I just implemented their TypeKey service on my MT blog when it came out. I used to get comment spam nearly daily, but in the five months since I turned on TypeKey I haven't had a single instance of it. I don't know why more blogs aren't using it, since it is free, and it works quite well for me...
Honestly, I'm in no big hurry to have HD-DVD content. I've got a 53" RPTV that's HD, and 480p DVDs look "good enough" on it. I get HBO and Cinemax in HD as well, but HD film just doesn't "pop" at you the way HD video content does, due to the difference in depth of field.
I'm not saying I can't tell the difference, as I can, but as long as the DVD is anamorphic widescreen, I don't see the quality difference between the two as being worth buying a new player and new discs for.
I'm sure I'll eventually buy a new player that does HD, as I've had Netflix for 5 years now, and that's how I watch all my movies, so once they start offering HD discs at the same price, and HD players hit the $200 mark, I might invest.
Yep, I just spent three weeks in Russia, and never even saw a legitimate CD or DVD in either Moscow or St. Petersburg. I went into a store called 505, which is just off Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, it's about the size of the average Sam Goody, and you can buy CDs, DVDs, PC CDROM/DVD-ROM games, Movies on MPEG4 discs, and even MP3 CD collections.
The MP3 collections are kind of neat, you can buy oh, say, the Metallica CD, which is one disc, with every song Metallica ever published, plus cover art, liner and bootlegs from concerts. A pretty cool idea, really.
Prices are low. DVDs were 120 rubles, ~$4, CDs were 75 rubles, and most of the computer games were 150 rubles.
As you mentioned, the average russian would never be able to afford a legitimate music CD at the prices charged here in the states. Many of them can't even afford to eat in a restaurant, one of my co-workers took out one of the IT guys, who said he hadn't eaten in a restaurant in six years.
One of the IT guys I was working with there told me his monthly salary was $200. How the hell is he supposed to afford to license his software on $200 a month?
I did ask about legitimate discs, and was told that they are sold in some of the upscale American-style shopping malls, but that no one buys them, because they're $20 each for DVDs and $15 for CDs.
The industries simply need to learn to adjust their pricing for that market if they're going to combat piracy. Start selling their CDs there for $4 and DVDs for $6, and then make them as convenient to buy as the pirated discs, which are in the Metro terminals and in the underground walkways under the busy streets of Moscow, and they might have a fighting chance. But as it is now, they might as well not even bother importing their legitimate goods into the country, as only the rich will be able to afford them.
C: What kind of stupid prudes are more concerned that they might be seen naked, than that their box has just been rooted?
An article today said that if you've got the cams with the shutters you can close, then it's not as bad. Uh, hello, I'm much more concerned about keyloggers, or someone reading my e-mail, and IM traffic than I am about someone seeing me in the buff. Mildly embarassing? Sure, but I'll take inadverntent nudity any day over having my bank account drained or losing my job because some gained access through my system to a critical box at work...
I've got to say, my new 12" 1.33Ghz G4 PowerBook really has some great battery life. Well over 3.5 hours with "normal" usage, even with the screen brightness cranked up. I haven't done any DVD playback testing though. You can probably get improved battery life for DVD playback by ripping the DVD to your hard drive, so you're not spinning the optical drive that whole time...
Greenpeace is made up by a bunch of hypocrites, who are at best completely uninformed, and at worse, racists bent on genocide. If you ever get a chance, watch the episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" where they talk about genetically modified food. It's simply not possible to feed the world without using new technology. If Norman Barlaug, winner of the Nobel Prize, hadn't created some GM wheat, a BILLION people would have died in Asia from starvation, but that doesn't seem to bother Greenpeace. They lobbied Zambia not to accept food donations from the U.S. due to the prescence of GM (which you and I eat everyday), and instead left the people of the country to starve.
So, let's say that Greenpeace gets its way, and all GM food is banned, world-wide. That means that millions, if not billions of people are going to starve to death. How many of those people who starve are going to be snotty white kids from suburbia, who like to dress in tie-dye and rant about the whales? None. How many are going to be in impoversished third world nations in Africa and Asia? The world's population grows by 80 million people each year. Where does the food come from to feed them?
I have both controllers, and I switch between them depending on the game. For normal left-stick usage, such as Project Gotham Racing 2, the small one is superior, but if you're going to have a marathon Halo session, go for the L controller. Anything that uses the right stick extensively benefits from the bigger controller, as you don't have to contort your right thumb so much to reach that stick, and you're not as likely to cramp up. Also, I find the black and white buttons easier to hit on the L controller than on the S controller.
I like MT, and I use it for my blog, but I think their new pricing is just set too high. I'd be glad to pay a lower price, but at $70, it's a bit outside what I'm willing to pay. Give me a $35 version, with no installation support, and 10 blogs and 10 authors, and I'd be happy, it gives me the freedom to do what I want in the future, and still puts coins in SixApart's coffers.
There's nothing I hate more than overpriced software, especially from vendors who make things which are handy, but not critical. I'm not a hard-core Mac user, I just have my first PowerBook shipping to me now, so I've been shopping about for Mac software the last few days. Here's a case in point, the Netware client for Mac OS X. It's $159 per seat. Uh, that's more than I've ever paid for an Operating System, and you want me to pay that for a piece of client software? No thanks.
Howabout ADmitMac? $119 to join my Mac to an ActiveDirectory? No thanks, I'll live without.
Both of these would be handy pieces of software to have, but not at the prices they charge, I'll use FTP to connect to the Netware box before I'll shell out that kind of cash. I can't help but wonder if these companies wouldn't make more money by selling a downloadable copy for $29. That's low enough that a Mac user who can't get their boss to buy it for them will consider buying it out of their own pocket, just to make their lives easier. But once you're over the $50-$75 range, you're outside what most people want to spend on their box, just to enable a "handy" feature.
NetNewsWire Pro, on the other hand, is $39. For an App that I'd use all day, every day, that's quite a reasonable price, and as soon as my new PowerBook arrives, Brent will see some of my cash. But, if that price were doubled, I probably wouldn't be paying for it, and I'd either stick to a free lite version, or use a competing product of lesser quality.
And don't get me wrong, I know that software authors need to make a living, but I wonder if they're being counter-productive in terms of what they make. You make a lot more money selling 10,000 copies of a $29 product than you do selling 1000 copies of a $100 product. And yes, I know that support costs something, so make it an option to purchase it without on-line support, if necessary. I generally don't find support, even from our large vendors to be all that helpful anyhow, just give me an online knowledgebase, and I'll fix it myself.:)
Yep, I got one of those in Vegas at Comdex in Fall of '97, they were demoing their Clik drive at the booth, as being useful for... nothing I can think of. I guess it was an expensive fragile alternative to Compact Flash?:)
It gets even dumber. People have privacy concerns about Google scanning the e-mail to deliver the AdSense ads, and now this, but they're sending their e-mail around the internet, through god knows what relays, in plain text? Uh, here's an idea, if you're worried about privacy in regards to your e-mail, wrap it in GPG/PGP and be done with it. You don't send important correspondence on a postcard, do you?
My problem with Apple's DRM is that it counts individual users on a computer as "separate" computers in the licensing scheme, meaning that a song I purchase from their store, won't work on all my machines.
There's my work machine, my home machine (two users, my wife and I), her 20GB iPod, my iPod Mini, and my laptop. Oh, whoops, can't do that, just ran out of licenses, and that's not even counting the old Pentium II that keep around as a print server/backup machine.
Or, are my wife and I not allowed to share one download? We can own a house together, but not an audio file?
Haven't met any, but I live in Iowa, where people are super-cheap, and most of them can't stomach the price premium for a Mac. I'm not bashing the Mac, I'd love to have one, thinking about getting an iBook later this year, but they're not as popular here as they are in more urban areas.
I like to take all those SASE cards that fall out of magazines, and drop them in the mail without filling them out. I'm hoping the magazines get sick of paying for them, so they'll stop including their stupid cards to try to get me to subscribe to a magazine that I already subscribe to.
Here's a better idea. Wipe both machines, and upgrade to Win2000 or XP. Why anyone would use the 9X series for work like AutoCAD is beyond me, unless they like instability.
I've just started telling all those people that I only know the MacOS. Truthfully, I use mostly Windows and Linux, but the odds of someone owning a Mac are far less than owning Windows. I'd say that I just use Linux, but since that runs on X86 hardware, someone would probably want me to install it for them, so I just feign ignorance. This doesn't work with my mom, or friends who know what I'm running at home, but it works great on random people you meet who want to ask you questions (like car salesmen and people you meet at dinner parties).
Yeah, I wrote the review, and realized that I left out the utopian references. I never read Bellamy's book, but it's mentioned quite a bit in the fore and aft words of FUTL. It reminded me quite a bit of Walden Two, as well, but probably in the same way all utopian books seem similar, as you pointed out.
Yeah, I have to say, anyone who doesn't like this feature is probably a misinformed idiot. TiVo doesn't delete your shows to record "Suggestions", it doesn't refuse to record one of your shows either. All TiVo is doing is saying "Hey, you have some free hard drive space, and I'm just sitting here idle, I might as well put some content on that space for you, in case you run out of things to watch later".
I really don't understand what's creepy or annoying about that feature, the box is going to be powered on anyhow, there's absolutely no reason not to use that feature.
And, if for some reason you don't like it, as the previous poster said, you can EASILY disable it. You go into the Settings menu, and just tell it not to record Suggestions.
Or, just burn one disc, then fire up Nero, Roxio, or whatever and duplicate that CD. No one says you have to do all your burning in iTunes, and once it's CD audio, you can duplicate it in any CD copying software.
It also isn't anamorphic, for those of us with widescreens. Dish networks called me last week, and offered me Cinemax for only $2/month. I said "I don't want it, your movies don't fit my screen". The sales monkey on the other end didn't understand, and I literally had to repeat that phrase 15 times before he gave up.
Not everyone has a 4:3 TV, the sooner everyone else realizes that, the better off we'll all be.:)
Ahh, mine had a 20MB hard disk, so I never used that boot floppy much. And, my computer was bought used, and had gotten MS-DOS installed on it, without speed.exe, so I had no clue it was even an option. It sure made MS Flight Sim run a lot smoother.:)
I'm still using a parallel printer cable that came with my Commodore-brand XT clone. It was a sweet computer at the time, my parents bought it for me for Christmas, when I was in the 7th grade. It came with a monitor that was also used for Amigas, so it could handle composite video and stereo audio, in addition to the fabulous CGA graphics.
The printer cable still works like a charm with my HP LaserJet 1200, it even has the Commodore logo on it.
The Commodore PC is long-since gone. After I owned it for about 1.5 years, I was moving the manual, and an addendum fell out that said "Note: to double CPU speed, press control-alt-d." Unbeknowst to me, I'd been running all that time at 4.77mhz when I could have been running at 9.44mhz! D'oh!
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I just implemented their TypeKey service on my MT blog when it came out. I used to get comment spam nearly daily, but in the five months since I turned on TypeKey I haven't had a single instance of it. I don't know why more blogs aren't using it, since it is free, and it works quite well for me...
Honestly, I'm in no big hurry to have HD-DVD content. I've got a 53" RPTV that's HD, and 480p DVDs look "good enough" on it. I get HBO and Cinemax in HD as well, but HD film just doesn't "pop" at you the way HD video content does, due to the difference in depth of field. I'm not saying I can't tell the difference, as I can, but as long as the DVD is anamorphic widescreen, I don't see the quality difference between the two as being worth buying a new player and new discs for. I'm sure I'll eventually buy a new player that does HD, as I've had Netflix for 5 years now, and that's how I watch all my movies, so once they start offering HD discs at the same price, and HD players hit the $200 mark, I might invest.
Yep, I just spent three weeks in Russia, and never even saw a legitimate CD or DVD in either Moscow or St. Petersburg. I went into a store called 505, which is just off Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, it's about the size of the average Sam Goody, and you can buy CDs, DVDs, PC CDROM/DVD-ROM games, Movies on MPEG4 discs, and even MP3 CD collections.
The MP3 collections are kind of neat, you can buy oh, say, the Metallica CD, which is one disc, with every song Metallica ever published, plus cover art, liner and bootlegs from concerts. A pretty cool idea, really.
Prices are low. DVDs were 120 rubles, ~$4, CDs were 75 rubles, and most of the computer games were 150 rubles.
As you mentioned, the average russian would never be able to afford a legitimate music CD at the prices charged here in the states. Many of them can't even afford to eat in a restaurant, one of my co-workers took out one of the IT guys, who said he hadn't eaten in a restaurant in six years.
One of the IT guys I was working with there told me his monthly salary was $200. How the hell is he supposed to afford to license his software on $200 a month?
I did ask about legitimate discs, and was told that they are sold in some of the upscale American-style shopping malls, but that no one buys them, because they're $20 each for DVDs and $15 for CDs.
The industries simply need to learn to adjust their pricing for that market if they're going to combat piracy. Start selling their CDs there for $4 and DVDs for $6, and then make them as convenient to buy as the pirated discs, which are in the Metro terminals and in the underground walkways under the busy streets of Moscow, and they might have a fighting chance. But as it is now, they might as well not even bother importing their legitimate goods into the country, as only the rich will be able to afford them.
C: What kind of stupid prudes are more concerned that they might be seen naked, than that their box has just been rooted? An article today said that if you've got the cams with the shutters you can close, then it's not as bad. Uh, hello, I'm much more concerned about keyloggers, or someone reading my e-mail, and IM traffic than I am about someone seeing me in the buff. Mildly embarassing? Sure, but I'll take inadverntent nudity any day over having my bank account drained or losing my job because some gained access through my system to a critical box at work...
I've got to say, my new 12" 1.33Ghz G4 PowerBook really has some great battery life. Well over 3.5 hours with "normal" usage, even with the screen brightness cranked up. I haven't done any DVD playback testing though. You can probably get improved battery life for DVD playback by ripping the DVD to your hard drive, so you're not spinning the optical drive that whole time...
Greenpeace is made up by a bunch of hypocrites, who are at best completely uninformed, and at worse, racists bent on genocide. If you ever get a chance, watch the episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" where they talk about genetically modified food. It's simply not possible to feed the world without using new technology. If Norman Barlaug, winner of the Nobel Prize, hadn't created some GM wheat, a BILLION people would have died in Asia from starvation, but that doesn't seem to bother Greenpeace. They lobbied Zambia not to accept food donations from the U.S. due to the prescence of GM (which you and I eat everyday), and instead left the people of the country to starve. So, let's say that Greenpeace gets its way, and all GM food is banned, world-wide. That means that millions, if not billions of people are going to starve to death. How many of those people who starve are going to be snotty white kids from suburbia, who like to dress in tie-dye and rant about the whales? None. How many are going to be in impoversished third world nations in Africa and Asia? The world's population grows by 80 million people each year. Where does the food come from to feed them?
I have both controllers, and I switch between them depending on the game. For normal left-stick usage, such as Project Gotham Racing 2, the small one is superior, but if you're going to have a marathon Halo session, go for the L controller. Anything that uses the right stick extensively benefits from the bigger controller, as you don't have to contort your right thumb so much to reach that stick, and you're not as likely to cramp up. Also, I find the black and white buttons easier to hit on the L controller than on the S controller.
Yeah, but you can't cache credentials for use with a laptop using the built in functionality.
I like MT, and I use it for my blog, but I think their new pricing is just set too high. I'd be glad to pay a lower price, but at $70, it's a bit outside what I'm willing to pay. Give me a $35 version, with no installation support, and 10 blogs and 10 authors, and I'd be happy, it gives me the freedom to do what I want in the future, and still puts coins in SixApart's coffers.
:)
There's nothing I hate more than overpriced software, especially from vendors who make things which are handy, but not critical. I'm not a hard-core Mac user, I just have my first PowerBook shipping to me now, so I've been shopping about for Mac software the last few days. Here's a case in point, the Netware client for Mac OS X. It's $159 per seat. Uh, that's more than I've ever paid for an Operating System, and you want me to pay that for a piece of client software? No thanks.
Howabout ADmitMac? $119 to join my Mac to an ActiveDirectory? No thanks, I'll live without.
Both of these would be handy pieces of software to have, but not at the prices they charge, I'll use FTP to connect to the Netware box before I'll shell out that kind of cash. I can't help but wonder if these companies wouldn't make more money by selling a downloadable copy for $29. That's low enough that a Mac user who can't get their boss to buy it for them will consider buying it out of their own pocket, just to make their lives easier. But once you're over the $50-$75 range, you're outside what most people want to spend on their box, just to enable a "handy" feature.
NetNewsWire Pro, on the other hand, is $39. For an App that I'd use all day, every day, that's quite a reasonable price, and as soon as my new PowerBook arrives, Brent will see some of my cash. But, if that price were doubled, I probably wouldn't be paying for it, and I'd either stick to a free lite version, or use a competing product of lesser quality.
And don't get me wrong, I know that software authors need to make a living, but I wonder if they're being counter-productive in terms of what they make. You make a lot more money selling 10,000 copies of a $29 product than you do selling 1000 copies of a $100 product. And yes, I know that support costs something, so make it an option to purchase it without on-line support, if necessary. I generally don't find support, even from our large vendors to be all that helpful anyhow, just give me an online knowledgebase, and I'll fix it myself.
Yep, I got one of those in Vegas at Comdex in Fall of '97, they were demoing their Clik drive at the booth, as being useful for... nothing I can think of. I guess it was an expensive fragile alternative to Compact Flash? :)
It gets even dumber. People have privacy concerns about Google scanning the e-mail to deliver the AdSense ads, and now this, but they're sending their e-mail around the internet, through god knows what relays, in plain text? Uh, here's an idea, if you're worried about privacy in regards to your e-mail, wrap it in GPG/PGP and be done with it. You don't send important correspondence on a postcard, do you?
My problem with Apple's DRM is that it counts individual users on a computer as "separate" computers in the licensing scheme, meaning that a song I purchase from their store, won't work on all my machines.
There's my work machine, my home machine (two users, my wife and I), her 20GB iPod, my iPod Mini, and my laptop. Oh, whoops, can't do that, just ran out of licenses, and that's not even counting the old Pentium II that keep around as a print server/backup machine.
Or, are my wife and I not allowed to share one download? We can own a house together, but not an audio file?
Fortunately, via m4p2mp4.exe you can strip the DRM out of them as necessary, or do the old m4p->CD audio->mp4 conversion, though recreating metadata is a bit of a pain in the arse.
What about the Daily Show? That's not crap!
Haven't met any, but I live in Iowa, where people are super-cheap, and most of them can't stomach the price premium for a Mac. I'm not bashing the Mac, I'd love to have one, thinking about getting an iBook later this year, but they're not as popular here as they are in more urban areas.
I like to take all those SASE cards that fall out of magazines, and drop them in the mail without filling them out. I'm hoping the magazines get sick of paying for them, so they'll stop including their stupid cards to try to get me to subscribe to a magazine that I already subscribe to.
Here's a better idea. Wipe both machines, and upgrade to Win2000 or XP. Why anyone would use the 9X series for work like AutoCAD is beyond me, unless they like instability.
I've just started telling all those people that I only know the MacOS. Truthfully, I use mostly Windows and Linux, but the odds of someone owning a Mac are far less than owning Windows. I'd say that I just use Linux, but since that runs on X86 hardware, someone would probably want me to install it for them, so I just feign ignorance. This doesn't work with my mom, or friends who know what I'm running at home, but it works great on random people you meet who want to ask you questions (like car salesmen and people you meet at dinner parties).
Yeah, I wrote the review, and realized that I left out the utopian references. I never read Bellamy's book, but it's mentioned quite a bit in the fore and aft words of FUTL. It reminded me quite a bit of Walden Two, as well, but probably in the same way all utopian books seem similar, as you pointed out.
Yeah, I have to say, anyone who doesn't like this feature is probably a misinformed idiot. TiVo doesn't delete your shows to record "Suggestions", it doesn't refuse to record one of your shows either. All TiVo is doing is saying "Hey, you have some free hard drive space, and I'm just sitting here idle, I might as well put some content on that space for you, in case you run out of things to watch later".
I really don't understand what's creepy or annoying about that feature, the box is going to be powered on anyhow, there's absolutely no reason not to use that feature.
And, if for some reason you don't like it, as the previous poster said, you can EASILY disable it. You go into the Settings menu, and just tell it not to record Suggestions.
Ugh, I hate the Office Space DVD. The cheap bastards didn't put it in anamorphic video, so it looks like crap on my widescreen HDTV. :(
Yeah, we've got another 17,000 or so here. :)
Or, just burn one disc, then fire up Nero, Roxio, or whatever and duplicate that CD. No one says you have to do all your burning in iTunes, and once it's CD audio, you can duplicate it in any CD copying software.
It also isn't anamorphic, for those of us with widescreens. Dish networks called me last week, and offered me Cinemax for only $2/month. I said "I don't want it, your movies don't fit my screen". The sales monkey on the other end didn't understand, and I literally had to repeat that phrase 15 times before he gave up.
:)
Not everyone has a 4:3 TV, the sooner everyone else realizes that, the better off we'll all be.
Ahh, mine had a 20MB hard disk, so I never used that boot floppy much. And, my computer was bought used, and had gotten MS-DOS installed on it, without speed.exe, so I had no clue it was even an option. It sure made MS Flight Sim run a lot smoother. :)
I'm still using a parallel printer cable that came with my Commodore-brand XT clone. It was a sweet computer at the time, my parents bought it for me for Christmas, when I was in the 7th grade. It came with a monitor that was also used for Amigas, so it could handle composite video and stereo audio, in addition to the fabulous CGA graphics.
The printer cable still works like a charm with my HP LaserJet 1200, it even has the Commodore logo on it.
The Commodore PC is long-since gone. After I owned it for about 1.5 years, I was moving the manual, and an addendum fell out that said "Note: to double CPU speed, press control-alt-d." Unbeknowst to me, I'd been running all that time at 4.77mhz when I could have been running at 9.44mhz! D'oh!