Keyboards and mice are cheap, and personal. Let us get whichever ones fit us. Assume that people will get better keyboards (IBM model M!), and mice (trackballs?). For that matter you can have several connected to one computer. I haven't found a reason for two keyboards yet, but I have a mouse on either side of my keyboard, and switch hands from time to time. I'd like to try a trackball, but so far nobody is willing to buy me on. (The mouse was stolen from a 486 we threw away)
Chairs are likewise personal, though a little more expensive.
A lamp would be really nice. Or it would be really nice if they would turn off those @%&%# lights. (flourescent, but any hurt)
At one office we had the file cabinets had wheels on them, a pad on top, and were stool height. A perfect chair when someone came in, and they sat under the desk the rest of the time. Comfortable enough that you could work, uncomfortable enough that you got it as quick as quality allows. (not as fast as possible, they weren't that uncomfortable)
I understand they were fairly expensive, but it was one of the best ideas I've worked with.
Woah. A little art is nice. You don't want people to thorw up, and don't go for the fad color schemes. Find something nice, but something that will look nice for decades. Get a little art. Nothing wrong with a few pictures here and there. Sometimes the eyes need a break, and art is a good reliver for a moment.
Don't go overboard with art, but don't go overboard with practical either. You need a little useless stuff once in a while.
Don't allow round walls no matter how nice they look, it leaves no room for the practical white boards. Don't use only straight walls with 90 degree corners no matter how functional it is. Something like a hexagon (whats half a 35 sided figure called?) might be a good compromise between the two.
Serious, currently my office has one functional outlet (and several not wired up in the cube walls), that I have to share with the cube next to me since he doesn't get one. I have cords running all over because the outlet is nearly in the middle of the floor, and on the side with a desk too small for the computers! Don't do it, outlets are not that expensive, can cable clutter isn't a good idea.
Frankly I'm surprised we have enough power, my neighbor had 5 computers, I have2. I have enough other hardware that my power strip is full, and so is his.
Yeah, but if I was modifying a learjet to become a spacecraft 60,000 feet would be the least of my worries. Okay, maybe the first test with my engines at 60,000 feet would be a worry (is the skin really that lightly designed that it can't take the pressure difference between 50,000 feet where it normally flys and 60,000?). In the end though, in order to make it into space passing 60,000 feet is a minor point on the way.
The most important thing you can do is vote. Even if you have to write yourself in for lack of anyone who will vote the right way. (if that is the case know in advance, knock on doors and otherwise get others to write you in)
Most politicians want to be re-elected more than anything else. Money from special interest groups is a means to that end. Money buys a good makeup crew for the debates. Money buys lots of nice ads (and mean ads attacking the other guy). If you inform yourself on the issues and then vote you are the scariest thing, the only way to get your vote is to represent you.
Remember, most elections are fairly close. just 5,000 votes would have changed most of the seats last time I voted. Must less on a local level. (My town isn't even 5000 people) Get a few people to change their vote and you have personally made a difference. That said, you can't win them all so don't give up.
Don't be blinded by Republican or Democrat labels either. Vote the candidate.
Worse than pointless, it would be stupid. Mind there are many complex issues. However public education is a local thing, and state (must less federal) governments should just stay out of it. Beyond that though, we can't spend all our money on education. Roads need to be paved (actually they don't, but we have decided it is worth the cost), borders need to be defended (forget about Iraq, though some outside action is valid), and all of the million other things governments do.
Personally I think anything to get drivers to take a break is worth it. That includes more than truckers, it includes people like me making the 23 hour trip to visit relatives. People should not drive for hours at a stretch, your body only thinks it can do it safely, and sadly you are lucky often.
I've only seen one rest stop in the US that was as bad as the rest stop in Canada. Note however that I used singular, I know there is more than one rest stop in Canada, I just didn't use it.
The quality varies, but generally rest stops are very nice. (I'm informed even the ones in Canada) States know that the large majority of people using them are from elsewhere, so a nice rest stop with info on all the tourist places to visit in state can bring in a lot of money. A bad rest stop will make you want to get out of there, so you won't find out about tourist traps, and won't visit them.
There is a solution to your problem: go to Best Buy type store and buy a card. Specifically search for the card lease likely to have linux support. TI chipsets are good and popular. (yeah there is a reverse engineered driver, but it doesn't work good despite increadable efforts) Open box and attempt to get it to work. Fail. Place everything back in back and return it, citing poor linux support. Repeat until you get bored, they run out of cards to try, or you get something that by chance works.
Find a card elsewhere that has linux support (unless you found one above...), and buy it.
The idea here is Best Buy has power. If they start seeing a lot of perfectly good wireless cards coming back that costs them money, and they don't like that. So they will start checking to see whats going on, and all the return counter clerks will tell them poor linux support is the reason. Ideally Best Buy will tell anyone who wants a wireless card on their shelves that it must have linux drivers. Or maybe they will at least require a some indication of which cards work with linux.
In general b card are likely to work, but there are exceptions. b+g cards almost never work, and a+b+g cards normally work. In general will many exceptions.
In the worst case and they do behead you, please have the guts to die as a martyr. Just before the ax falls (or before they gag you, and hope the camera catches it) pull a Patric Henry. No it isn't the revolutionary war, and all that. Still you can spoil their tape by turning your dieing words into a heroes stance. Consider your words carefully. ("You will now see how an Italian dies" was apparently used, though I can't recall the story)
Odds are it won't happen to you. Pray and whatever else you do that you will be safe. But if you must die please don't turn it into a good PR move for bad guys.
But they don't have that ability. However a good presidentail candidate who won't win, but can at least speak well acts as a focal point for a lot of local elections where they can win. Libertarians want to win on all levels, but fully understand they don't have much a chance above the local levels. They do however have powerful control of some local town boards. There are even a few towns where the libertarians carry a majority of the positions.
I just installed windows and linux on different machines this month (I was setting up a lab with one of everything). Windows is NOT easier to install. Of the installs I've done: win98 - had to build my own boot floppy. Windows 2000: it installed, no networking though, and only VGA resolution. Had to find the venders site to download drivers from, as windows didn't include them. I managed to find them by doing a google search for the numbers on the various chips on the motherboard! Thats easy? Did I mention that I had to pry a heatsink off of one chip (northbridge) to get the right numbers to search on? Are you sure windows is easy? Xp didn't recognize all my network cards either.
linux installed and recognized everything except the modem. Even though this is a laptop, famious for being hard to install with linux. And I knew in advance the modem wouldn't work. Linux even recognized and installed drivers for the wireless card (and if I had the firmware it might work).
With windows I had to read a license agreement that was very restrictive compared the the linux one that I read. Windows has these activation keys that I had to type in (several times because I messed up the first time). Many more clicks were required to install windows, yet less options were presented, and they were no easier to choose from.
Then I had to reboot many more times because windows out of the box has 4 critical updates that cannot be installed togather. (a fix pack, which I understand, then a fix for the fix pack, then ie6 which is almost optional, and something else I forget). Even after that was done I had to reboot when I latter attached a USB cdrom to the machine. (windows 2003 with all fixes) It really felt like that old joke "windows has detected you have moved the mouse, you need to reboot for this to take affect".
Try installing linux and windows sometime, instead of ranting about that which you know not.
Maybe, but I can move my eyes from window to window a lot faster than I can use anything else to switch windows.
Today I was doing test runs of software, with long runs. I had the web browser open, but it wasn't my main task, my main task was making sure the latest 30 minute run was continuing. I only needed to look back every few minutes (I think I've already killed any bugs in shorter runs)
More typically I'll have 4 vi windows on one monitor: two different header files for the classes I'm working with, two source files for the classes I'm writing. Then the other will have two browsers open with the relavant SCSI standards, latter on also the debugger and the last run of the program. My mail client is minimized.
My eyes don't multi-task, but I don't need to see everything. I can type without looking at either the keyboard or the window I'm typing in. Often my eyes will switching between looking at the API specification, and the header file with my variable (spelled correctly) while my fingers are typing the correct options into the window that has the focus. My eyes don't need to look at that window, I already know what is in it
Sure I can remember what I have open. Moving my eyes to a different window is faster than any window switching you can do. My short term memory is good enough that I don't need to look at the exact point I'm working on all the time.
Hang out on a college campus sometime. At least once a year the Gideons are there giving away bibles. Just new testament, but a pocket size version. Handy for camping or other trips where you don't want the mass of a full bible.
Yes I have met a few, or at least their agents, when they gave me a bible. Interesting book, everyone should read it once. (even if you refuse to believe, you should read it for the same reason people read about the Greek Gods, which AFAIK nobody believes in anymore)
In the UK, the crown still owns the copyright, and licenses it to various publishers, some of whom sublicense it. (Oxford university press is the major one) The copyright is actually stronger, as it doesn't follow the rules of other copyrights in the UK.
Everywhere else the King James version is public domain.
I could even buy 19 those 20 Cd's again if I had to. Last time I lost a CD though it was a limited edition. Unless I find someone else who has a copy (and only a few thousand were made, and the band isn't from my state) I can't get a copy.
Thats why I now backup everything. Course a large part of my CD collection is from small artists who don't sell a lot of music. I have to protect myself.
Linus has just as many problems? Are you comparing apples to apples? Most linux distributions include a lot more than windows does. Hundreds of games, two desktops, several different web servers (even though you can only run one at a time), a couple different office packages, and much more. Sure a lot of that stuff isn't very secure, but windows doesn't include it at all, so you really need to subtract some of it out.
In any case OpenBSD has an 8 year track record now: 1 remotely expolitable hole! Windoes cannot match that. Yes there are some gotchas, but it you upgrade your machines when OpenBSD does a major release, something they plan well in advance, you should be safe.
Yes that counts. Now go to their site and fill in the forms. Assuming you actually have TRIED to make your abandonware games legal. If your the typical person you don't see it at Best Buy so you assume it isn't available anywhere, and that doesn't count.
Re:I think the Time article misses the point
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Perhaps. If your local newspaper is better than mine. My local newspaper is very biased in favor of the city (I live in a township outside of city limits). It is very hard for me to get local news that matters, events that I care about are not covered, or are covered from the cities point of view. When the township and city have a disagreement this is a big deal, I don't know "our" side thinks because the newspaper either outright ignores it, or only covers a small part that can be taken out of context to make us look bad.
Still I have to assume with the thousands of newspapers out there that not all are that bad. Just beware that there is a lot less to check up on them. You can watch Fox and CNN. You can read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and if that isn't enough get El Pies (? I think that was the name of the big Spanish newspaper) for a completely different point of view. All will cover international and national news good enough (even the Spanish paper will cover the biggest US news stories, though you can't expect much), but none will cover the local zoning board.
Yes and no. Yes the only guaranteed difference is in the electronics. However there are other factors at play. (read some other responses in this thread, I'm going to avoid some things covered)
SCSI drives are sold for money to customers who want reliability. Even if in theory the mechanism is exactly the same, the SCSI drive might be better just because they will not put the SCSI electronics on mechanisms that get worse (but still in spec) scores on their tests. (The reverse cannot be said though because so many more ATA disks are sold that they have to put the ATA electronics on some higher scoring mechanisms).
Some of the more expensive mechanisms don't come in ATA versions. Something that could be done, but they don't bother.
In short: in theory you are right, and the variety of drives insures you often are. However if you buy a SCSI drive it is likely to be better than an ATA one anyway.
I would hope that companies are not that stupid. Backups come in many flavors. From the on-site copy for when you accidentally delete something you should have kept to the copy in Europe (until Mars opens up...) in case your location falls into the sea.
Of course not all companies need all levels of protection. However if your protection is just one level of RAID that is turned off you are asking for trouble. Eventually someone will delete a critical file and not realize it until the backup has been updated. (though if you are smart you will alternate your secondary on-line RAID with the backup weekly)
It isn't going overboard at all to have 24 full backups, each covering a month, just in case.
Remember though, there is no one size fits all. I don't allow critical data on my system so I don't back it up.
A lot of good music. Unless you are going to break at least the top 5 on either the pop or country charts (there might be one or two others worth targeting too, nothing I listen to though) you will make more money by going for a small non-RIAA label. The RIAA isn't the killer here so much as the rest of the overheard of the big labels.
Take jazz for instance (I just heard an interview with a jazz artist who mentioned this issue), you can get a label that consists of just one guy doing all the work for a bunch of bands, or you can get a big company to do the same work... which is cheaper? Which is likely to know something about your market. The one guy label only handels Jazz, so he knows all the jazz outlets and makes sure you are in them. (Mom and pop stores, the jazz radio stations)
Bluegrass, classical, folk, and most other good music is this way. The overhead of the big RIAA labels will cost you money.
I once heard a DJ talk over an entire song! Thats right, the song finished first.
Thats public radio for you. Play some great songs, but the DJs still talk too much. (In this case the song was less than 30 seconds long. Well worth hearing though)
Interestingly enough, when Stern came to the twin cities he got 5% of the market. The direct competing station's morning show was getting close to 15% at the time. So Stern isn't unbeatable.
Personally I just call those hosts "potty mouth". I can't stand them, but them I'm strange in a lot of ways.
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Keyboards and mice are cheap, and personal. Let us get whichever ones fit us. Assume that people will get better keyboards (IBM model M!), and mice (trackballs?). For that matter you can have several connected to one computer. I haven't found a reason for two keyboards yet, but I have a mouse on either side of my keyboard, and switch hands from time to time. I'd like to try a trackball, but so far nobody is willing to buy me on. (The mouse was stolen from a 486 we threw away)
Chairs are likewise personal, though a little more expensive.
A lamp would be really nice. Or it would be really nice if they would turn off those @%&%# lights. (flourescent, but any hurt)
At one office we had the file cabinets had wheels on them, a pad on top, and were stool height. A perfect chair when someone came in, and they sat under the desk the rest of the time. Comfortable enough that you could work, uncomfortable enough that you got it as quick as quality allows. (not as fast as possible, they weren't that uncomfortable)
I understand they were fairly expensive, but it was one of the best ideas I've worked with.
Woah. A little art is nice. You don't want people to thorw up, and don't go for the fad color schemes. Find something nice, but something that will look nice for decades. Get a little art. Nothing wrong with a few pictures here and there. Sometimes the eyes need a break, and art is a good reliver for a moment.
Don't go overboard with art, but don't go overboard with practical either. You need a little useless stuff once in a while.
Don't allow round walls no matter how nice they look, it leaves no room for the practical white boards. Don't use only straight walls with 90 degree corners no matter how functional it is. Something like a hexagon (whats half a 35 sided figure called?) might be a good compromise between the two.
Got a problem with sharing outlets?
Serious, currently my office has one functional outlet (and several not wired up in the cube walls), that I have to share with the cube next to me since he doesn't get one. I have cords running all over because the outlet is nearly in the middle of the floor, and on the side with a desk too small for the computers! Don't do it, outlets are not that expensive, can cable clutter isn't a good idea.
Frankly I'm surprised we have enough power, my neighbor had 5 computers, I have2. I have enough other hardware that my power strip is full, and so is his.
Yeah, but if I was modifying a learjet to become a spacecraft 60,000 feet would be the least of my worries. Okay, maybe the first test with my engines at 60,000 feet would be a worry (is the skin really that lightly designed that it can't take the pressure difference between 50,000 feet where it normally flys and 60,000?). In the end though, in order to make it into space passing 60,000 feet is a minor point on the way.
The most important thing you can do is vote. Even if you have to write yourself in for lack of anyone who will vote the right way. (if that is the case know in advance, knock on doors and otherwise get others to write you in)
Most politicians want to be re-elected more than anything else. Money from special interest groups is a means to that end. Money buys a good makeup crew for the debates. Money buys lots of nice ads (and mean ads attacking the other guy). If you inform yourself on the issues and then vote you are the scariest thing, the only way to get your vote is to represent you.
Remember, most elections are fairly close. just 5,000 votes would have changed most of the seats last time I voted. Must less on a local level. (My town isn't even 5000 people) Get a few people to change their vote and you have personally made a difference. That said, you can't win them all so don't give up.
Don't be blinded by Republican or Democrat labels either. Vote the candidate.
Worse than pointless, it would be stupid. Mind there are many complex issues. However public education is a local thing, and state (must less federal) governments should just stay out of it. Beyond that though, we can't spend all our money on education. Roads need to be paved (actually they don't, but we have decided it is worth the cost), borders need to be defended (forget about Iraq, though some outside action is valid), and all of the million other things governments do.
Personally I think anything to get drivers to take a break is worth it. That includes more than truckers, it includes people like me making the 23 hour trip to visit relatives. People should not drive for hours at a stretch, your body only thinks it can do it safely, and sadly you are lucky often.
I've only seen one rest stop in the US that was as bad as the rest stop in Canada. Note however that I used singular, I know there is more than one rest stop in Canada, I just didn't use it.
The quality varies, but generally rest stops are very nice. (I'm informed even the ones in Canada) States know that the large majority of people using them are from elsewhere, so a nice rest stop with info on all the tourist places to visit in state can bring in a lot of money. A bad rest stop will make you want to get out of there, so you won't find out about tourist traps, and won't visit them.
There is a solution to your problem: go to Best Buy type store and buy a card. Specifically search for the card lease likely to have linux support. TI chipsets are good and popular. (yeah there is a reverse engineered driver, but it doesn't work good despite increadable efforts) Open box and attempt to get it to work. Fail. Place everything back in back and return it, citing poor linux support. Repeat until you get bored, they run out of cards to try, or you get something that by chance works.
Find a card elsewhere that has linux support (unless you found one above...), and buy it.
The idea here is Best Buy has power. If they start seeing a lot of perfectly good wireless cards coming back that costs them money, and they don't like that. So they will start checking to see whats going on, and all the return counter clerks will tell them poor linux support is the reason. Ideally Best Buy will tell anyone who wants a wireless card on their shelves that it must have linux drivers. Or maybe they will at least require a some indication of which cards work with linux.
In general b card are likely to work, but there are exceptions. b+g cards almost never work, and a+b+g cards normally work. In general will many exceptions.
In the worst case and they do behead you, please have the guts to die as a martyr. Just before the ax falls (or before they gag you, and hope the camera catches it) pull a Patric Henry. No it isn't the revolutionary war, and all that. Still you can spoil their tape by turning your dieing words into a heroes stance. Consider your words carefully. ("You will now see how an Italian dies" was apparently used, though I can't recall the story)
Odds are it won't happen to you. Pray and whatever else you do that you will be safe. But if you must die please don't turn it into a good PR move for bad guys.
But they don't have that ability. However a good presidentail candidate who won't win, but can at least speak well acts as a focal point for a lot of local elections where they can win. Libertarians want to win on all levels, but fully understand they don't have much a chance above the local levels. They do however have powerful control of some local town boards. There are even a few towns where the libertarians carry a majority of the positions.
I just installed windows and linux on different machines this month (I was setting up a lab with one of everything). Windows is NOT easier to install. Of the installs I've done: win98 - had to build my own boot floppy. Windows 2000: it installed, no networking though, and only VGA resolution. Had to find the venders site to download drivers from, as windows didn't include them. I managed to find them by doing a google search for the numbers on the various chips on the motherboard! Thats easy? Did I mention that I had to pry a heatsink off of one chip (northbridge) to get the right numbers to search on? Are you sure windows is easy? Xp didn't recognize all my network cards either.
linux installed and recognized everything except the modem. Even though this is a laptop, famious for being hard to install with linux. And I knew in advance the modem wouldn't work. Linux even recognized and installed drivers for the wireless card (and if I had the firmware it might work).
With windows I had to read a license agreement that was very restrictive compared the the linux one that I read. Windows has these activation keys that I had to type in (several times because I messed up the first time). Many more clicks were required to install windows, yet less options were presented, and they were no easier to choose from.
Then I had to reboot many more times because windows out of the box has 4 critical updates that cannot be installed togather. (a fix pack, which I understand, then a fix for the fix pack, then ie6 which is almost optional, and something else I forget). Even after that was done I had to reboot when I latter attached a USB cdrom to the machine. (windows 2003 with all fixes) It really felt like that old joke "windows has detected you have moved the mouse, you need to reboot for this to take affect".
Try installing linux and windows sometime, instead of ranting about that which you know not.
Maybe, but I can move my eyes from window to window a lot faster than I can use anything else to switch windows.
Today I was doing test runs of software, with long runs. I had the web browser open, but it wasn't my main task, my main task was making sure the latest 30 minute run was continuing. I only needed to look back every few minutes (I think I've already killed any bugs in shorter runs)
More typically I'll have 4 vi windows on one monitor: two different header files for the classes I'm working with, two source files for the classes I'm writing. Then the other will have two browsers open with the relavant SCSI standards, latter on also the debugger and the last run of the program. My mail client is minimized.
My eyes don't multi-task, but I don't need to see everything. I can type without looking at either the keyboard or the window I'm typing in. Often my eyes will switching between looking at the API specification, and the header file with my variable (spelled correctly) while my fingers are typing the correct options into the window that has the focus. My eyes don't need to look at that window, I already know what is in it
Sure I can remember what I have open. Moving my eyes to a different window is faster than any window switching you can do. My short term memory is good enough that I don't need to look at the exact point I'm working on all the time.
Hang out on a college campus sometime. At least once a year the Gideons are there giving away bibles. Just new testament, but a pocket size version. Handy for camping or other trips where you don't want the mass of a full bible.
Yes I have met a few, or at least their agents, when they gave me a bible. Interesting book, everyone should read it once. (even if you refuse to believe, you should read it for the same reason people read about the Greek Gods, which AFAIK nobody believes in anymore)
In the UK, the crown still owns the copyright, and licenses it to various publishers, some of whom sublicense it. (Oxford university press is the major one) The copyright is actually stronger, as it doesn't follow the rules of other copyrights in the UK.
Everywhere else the King James version is public domain.
I could even buy 19 those 20 Cd's again if I had to. Last time I lost a CD though it was a limited edition. Unless I find someone else who has a copy (and only a few thousand were made, and the band isn't from my state) I can't get a copy.
Thats why I now backup everything. Course a large part of my CD collection is from small artists who don't sell a lot of music. I have to protect myself.
Linus has just as many problems? Are you comparing apples to apples? Most linux distributions include a lot more than windows does. Hundreds of games, two desktops, several different web servers (even though you can only run one at a time), a couple different office packages, and much more. Sure a lot of that stuff isn't very secure, but windows doesn't include it at all, so you really need to subtract some of it out.
In any case OpenBSD has an 8 year track record now: 1 remotely expolitable hole! Windoes cannot match that. Yes there are some gotchas, but it you upgrade your machines when OpenBSD does a major release, something they plan well in advance, you should be safe.
For what?
SCSI is better for everything except cost. Often in the real world cost is the only difference you will notice.
Yes that counts. Now go to their site and fill in the forms. Assuming you actually have TRIED to make your abandonware games legal. If your the typical person you don't see it at Best Buy so you assume it isn't available anywhere, and that doesn't count.
Perhaps. If your local newspaper is better than mine. My local newspaper is very biased in favor of the city (I live in a township outside of city limits). It is very hard for me to get local news that matters, events that I care about are not covered, or are covered from the cities point of view. When the township and city have a disagreement this is a big deal, I don't know "our" side thinks because the newspaper either outright ignores it, or only covers a small part that can be taken out of context to make us look bad.
Still I have to assume with the thousands of newspapers out there that not all are that bad. Just beware that there is a lot less to check up on them. You can watch Fox and CNN. You can read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and if that isn't enough get El Pies (? I think that was the name of the big Spanish newspaper) for a completely different point of view. All will cover international and national news good enough (even the Spanish paper will cover the biggest US news stories, though you can't expect much), but none will cover the local zoning board.
Yes and no. Yes the only guaranteed difference is in the electronics. However there are other factors at play. (read some other responses in this thread, I'm going to avoid some things covered)
SCSI drives are sold for money to customers who want reliability. Even if in theory the mechanism is exactly the same, the SCSI drive might be better just because they will not put the SCSI electronics on mechanisms that get worse (but still in spec) scores on their tests. (The reverse cannot be said though because so many more ATA disks are sold that they have to put the ATA electronics on some higher scoring mechanisms).
Some of the more expensive mechanisms don't come in ATA versions. Something that could be done, but they don't bother.
In short: in theory you are right, and the variety of drives insures you often are. However if you buy a SCSI drive it is likely to be better than an ATA one anyway.
I would hope that companies are not that stupid. Backups come in many flavors. From the on-site copy for when you accidentally delete something you should have kept to the copy in Europe (until Mars opens up...) in case your location falls into the sea.
Of course not all companies need all levels of protection. However if your protection is just one level of RAID that is turned off you are asking for trouble. Eventually someone will delete a critical file and not realize it until the backup has been updated. (though if you are smart you will alternate your secondary on-line RAID with the backup weekly)
It isn't going overboard at all to have 24 full backups, each covering a month, just in case.
Remember though, there is no one size fits all. I don't allow critical data on my system so I don't back it up.
A lot of good music. Unless you are going to break at least the top 5 on either the pop or country charts (there might be one or two others worth targeting too, nothing I listen to though) you will make more money by going for a small non-RIAA label. The RIAA isn't the killer here so much as the rest of the overheard of the big labels.
Take jazz for instance (I just heard an interview with a jazz artist who mentioned this issue), you can get a label that consists of just one guy doing all the work for a bunch of bands, or you can get a big company to do the same work... which is cheaper? Which is likely to know something about your market. The one guy label only handels Jazz, so he knows all the jazz outlets and makes sure you are in them. (Mom and pop stores, the jazz radio stations)
Bluegrass, classical, folk, and most other good music is this way. The overhead of the big RIAA labels will cost you money.
I once heard a DJ talk over an entire song! Thats right, the song finished first.
Thats public radio for you. Play some great songs, but the DJs still talk too much. (In this case the song was less than 30 seconds long. Well worth hearing though)
Interestingly enough, when Stern came to the twin cities he got 5% of the market. The direct competing station's morning show was getting close to 15% at the time. So Stern isn't unbeatable.
Personally I just call those hosts "potty mouth". I can't stand them, but them I'm strange in a lot of ways.