Let’s see. CompUSA has a Seagate 200GB drive for $99, after rebates.

Kelly and I own in the neighborhood of, oh, say 500 compact discs. Each holds an average of 600 MB of music in CDDA format. Shorten losslessly compresses music to roughly half its original size.

500 x 600 MB = 300,000 MB / 2 = 150,000 MB * (1/1000) = 150 GB.

I could store all of our music digitally in lossless format, and still have 50 gigs left to play with. It may finally be time to build the Mother Of All Audio Servers. Continue reading →

Jamie Gaines, one of the few, the proud readers of MT.net, alerted me to this story of how John McCain (why isn’t he president?) is prodding the cable industry to quit masking the price of cable channels through their tier packages. He’s drafting a bill to force cable and satellite providers to offer a la carte pricing.

Says McCain:

“When I go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk, I don’t have to buy a package of celery and a bunch of broccoli,” McCain said. “I don’t like broccoli.”

This is long overdue, of course. To the point that it may not go far enough. Now that Tivo has made a la carte shows a reality, I’d like to see this being offered. Then, we could cut out the middlemen and buy our shows straight from the production companies.

Cable beats broadcast. Satellite beats cable. The duo of DVR and a-la carte shows will beat them all.

The television channel is now redundant.

I got a new check card in the mail this week, thanks to a security breach this month at B.J.’s Wholesale Club. It seems some script kiddies spent time in the parking lot, capturing unencrypted point-of-sale 802.11b traffic (my speculation only, as I can’t find many details on the actual attack). Their haul was a few hundred card numbers at the most, but enough to get the attention of BJ’s and many banks.

Odds that our card number was swiped are pretty low, considering the theft occured at only a few stores. Still, it shows that many retailers and other businessess aren’t taking the most basic care to keep your data safe.

Now would be a good time to hang out your shingle if you were in the security business. I guarantee you won’t be bored.

All of this aside, I’ve long had a beef with just how insecure credit cards are in general. With the advent of smartcards and digital cash, you’d think we’d be so far beyond this by now.

Spent a good part of the weekend resting up in front of NCAA basketball. I was on the fence as to who I wanted to win yesterday’s game of Xavier vs. Duke. I love a good Cinderella story as much as the next guy, but I ended up wanting an all-ACC championship game.

With any luck, we’ll see Georgia Tech beat Duke next Monday for the national championship. I won’t be down at all if Duke wins, but competition in the conference helps us all. Let’s see if someone else has what it takes to win it all.