Slashdot Mirror
Apple Outrages Users By Automatically Installing U2's Album On Their Devices
Zanadou writes "Apple may have succeeded at breaking two records at once with the free release of U2's latest album, titled Songs of Innocence, via iTunes. But now, it looks like it's also on track to become one of the worst music publicity stunts of all time. Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhones automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phones. But even if iTunes users hadn't chosen automatic downloads, Songs of Innocence will still be displayed as an "iTunes in the Cloud" purchase. That means it will still be shown as part of your music library, even if you delete all the tracks. The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your "iTunes in the Cloud" purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list. Other reactions include rapper Tyler, The Creator saying that having the new U2 album automatically downloaded on his iPhone was like waking up with an STD. Update: 09/16 15:06 GMT by T : Note: Apple has released a fix.
If you buy a product from Apple, it's not really yours. Oh, you own the lump of hardware, but the apps, the content, the OS? No, you do not own any of that.
Test 1 2 3 4
I should take my Mac into the shower to wash away any remaining traces...but that might void the warranty.
You'll get over it.
What do you expect after sleeping with an Apple product?
If this album is 100 Mbytes at AT&T's roaming price of $19.95 per megabyte, this is going to cost me $1,995. The album is on my phone so I hope it downloaded over a week ago! If not, I'm screwed because this is a work phone. They were fine with me checking email a few times the last time I traveled, but that was only $45 in overage fees. This is going to be very profitable for AT&T and other providers.
It downloaded over wi-fi on my phone.
I had to actually start my download because I turn OFF THE ABILITY TO AUTOMATICALLY DOWNLOAD!!!
I swear, the more technology we get the dumber people become. Stop yer damn whining and delete the FREE ALBUM.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
A lot more #2 than before.
HA-HA!
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
U2 didn't pay a dime, Apple paid them.
It took me all of 5 seconds to hide the album in iTunes. All gone, I'll never see it again (unless I choose to unhide it).
Such a hardship.
If you leave automatic downloads on - guess what - you have automatic downloads!
I think it was a great thing to have the album right at your fingertips. This is not some cheap promo song of some re-released stuff of some ex-famous guy. This is a full-blown U2 album with a song about Joey Ramone!
I'd be happy to have that kind of album from your preferred musical genre im my library anytime, so please stop pretending to be offended.
They have? I haven't gotten any free books. I think you're making shit up.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to. That's how the game stores Steam and GOG usually do these kind of things. I have not seen them chucking any items into my library against my will.
it could have been nickelback....
If your Mac is running out of hard drive room from downloading a single album, I think the album is probably the least of your problems.
Why do you think Apple needs to be paid before screwing over their users?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You run macs with almost no free disk space and set iTunes to download stuff automatically - and that's someone else's fault when they run out of disk space?
Oh right, this is an apple product. You all must be 'stylish' hipster douchebags who think you're smart.
still haven't found what they're looking for...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
to, Yeah Yeah Yeah!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So, Bono is back from Africa then.
Surely the point here is the precedent... It signals that the corp can and will push music and in future other content to your otherwise 'personal' media collection and otherwise ad-free OS... It doesn't take a lot of cynicism to guess where apple can go with this... How about a mass unsolicited email and SMS to all device users to promote... Oh wait that is called spam...
Anything by James Blunt - that would have promoted a mass defection to Android..
The album was a give-away. If you have your phone set to auto-download things you own, guess what? It downloads it. #firstworldproblem
Hasnt happened to me, but yes i would bitch about that too. Dont put stuff in MY library that i didnt ask for. This is a MAJOR Information Age problem that needs to be stopped now. Offer it to me for free, just dont insert it into my library without my permission.
Good-bye
Some people take curating their libraries much more seriously than you do. I choose what goes into my media libraries, not Apple.
Good-bye
No random downloads on my Kindle. It's all setup to sync and everything, basically always on my wifi. Everything on there, I put on there, aside from the bloatware it starts with.
Easy BitCoins
Well, given that I listen pretty much exclusively to classical music, finding the new U2 album on my iPhone (if I had one) or on my Mac in iTunes would be more like waking up and seeing that my ex-wife's sister is in bed with me. Ewww....
But on a serious note, this behavior by Apple is very unpolite, regardless of whether the album is pushed onto one's phone, computer, or cloud account.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I thought this album release was quite significant actually. Many years ago Courtney Love wrote on Salon.com ("Courtney Love does the math") that she was not bothered with P2P distribution of her music, as in fact CD sales were not a source of income for artists. Every now and again the publishers associations whine about how artists will perish due to P2P, and on /. there is disagreement with no proper evidence to support it. Now we see a well established band and Apple showing that revenue sharing with a publisher for printing CDs that may or may not be bought is not the best deal they could have.
Opt-in and UI preferences aside, this album was a major release.
Wealth doesn't correlate strongly with intellect. If anything, it might be slightly negative. Besides, if you really earned that much, you would've probably never heard of slashdot in the first place. You'd be off doing more interesting things.
Totally. Because U2 are your typical, just about getting by, rock band.
U2 don't have to sell another album, ever, to remain multi-millionaires. They could give away their work for nothing for the rest of their lives, and still be richer than 99.99% of the planet. They are not, in any way, a template for other musicians.
This strikes me as simply the next logical step in marketing. U2 is a major group, and it's hard to argue that giving customers their new album as a bonus is a bad thing. But the next step will be "free" albums Apple wants you to listen to, and the one after that will be extorting artists to pay them to have their albums released this way.
The final step, no doubt, will be an extra fee to have automatic installation of such stuff disabled.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Literally within days, this hot breaking news item shows on /. Impressive. How we ever managed to keep abreast before the age of internet is well beyond my metal capabilities.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Maybe the kind of person who thinks they're in charge of their phone, and can decide what and when it downloads.
Apple just taught them an expensive lesson.
Amazon has done worse - deleting books.
Kindles are as much of a prison as iWhatevers.
I'll be damned, went into winamp and searched for a U2 song and found one. Didn't think I had any. "New years day" Just had to share that. It's Monday!
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
From 1999 to 2009, music sales dropped about 60%. People used to say they pirated for convenience because there was no modern commercial way to download-for-pay, or that they would still buy as much music even if they choose to download large amounts in addition to that - but now with it incredibly easy to buy music online and prices lower than ever, sales are not back up. People need to be intellectually honest and stop making disingenuous arguments and just accept that, yes, with it being very easy to pirate music, people are going to pirate music and artists will have to find other revenue sources or make less.
Pretentious? Moi?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're incompetent or lying.
To download the album your Mac Minis would have to a) have iTunes running, and b) have end-users tell iTunes to download the songs. Unlike an iPhone, there is no auto-download setting on a Mac. Hell, I can't even get the "check for Available Downloads" menu option to download new episodes for my season passes to TV shows, I have to load the iTunes store, go to "purchased," and then manually select the TV season/album/whatever I want to download.
More importantly everybody knows Mac OS X needs multiple gigabytes free as memory swap space on it's startup disk. The general recommendation is 15% of the drive. Which means even if you're using the very first, circa 2005, PPC version, of the Mac Mini you should have 6 GB free. The entire U2 album is only 109 MB.
"-1 Uncomfortable truth"
Just some random counter examples for success == intelligence.
* Athletes
* Musicians
* Actors
* Models
There are other talents a human can have besides intelligence, both mental and physical; beauty, creativity, muscles, taste, empathy, etc.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I assume she was basing this on her own CDs , and indeed the royalties on 37 worldwide sales is probably cancelled out by the clerical, stationery and postage charges incurred by the record company.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Under the deal between Apple and the band where Bono is one of the members, U2 "gives away" the album on iTune and for that, Apple awards them with a cool Two Hundred Million United States Greenbacks
You have taken the cost of a whole advertising campaign, doubled it, and attributed it to one little part of that campaign.
Got any figures from the last 6 years?
There is a computing principle called GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. It applies to humans as well. What you put in your head shapes who you are. I carefully choose what goes into my head.
Good-bye
True, U2 have more money in their pockets than most. However, if you do get around to read the Salon.com article I recommended (and I really think it's a great +5 insightful read), you'll be able to learn about what happens BEFORE someone has the chance to become big as U2. You'll see that the revenue share that privileged U2 and Radiohead opted out from was NEVER good for a starting band in any case.
then stop assuming and just read the article. it's a really good one.
Or maybe people just are not that interested in the music that is available? I do not pirate music, but I, also, do not buy music. I have several friends who pirate music...interestingly enough, they buy more music every year than I ever did.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
"More importantly everybody knows Mac OS X needs multiple gigabytes free as memory swap space on it's startup disk. The general recommendation is 15% of the drive"
Emphasis mine
They may be lying but you are also being dishonest claiming that EVERYONE knows OS X needs 15% free space. I'm sure the number of people that know it is much closer to "No one" than "Everyone"
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
"Other reactions include rapper, Tyler, The Creator, saying that having the new U2 album automatically downloaded on his iPhone was like waking up with a STD."
They're so straight-to-the-point, and really put things in terms that all of us can relate to.
Mine doesn't need this 15% swap space. but then I'm not a poor pleebe and I added 16Gb of ram to mine. I'm guessing the uneducated masses still running with 4GB of ram in any computer might need swap space.
All of it is attributed to retarded users. 100%
If you dont know the basics about computers, you dont deserve to own one.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When you purchase an Apple device and use iOS, the EULA clearly states that Apple can have its way with your device, including installing or UNinstalling any software or data that Apple sees fit to install or uninstall, so long as they feel it is necessary.
It's not really "your" device in the strictest sense. Sure, you possess the device, but whether or not it functions at all is strictly at the whimsy of Apple. They can even brick your device if they feel it is necessary and you have no recourse to recover the purchase price, because you agreed to such an act by using iOS.
Apple may be showing a complete lack of respect for it's customers but if you are down to 50 megs of hard drive space or less you are screwed anyway. how can you download software patches?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Oh right, this is an apple product. You all must be 'stylish' hipster douchebags who think you're smart.
That's why they 'like' the U2 album.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Inherited wealth no, but earned yes, it correlates extremely well because it's tied with success, and success == intelligence. That is, the ability to set yourself goals and planning to reach them, and actually achieving them. As for Slashdot, I only post now and then to remind its sad dwellers that yes, there is a better world out there, and that they don't belong there.
Some of the richest people I know are absolute chuckleheads with the gift of gab. The only smarts they have is how to use the smart people.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
> how can you download software patches
When you want to, when you have cleared some space and you're ready. Just like you should be able to choose when to download anything, and how to use your disk drive space.
This would be an awesome technique for Monty Python to promote their next box-set.
They could have unsolicited downloads this sketch onto people's devices. I'm sure everybody would be delighted to receive it.
sure they have a few hit songs, and i enjoy listening when they are played on the FM radio but i wont go buying their music, i dont buy any music or movies anymore, i just dont consider my income disposable like that anymore, i rather save it for more important expenses
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I've always wanted a way to delete programs and content from my account that I don't want and no longer use. Perhaps this is Apple's chance to add this as a new feature.
The poster you responded to above did not say anything negative about athletes, musicians, actors or models; he just pointed out that you don't necessarily need intelligence to succeed in those fields. Since you couldn't parse the message, it's obvious your strengths lie elsewhere as well, and that's cool, but maybe you don't want to poke a wasp's nest of intellectuals and take them on in their home turf.
Just a suggestion.
Revenues are up almost 50% since Job's years. There have been several successful products launched and Apple is much more heavily embedded in the global mobile ecosystem. So yes.
It's not a FREE ALBUM. Apple rolled the cost into every phone it sells; you paid for the album whether you wanted it or not.
The album including artwork is 144m. Macmini come in 500g-1t sizes for quite a while now. Which means you are talking .01-.025% or so. If you are running your computers that close to locking up it ain't Apple that is at fault. Besides why would you have an iTunes account at all on work computers or be set to autodownload?
This doesn't "prove" anything. You may believe that it illustrates a point that you're trying to make, but it supplies no proof of any kind.
That aside, I'm sure that music publishers and/or U2 are making plenty of money on this deal. It's "free" to iDevice users, not to Apple and nothing like sharing music with P2P.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Apple is pretty good about this. For about a decade they've had a sequence of warnings as your drive gets too full. I don't know the exact level they kick in because I give the systems the swap space they need but yes they do warn users effectively.
If this isn't the most First World Problem I've heard of, I just don't know. Of course it's there if you chose automatic downloads. Of course it will show up on some menu as being available to download. This story is manufactured outrage for clicks and I, sadly, fell for it.
You are a macpro user. You can move swap where ever you want. Either just hardlink /private/var/vm/swapfile to some other drive or change the path in com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist to point to a directory with a larger drive.
Many years ago Courtney Love wrote on Salon.com ("Courtney Love does the math") that she was not bothered with P2P distribution of her music, as in fact CD sales were not a source of income for artists
Keep in mind that the percentage of revenue artists get from album sales has historically been heavily genre-dependent. Rockers in general, and heavy metal and alternative rock in particular, have long derived most of their income from touring and merchandise. They treat album sales primarily as PR for their live performances. In contrast, with pop and top 40 groups, it's the reverse. Most of them use touring as PR to generate album sales.
U2 is actually one of the latter, even though they're rockers, BTW. They put on such extravagant live performances that their financial goal on tour is to avoid losing money (and they often fail). They do make some money on merchandise, but most of U2's income is from album sales, or at least used to be. Perhaps that's changed; my information is 10+ years old. The source of my information, BTW, is a gentleman (and I use the word deliberately, he was, unlike many of the people I encountered in the music biz) I worked with at Universal a few years back. He had been the manager of U2's account for several years, responsible for the financial aspects of the label's U2 business including royalties and their advances and recoupment.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I couldn't find information that displayed they constantly moaned about pirates. Just a few articles.
I don't really get what your point is. Tax avoidance isn't piracy.
Illegal investments aren't piracy.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
They know that ALL their users are U2 fans. Every. Single. One.
And from this point on, if someone says they bought an iPhone you can say to their face that they are U2 fans, even if they deny it. Because Apple SAYS they are U2 fans, and to them that is the word of their god.
Task Mangler
They are just poseurs and not real Apple users. Real Apple users don't mind the Apple tax.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Then you're not a real Apple user, you're just a psseur. Apple users "think different" to you.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
If you dont know the basics about computers, you dont deserve to own one.
That's a pretty harsh way of looking at it. You can't even get through a public education these days w/o access to a computer. There a lot of senior citizens (my aunts and uncles in their 70s and 80s are all online), who just want to send email, and surf the web. Why the fuck should they have to know what swap space is?
Just another day in Paradise
Does OSX not follow typical behavior of reserving the last few percent of storage for root only, specifically to prevent a computer becoming unusable because a user filled the hard drive?
Reason #12,345,432 not to buy Apple products.
Way back in the day, when Steam used that ugly vaguely-military olive drab color, any free apps just showed up in everyone's accounts. There weren't that many - a few demos, all for Valve games. The entire Steam library was only like thirty or forty games at this point.
And then PopCap joined. They basically doubled the list of paid games, but also added demos for at least two dozen games (I recall the list was so long I actually had to scroll). People were understandably furious, because that made it a lot harder to pick out the games you had actually bought from the demos that just popped into everyone's accounts. I think this was before there was an option to show only installed games, which would have made things much worse.
Valve fixed that pretty damn quickly. And I thought everyone would have seen and learned from that. Sadly Apple refuses to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of others.
He's competent but Apple needs someone great, not merely competent.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
We already know that new artists do well from free distribution of their work. From Metallica back in the days of bootleg tapes of their gigs, to modern artists who get started on YouTube and social media. We already know that established acts aren't significantly harmed by piracy either, and this just confirms that in a high profile way.
Artists have always needed to give their music away for free. The money they get from radio play is a fraction of the pittance they get from CD sales, but it's an essential marketing tool. If they don't give it away for free no-one will hear it and no-one will buy it, simple as that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Isn't there a setting to download only on Wi-Fi? That would work for anyone whose primary home Internet connection isn't satellite or Iowa DSL.
Not only your "Mac" but your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch as well. I know many people with iProducts, and many of them complain about the amount of space available on the device. Most devices only ship with 16 GB (12GB free out of the box), and since they have no SD card option, an it's $100 for an extra 16 GB of space, most users opt for the smallest storage options. Personally, I will never buy a phone/tablet that doesn't have any option for expanding storage with standard media. There is no real reason to not have a micro SD card slot except to fleece people out of money. I can't believe people fall for it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Now iTunes users get to experience what it's like having Phil Collins / Genesis appear in any given Pandora playlist given sufficient time.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
There seems to be a permanent shift in the younger generation not owning music. I don't know that piracy is the problem. My daughter and her friends (all teenagers) don't pirate but they, with very few exceptions for which those services don't work, don't buy music on a per song or per album basis. Rather they subscribe to services or get ads via. things like Pandora, youtube and Spotify.
My generation which was enculturated to buy music still buys. But I think we are talking about a true cultural shift where younger people see music like TV shows as something they wouldn't own for a lifetime.
As bundled crapware.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your "iTunes in the Cloud" purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list.
Incorrect. In iTunes there's a prominent "X" displayed on the upper right corner of the album. Click it. The album is gone.
In other news, yet another 2 bit "rapper" is getting free publicity accidentally on purpose!
Doesn't this artificially inflate album sales for U2? I mean, it sounds like iTunes has record of millions of customers "purchasing" their new album. Sure, it was $0 but the charts don't ever talk about how much the average price for an album is.
Relax, Francis.
FAndroids always want to find something to complain about Apple. Get a life, sport.
From 1999 to 2009, music sales dropped about 60%.
Much of that has to do with three things:
1. Many people have already purchased all the pre-1999 music they want, and now only buy new music. Prior to digital, there were a lot of replacement sales of old music.
2. It is now easy to only purchase the songs you want, so people no longer have to spend $10 for two songs, which means overall revenue is down. The solution to this is for artists to create music where every track on an album is desired.
3. "Rental" options like Spotify, Pandora, etc., don't count as sales, but are widely used by many people as their only music source.
++
Come back to us when it's somebody more important.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
It's on my phone but I'd have to download it to icloud. All they did was add it to your ethereal icloud music library. It's not taking up any space in your iDevice unless you download it.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
This poor guy was nailed by more than one anti-apple moderator.
Not sure about legally :) but it has no DRM...
Could it just be natural market growth?
I don't think the new iPhone would look like another generic phone if Jobs was still there. He was an asshole, but the products were beautiful.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
There is a ton of stuff in my Google Play Music library that Google thinks I might like. It's damn annoying and clutters up my library.
My Pandora channels have suggested channels at the bottom. I don't want them, but they are there.
This bothersome phenomenon is not unique to Apple.
Didn't happen. If it did happen , it was a darwin moment. Even following the directoions in the text message the carrier sends whenever you land in a foreign country would have prevented it. By the way, even at AT&Ts 19.95 a meg it would not have been 1000s of dollars.
They are not real people at all. They can't control their phone. If you don't have an international data plan and you have data roaming on (off by default, just like automatic downloads), you will be paying a lot of money. Period.
Really? Outrage? Worst music publicity stunts of all time? How about "minorly annoyed and then I moved on"? Can we just have that reaction for once?
Yes, there's an auto-download setting on the Mac.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What DRM?
iTunes music has no DRM. Hasn't for years and years and years.
You can't get a DRM'd music file from Apple even if you beg them for one.
There are plenty of legit reasons to bitch about iTunes and the iTMS, but DRM isn't one of them.
Your music library WILL contain all of the stuff you choose to put in it. That's not going to change, because that's pretty much the POINT of it!
What we've got here are a bunch of whiny people who dislike U2, throwing fits over the fact that their latest album is now a part of their collection despite not wanting it there. Well..... so what? How does this really affect you in a negative way, in the grand scheme of things? You never have to add a U2 song to a custom playlist. It doesn't delete any of your other music you already have, or prevent you from adding something new that you want. It cost you absolutely nothing. And because of the way iTunes works, you don't even have to use any disk space keeping the downloaded tracks on your Mac or iOS device. You can delete them all and it just leaves a "marker" in the cloud, saying you have the ability to download it any time.
Heck, if THAT is so intolerable? Consider exporting your music library to a standard format like MP3 (iTunes gives you the ability to make an MP3 version of any of your songs by right clicking on them, even) - and use a different program as your music manager. You could still purchase new stuff via iTunes if you wanted, and just export a copy to the player you actually use.
As I understand it, this whole "promotion" cost Apple hundreds of millions of dollars to pull off -- and was likely only something negotiated courtesy of the recent acquisition of Beats and the inside connections they had with the music industry. I really don't think you're going to see this happening regularly.
+6
That really depends on what fills it up and how. I've had my torrent client glitch out and completely fill my drive a couple times, to the point where the UI was too slow to even move a window.
Fortunately I was able to ssh in and kill the program and delete the offending temp files, but the first warning I had was 'oh hey, trying to type locks the system.'
(And the other pain in the butt is that completely filling an OSX volume will tend to horridly fragment things, and defragging it isn't free.)
Are you saying the dispatch computers not only have iTunes set up, but are also tied to personal iTunes accounts? I'll leave the full hard drive problem for someone else. But if 911 is really that important, then these computers should not be messed with - by the users either.
So people that own cars should be mechanics?
What about a house? do I need to know about plumbing, electricity and such?
If I want a cellphone do I need to study RF or electronics?
I know even more than the basics on stuff I own, but most people don't (and don't care).
So those people should all be using public transportation and rent their places (and not own any electronics and other stuff) ?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
If you're /that/ exercised about being able to choose to do absolutely anything, then why in the hell are you using a proprietary operating system?
I think you're full of crap.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That's also the time frame when MOST people I know became disinterest / disenchanted with the new music coming out, and reverted to listening to older material instead.
I'm not saying the ease of "pirating" music with digital tools doesn't contribute to loss of music sales. It MAY (but the ease of BUYING tracks has exponentially increased too, as well as a reduction to nearly zero in costs of distribution to people -- so I'm not sure).
But quite frankly, we've regularly witnessed trends in popular music that are long overdue, here in the 2000's. As just a random few I can think of off the top of my head? We had the "rise of the alternative girl bands" (Bjork, Sarah McLaughlin, Poe, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star, etc. etc.) in the 90's. We had the brief burst in popularity of ska and neo-swing type music (Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, etc.). Obviously, we had the huge effect of the Seattle grunge scene. Before that, we saw a rise in popularity of "modern country" and line-dancing, the era of Heavy Metal in the 80's, and a period where rock/rap fusion was popular. So what's really happened along these lines in the 2000-2014 time period?
Four things happened:
- Apple pushed something on us that we did not ask for, just so that U2 could reach multi-platinum status with the latest album almost instantly.
- Apple forced the music taste of their CEO on everyone with an iTunes account. They should have set the album price to "free" and let people decide if they wanted it or not. Use their music in the iPhone 6 ads and write "U2 album available for free on iTunes until date xyz" at the end of the ad, no need for anything else.
- A lot of people have monthly data quotas, and some are always on the edge of going over it. Around 100MB might not seem like much, but on a cellphone plan of 2GB that's 5% wasted, or roughly a day and a half of data if you spread it over 30 days. Will Apple pay for the people who went over their monthly cap because of this publicity stunt? That certainly doesn't make the album "free" for those people, on the contrary.
- the iTunes algorithms make recommendations based on our purchases. Now, because of the "purchase" of this U2 album that I didn't ask for, I'll get recommendation for things I absolutely hate, which means Apple just destroyed their own recommendation system, which means I'll be ignoring recommendations from now on, which means less profits for Apple. How stupid is that.
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After seeing the keynote I went looking in my iPhone/iTunes for the album - expecting to see a "Free" where "Buy" usually appears (or Buy $0.00). I couldn't even find the album for a long time (still can't find it on my PC w/ iTunes). Next stop - Google, to discover that it was already on my phone. Sure enough - when browsing through my Artist list there was a new entry to U2, and all of the songs marked with the "download from cloud" icon.
From a user perspective it was confusing and expected to "buy it" (first) like any other album. Let's pretend I'm not a U2 fan. Sure I've purchased albums from other band and decided I didn't like it later - and simply deleted it. I now forever have this album in my list that Genius will try to mix and play from when at home on Wifi.
While I appreciate being able to discover "new" music - I'm not in control of it. I can't put it back on the shelf. Kind of ugly.
They assume everyone likes the same entertainment. Sure - U2 is probably more universally liked than the Juicy Bananas.
Yeah, but deleting books frees up storage space.
Thank you Amazon!
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At 19.95 per megabyte, a 100MB album will cost 2000 dollars.
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Many people have already purchased all the pre-1999 music they want
And many of those people think nothing good has been recorded since.
I sort of like U2 sometimes, But I refuse to take part in this. I deleted it and gave it a bad review. I suggest everyone else do the same.
If you don't know the basics about farming, you do not deserve to eat.
Ooo, this is fun!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I don't see this as a huge problem. Not particularly invasive. If you don't like U2, don't click on the cloud. If you have things set in a particular way, it might download automatically, but you can now "delete" things directly from your phone (as against the way that it used to be where you needed to do everything from iTunes); so again, not too big of a deal. OTOH, it shows up as an entry in your list of albums, which could become annoying if this were to become any sort of standard practice, but only because at some point it makes it harder to find the items which you want to be there.
In this way it isn't too much different from the new Amazon Prime Music app, which lists all the "free" streamed albums offered through Amazon Prime membership. It becomes hard to browse for something I am interested in because there are so many things that I am NOT interested in. That being said, I can't complain too much as I haven't paid for any of them (I paid for the prime membership for other reasons) and it is occasionally nice when I want to hear something that haven't thought to purchase outright. Search works well, just browsing not-so-much, and even then sometimes one _wants_ to browse through things unknown to find something new.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Apple will start killing puppies and then charge you a fee to stop.
. Either just hardlink /private/var/vm/swapfile to some other drive or ...
Someone correct me, but I think you have to symlink to link to another drive. (not hardlink)
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
I remember when I first added "Google Books" to an Android device, it added a bunch of free "classics" (Alice in Wonderland, Huck Finn, etc) to my purchased library.
I for one would much prefer a bag of crap to a U2 album.
Good point. Bags of crap have a very good use in the garden. Music files on the other hand aren't good for much of anything.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Save your 'outrage' for something real and meaningful. This is not a real problem. You have not been harmed. Get over it. It has been normal for decades for music players to come with free sample songs.
I can easily see a future where content creators will automatically have a 'sample track' or a trailer sent automatically to your cloud account.
go ahead and drink your apple kool aid
some dbags will say anything to get their name a little popularity. he may not be U2's target market but boo-hoo-hoo, what a crybaby.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
of course they are, they put a supply chain guy in charge.
they are coasting and sucking up profits now. no innovation.
I was using short hand. You have to mount the drive so that the /private/var/vm/swapfile is a hardlink. So for example you might mount a drive to /vm and then have /X/private be a hardlink. You can't just symlink for swap.
So the OP is just full of shit?
Would probably help a lot on the obesity front.
Why shouldn't people know the basics of farming, of how cars and engines work, how to manage a business. Shit, Lazarus Long expects a fuck of a lot more than that.
I don't think you can compare the two. Radio play is a degraded, time limited, copy that takes effort to replicate. If you like what you hear there are plenty of incentives to buy your a copy that will suffer from none of these limitations. A copied MP3, on the other hand, is available always, pristine and effortless. Once it is available for free there are no limitations to it and no further incentive to buy a copy.
should be banned from the internet for a month.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's Canter and Siegel for the new millennium. Expect to see more of this (and not just from Apple).
We need a proper open-source phone. Maybe it's time to look into that Pi-phone again. http://www.raspberrypi.org/pip...
Consider switching carriers to TMobile, where there are no data overage fees.
No. Just an observation. Your comments emphasize my point, though.
If you don't like Apple's products, why do you care that others do?
If people like Apple products and wish to spend their money on the brand or simply enter into that ecosystem for whatever reason, that's their prerogative. Right? Just like buying a BMW or Jaguar over a Hyundai, Ford or Kia. It's a personal choice (and, budget).
FAndroids seem hell bent on forcing their will on those who prefer other options and love to belittle anyone who doesn't buy into their way of thinking. I don't see that from Apple users as much. You don't find many of them posting on Android related articles. One could get this level of discourse elsewhere from troll posts on other media sites (such as CNN) .
Personally, I buy what works best for me and fits my budget. Having had both Android and Blackberry phones lock up on me in the middle of business calls, I prefer to go with something that works (well, until I run out of battery, anyway). Given the fact that I can make money developing for iOS more readily than Android, it's a no-brainer for me. If I need to develop for Android, I COULD easily switch as I have the skills. Instead, I find it easier to use cross-platform tools to get there and develop native for iOS. So far, I have seen little business need to develop for Android. That may change as will I when the time is right. Others who see it differently are more than welcome to develop for that platform. Their choice.
Now, go crawl back under the bridge, Troll.
when the ipod came out, apple paid the artists to provide about 300 free songs for users for free - it was a gift - it was like them paying to give us a free mix tape. i found some good tunes on there, and deleted the rest. thx apple.
again, instead of paying for this music, apple is paying (or in cahoots depending on yr pov) for a gift of music that they believe to be good. if you like u2 - its a gift. if you dont, it is easy to delete - you wont even see it unless you go digging for it.
thanks apple.
2cents from toronto
jp
It's not like that at all. In your example people are able to simply not take the tape - this was forced into your library and the only way to hide it (not even delete it) is to hide ALL your previous purchases. Sucks if you delete content to make space sometimes and want to add it again later - this album will always be there in that list of stuff you bought (now a combined list of stuff you bought and stuff apple forced on you).
A lot of what I read above seems to be "so what" but what happens when it's more targeted, and more rampant? You'll start changing your minds and start to value having a little control over your media, your device, your life. You'll miss your short list of 5 albums you bought when you have to wade through 40 albums of crap Apple decided should show up in the list. At very least just make it a new/different list!! We used to get TV free but had to sit through commercials - that was fair. Now you pay $40/month for cable and still have to watch commercials? Greed and desire for control are changing things more rapidly than before, and it seems silly to me that they're taking control away from consumers; if we can't even vote with our dollar any longer I suspect piracy will skyrocket on a scale so far unseen. If I owed stock in Apple I'd be outraged that company money went toward this rather than R&D for how to not suck.
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Let's see, $19.95/MB * 109MB. Time to thin the herd.
> how can you download software patches
When you want to, when you have cleared some space and you're ready. Just like you should be able to choose when to download anything, and how to use your disk drive space.
I recommend turning the option to download all music back to it's default setting: OFF. That way you can have control over the music downloads just like you have control over patches.
The point is that you're dangerously toeing the line. Running out of disk space doesn't cause very graceful failures. Even a 5% "buffer" of free space is enough. I realize these are client machines and not servers, but still. You don't need pagerduty or whatever waking your ass up to deal with it, but you should be dealing with it instead of believing it to be a non-problem.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Wow...."Apple outrages users?" Seriously? I'd love to know how many people were "outraged" versus those who either appreciated the album or just didn't care. If you're 1) that concerned about "curating" your library, 2) too dumb/lazy to turn off automatic downloads, especially when roaming, 3) can't spare 100mb, 4) actually concerned what someone might think upon seeing an album in your library, 5) concerned about what a free album will do to Apple's suggestions but too lazy to rate the album on iTunes, then you have no business having an iPhone at all. It's much more likely these "outraged users" don't exist at all and are just hipster douches complaining about (Cr)Apple from their rooted Androids.
I'm not sure why this is really an argument to be getting into. I'm going to throw the blame on Apple for this one for not using a dedicated swap partition.
It's hard to use up too much space for swap to work, when the space set aside for swap is literally impossible to use for other purposes.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
only weasel lawyers, it seems, own music. you at best own a limited-rights use license for personal gratification, and one physical or electronic copy of the work. if you don't want it, mark it "do not push" so it doesn't get on all your devices after syncing.
could be worse. could have been Slim Whitman. or Shatner Sings the Hits. that's what would have been a freebie on the Zune.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's so nice that Apple's memory management system is so atavistic and hard to configure. Even Windows has a GUI for this configuration, which incidentally *also* includes an option to turn off the paging file.
Let's compare what happens if you disable paging and subsequently exhaust your physical memory, Windows vs Mac OS.
On Windows, an app may fail to launch, or a running app may close unexpectedly. Windows will then display a useful message in your systray and continue running without any problems. Close a few apps to free some RAM and try again.
On Max OS, it's even simpler: your entire fucking machine will hard-lock and you will be required to initiate an ACPI shutdown, (or yank the power cord, should you find that more satisfying). It's like something out of the System 7.5 days, except you don't even get a bomb dialog in Mac OS X.
The Mac OS memory management system is a toy. dynamic_pager sucks.
If you live in the region that I suspect you do, 911 was down because massive amounts of rain flooded utility easements and fucked up some copper that AT&T is replacing. If you have any modicum of evidence tying an Apple software update to the problem, take it to the media, I'd sure love to see that story.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
regardless of the actual number, its to high for a U2 album. they dont deserve 100 million (or a dollar) for that album. If I were an apple guy id be pretty pissed off if im listening to my music and all of a sudden a U2 CD I didnt buy starts playing. Everyone know that bono is just a giant piece of shit. i mean you saw the south park right???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
i still have no interest in buying an idevice, but i have seen more things Ive liked since jobs left.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Revenue? No one cares. Profit is the bottom line.
Beyond that, one doesn't exactly need a crystal ball to see that Apple is rapidly losing market share to Android devices.
It's Blackberry all over again.
depends, If the machine in question was static than it is a problem. I have a few machines that I run with almost no headroom intentionally for specific reasons. then again I also dont use a mac
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If you dont know the basics about computers, you dont deserve to own one.
See, we have this thing called a society right. where different people do different things. I dont need to know how my engine works, I just know it does. I dont need to know how electricity works, I just know it does. I dont need to know how... you get the point. This is a horrible horrible piece of advice.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The growth has happened in areas like computers where the market has beens shrinking as well.
I think there has been some rather large innovation.
iPhone:
an entirely new manufacturing process unlike any ever done for any consumer device ever allowing for thinner and lighter
an entirely new GUI
the introduction of a finger print based security / payment system
mac laptop:
The move to high resolution (retina display)
standardizing on SSD allowing the operating system to use a small frequent write strategy that won't work for HDD
desktop:
an entirely new pro line
the move to fusion technology
Actually in the price point they compete in ($400+, $500+ phones) they are gaining share. The huge growth is in the $150- part of the market and Apple is getting none of that. You can count share by grouping sneakers, and jumbo jets into "transportation facilitation devices" and just counting units. And that would be similar to the way people count smartphones as one big pile.
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/201...
This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to.
That's how it worked for everyone that didn't enable auto-downloads of purchases (which is not enabled by default).
I *wanted* the album, and it took me two days to figure out how to get it. It did not appear for me anywhere automatically...
I can't believe people get worked up over being given music for free. Hey guess what, all sorts of free crappy music is in whatever music streaming service you favor also. Why not complain about that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, this actually makes sense. Magnetic media degrades over time, CDs suffer from bit rot, vynil records are easily dameged, HDDs fail, id3 tags are corrupted (Windows Media Player does that). Formats change over time - for example movies purchased 10 years ago are in DVD quality, which doesn't look good in big TVs; and high-quality 1080p torrents consume less space.
And just at old iTunes purchases - they are poorer quality and have DRM.
Now, renting music is not much worse than maintaining a record collection, and for the price of one album per month you get unlimited access to all songs. Sounds like a great bargain to me if you download at least one new album per month. And in 5-10 years your library will probably get upgraded to FLAC quality.
If you are "lucky" to work in an open space environment, you need A LOT of music to compensate the noise. Listening to the same music over and over is even worse than listening to loud sales calls, and radio-style services or unlimited libraries really help to keep your sanity.
The only downside I see is the possibility of provider going bankrupt or shutting down the music service.
Well to use my daughter as an example she doesn't download anything. She just pays $60 a year to have unlimited access to 90% of the all the music she could ever possibly want. She doesn't get to keep anything but the total cost is very reasonable.
Remind me to put a copy of <insert horrible title> on your book shelves next time you leave the door open. It's not a crime, but it is annoying.
Not that I disagree completely, I'd personally love to see an sd card slot on a ipad, but there are reasons other than 'fleecing people out of money'. There's software reasons (how does the software handle the sdcard being removed / inserted. Do I provide UI to format the SD card? What data should I store on there? Should it appear as a separate storage area, or be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the storage?). There's hardware reasons (where does the slot go? Should it have a cover? Board space etc etc).
And people 'fall for it' because they want a straightforwards user experience, not one that involves plugging little fiddly things into little fiddly slots, and having to worry about how to copy all their data to their new larger sdcard (for instance). None of the nexus line of tablets have sdcard slots, for instance.
Remember that all of the internal storage of an ipad is encrypted, so even if they did have an sdcard slot you wouldn't be able to use it to transfer files. I'd love to see expandable storage on an ipad, my kids are always running out of room on theirs (although it does give me a good excuse to delete their games to make room for their schoolwork :) ).
Define the basics. Seeds + Soil + Water + Sun = plant. Am I expected to know the composition of fertilizers or how much yield to expect per acre? I probably know a bit more than the average person because I'm in middle America and my dad's family use to farm.
I can tell you the difference between a 2-stroke and 4-stroke engine but that's because I work for an automotive company.
The OP's statement was a bit ridiculous... not knowing that a certain OS requires 15% of HDD space should disqualify someone from owning a computer? What an expert knows and qualifies as "general knowledge" is most likely not general knowledge to the average person.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Dude,
This dumbass isn't claiming he's some end-user who is not familiar with how his computer works. He's claiming he's got a fucking network full of Mac Minis and fixing them is his job. If true, and if his Minis truly have so little swap space that 109.8 MB will fuck them up, they are already fucked up.
Seriously. I have had startup disks with 5-6 GB in free space, and it caused serious stability issues. That's how I found out you need lots of free space.
Keep in mind that the OP isn't claiming to be a grandma with no clue, he's claiming that a) he has a network of Mac Minis, and b) it is his job to fix them when something goes wrong. Knowing you need more then 109 MB of swap space is something my everyone who uses Macs seriously for work finds out, because when OS X doesn't have GB after GB of swap space stability collapses.
Read the post I was responding to.
That guy is not claiming to be grandma with a computer her favoritist grandson set up for her. He's claiming to be the guy in charge of maintaining a network of Mac Minis. As in he's claiming someone pays him to support a specific computing platform: the Mac Mini, He's also claiming that his networked machines had so little free space that 109 MB made a difference in their stability. That is ridiculous BS.
Which means one of two things is true: his network's stability sucked ass, and he's just blaming U2 for it because his boss hates Bono, or he's making the whole thing up.
problem
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You have a good point. Apple lacks safety there.
Apple has very good memory management for the application developer. They are supposed to be telling the OS what memory is purgeable and cooperating. The system then uses automatic termination or sudden termination (both are opt in for applications). There is also memory compression. The OS is expecting to use as much memory as it can cooperating with applications. It doesn't want the end user doing anything more than telling it which applications are still running and which aren't. That's really where it is configurable.
Reconfiguring OS X is something you can do because it is a Unix, but you are going to have to reconfigure it like a Unix. Apple doesn't support it easily.
For a while, Barnes & Noble was dropping samples into my Nook library. No big deal. I got hooked on an author (Brandon Sanderson) because of it, so that's a positive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I never though that the US government would be so mean
Now millions of iPhones of ISIS are infected with U2's last "album" and many will have no idea on how to remove it, driving them to commit suicide in the most horrible and painful manners imaginable like barbecuing themselves at slow flame or drowning in rotting pig pee.
I don think that even ISIS deserves this much pain and suffering
Obama! You are a Criminal!!!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
The album shows up in my collection, but it didn't download to my device and take up valuable space without my knowing. And I have "AUTOMATIC DOWNLOADS" switched on. The album was essentially given to me for free, and is available for me to download at will. Nobody forced anything on me. What's all the fuss? I don't see the issue (yet?), if there is one.
Really? Outrage? First world problems.
Is it pro Bono?
Actually in the price point they compete in ($400+, $500+ phones) they are gaining share. The huge growth is in the $150- part of the market and Apple is getting none of that. You can count share by grouping sneakers, and jumbo jets into "transportation facilitation devices" and just counting units. And that would be similar to the way people count smartphones as one big pile.
They don't compete in a price point, they compete in the market as a whole.
No they don't compete in the market as a whole. People who buy $50 phones aren't going to buy $600 phones and people who buy $600 phones aren't going to buy $50 phones. They aren't the same customer base. For all practical purposes they are different products.
It's not like they pushed down some rap crap, or some stuff passing as music that's actually noise.
Manufacturing process has bearing on firmware is flashed to an EEPROM.
SSDs do not optimize for small frequent writes as a) the blocks a strictly limited number leveltimes, fancy wear levelling algorithms must calculate where actually put each write. b) to write a block already containing data a slow erase operation has to happen first and all data in that block gets erased. what SSDs do optimise for is lots of reads. Finally most other manufactures already included in their laptops for the, Apple was quite late to that party.
I first ran into this about 5 years ago when I had a machine that had 6 GB of RAM (not 8, because the moron Apple firmware developers decided that the motherboard should only be able to address 6 GB max in two slots, and heaven forbid you install two 4 GB sticks...).
Despite not having much memory consumed, I was having my machine "freeze" to thrash VM for 20+ seconds because the moronic memory manager paged memory to disk aggressively. So, I'm sitting here with 2 GB active on 6 GB physical and it's frozen / beachballing due to thrash in order to page in shit it never should have paged out. Fuckers.
So, I decided to turn off paging. Should be simple, right? Configuring VM is simple GUI maneuver in Windows, so Apple should make it a breeze too, right? Right?
Yeah. I only found out about the shitty handling of OOM conditions about 18 months later, after I really started using a bunch of RAM (multiple VM's, etc).
This memory management aspect of Mac OS just really sucks from a user standpoint. People shouldn't have to deal with sharp corners on their machine's memory manager. I swear, even RAM Doubler by Connectix was more user friendly than OS X's implementation.
I'm not following you. What specifically are you claiming about iPhone 5?
Apple has lots of sharp corners once you want to go beyond basics. They would want the VM software to take over memory management. Honestly that's who you should be blaming. They weren't operating within Apple's system. Memory configuration isn't something that Apple wants end users doing. It is simple for the OS to handle it and they have great features for developers. For end users it is terrible.
So some rapper is all pissy he's gonna lose some street cred because he now has a U2 album in is music list and everyone on slashdot is commenting about the merits of this argument? Do you get all offended when the lady at the supermarket offers some new cocktail wieners for free and even though you turned it down there's an ad for those same wieners printed on your receipt? If your music library list is how you "represent" yourself to the world then you've got bigger problems none of which anyone here should care to discuss.
No they don't compete in the market as a whole. People who buy $50 phones aren't going to buy $600 phones and people who buy $600 phones aren't going to buy $50 phones. They aren't the same customer base. For all practical purposes they are different products.
People who buy $12 jeans aren't going to buy $150 jeans.
What happens every time a Walmart opens within 10 miles of fancy boutiques?
And the answer to your question is nothing. $150k in household income is the cutoff for the top 10%. That bracket represents 2.1% of Walmart customers. 60% of Walmart customers are in the bottom 50%. This is unusual because the bottom half spend much less time buying stuff than the top half. You still aren't anywhere near the bulk of $150 jeans consumers but no, Walmart has no impact. Target which is far short of a boutique has double the percentages in all the 100k+ and still 50% in $75-100k category.
And further the difference in living standard between Walmart customers and boutique customers is small than the spread between iPhone customers and the $150- smartphone customers on average.
And the answer to your question is nothing.
Oh, okay. I guess facts don't matter to you.
I just gave you facts. You have facts, then present them.