The Minihowto Newsletter
Issue 4 June 5, 2009

This Issues Topic: Escalating Costs

I have done a few projects around the house and see good examples of how something small can rise in cost. For example a chair in our dinette set recently broke. I know we probably will not be able to find the same chair, so this led to a discussion about replacing the dinette set. Then it let to how the other furniture will not match, then the rug, then the curio cabinet, etc, etc.

Setting up a network or building a new PC can incur such costs as well. Imagine, your hard drive crashes, you decide to get a new hard drive, since your getting a new hard drive might as well get one with higher capacity. No 750GB PATA drive, well you should replace it with SATA, well you might as well replace the motherboard, CPU slot and RAM aren't compatible, need to get new one of those, new motherboard does not have AGP, well spring for a new video card. Sound far fetched, I hate to admit it but it happened to me, but that's just me getting greedy. I could have stayed with a 500GB PATA drive and would have been OK.

As for the new dinette set, duct tape, glue and additional screws, work wonders on that broken chair.

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Editorial: RIAA

The RIAA has won the lawsuit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Jammie now owes $1.92 million to the Music Industry.

A little background, Jammie was picked out of thousands of people to be made an example of, she was sued by the music industry for sharing a bunch of songs on the Internet. Each song is valued at $80,000 USD.

I'm pretty sure Jammie does not have this kind of money. This suit really makes the Music Industry look like a bully. So what did the music industry gain? The learned a lesson... people will still share files, they just need to find a new model of making money. Maybe concerts, memorabilia, whatever, but the need to face the fact that the well is dry.