The music industry is quite crazy. For years they have been milking us like cattle. They continually tout illegal ripping of CD’s as the main reason for their high price. This seems like a nice cop out. Its in their interests to keep the price high because there is always a base of people who buy CD’s regardless of how easy they are to copy.
There are 3 types of people.
1. People who buy CD’s
2. People who buy CD’s and also accept illegal copies.
3. People who deal mainly with illegal copies
I am one of those Tyoe 1 suckers. People of Type 2 would be more likely to become Type 1 if prices where lower. The people of Type 3 are unlikely to mend their ways unless prices drop significantly but there will always be a pirate market its the size of it that matters.
I like to own the originals but prices are extortionate and illegal copies are looking very tempting. I buy a CD every couple of weeks and always look for the bargains, rarely will I ever buy a CD that costs me more than £8 (still expensive). One exception was a Metallica’s Black album that cost a wopping £15. I really wanted it so I had to take another shafting up the arse from the industry to buy it.
When I come home I burn the CD then put it back in its case for safe keeping. I need to do this because CD’s are so bloody expensive and CD’s get scratched. I also like to have them on my mp3 player for the train journey to work.
We now have Copyright protected CD’s which means I am not able to make copies of them. I know I can copy them but its against the law to make a copy for my own use, this is a pile of crap. I for one will not be buying any Copyright protected CD’s. In the age of MP3’s there is really not much point in owning a CD that you cannot copy so why buy it. Then of course some players won’t actually play these CD’s.
I think the music industry are hanging themeselves. They are making it harder and harder for people to use the music the way they want it and more an more people are sick to death of paying high prices for it. They need to make the prices low enough so that its not worth the effort of burning them when you can get them for next to nothing.
There will be a loser in this war and I can guarantee that it will not be the public. Music is getting easier and easier to get hold of or copy and prices are not going down so its only going to get worse. Its about time the music industry realised that you can only shaft Joe public for so long before it all goes horribly wrong.
iRiver H320
I bought two of these as Christmas presents ie one for me 😉 and one for Jenny. I am not really a gadget person but I knew I wanted plenty of storage and the H320 has 20Gb which should keep me happy.
What I didn’t know is that iRiver released an American version that has had the hardware castrated by removing USB TO GO (USBTG). This was the facility to plug another USB device into the other and copy files between them in particular cameras. From what I understand hardly any hardware was supported but it still seemed to be a daft decision. I got both the units in Manhattan so I have the American version, bollix.
For the low down on the USBTG issue visit www.misticriver.net
My initial impressions were very good, it looks sleek enough and although there are plenty of complaints about it being a bit big I like the size of it. I have also read a lot of complaints about usability and I for one am getting along fine with it. Of course, I read the instructions which some people seem to miss and assume that it should just do it the way their last one did or the same way an iPod works. It is easy to figure out an like most new bits of tech with a lot of feature it takes a wee bit of getting used to.
I plugged it into the PC and after a while (it needs some charge before it will work on the PC) I tried to write some files to it. This was a pain in the ass because the device is unable to be charged and do this stuff at the same time so I had to wait a while before I could switch data mode and move some files on.
First off it does not tell me in the manual which port I am meant to use to transfer files, I guessed data and managed to get it to work but being curious I tried to see what would happen if I plugged in the media port. On the manual the media port is meant to show up as a device the same way the data port did but it kept asking me for a driver so I can only assume there is something very wrong there since it is touted as plug and play with no need for drivers unless you are using Win98. This annoyed me because now I have a port on the unit and I have no idea what it is for.
Earphones: I have no idea why they supplied these because they are complete shit. They don’t fit and keep falling out but then they all do in my ears but what makes these crap is that as the volume goes up I start to get all sort of crap coming through them. I am assuming they are faulty because they shouldn’t sound that bad out of the box. I have tried them on several different songs using different bit rates etc and they are still crap.
Case: This is OK. Its sturdy and will save the unit from some damage but I have to ask why they blocked the view of the screen. I suppose they want you to purchase the remote control or buy a better case.
Radio: I am unable to get more than three stations and this is in the center of London so I think the radio is a bit crap as well. I will keep trying because this is one feature I really need, I like Radio 2 and Radio 4 so if I cannot get these I will be sending them back. (I know about the European setting on the radio)
Would I buy the iRiver again?
Not at UK prices, its a rip off. I also need to spend more money getting headphones which is another pain. My advice is if you can get either the HI120 or the H140 it would be money better spent. There is just too many little things that tell me that the H320 is a half arsed attempt at an update for the H100 series.
As a first impression with the company I am disappointed so will be purchasing somewhere else in future.
I am currently trying to get the H320 to work in Linux but more in that in another post.
Do not cast your pearls in front of swine
I heard a great saying today.
“do not cast your pearls in front of swine”
This is so true. The context I had heard it is was in reference to people who would not accept Open Source as an alternative to proprietary systems ie you try and convince someone that there is a tool that will do the job and it is free but they insist on spending money on a closed system because free stuff can’t possibly be as good, or maybe thats what they know and they don’t want to change.
Don’t bother with them, let them spend their money and go use your time on someone who deserves and appreciates it. Unfortunately some people are like horses and require their blinkers in order to work otherwise they get spooked.
For those interested in where the saying comes from its the Bible. The original King James says.
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”
(Matt. 7:6).
Against Fox Hunting
The first thing I would like to make quite clear is that we cannot proceed on banning fox hunting because its unnecessary. A lot of friends who want the ban argue that it is unnecessary so it should be banned. This argument is rubbish because we all do quite unnecessary things every day just because we want to. There are thousands of sports fisherman and recreational hunters in the UK and it’s quite unnecessary that they do it yet we are not about to ban them.
I intend to proceed on the basis of fox hunting being unnecessarily cruel. This is very apparent to me and anyone with a pair of working eyes.
Fox’s have been portrayed by the hunters as a farmers worst nightmare and that this little demon kills everything on site and thus the less of them the better in their book. There is some truth in this (see “surplus killing” on Google), fox’s are not angels but then neither are domestic cats. Having been raised in a village that loved pigeon racing it was very apparent to us that the cute little kitty cat next door wanted to kill every single bird in the shed and would do so without remorse. What did we do? We made sure that they could not get into the shed. We didn’t chase them around the neighborhood with 50 dogs.
Anywhere someone makes a living from the land we will always have a conflict between the farmer and the predator. A farmer has every right to protect his animals from these marauders. However, this does not give anyone the right to be cruel to an animal and most farmers respect this.
Fox hunting is unnecessary because it is actually easier to shoot a fox than it is to gather together a team of hunters with their dogs and chase it across the country. This is the point that I stated earlier that was an insufficient argument to ban fox hunting. What is sufficient is the fact that it’s cruel.
The fox is chased down by a team of dogs and then killed. The actual death of the fox may not actually be that pleasant either. Unfortunately a lot of hunters would like you to believe that the fox is killed quickly. This is the biggest lie they seem to push because they know beyond all shadow of a doubt that the fox does not die quickly. It is quite easy to get your hands on a video where you will see a fox being disemboweled and it will still continue to fight until the end. These are the lucky ones……
They unlucky ones are the ones that are smart and go to ground. The fox knows it’s being hunted so it determines that if it goes deep enough no natural predator would be getting to it. What the fox doesn’t factor in is the human with the shovel (the spade brigade) who is prepared to dig the fox out and let the dogs rip it to shreds.
What we don’t hear about are the terrier men who send terriers down after the fox either of which may die from their injuries. There are recorded videos of terrier men digging down to a fox and then setting teams of terriers on the animal until it is killed. The so called men claim that this is not cruel yet it can go on for up to half an hour. It is illegal to dig a badger from its hole. Why then should we not extend the same courtesy to the fox who might happen to have went down a badger sett.
Sending terriers down after a fox is the closest thing these terrier men can get to a dog fight with little or no fear of a prosecution if caught in the act, or even with a video of the act which has happened in the past.
My argument above is weak at best so I will leave you with a much better argument against fox hunting… the facts… Pack of lies
Web Standards CSS and HTML
Before I start I just need to say that I am an advocate of standards but I am not a religious bigot about them.
My problem has never been the technicalities of CSS or HTML, lets face it if you have figured out Perl to a reasonable degree and know your way around half a dozen programming languages then adding some markup etc to your toolbox is hardly going to kill you. Or at least you wouldn’t think so?
Unlike programming languages and their platform specific problems, browsers display your work as they see fit. The user at the other end may see a work of art or a bloody debauchery and judge you and your ability accordingly.
The browser doesn’t even have the common decency to open a window informing the user that it’s made some complete horlicks in rendering our page, nor should it! It’s our problem! if we want people to read the stuff the least we can do is make it as legible as possible for them, its not their fault the browser has a few quirks.
The internet, for all intents and purposes is a new method of communication and like all previous methods of communication it comes with its fair share of problems ie its new, its evolving, it hasn’t reached any form of maturity yet. As an analogy:
Have you ever phoned someone and had a “BAD LINE”. This prompts you into very articulated speech were all the words are formed “just so” and you might even talk a bit louder. Mean while, in the back of your mind you are cursing the weather or your blaming the old exchange down the road for the bad reception.
Without even realising it you will be compensating for the deficiencies of the system you are using with your loud speech and long drawn out words. You might not like it but its an accepted part of the system and out of your control so you just get on with it and do your best. Web Development (Development in general) is like this.
I am all up for standards but I am not one to take a pop at something because it has not been done “Just So”. Implementing standards is a process and there is no need get all religious about it.
Pig Shit and Chips please
For just over two years we have always bought McCain’s oven chips. They are low in fat and as far as we were concerned very nice.
This all changed about 3 weeks ago when we cooked some chips and they came out smelling like pig manure, I kid you not, I have worked in a cattle market and I know what pigs smell like and this was exactly the whiff I was getting. The first thing we thought was that the freezer was playing up and that somehow the chips had defrosted and gone off or some such nonsense. We checked the rest of the stuff in the freezer and everything was fine, I know this because we always keep Vodka in the freezer and it was as syrupy as usual which indicated to me that the freezer was very cold.
Anyway, we bought another bag (previous bag from Tesco’s) from Asda’s several days later under the assumption that we had just got a dodgy bag, perhaps it had lay on the floor somewhere too long or defrosted and been refrozen once too often. Same bloody problem. You can imagine our consternation, we had been using this product religiously for two years. We then decided to clean the oven completely even thought it was fine.
Most people would just try and change brands at this point but we wanted to know exactly what was causing that pig shit smell so we went off to Iceland (the frozen food mecca of the UK) and got a bag out of their freezer. We came straight home and bunged a batch in the Oven. You’ll never guess what. PIG SHIT all over again. So there we have it.
McCains Oven Chips stink of pig manure, or at least the ones we have used recently do. We wrote a letter to them detailing our discovery a few days ago. We are awaiting a reply…………….. to be continued……………………..
Website Traffic Spam
I received a great little bit of spam that I thought I would chase up to see from whence it came. The following is the text of the email with the links edited a bit.
You have got a useful web site, but no one visits it?
Get each page of your www-site crawled by each major Search Engine including: MSN, AOL, Google, Yahoo, Overture, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, Webcrawler, Ask Jeeves, etc. Having each page of your site relisted every quarter will expose your site to extra traffic.
Site1: www[dot]hvat[dot]org/9767[dot]asp
Get more traffic from the search engines!
Jennifer Clark,
Marketing Executive
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
On following the site there you get redirected to payinq-traffic.com which is a
site that reportedly submits your site to all the search engines once a month
if you pay a fee for this to be done.
For those of you that think this is great idea here are some facts.
1. Five search engines command over 80% of the market share
2. Its free to submit to these search engines.
3. Submitting to a search engine more than once is pointless.
4. Some search engines don’t like the submission of individual pages only home pages.
Most important of all is:
Don’t believe a bloody word you read on a website. That piece of advice goes
for my site to. Check everything I say and make sure I am not feeding you a crock
of shit otherwise you will just be another internet luser. When some stranger
approaches you on the street and offers you a magic bean you know straight away
the blokes full of it, a fraudster, a crook. Its just the same on the World Wide
Web except there’s more of them and for the most part they are not going to prison if you have been dumb enough to give them your cash.
Believe nothing, confirm everything, take nothing for granted and always watch
your back.
Trains
I have just spent a week in Nottingham doing the Summer School for M203 ( Open University Pure Maths Course) which was quite a good laugh. I decided since I new the dates that I would book the tickets quite a bit in advance so that I could get them cheaper. I did consider using the car but I trust Midland Mainline so I might as well do a bit for the environment and traffic congestion and use the train, what a mistake that turned out to be.
The train was due to leave at 10:01 Saturday morning. On arrival at Luton station 20 mins early I am then told that there is no such train, it doesn’t exist, there is no train at 10:01. I showed the bloke my ticket and lo and behold I am meant to be on the 10:01. This was not a mistake on my part, they had changed the timetable and my train would now be leaving at 10:50. BOLLOCKS, thats a lot of extra time I could have spent in bed.
Anyway, I got on the train and things were looking good until Kettering which is where the train decided to break down. So off we went to another platform where I could catch a train that would mean changing at Leicester. I don’t like changing so I waited for a direct train that came 15 minutes later and caught it instead. Arriving more than two hours later than I thought I was a bit pissed off to say the least.
Return Journey.
Well, I finished earlier than I expected on the course so I decided to hell with it I am not waiting a further two hours at the station just to catch a train that said suggested service on the ticket. This was my mistake. I seen suggested service on the train that runs from Nottingham to Leicester but I had a reservation on the train from Leicester to Luton. I jumped on the train that was fast to Kings Cross and decided to change there and come back up to Luton since that would get me in a lot quicker than the other way. On ticket inspection I got whacked with a bill for £27 because I was being bumped up by £7.50 to get to Luton for some reason and I had to pay £19.20 to get a return from Luton to Kings Cross and back again. FSCK IT
The bastards make me late by two hours and charged me £27 quid for the pleasure of recovering one hour. Using the train is a sure fire way to get stressed out over a simple journey of just over 100 miles.
100 miles cost me £64. I can fly home to Ireland and back again for less than this. The government are constantly wittering on that we should all start using public transport, its quite obvious very few of them actually use it. I would also imagine that when they do they have everything arranged for them at both sides and its other peoples money they are spending. The whole things a bit of a farce.
Ignorance Arrogance or Autism
I had the pleasure of attending a technical talk the other night at the Morgan Stanley building down by the docklands. Or at least it was pleasurable when I was able to hear the speakers. Let me elaborate.
Lets for arguments sake say that you went to a talk by one of the following:
Edward Whitten. One of the smartest guys on the planet. His brain generates so much heat they run a heat exchanger around his head. This runs a 2 Mega Watt steam turbine.
Donald Knuth Intel are experimenting with Knuth’s DNA in order to grow their next generation chips.
Would you take along your laptop. Some of you probably would. Would you plug it in? Possibly, you might want to record the talk. Would you type while they are talking. I wouldn’t, it’s pig ignorant. You might not know it but some of us want to hear them speak. The tapping on the keyboard is distracting.
Perhaps you’ve already had the pleasure a talk by Donald Knuth. We’d all be dying to ask him a question. I know I would. Some of us would be itching to stick our hands in the air and grab his attention. Should we talk to your mates or interrupt him with some witticism’s only you find funny. I think bloody not!
So why the hell do some people think its ok to inflict us with this crap when the speaker is not someone famous. These people took their time to do the talk and I was there to listen to it. I don’t want to hear the audience unless it’s relevant. If you really want to tap on your keyboard leave the room. If you have to interrupt make sure its something worthwhile or wait to the end of the talk or talk to the speaker after it. I am convinced that an awful lot of people in IT have Autism or Aspergers but don’t know it.
So, I ask, is it ignorance, Arrogance or Autism?
Cruise Missile Going Cheap
Have you ever read something and thought that there is no justice in the world. Have you ever been pushed far enough that in an act of desperation you would do anything to keep yourself sane, Bruce Simpson has and he’s selling cheap cruise missiles because of it. The New Zealand Government has decided to persecute him because he showed that it was possible to build a cruise missile for 5000 dollars and they didn’t like it.
Bruce Simpson Cruise Missile Maker extraordinare
Now if I had been the government the last thing I would have done would have tried to draw any attention to him at all and possibly even hire him. It’s a shame he has been pushed to the point of offering to build a missile for anyone but if you treat a man like and animal you are sure to be bit.
I thought that the lady holding the torch stood for freedom and liberty so why do we still hear about governments persecuting people, particularly America. You would have thought that history (our greatest teacher) teaches that persecution is a fine way to shoot yourself in both feet at the same time whilst simultaneously lighting cigarettes near a gas leak.
Will we ever learn?