It's not being removed from the CD, it's just not being installed by default. I'm pretty sure you are wrong here, afaict the standard ubuntu CDs are livecds which are installed by a cloning system not by installing packages individually (the alternate CD OTOH does install by installing packages and I think the DVD does too)
Plus I imagine things are getting very tight on that CD space wise.
AFAIK with iTunes and most other music stores, you keep the rights to your creative works. They just take a cut as a fee for the transaction Indeed though afaict itunes won't take generally take music directly from bands so you have to go through an intermediary who will add thier own fee (either on a time basis or as a proportion of revenue).
Still I can well believe that for a small band it could work out cheaper than rolling your own. The payment gateways that small online vendors use tend to take quite a big cut especially for small transactions and setting up the distribution infrastructure won't be free either.
Does something like this exist for physical music media, from pressed CDs to finished package? (i.e. "print on demand"). I'm not aware of any services that will burn and package on demand, my guess is a service that did so would be quite expensive. CD baby will stock a small quantity of CDs for you and ship them out as they are ordered and will do duplication for you but there doesn't seem to be any way to link thier two services together.
If you want pressed (rather than burned) CDs then you will have quite substantial upfront costs to create the pressing master and an initial run of CDs stamped (looks like about a grand to get 1000 CDs pressed and packaged).
If you're a small band, I really don't think you'd need to get a label's services in doing this. I agree, afaict the main reason people sign up with record companies is that they want the record companies clout to turn them from being a small band to being a big band.
Mostly we find people stealing power by looking at billing patterns. Most people steal power with a bypass at the meter of some sort. In other words you are saying that most people you catch stealing electricty are caught because they are idiots (stealing too much and putting thier bypasses in a place where you can easilly find them).
The bios can only be easilly used from real mode, win9x had code to switch back to real mode temporarily to use the bios for hard drive access but afaict no modern OS does so (and you wouldn't want to anyway because the performance would suck).
The bootup process of a PC running a modern* operating system goes something like this.
1: the bios looks for the expansion cards, loads the option roms (which if it's a mass storage device may hook interrupt 13h to make itself accessible) 2: the bios loads and runs the code in the MBR of the boot hard drive. 3: under some operating systems there is just a stub in the MBR that loads and runs the code from the bootsector of the active partition, under others the bootloader itself is there. 4: the bootloader runs either from the MBR or the boot sector of the active partition. The bootloader loads the kernel and other critical components into memory 5: the kernel is booted and the system switches to protected mode 6: the boot process continues now using drivers provided by the OS to access the hard drive.
If you don't have the right driver available or things are not set up correctly to make the bootloader load it (on linux this would mean either the driver being built into the kernel or the driver module being in the initrd, i'm not sure of the details of how windows handles it) the system will fail just after the switch to protected mode.
A similar process happens when installing except a CD rather than a hard drive is installed and some of the details of where stuff is located are different. If once it gets into protected mode it doesn't have a driver for the hard drive or the CD drive the install won't be going much further.
*e.g. windows NT/2K/XP/Vista/7 or linux, not dos or win9x
It's rather easy to find stolen electricity. Total the usage of the meters in an area vs. how much power was used there. If there is a difference of more than the reasonable margin of error, they have ways to isolate where this is very easy (especially since the thieves are constantly using). I guess this depends on how your local distribution network is setup, afaict here in the UK it would be virtually impossible to do this because
1: most of the cable is underground, even if they know power is being stolen somewhere in an an area good f*cking luck finding an unauthorised tee junction buried somewhere. 2: afaict there is little if any metering within the distribution network. 3: the cable is often in a really grotty state, I bet they lose a nontrivial ammount of power just to leaky cable, volt drop (meters at least here in the UK measure power, not current) in the cables and so on. 4: afaict things like streetlights are not metered.
P.S. I heard of one incident where the DNO didn't check things out properly and ended up double-charging a customer for electricity (they were supposed to be installing a new seperately metered supply but the idiots who installed it took thier feed from a line that was on the customers side of the existing meter).
Maybe a person with illegal growing in mind could canvas the neighborhood, find out the upper bound from the normal "wasteful" electric use, and then "fly under the radar" and only grow subject to that cap on electric use. Or they could just steal the electricity....
It's a good idea but it's also something that is both unexpected and in many situations undesirable. Therefore IMO it is not something that should be done without warning the person doing the install.
I see they insource packaging (it is not clear from the website if they insourced or outsource the actual CD production), order processing and dispatch for the physical release but outsource the entire process to itunes for their download release.
In some ways downloads are harder to insource than physical shipping. For low volume physical shipping of a single item (as is the case here) you can pretty much just thow up a static link to provide the information to the payment gateway (unless you are doing huge volume you basically have no choice but to outsource payment processing to a payment gateway) and do everything else manually.
For digital downloads things get a bit more complicated, you need to make sure your hosting account can take the strain and unless you want to see rampant abuse you need to put in place a system to track who has purchased items and only allow users logged in with an appropriate account to download them, you probablly would also want to track and control how many downloads each account can make of each purchase to stop people just handing out thier login details online.
None of this is insurmountable of course but it does require some setup by someone experianced with web technologies, maybe even some coding (i'm not sure if there are precanned packages for digitial media distribution or not), it is also likely to cost more to host than the fairly plain website they have now.
PS: Don't try this at home kids. Why not? (though i'd preffer to have a better indication of the timing than "until lightly brown on various plastic parts")
In general retailers who sell internationally* just mark the package with (sometimes faked or at least not particularly detailed.......) details of the contents and it's value and leave collecting any applicable taxes or duties from the customer to the courier and the destination countries customs.
*Some trading blocks are an exception to this, for example suppliers in one country in the EU are required to charge (non VAT-registered) consumers in other EU countries VAT (larger buisnesses have to charge the customer as if the transaction happened in the customers country, smaller ones are allowed to charge as if the transaction happened in the suppliers country)
Sure, amazon is big enough, but that still crushes the little guys with a hefty start-up capital requirement, and a full time tax guy to figure this out. What we do over in the EU is allow smaller businesses to charge VAT in their local manner and pay their local government wherever the customer is. Larger buisnesses have to work everything out based on where the customer is.
OFC afaict the US sales tax system is far more complex than european VAT and some areas charge no sales tax at all. Still it seems that like in the EU case a compromise is needed which gets rid of the huge unfair advantage the likes of amazon have under the present system without making it impractical for small businesses to offer mail order.
You're assuming they knew If you had licensed something to a company for use in one version of their only and they go and release another version without renegotiating with you wouldn't you check to see what was going on?! It would seem pretty crazy to me not to.
OTOH MS has said they are going to appeal so maybe the license wasn't very clear on exactly what MS was licensed to do. Without seeing the actual documents it's hard to tell.
They considered five systems, three existing and two hypothetical and looked at the total efficiancy including UPS, distribution and PSU in equipment (remember even with DC distribution you still need a PSU and generally said PSU needs to be isolating).
* american AC: 480V/277V three phase from the UPS converted to 208V/120V three phase by transformers in the PDU and then split out to 120V single phase to feed into the PSU. Overall efficiancy 83.56% * european AC: 400/230 three phase from the UPS split out into 230V single phase to feed into the PSU. Overall efficiancy 86.39% * telco DC: 48V DC from UPS straight to the PSU. overall efficiancy 84.58% * hypothetical 380V DC: 380V DC from UPS straight to the PSU 87.64% * hypothetical hybrid DC: 575V DC from UPS to an intermediate converter which converts it to 48V to feed to the PSUs 80.74%
The hypothetical 380V DC system wins but not by much and it is likely to be FAR FAR more expensive to deploy than the european AC system.
it has to advertise it's self as an existing standard compliant card No it does not, it just has to have a rom that knows how to talk to the card, is loaded as a bios extension and traps interrupt 13h. The bootloader uses that interrupt to access the drive and load critical parts of the OS including the drivers needed for the main hard drive. The OS then switches into protected mode and the driver takes over.
There are plenty of SATA/SCSI/RAID cards/chips that are bootable and yet need a special driver for windows/linux to access them. Remember the "press f6 to install a third party scsi or raid driver" prompt?
There are already services out there that will put your music on multiple digital retailers. cdbaby is an example that often comes up here.
What I suspect will happen in many cases though is that authors will use the threat of revoking the rights as leverage to get a better deal out of the major labels (in the same way that artists that manage to stay relavent long enough to complete thier first record deal and start a second get a much better deal on thier second).
Setting up the infrastructure to sell direct to customers will cost you a bit but not a huge ammount and if you want to outsource there are companies that will do it for you for a lot less than the major labels charge. Some of theese places can even get your music on the likes of itunes and amazon (cdbaby is a good example).
The hard bit is convincing sufficiant people to buy it that you make a decent profit. Doing that well generally requires either a lot of luck, a lot of money, a lot of influence or a combination of the three.
In the scope of a consumer product, I can't think of many common workloads that would really benefit from a PCIe interface. Well the review showed it as cutting game load times in half compared to a conventional SSD. Is that worth adding $1000 to the cost of your gaming rig? I personally don't think so but I bet there are some gamers who think otherwise just as there are some who will spend $1000 each on CPU, and $700 each on thier SLI graphics cards. These early adopters cover some of the R&D and hopefully bring prices down to levels acceptable to the rest of us.
is intended to eventually replace PCI and PCIx (for example the FC HBA and the SAS controller in my new Precision T5500 workstation are PCI-E rather than the PCIx that was in my old PowerEdge 2650) Afaict PCIe has already practically killed PCIx, take your precision workstation for example, four PCIe slots but only one PCIx.
At the low end PCIe x1 cards/slots don't seem to be doing so well though, while lots of machines have at least one slot I don't think i've ever seen a card in person (and the cards i've seen on suppliers websites are generally more expensive and with less choice than PCI versions). It seems at the low end that most stuff has either moved to USB or been itegrated onto the motherboard (though when integrated on the motherboard it is often connected with PCIe x1).
PCI (including PCIe) devices can supply a bios extention rom to make themselves bootable, afaict this is how most scsi and sata cards make themselves bootable.
But as long as it has a bios extention rom on it that knows how to make basic use of the interface (it doesn't have to be particulally fast, just good enough to let the OS kernel/drivers be loaded by the bootloader) then it should be bootable.
The thing with cards is that while you are almost certain to get things straigntened out eventually in the meantime they can be rendered useless which can leave you in a very sticky situation and card details can be stolen easily and quietly by any merchant you use the card with.
Afaict radio stations nearly always pay for the right to air music through thier countries compulsary licensing body anyway so I doubt this will have any impact on them either way.
These contracts will probably go down in history as the best oil extraction deals ever made That rather depends on whether some future iraqi government decides to forcibly nationalise and/or heavily tax those oil developments doesn't it?
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It's not being removed from the CD, it's just not being installed by default.
I'm pretty sure you are wrong here, afaict the standard ubuntu CDs are livecds which are installed by a cloning system not by installing packages individually (the alternate CD OTOH does install by installing packages and I think the DVD does too)
Plus I imagine things are getting very tight on that CD space wise.
AFAIK with iTunes and most other music stores, you keep the rights to your creative works. They just take a cut as a fee for the transaction
Indeed though afaict itunes won't take generally take music directly from bands so you have to go through an intermediary who will add thier own fee (either on a time basis or as a proportion of revenue).
Still I can well believe that for a small band it could work out cheaper than rolling your own. The payment gateways that small online vendors use tend to take quite a big cut especially for small transactions and setting up the distribution infrastructure won't be free either.
Does something like this exist for physical music media, from pressed CDs to finished package? (i.e. "print on demand").
I'm not aware of any services that will burn and package on demand, my guess is a service that did so would be quite expensive. CD baby will stock a small quantity of CDs for you and ship them out as they are ordered and will do duplication for you but there doesn't seem to be any way to link thier two services together.
If you want pressed (rather than burned) CDs then you will have quite substantial upfront costs to create the pressing master and an initial run of CDs stamped (looks like about a grand to get 1000 CDs pressed and packaged).
If you're a small band, I really don't think you'd need to get a label's services in doing this.
I agree, afaict the main reason people sign up with record companies is that they want the record companies clout to turn them from being a small band to being a big band.
Mostly we find people stealing power by looking at billing patterns. Most people steal power with a bypass at the meter of some sort.
In other words you are saying that most people you catch stealing electricty are caught because they are idiots (stealing too much and putting thier bypasses in a place where you can easilly find them).
The bios can only be easilly used from real mode, win9x had code to switch back to real mode temporarily to use the bios for hard drive access but afaict no modern OS does so (and you wouldn't want to anyway because the performance would suck).
The bootup process of a PC running a modern* operating system goes something like this.
1: the bios looks for the expansion cards, loads the option roms (which if it's a mass storage device may hook interrupt 13h to make itself accessible)
2: the bios loads and runs the code in the MBR of the boot hard drive.
3: under some operating systems there is just a stub in the MBR that loads and runs the code from the bootsector of the active partition, under others the bootloader itself is there.
4: the bootloader runs either from the MBR or the boot sector of the active partition. The bootloader loads the kernel and other critical components into memory
5: the kernel is booted and the system switches to protected mode
6: the boot process continues now using drivers provided by the OS to access the hard drive.
If you don't have the right driver available or things are not set up correctly to make the bootloader load it (on linux this would mean either the driver being built into the kernel or the driver module being in the initrd, i'm not sure of the details of how windows handles it) the system will fail just after the switch to protected mode.
A similar process happens when installing except a CD rather than a hard drive is installed and some of the details of where stuff is located are different. If once it gets into protected mode it doesn't have a driver for the hard drive or the CD drive the install won't be going much further.
*e.g. windows NT/2K/XP/Vista/7 or linux, not dos or win9x
It's rather easy to find stolen electricity. Total the usage of the meters in an area vs. how much power was used there. If there is a difference of more than the reasonable margin of error, they have ways to isolate where this is very easy (especially since the thieves are constantly using).
I guess this depends on how your local distribution network is setup, afaict here in the UK it would be virtually impossible to do this because
1: most of the cable is underground, even if they know power is being stolen somewhere in an an area good f*cking luck finding an unauthorised tee junction buried somewhere.
2: afaict there is little if any metering within the distribution network.
3: the cable is often in a really grotty state, I bet they lose a nontrivial ammount of power just to leaky cable, volt drop (meters at least here in the UK measure power, not current) in the cables and so on.
4: afaict things like streetlights are not metered.
P.S. I heard of one incident where the DNO didn't check things out properly and ended up double-charging a customer for electricity (they were supposed to be installing a new seperately metered supply but the idiots who installed it took thier feed from a line that was on the customers side of the existing meter).
Maybe a person with illegal growing in mind could canvas the neighborhood, find out the upper bound from the normal "wasteful" electric use, and then "fly under the radar" and only grow subject to that cap on electric use.
Or they could just steal the electricity....
It's a good idea but it's also something that is both unexpected and in many situations undesirable. Therefore IMO it is not something that should be done without warning the person doing the install.
I see they insource packaging (it is not clear from the website if they insourced or outsource the actual CD production), order processing and dispatch for the physical release but outsource the entire process to itunes for their download release.
In some ways downloads are harder to insource than physical shipping. For low volume physical shipping of a single item (as is the case here) you can pretty much just thow up a static link to provide the information to the payment gateway (unless you are doing huge volume you basically have no choice but to outsource payment processing to a payment gateway) and do everything else manually.
For digital downloads things get a bit more complicated, you need to make sure your hosting account can take the strain and unless you want to see rampant abuse you need to put in place a system to track who has purchased items and only allow users logged in with an appropriate account to download them, you probablly would also want to track and control how many downloads each account can make of each purchase to stop people just handing out thier login details online.
None of this is insurmountable of course but it does require some setup by someone experianced with web technologies, maybe even some coding (i'm not sure if there are precanned packages for digitial media distribution or not), it is also likely to cost more to host than the fairly plain website they have now.
PS: Don't try this at home kids.
Why not? (though i'd preffer to have a better indication of the timing than "until lightly brown on various plastic parts")
In general retailers who sell internationally* just mark the package with (sometimes faked or at least not particularly detailed.......) details of the contents and it's value and leave collecting any applicable taxes or duties from the customer to the courier and the destination countries customs.
*Some trading blocks are an exception to this, for example suppliers in one country in the EU are required to charge (non VAT-registered) consumers in other EU countries VAT (larger buisnesses have to charge the customer as if the transaction happened in the customers country, smaller ones are allowed to charge as if the transaction happened in the suppliers country)
Sure, amazon is big enough, but that still crushes the little guys with a hefty start-up capital requirement, and a full time tax guy to figure this out.
What we do over in the EU is allow smaller businesses to charge VAT in their local manner and pay their local government wherever the customer is. Larger buisnesses have to work everything out based on where the customer is.
OFC afaict the US sales tax system is far more complex than european VAT and some areas charge no sales tax at all. Still it seems that like in the EU case a compromise is needed which gets rid of the huge unfair advantage the likes of amazon have under the present system without making it impractical for small businesses to offer mail order.
You're assuming they knew
If you had licensed something to a company for use in one version of their only and they go and release another version without renegotiating with you wouldn't you check to see what was going on?! It would seem pretty crazy to me not to.
OTOH MS has said they are going to appeal so maybe the license wasn't very clear on exactly what MS was licensed to do. Without seeing the actual documents it's hard to tell.
Going DC doesn't save as much as you might think
There was an apc paper (search for DC on http://www.apc.com/prod_docs/results.cfm?DocType=White%20Paper&Query_Type=10 to find it) on this not long ago.
They considered five systems, three existing and two hypothetical and looked at the total efficiancy including UPS, distribution and PSU in equipment (remember even with DC distribution you still need a PSU and generally said PSU needs to be isolating).
* american AC: 480V/277V three phase from the UPS converted to 208V/120V three phase by transformers in the PDU and then split out to 120V single phase to feed into the PSU. Overall efficiancy 83.56%
* european AC: 400/230 three phase from the UPS split out into 230V single phase to feed into the PSU. Overall efficiancy 86.39%
* telco DC: 48V DC from UPS straight to the PSU. overall efficiancy 84.58%
* hypothetical 380V DC: 380V DC from UPS straight to the PSU 87.64%
* hypothetical hybrid DC: 575V DC from UPS to an intermediate converter which converts it to 48V to feed to the PSUs 80.74%
The hypothetical 380V DC system wins but not by much and it is likely to be FAR FAR more expensive to deploy than the european AC system.
it has to advertise it's self as an existing standard compliant card
No it does not, it just has to have a rom that knows how to talk to the card, is loaded as a bios extension and traps interrupt 13h. The bootloader uses that interrupt to access the drive and load critical parts of the OS including the drivers needed for the main hard drive. The OS then switches into protected mode and the driver takes over.
There are plenty of SATA/SCSI/RAID cards/chips that are bootable and yet need a special driver for windows/linux to access them. Remember the "press f6 to install a third party scsi or raid driver" prompt?
There are already services out there that will put your music on multiple digital retailers. cdbaby is an example that often comes up here.
What I suspect will happen in many cases though is that authors will use the threat of revoking the rights as leverage to get a better deal out of the major labels (in the same way that artists that manage to stay relavent long enough to complete thier first record deal and start a second get a much better deal on thier second).
Setting up the infrastructure to sell direct to customers will cost you a bit but not a huge ammount and if you want to outsource there are companies that will do it for you for a lot less than the major labels charge. Some of theese places can even get your music on the likes of itunes and amazon (cdbaby is a good example).
The hard bit is convincing sufficiant people to buy it that you make a decent profit. Doing that well generally requires either a lot of luck, a lot of money, a lot of influence or a combination of the three.
In the scope of a consumer product, I can't think of many common workloads that would really benefit from a PCIe interface.
Well the review showed it as cutting game load times in half compared to a conventional SSD. Is that worth adding $1000 to the cost of your gaming rig? I personally don't think so but I bet there are some gamers who think otherwise just as there are some who will spend $1000 each on CPU, and $700 each on thier SLI graphics cards. These early adopters cover some of the R&D and hopefully bring prices down to levels acceptable to the rest of us.
is intended to eventually replace PCI and PCIx (for example the FC HBA and the SAS controller in my new Precision T5500 workstation are PCI-E rather than the PCIx that was in my old PowerEdge 2650)
Afaict PCIe has already practically killed PCIx, take your precision workstation for example, four PCIe slots but only one PCIx.
At the low end PCIe x1 cards/slots don't seem to be doing so well though, while lots of machines have at least one slot I don't think i've ever seen a card in person (and the cards i've seen on suppliers websites are generally more expensive and with less choice than PCI versions). It seems at the low end that most stuff has either moved to USB or been itegrated onto the motherboard (though when integrated on the motherboard it is often connected with PCIe x1).
PCI (including PCIe) devices can supply a bios extention rom to make themselves bootable, afaict this is how most scsi and sata cards make themselves bootable.
But as long as it has a bios extention rom on it that knows how to make basic use of the interface (it doesn't have to be particulally fast, just good enough to let the OS kernel/drivers be loaded by the bootloader) then it should be bootable.
The thing with cards is that while you are almost certain to get things straigntened out eventually in the meantime they can be rendered useless which can leave you in a very sticky situation and card details can be stolen easily and quietly by any merchant you use the card with.
Afaict radio stations nearly always pay for the right to air music through thier countries compulsary licensing body anyway so I doubt this will have any impact on them either way.
I think if you tried something like that then it would not take long for an arrest warrent to be issued, likely a no-knock warrant.
Better hope you have a method for conducting the transaction anonymously.
I thought he got sacked not for the advice per-se but for bitching publicly when the governement ignored his advice.
These contracts will probably go down in history as the best oil extraction deals ever made
That rather depends on whether some future iraqi government decides to forcibly nationalise and/or heavily tax those oil developments doesn't it?