Agreed:-D For the best possible shopping experience, go elsewhere.*
* offer void where** prohibited by exclusivity with the local government
** which is just about everywhere*** they do business
*** we'll screw you one way or another, citizen, just you wait
They have such an impenetrable thicket of a website that I gave up before I could ask them a question on the site. Telephone is much better.. if you call a local branch, at least you have a chance to get someone knowledgeable AND who speaks intelligible English. But, when you compare it to waiting in line at the office, which you have to do if you want to save a few bucks and install it yourself... the order is (1) phone (2) website (3) get DSL (4) branch office
As easy as it is to "hate the man" in potential ugly situations like that, I've never heard of that scenario where a small business was put out of business by ASCAP + BMI fines, so feel free to cite some sources on that one.
However, as a part time DJ, I am aware of the licensing fees and obligations on the part of both the DJ and the establishment. It's expensive to deal with them.
And as a friend of lots of musicians, I am aware of the royalty fees that ASCAP can bring in to its members.
It's kind of a love/hate relationship, where money circulates and there's no way to stop the cycle. Ostensibly, you're supposed to be protected from people ripping off your band's music. But, a cover band/DJ and a bar need only to get a blanket license, and they're good to go and rip you off all the way to the bank. So... what's the point, really?
Don't forget about SESAC!
You usually have to have ASCAP, BMI and SESAC licenses to be mostly clear, and then you should track down all the little off-mainstream labels that are unlikely to pursue legal action, but you still don't want to rip them off or get sued by some random exec you didn't know about that showed up at a wedding/party.
What happens when some not-so-savvy user gets an app, and the developer's info about the app says "Ignore the warning, that's a bug we're fixing in the next version"... hmmmm
Matrox has cards going up to 8 heads. This one does 12.
Although, I wonder if you can use the TripleHead2Go DP Edition in combination with this 12-screen monster, for a total of 36 per card or 72 if you have two cards. The mind boggles.
See, this is the correct way to interact with the police. Be polite and friendly, build rapport, be willing to learn what the law is, and they'll be a lot nicer to you in return.
I have made a number of acquaintances who don't understand that, won't try it, and they unsurprisingly got roughed up and written up by the police a lot.
It does. I've bought myself a Coke or Pepsi from the vending machine at work (it has both) because I wanted that little caffeine kick, but not the stomach-slaying jitter-inducing amount that's in Mountain Dew.
Not being a coffee drinker, soda tends to be my vice on occasions when I don't get enough sleep:-\
and of course I melded a couple of posts together in my head and addressed you as if you were one of the other posters commenting on how their new cars had some particular features... oops
Looking at this and your other comment elsewhere... I still don't see the price benefit.
Yeah? And a 1 gig flash drive is often bundled free these days with purchases because they're so cheap. I mean, really, come on [ebay.com]. Ninety-nine cents new on eBay. That's, like, two postage stamps.
I haven't seen purchases bundled with them in any store or convention I've been to, nor any online specials - and I get the buy.com and tigerdirect.com and musiciansfriend.com (and others) daily emails. So this is not for lack of shopping or convention going! Where are these specials?
Those eBay listings for 99 cent flash drives? I looked at them after seeing your link. Those come with a $7 shipping charge. It's not such a great deal anymore when the price is $8 in the end. Don't fall victim to that sort of thinking. Retailers LOVE that!:)
I can go buy a 50 pack spindle of Memorex CDRs from Staples for $9.00 right now. They're on sale. Or, I could buy some cheapo no name media for less just about anywhere.
But you're not using it for archival storage. You throw some files on to copy for a friend. Or listen to some music. Short durations. The longevity of the medium is basically irrelevant since you won't be needing it to store things for longer than a couple of months, max, anyway.
I can give a friend a CD that cost me 20 cents and not care if he never gives it back. Files, demo recordings, you name it - one cd isn't going to make me upset. On the other hand, my work-provided 32GB flash drive.. I wouldn't loan it out to anyone unless I was going to be in the same room the whole time. I use it infrequently even there because the network at work and the one I have at home is gigabit end-to-end and transferring files that way is much faster.
Sure, DVDs are still cheaper to produce when you're a business making a few thousand copies. When you're Joe Consumer, you usually only need one.
I'm talking about ONE program that comes as a box of 10 DVDs which for ONE license costs over $100,000. Yes, these exist, and are critical for some tasks. And they don't let you download the bits over the Internet.
When was the last time you bought software that came on a flash drive? That'd be pretty cool, I have to say.
You can get a Sansa Clip [newegg.com] for $30.00. That also plays FLAC, OGG, MP3, WAV, has a built-in radio and can record from the radio. Combine that with any run-of-the-mill car stereos that support USB, or just go old-school and use a tape-adapter.
It's a pretty nice device, if a little clunky sometimes. I used to sell 'em years ago. However... check this scenario out. I could burn one new mix CD using material I already own on CD, using that $10 spindle of 50 disks. If I do that once every two weeks, which is certainly reasonable, I'll get two years of music out of less than $10. Not bad! Meanwhile, someone else just spent $30 on a Clip, $75 on a USB connector (or more on a pile of batteries to last the same two years), $10 on a 3 foot male-to-male 1/8" stereo cable, shipping and handling to 'save' money by buying from Newegg, waited a week, and still had to install software on their computer. I would think that buying one spindle of CDs is a little bit more environmentally friendly than going to the store for batteries and throwing out all the packaging and dead batteries, too.
50pk CDs instead of MP3 player net savings, $100+ and fewer trees and less oil products.
It's fun to be cutting edge - the lab I work in is cutting edge. I love ordering up another 32GB of RAM to throw in a server. But... At home I just don't have the money to keep up with the Joneses, when what I have works.
Unless you're living under a bridge (yes, pun intended) you should have no problem embracing the future, either.
I've got a great car with a great stereo, good mileage, low maintenance, AND I can get in there and work on it myself (unlike GM which uses nonstandard nut sizes) and it's fully paid for. Its only
Zomg, what will the pirates do if they can't burn DVDs??
OK, for real though, here's the other side of the debate.
Higher end tech is too expensive - BD-ROM is the current highest end consumers can buy, but the entrance cost to using that technology is sufficiently high that Joe Middle Class Consumer with his wife and 2.5 kids and a mortgage can't afford it.
Why buy a BD-R or flash drive when you only have 1 GB of photos to give to Aunt Mabel, anyway? A blank DVD only costs a few cents.
Burning CDs to listen in your car is cheaper than buying an mp3 player. Those are still a luxury item, especially with the outrageous cost of the kits you have to use to hook them up to your car. (Let's face it - I'm not going to buy a luxury car just because it plays mp3s.) Hitting the next track button on your stereo is safer than fiddling with your handheld mp3 player, too.
CD/DVD-ROM discs will outlast a frequently-used USB drive. I've had some Flash devices that lasted, some that didn't make it 2 years.
In the business world, $100,000+ software is still distributed on CD and DVD, or an image thereof. Drivers for certain brands of servers are downloaded as ISO format, so you are supposed to burn them. Firmware drivers come in bootable ISO form now. Yes, I know, 7-zip can unpack all of the above. But when you're setting up an OS on a new server or zeroing a disk or recovering a failed machine, you usually need a disc because they DON'T boot off the USB ports.
USB drives cannot normally be write-protected without arcane magik tricks, and not many can be write-protected at all. Read-only media is more secure when you're up against malware. This is important when performing security breach remediation, such as antivirus on a live system.
And now, for Slashdot brownie points: Linux installs are available as CD/DVD ISO images.;) Of course you could use USB for this, but when you can give someone Linux for essentially free (CDs are dirt cheap) how could you go wrong there?
I've seen people using floppies and tapes as recently as last year. So, just because something's obsolete on the cutting edge, doesn't mean hordes of people aren't still using it.
Must be nice to have the money and time and modern hardware to get rid of optical media!!:)
Yes, I remember a few years ago the annoyance of people clickety-clicking away through the whole class. The people who were legitimately taking notes on their computers never seemed to be caught up to the rest of us, but always justified it somehow. Some professors expressly forbade it from their classrooms, which was nice.
The AIM chatters were really bad - burst of typing, silence, burst of typing, silence... sometimes a snicker or whatever. Even worse were the ones who were also listening to music on their earbuds where you could hear it if you were right next to them. Ever wanted to strangle someone with their headphones? Why even bother going to class??
I tried to take notes with a laptop once (two days and I was done trying that) but my typing is so much slower than the professors can speak, and thus requres a lot of attention that could be better spent engaging the material being presented. So you fall behind and miss opportunities to ask questions. Then there's diagrams - can't type those - and all the math - also hard to type.
I once saw a kid a couple rows up get busted for watching some movie while we were watching a video in class. Forcible ejection, hooray! The professor just happened to sit down in the back to watch the video and caught the guy, who was totally oblivious.
It's distracting. I used to wish people would either upgrade to pen and paper, or get tablets. But that was a while ago. Maybe things have gotten better.
Summary: You're better off without the laptop in class.
Correct. Generally it's an MPEG-2 transport stream. Not all that far removed from DVD Video, actually! The problem is the bandwidth they fit it in... at some point any lossy compression is going to kill your picture.
Well, if streaming media has proved *anything* over the years, it's that the general public doesn't care if the compression ruins the work as long as they can play it for free.
Reference the following: * RealMedia * Most Youtube videos, "fan reposts" aka re-encodes, and re-re-encodes * Low bitrate MP3 * JPEG (ok, it's not streaming, but still - "needs more JPEG artifacts") * Screeners, cams, and foreign translations from the DIVX Discount Theatre * Webcams * Most QuickTime videos * Most AVIs * Most streaming video on Flash today * Cable and satellite delivered HD content
Really, the only thing you need to say is "free" and people will at least give it a try.
Ha! No, they didn't. Of course, Ansel Adams was not using an inkjet printer. If we'd used Walmart, we probably would have failed outright. "Good enough" is ok for an art class, but technical classes are another story!
We're not exactly talking about slight casts though - improper color management tended to make midtones and shadows very noticeably green or magenta.
Profiling imperfect pigments and papers such that you can print grayscale is a laborious technical endeavor which is not for the faint hearted:)
Right - but Aero is not installed or enabled by default, and drivers that support Aero are not included in the box either. RDP won't show you Aero if it's not available on the system. So out of the box, you get a plain if a bit ugly GUI that a low-end graphics card can handle.
Most servers do not come with a display adapter that supports Aero. I've tried just to see if it was even possible, but the ATI ES1000 that comes standard in my IBM xSeries servers just doesn't cut it:)
So, most of the people using Server 2008 R2 as a server OS will be safe from this one.
It does the job okay until you need color profiles. When you need to print accurate colors, for example when printing grayscale on a specific full-color printer on specific paper with specific color inks without a color cast, Photoshop is well nigh impossible to beat. Printer drivers just don't handle it well enough on their own. GIMP still just wouldn't fly in any of the technical photography classes I had - we lost whole letter grades for the typical magenta or green color casts.
If you just need to do some image editing for onscreen viewing, though, GIMP is usually sufficient!
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed :-D For the best possible shopping experience, go elsewhere.*
* offer void where** prohibited by exclusivity with the local government
** which is just about everywhere*** they do business
*** we'll screw you one way or another, citizen, just you wait
They have such an impenetrable thicket of a website that I gave up before I could ask them a question on the site. Telephone is much better.. if you call a local branch, at least you have a chance to get someone knowledgeable AND who speaks intelligible English. But, when you compare it to waiting in line at the office, which you have to do if you want to save a few bucks and install it yourself... the order is (1) phone (2) website (3) get DSL (4) branch office
As easy as it is to "hate the man" in potential ugly situations like that, I've never heard of that scenario where a small business was put out of business by ASCAP + BMI fines, so feel free to cite some sources on that one.
However, as a part time DJ, I am aware of the licensing fees and obligations on the part of both the DJ and the establishment. It's expensive to deal with them.
And as a friend of lots of musicians, I am aware of the royalty fees that ASCAP can bring in to its members.
It's kind of a love/hate relationship, where money circulates and there's no way to stop the cycle. Ostensibly, you're supposed to be protected from people ripping off your band's music. But, a cover band/DJ and a bar need only to get a blanket license, and they're good to go and rip you off all the way to the bank. So... what's the point, really?
Don't forget about SESAC!
You usually have to have ASCAP, BMI and SESAC licenses to be mostly clear, and then you should track down all the little off-mainstream labels that are unlikely to pursue legal action, but you still don't want to rip them off or get sued by some random exec you didn't know about that showed up at a wedding/party.
Get free money and publicity? Looks like it worked.
Here, you can borrow my sarcasm meter, it's functional
Good one!
What happens when some not-so-savvy user gets an app, and the developer's info about the app says "Ignore the warning, that's a bug we're fixing in the next version"... hmmmm
I thought people moved on from writing apps with that long ago ;)
Remember when Blackle came out as a joke on the plain white background?
You're probably being sarcastic... but you'd get the same situation we have today with email spam if there was no regulation.
Matrox has cards going up to 8 heads. This one does 12.
Although, I wonder if you can use the TripleHead2Go DP Edition in combination with this 12-screen monster, for a total of 36 per card or 72 if you have two cards. The mind boggles.
See, this is the correct way to interact with the police. Be polite and friendly, build rapport, be willing to learn what the law is, and they'll be a lot nicer to you in return.
I have made a number of acquaintances who don't understand that, won't try it, and they unsurprisingly got roughed up and written up by the police a lot.
Wish I had mod points for you.
It does. I've bought myself a Coke or Pepsi from the vending machine at work (it has both) because I wanted that little caffeine kick, but not the stomach-slaying jitter-inducing amount that's in Mountain Dew.
Not being a coffee drinker, soda tends to be my vice on occasions when I don't get enough sleep :-\
What if you were traveling at Warp 9 and turned on the headlights?
Betelgeuse is, according to Wikipedia, 640 LY from Earth. Therefore it will take light 640 years to travel to Earth from Betelgeuse.
This is... OLED NEWS
and of course I melded a couple of posts together in my head and addressed you as if you were one of the other posters commenting on how their new cars had some particular features... oops
Looking at this and your other comment elsewhere... I still don't see the price benefit.
Yeah? And a 1 gig flash drive is often bundled free these days with purchases because they're so cheap. I mean, really, come on [ebay.com]. Ninety-nine cents new on eBay. That's, like, two postage stamps.
I haven't seen purchases bundled with them in any store or convention I've been to, nor any online specials - and I get the buy.com and tigerdirect.com and musiciansfriend.com (and others) daily emails. So this is not for lack of shopping or convention going! Where are these specials?
Those eBay listings for 99 cent flash drives? I looked at them after seeing your link. Those come with a $7 shipping charge. It's not such a great deal anymore when the price is $8 in the end. Don't fall victim to that sort of thinking. Retailers LOVE that! :)
I can go buy a 50 pack spindle of Memorex CDRs from Staples for $9.00 right now. They're on sale. Or, I could buy some cheapo no name media for less just about anywhere.
But you're not using it for archival storage. You throw some files on to copy for a friend. Or listen to some music. Short durations. The longevity of the medium is basically irrelevant since you won't be needing it to store things for longer than a couple of months, max, anyway.
I can give a friend a CD that cost me 20 cents and not care if he never gives it back. Files, demo recordings, you name it - one cd isn't going to make me upset. On the other hand, my work-provided 32GB flash drive.. I wouldn't loan it out to anyone unless I was going to be in the same room the whole time. I use it infrequently even there because the network at work and the one I have at home is gigabit end-to-end and transferring files that way is much faster.
Sure, DVDs are still cheaper to produce when you're a business making a few thousand copies. When you're Joe Consumer, you usually only need one.
I'm talking about ONE program that comes as a box of 10 DVDs which for ONE license costs over $100,000. Yes, these exist, and are critical for some tasks. And they don't let you download the bits over the Internet.
When was the last time you bought software that came on a flash drive? That'd be pretty cool, I have to say.
You can get a Sansa Clip [newegg.com] for $30.00. That also plays FLAC, OGG, MP3, WAV, has a built-in radio and can record from the radio. Combine that with any run-of-the-mill car stereos that support USB, or just go old-school and use a tape-adapter.
It's a pretty nice device, if a little clunky sometimes. I used to sell 'em years ago. However... check this scenario out. I could burn one new mix CD using material I already own on CD, using that $10 spindle of 50 disks. If I do that once every two weeks, which is certainly reasonable, I'll get two years of music out of less than $10. Not bad! Meanwhile, someone else just spent $30 on a Clip, $75 on a USB connector (or more on a pile of batteries to last the same two years), $10 on a 3 foot male-to-male 1/8" stereo cable, shipping and handling to 'save' money by buying from Newegg, waited a week, and still had to install software on their computer. I would think that buying one spindle of CDs is a little bit more environmentally friendly than going to the store for batteries and throwing out all the packaging and dead batteries, too.
50pk CDs instead of MP3 player net savings, $100+ and fewer trees and less oil products.
It's fun to be cutting edge - the lab I work in is cutting edge. I love ordering up another 32GB of RAM to throw in a server. But... At home I just don't have the money to keep up with the Joneses, when what I have works.
Unless you're living under a bridge (yes, pun intended) you should have no problem embracing the future, either.
I've got a great car with a great stereo, good mileage, low maintenance, AND I can get in there and work on it myself (unlike GM which uses nonstandard nut sizes) and it's fully paid for. Its only
A logical next step would be to set https as the default when in Incognito mode in Chrome, or Private Browsing in Firefox.
Zomg, what will the pirates do if they can't burn DVDs??
OK, for real though, here's the other side of the debate.
Higher end tech is too expensive - BD-ROM is the current highest end consumers can buy, but the entrance cost to using that technology is sufficiently high that Joe Middle Class Consumer with his wife and 2.5 kids and a mortgage can't afford it.
Why buy a BD-R or flash drive when you only have 1 GB of photos to give to Aunt Mabel, anyway? A blank DVD only costs a few cents.
Burning CDs to listen in your car is cheaper than buying an mp3 player. Those are still a luxury item, especially with the outrageous cost of the kits you have to use to hook them up to your car. (Let's face it - I'm not going to buy a luxury car just because it plays mp3s.) Hitting the next track button on your stereo is safer than fiddling with your handheld mp3 player, too.
CD/DVD-ROM discs will outlast a frequently-used USB drive. I've had some Flash devices that lasted, some that didn't make it 2 years.
In the business world, $100,000+ software is still distributed on CD and DVD, or an image thereof. Drivers for certain brands of servers are downloaded as ISO format, so you are supposed to burn them. Firmware drivers come in bootable ISO form now. Yes, I know, 7-zip can unpack all of the above. But when you're setting up an OS on a new server or zeroing a disk or recovering a failed machine, you usually need a disc because they DON'T boot off the USB ports.
USB drives cannot normally be write-protected without arcane magik tricks, and not many can be write-protected at all. Read-only media is more secure when you're up against malware. This is important when performing security breach remediation, such as antivirus on a live system.
And now, for Slashdot brownie points: Linux installs are available as CD/DVD ISO images. ;) Of course you could use USB for this, but when you can give someone Linux for essentially free (CDs are dirt cheap) how could you go wrong there?
I've seen people using floppies and tapes as recently as last year. So, just because something's obsolete on the cutting edge, doesn't mean hordes of people aren't still using it.
Must be nice to have the money and time and modern hardware to get rid of optical media!! :)
Yes, I remember a few years ago the annoyance of people clickety-clicking away through the whole class. The people who were legitimately taking notes on their computers never seemed to be caught up to the rest of us, but always justified it somehow. Some professors expressly forbade it from their classrooms, which was nice.
The AIM chatters were really bad - burst of typing, silence, burst of typing, silence... sometimes a snicker or whatever. Even worse were the ones who were also listening to music on their earbuds where you could hear it if you were right next to them. Ever wanted to strangle someone with their headphones? Why even bother going to class??
I tried to take notes with a laptop once (two days and I was done trying that) but my typing is so much slower than the professors can speak, and thus requres a lot of attention that could be better spent engaging the material being presented. So you fall behind and miss opportunities to ask questions. Then there's diagrams - can't type those - and all the math - also hard to type.
I once saw a kid a couple rows up get busted for watching some movie while we were watching a video in class. Forcible ejection, hooray! The professor just happened to sit down in the back to watch the video and caught the guy, who was totally oblivious.
It's distracting. I used to wish people would either upgrade to pen and paper, or get tablets. But that was a while ago. Maybe things have gotten better.
Summary: You're better off without the laptop in class.
Correct. Generally it's an MPEG-2 transport stream. Not all that far removed from DVD Video, actually! The problem is the bandwidth they fit it in... at some point any lossy compression is going to kill your picture.
Well, if streaming media has proved *anything* over the years, it's that the general public doesn't care if the compression ruins the work as long as they can play it for free.
Reference the following:
* RealMedia
* Most Youtube videos, "fan reposts" aka re-encodes, and re-re-encodes
* Low bitrate MP3
* JPEG (ok, it's not streaming, but still - "needs more JPEG artifacts")
* Screeners, cams, and foreign translations from the DIVX Discount Theatre
* Webcams
* Most QuickTime videos
* Most AVIs
* Most streaming video on Flash today
* Cable and satellite delivered HD content
Really, the only thing you need to say is "free" and people will at least give it a try.
Ha! No, they didn't. Of course, Ansel Adams was not using an inkjet printer. If we'd used Walmart, we probably would have failed outright. "Good enough" is ok for an art class, but technical classes are another story!
We're not exactly talking about slight casts though - improper color management tended to make midtones and shadows very noticeably green or magenta.
Profiling imperfect pigments and papers such that you can print grayscale is a laborious technical endeavor which is not for the faint hearted :)
Right - but Aero is not installed or enabled by default, and drivers that support Aero are not included in the box either. RDP won't show you Aero if it's not available on the system. So out of the box, you get a plain if a bit ugly GUI that a low-end graphics card can handle.
Most servers do not come with a display adapter that supports Aero. I've tried just to see if it was even possible, but the ATI ES1000 that comes standard in my IBM xSeries servers just doesn't cut it :)
So, most of the people using Server 2008 R2 as a server OS will be safe from this one.
It does the job okay until you need color profiles. When you need to print accurate colors, for example when printing grayscale on a specific full-color printer on specific paper with specific color inks without a color cast, Photoshop is well nigh impossible to beat. Printer drivers just don't handle it well enough on their own. GIMP still just wouldn't fly in any of the technical photography classes I had - we lost whole letter grades for the typical magenta or green color casts.
If you just need to do some image editing for onscreen viewing, though, GIMP is usually sufficient!
If only a more cutting-edge Linux distribution were to emerge... ;)