTS OF IT! They're expanding it by 50% and adding another power unit now.
* Trains have been running to the Commanche Power station since 1976
* There are a minimum of 8 trains of coal each day to the power plant. Often 12 or more.
* Each Train has between 100 and 125 cars of coal
* Each car holds between 286,000 - 315,000 pounds of coal
30 Years = 10950 days
8 trains x 100 cars x 10950 days yields 8,760,000 cars of coal
8,760,000 cars x 286,000 lbs per car = 2,505,360,000,000 Pounds of coal
One could assume that 2.5 trillion pounds of coal have been burned.
That's 1,211,753,400 tons!
Now there's 45 cu ft per ton for hard coal
So just this one power plant has consumed 54,528,903,000 cu ft of coal.
That's just one power plant. That's one hell of a big hole! That's also only for one small power plant. Almost 7 times that number of trains run through here and who knows how many in other directions from the mines. That same mine in Wyoming is also sending about the same amount of coal to Utah and other states. The hole above is just to keep one power plant running. Wyoming Some day I'm going to head up there because I want to see the hole that has produced over a trillion cubic feet of coal..
27 trains a day come through here (and 27 empty trains return through here) every day.
Each of the 54 trains has six engines smoking away as they go back and forth for hundreds of miles.
If North, East, West and SouthWest all have comparable train volumes from just this one mine, and there are many similar mines in Wyoming, we are consuming coal in mass quantities and stripping the land of its features in the process.
So, now what does it cost to run your little green car?
I need Laurel (E-mail) and Hardy (Usenet) to keep in touch but my PUP net only runs at 3 Mbit/sec. Lets see, where did alt.sci.physics.spam go?
;-}
What? Me Old?!?!?
I consult with various big insurance companies and from call centers to data centers, Windows 2000 is everywhere today. A major new medical center opened up near my home and I had injured my shoulder trying to stay healthy ;) and the X-ray room, doctors office and reception were all running Windows 2000 Pro. I went downtown to a government office last month and saw Windows 2000 running there. Some of the military installations also run Win2K. Most IT departments and IT/Telecom/Computing businesses run XP but outside of that, I still see tons of Win2K boxes happily chugging along.
Win2K is everywhere even though Microsoft claims its end-of-life. Obviously, there are a lot of businesses that don't see it as DOA yet and they never made the switch to XP. If after XP has been out this long and these companies and corporations didn't have a need to upgrade, what makes Microsoft think they would upgrade to Vista or Windows 7?
I think about the only way some of these institutions would upgrade would be if Microsoft remotely disabled their products. The old product still works and the old applications are running fine so many of my clients don't want the risk of changing anything. While some run every other OS release, many don't change until forced to. That means their IT staff need to support multiple versions of the OS.
One company runs hundreds of X-Terms to three Sun 6500s on large RAID systems and a small group of Citrix Windows servers (Suns are the drives and Citrix is the OS and applications) There isn't a real PC anywhers! Everything is X-Terms and thin clients.
By the time Windows 7 comes out, it is possible that computers on every desk will be obsolete. Look at where Google is headed.
Well, I think laptops can do without the battery for now. When they're new, the battery may give you a few hours but, they die quickly. My IBM laptop had a battery that may give you 10 minutes. I finally removed the extra weight as it served no other useful purpose. Why have a battery if you need to plug it in anyway? Even my boss has to keep his 1-year old Vaio plugged in all the time or he can't get any work done.
For battery life to be useful, they need to run 10 hours and not be heavy That way they can get you through a normal work day. We're not there yet. Maybe fuel cells will get us there someday. I like the concept of a power storage and portability but I think our dreams are ahead of technology at this point. Battery design hasn't really changed much over the years. Fuel cells, super capacitors and bio-hydrogen may get us somewhere but batteries don't live up to their promise anymore.
Drives use less and less power, are getting smaller and now solid-state memory may replace drives all together. Video is certainly getting more efficient but we keep asking it to do more. WiFi and encryption are standard now. About the only part of the computer that isn't making rapid advances is the power supply -- the battery. Until that problem is solved, we won't have a truely portable PC.
This is the American Judicial System we're talking about so anything can happen. I mean this is the system that arrested an elerly woman, hand cuffed her and tossed her down to the street cutting her face for the heinous crime of not watering her lawn but, that let a repeat sex offender out on the streets the same day.
What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of his class in medical school?
Doctor!!!
After my last hardware upgrade with the new ASUS motherboard, 2.4 GHz AMD CPU, 4 GB RAM, ATI graphics card... I tried the Vista tool to see if my system was compatible. It's only about 6 months old and the tool told me I was not capable of running Vista. It couldn't even id the video card! No problem. If the software doesn't want to run on this latest hardware, I'll keep Win2K. It's perfectly happy there.
It's like when I visit a site that says I need to install Microsoft's DRM package. I say, "No I don't" and run over to another site to watch or hear the program. They aren't the only game in town.
As for IE7... I don't know. I use Opera. MS Office? I use OO. VLC is a great app too. I keep waiting on MS to IMPROVE their product but they are intent on going the other way.
Send Balmer some new chairs....
Vista sales are below plan and XP is back on new systems.
Microsoft has fallen into a rut where they are telling the consumer what the consumer wants. Microsoft is no longer listening to what the consumer is telling Microsoft. Microsoft knows best. The problem is that this time, the consumer isn't happy. They don't like all the control, invasion of privacy, DRM, heavy burden on the hardware and many other things.
The consumer wants their XP and, twice now, Microsoft has had to offer it. Even today, they refuse to admit that they missed the mark with Vista. Now, the tech community has spread their opinion of Vista wide and far and it will take Microsoft a while to recover from that. Maybe by SP 4.
Me? I'm still running Windoze 2000 Pro and am very happy with it. ALL my applications run. No DRM or other weird limitations. I've changed almost all the hardware (CPU, mother board, power supply, CD, DVD, Memory, Video Card, Sound card, network card...) and the system just prompts for news drivers...a reboot...I'm up. No reinstalls in years. Why would I change? Everything works. I am not aware of anything that XP or Vista gives me in added functionality, stability or compatibility. Other than eye-candy and a few bells and whistles, there is nothing that I'm aware of that XP or Vista gives me that I need or can't do with Win2K. If it ain't broke -- don't fix it.
What a Crock! Comtrash techs that visited my home confirmed that ComTrash was throttling my network. They were charging me for 6 MBit and delivering 1 MBit. Finally, after numerous complaints, they fessed up that they were, in fact, throttling EVERYBODY here to make bandwidth available for their new TV and Telephone digital services. They were suprised that I noticed but, they also refused to correct the situation. So, I dropped their over priced less-than-T1 service and got DSL at 1.5 MBit for about 1/3 the price of ComTrash's rip-off for their falsly advertised 6 Mbit.
I know that calculators killed me. I used to be able to do all kinds of math in my head but found I was losing it. Now, I only use a calculator if I really need to. I try and do more in my head or on paper. Seeing it is different than punching buttons on a calc. Now, I'm finally able to again add up the entire shopping cart of goods so I know what to pay at check out. Division and multiplication are again a snap. Trig still requires the rule or calc but I try and use my ole slide rule again because it forces you to do more in your head. I also find that when somebody else uses a calculator and makes a mistake that I see it almost immediately while they trust the number on the display. Calculators ruined math for me but, by not using them much, it does come back.
Only the consumer can stop this insanity. Stop buying the music -- ALL of it! Stop listening to the radio! Stop going to concerts! Stop the revenue flow to the industry. If you cut off their economics, they will have to go away with no money to fund their extortion activities.
Make your own music for a few years. Listen to what you already have for a few years. They will respond to a total lack of money coming in but, the consumer can't expect somebody else to do it -- all consumers need to do it!
I was a manager of a VLSI lab in California many years ago. I hired this MIT graduate with a Masters in Semiconductor Engineering. I fired her a week later because he had no clue how a FET worked! How can MIT graduate a person with a degree in semiconductors that doesn't know how a basic semiconductor works?!? I had asked her to put some probes on a chip test circuit and to measure the rise/fall times of the transistor. She didn''t know how. Bye Bye. I never hired a graduate from another top university after that and my teams achieved some outstanding designs and concepts. That was in the 80s and 90s. I guess things are still bad when it comes to the quality of education in US graduates.
But...Pickett never made an Analon Rule! The Analysis Rule was a K&E only device and, quite possibly one of the rarest rules in existence. The Analon came with a leather carry case, hard-bound user guide and a paper leaflet. I bought mine for around $35 back in the late '70s.
I have slide rules and use them today. For some tasks, they are easier and faster than a calculator. My K&E Analon rule also helps you to remember formulas and the Pickett is light weight and durable (even if it is an ugly green).
;)
Knowing how to use a rule also helps you realize if a calculator answer is right or wrong. Since so much of using a rule is in your head, sharing that with a calculator is beneficial.
Yes, I also have a pair of electronic rules -- HP-35 and HP-67 calculators. Oops. Just dated myself