Per person, the UK spends more on albums than any other nation in the world:
The figures confirm that the UK rules the sound waves with each resident buying on average 3.2 units in 2004, followed by the USA (2.8), Germany (2.2), France (2.1) and Japan (2.0). Source: http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/03/24/bpi-uk-c d-sales-beat-the-world/
You're right though, in revenue terms the UK is a smaller market (approx 175 million CDs sold in 2006 compared to 650 million in the US)
I completely agree, I was just pointing out that this was going to be an issue for some living people, not just dead people as the parent implied. I suspect the main reason this is coming to the fore is because some high-profile recordings are going to be out of copyright in the next few years (that and the whole disparity between the UK law and that imposed by the EU).
The RECORDINGS' copyright -- the particular recordings made 50 years ago. Not the copyright of the music and lyrics, which lasts for their lifetime + 70 years. (Though I think thay signed thewm away to the record companies, who later sold them to Micheal Jackson, IIRC.) But in the last 10 years, the "Anthology" and such versions of the old songs will have copyrights until McCartney is 110 or so. I'm aware of the difference between the recording's copyright and the music/lyrics copyright, but will Anthology really cause Beatle recordings to receive extended copyright?
From Wikipedia:
Track 22 is the original June 1962 EMI audition recording of "Love Me Do" Surely the copyright on this recording runs out in June 2012, not 50 years from the issue of Anthology 1?
The artists should just re-record the work and the record company should stop issuing the original recording then. I guess it would still be easy to find a copy of the original recording online though.
I wonder whether copyright on re-mastered CD versions of old albums expires 50 years from the original studio recording, or 50 years after the first issue of the commercial product (the re-mastered CD) - anyone know?
I sure wish that I could get to keep collecting money for 50 years for work that I'm doing today. Time to get the guitar out then;-)
As a UK citizen, I'm glad the British government is able to stand up to the record companies and reject their calls for an extension. If anything, we should be looking at reducing the length of copyright for written works (books and stuff) to match that for music.
I'd say if you like or are good at maths (especially pure maths as opposed to stats or mechanics) then do CS, otherwise do IT or Software Engineering depending on whether you have a preference for development or business analysis type work.
If you want to go down the investment-banking-in-London type route then a CS degree is probably where the big bucks are at (I know a guy who has just started on ~£60k straight out of uni), otherwise most employers won't care whether you did CS or IT as long as the degree is from a good university. If the entry requirements are such that you could go to a better university with your expected grades if you did IT rather than CS, I would give that some serious thought.
I'm saying this as someone who graduated with a CS degree from the University of Warwick in 2003 and now works in the IT Consultancy business out of London. I know quite a lot of people who have gone both the CS and IT routes and have had very similar career paths. Most of all I'd say go with the course you're more likely to stick at!:-)
Why not just get MySpace to send an e-mail out to the user containing the spyware? That way it looks fairly legitimate and is (almost) guaranteed to get to the right person.
Of course there is still the chance that a firewall or piece of security software would pick up the offending malware. Chances are the kid didn't have a very secure setup as others have suggested. The FBI probably thought they'd give the spyware thing a try and it worked out - I doubt they need to make use of OS exploits. They probably had enough data about the kid to create a highly targeted piece of spam or advertising that he was simply not able to resist.
I must admit I just had to look up MapQuest as I'd never heard of it. I live in the UK and over here services such as Streetmap and Multimap are probably the most popular 'legacy' services. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps was the most popular these days though.
I've been using the My Maps functionality of Google Maps quite a lot recently to keep private maps of where my friends live etc. - especially useful for those I don't visit very often as it works like a geo-tagged address book. I can certainly see myself slowly adding more mapplets to my standard google maps view as this feature evolves.
(Slightly off-topic, I absolutely love the Customise your route functionality Google have recently added)
There is no conspiracy. They are simply reacting to competitive pressures. They probably determined that Linux laptop sales would not be dramatically higher with the extra RAM promotion since they don't really have any competition for Linux laptops; they are the only game in town among the big vendors. Conversely, in the Windows world I think HP is eating their lunch (HP is heavily discounting their new Santa Rosa dvx5 series), and so they need these discounts to shore up sales. I tend to agree with this (and other similar comments); it's probably just marketing/competition. Still, it's always fun to throw in a "maybe it's all Microsoft's fault" whenever possible;-)
That's interesting, but I'd like to know whether you're watching videos that make use of the hardware acceleration features of your video card or not.
I can watch a video downloaded from the net in XVid on my HDTV whilst playing a game on my monitor, as I expect the game is handled by one core of my CPU and the video by the other. The graphics card isn't really doing much work for the video other than outputting the signal on one of the DVI ports (there's probably a separate chip for this per port, but I'm only guessing here). When I try and watch a DVD through my PC to take advantage of the hardware acceleration of my X1800XL and the upscaling to 720p at the same time as playing a game, the whole thing falls apart and the video doesn't play (usually the player just crashes and yes I've tried a few different ones). If I turn off the hardware acceleration everything is fine and I can watch the DVD whilst playing the game with no problems.
I'm not sure how DX10 would help here, but maybe if there was effectively two VMs running on my DX10 card, one for the video and one for the game, the VM for video could be assigned the minimum amount of resources necessary to do the hardware acceleration (some of these unified shaders, stream processors or whatever they're called). Hopefully, I'd get a smooth video and just lose a few fps in the game, effectively as if I was playing the game on a lesser model of the same card with less resources available.
What incentive does Dell have to only provide the free upgrade to Windows users? This could be an honest mistake, but if I were a conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) I'd assume Microsoft have something to do with this.
I have a 5.1 receiver, and a HDTV with HDMI in and optical out. Unfortunately, the incoming sound over HDMI does not get routed through to the optical output by my TV.
If the ATI/AMD cards only do standard 5.1 audio (Dolby Digital or DTS I guess) over HDMI, then the audio controller doesn't really add much. As nearly all motherboards in the last 3 years have an optical/coax output all you're really doing is saving a cable. Maybe there's some additional benefit I'm missing?
Apparently a lot of the puzzles/storylines for Warcraft Adventures made it into World of Warcraft as quests - there probably isn't enough original content to resurrect the project.
OK, I probably wasn't very clear. What I'm saying is that there are a load of people who have been in the industry for around 7-10 years who are no better in their field than people with 2 or 3 years of experience, but earn a crapload more money simply because they managed to ride out the dot-com bust. These guys generally managed to make themselves indispensable somehow, which admittedly is a skill in itself.
Also, given how new some Web 2.0 technologies are (AJAX springs to mind, but probably isn't the best example) the extra experience doesn't always justify the extra pay. Although I'll readily admit there's more to being good at your job than knowing the latest trends.
I fully appreciate that most people will have developed their skills massively and are fully justified in earning more than the newly qualified folks... I just don't think that newer graduates have been on a equal footing of late. Also, I just wanted to point out that as far as I'm concerned, I don't wish I could've participated in the boom because I like bean-bags, it's the return to higher salaries that's of more interest.
I've been working in IT since just after the bubble burst (I graduated in CompSci mid-2003 and joined a corporate graduate scheme at a time when you were grateful for any IT job at all) and to be honest the corporations can keep their bean-bags, I'd just like my salary to be brought in line with those who survived the crash and are still on incredibly inflated salaries.
Here in London, a web expert (read: someone who knows a bit of HTML/CSS/Javascript and has been working in IT since around 2000) can easily be on £60k-£70k, which equates to $120k-$140k, as a result of being in the right place at the right time during the last boom. Someone just starting out in the profession with the same skills would have been lucky to get £25k after a couple of years experience until recently. The recent Web 2.0 boom and a shortage of people with the right skills means that the salary gap is now closing, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
Completely agree. Microsoft went out of their way and spent a lot of money on making it easy for games developers to develop for windows. They even have the graphics hardware manufacturers on board.
If Linux/Apple want more game development for their platforms, they need to court the developers in a similar way. I'm sure the open source community is capable of coming up with something, and I'm not just talking OpenGL - DirectX is more than just graphics after all.
All of this content is already available DRM free for $0 on ThePirateBay.org, and that fact isn't going to change anytime soon. A simpler direct download (either to UK residents for free or to the world for a fee) is a service worth offering. If they make that download DRM-encumbered, they've basically just made their service worse than TPB - they shouldn't bother because it's a waste of time and will give them bad press.
Sure the content is already available free via your favourite BitTorrent site, but the difference is that distributing TV-rips of BBC shows is illegal. If the BBC put their content online DRM free, they would basically be telling people that it's OK to download, transcode, share etc. all of their content which would surely have a more significant impact on their revenue than P2P does at the moment. How many times do you watch that content from TPB once you've downloaded it anyway? Personally I tend to watch stuff from BitTorrent once and then leave it languishing somewhere on my hard drive probably never to be watched again, so the time limit imposed by DRM will make no difference to me as long as the content remains free.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the BBC doesn't have the intellectual property rights to some of the shows they broadcast, so probably have no choice but to use DRM to get those content owners on board (actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the iPlayer is limited to home-grown content only - anyone know for sure?).
Unfortunately your licence fee doesn't go very far - DVD sales of shows like the office, red dwarf etc. provide a massive source of income for the BBC (and a significant chunk of UK exports). The BBC is not going to give up this revenue stream easily (the creation of new programming would suffer) which is why some form of DRM is necessary.
I'm fairly sure ID software are continuing to support games on other platforms (via OpenGL).
EA even recently stated they would be releasing a bunch of games for the Mac (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/11 /1856212&from=rss), so the 'Games for Windows' strategy is hardly producing the monopoly I'm sure Microsoft are hoping for (although in the Windows domain it may help drive Vista adoption at some point for the above reasons).
Personally, I don't know of any off-the-shelf-and-easy-to-implement open source DRM solution the BBC could have gone for, and given the choice between using Microsoft DRM and getting an iPlayer out the door now or building something in house that could take years I can see why the BBC made the decision they did.
I'm from the UK, love the BBC, not overly keen on Microsoft. The BBC's promise to keep things under review and aim to get something for other platforms out in ~2 years is good enough for me.
Plus, I haven't heard of any rivals (ITV/Sky/Virgin) promising a non-Microsoft implementation and as far as I know the Channel4 on demand software (http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html) doesn't even work on Vista let alone non-MS platforms.
The hacks from the article only work because these games still support DirectX 9 and DirectX 9 is available under XP. I'm guessing it will be an entirely different challenge to get DirectX 10 running under XP, which will obviously be required when games no longer support DirectX 9.
Admittedly, it will be a while before we see games that are DirectX10-only, but I doubt Microsoft will be getting too worried yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The figures confirm that the UK rules the sound waves with each resident buying on average 3.2 units in 2004, followed by the USA (2.8), Germany (2.2), France (2.1) and Japan (2.0). Source: http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/03/24/bpi-uk-
You're right though, in revenue terms the UK is a smaller market (approx 175 million CDs sold in 2006 compared to 650 million in the US)
I completely agree, I was just pointing out that this was going to be an issue for some living people, not just dead people as the parent implied. I suspect the main reason this is coming to the fore is because some high-profile recordings are going to be out of copyright in the next few years (that and the whole disparity between the UK law and that imposed by the EU).
From Wikipedia: Track 22 is the original June 1962 EMI audition recording of "Love Me Do" Surely the copyright on this recording runs out in June 2012, not 50 years from the issue of Anthology 1?
The artists should just re-record the work and the record company should stop issuing the original recording then. I guess it would still be easy to find a copy of the original recording online though.
I wonder whether copyright on re-mastered CD versions of old albums expires 50 years from the original studio recording, or 50 years after the first issue of the commercial product (the re-mastered CD) - anyone know?
As a UK citizen, I'm glad the British government is able to stand up to the record companies and reject their calls for an extension. If anything, we should be looking at reducing the length of copyright for written works (books and stuff) to match that for music.
I dunno, if the remaining Beatles survive another 6 years then their early work will be out of copyright in their lifetime.
Cliff Richard will start losing royalties two years before that.
I'd say if you like or are good at maths (especially pure maths as opposed to stats or mechanics) then do CS, otherwise do IT or Software Engineering depending on whether you have a preference for development or business analysis type work.
:-)
If you want to go down the investment-banking-in-London type route then a CS degree is probably where the big bucks are at (I know a guy who has just started on ~£60k straight out of uni), otherwise most employers won't care whether you did CS or IT as long as the degree is from a good university. If the entry requirements are such that you could go to a better university with your expected grades if you did IT rather than CS, I would give that some serious thought.
I'm saying this as someone who graduated with a CS degree from the University of Warwick in 2003 and now works in the IT Consultancy business out of London. I know quite a lot of people who have gone both the CS and IT routes and have had very similar career paths. Most of all I'd say go with the course you're more likely to stick at!
Why not just get MySpace to send an e-mail out to the user containing the spyware? That way it looks fairly legitimate and is (almost) guaranteed to get to the right person.
Of course there is still the chance that a firewall or piece of security software would pick up the offending malware. Chances are the kid didn't have a very secure setup as others have suggested. The FBI probably thought they'd give the spyware thing a try and it worked out - I doubt they need to make use of OS exploits. They probably had enough data about the kid to create a highly targeted piece of spam or advertising that he was simply not able to resist.
I must admit I just had to look up MapQuest as I'd never heard of it. I live in the UK and over here services such as Streetmap and Multimap are probably the most popular 'legacy' services. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Maps was the most popular these days though.
I've been using the My Maps functionality of Google Maps quite a lot recently to keep private maps of where my friends live etc. - especially useful for those I don't visit very often as it works like a geo-tagged address book. I can certainly see myself slowly adding more mapplets to my standard google maps view as this feature evolves.
(Slightly off-topic, I absolutely love the Customise your route functionality Google have recently added)
That's interesting, but I'd like to know whether you're watching videos that make use of the hardware acceleration features of your video card or not.
I can watch a video downloaded from the net in XVid on my HDTV whilst playing a game on my monitor, as I expect the game is handled by one core of my CPU and the video by the other. The graphics card isn't really doing much work for the video other than outputting the signal on one of the DVI ports (there's probably a separate chip for this per port, but I'm only guessing here). When I try and watch a DVD through my PC to take advantage of the hardware acceleration of my X1800XL and the upscaling to 720p at the same time as playing a game, the whole thing falls apart and the video doesn't play (usually the player just crashes and yes I've tried a few different ones). If I turn off the hardware acceleration everything is fine and I can watch the DVD whilst playing the game with no problems.
I'm not sure how DX10 would help here, but maybe if there was effectively two VMs running on my DX10 card, one for the video and one for the game, the VM for video could be assigned the minimum amount of resources necessary to do the hardware acceleration (some of these unified shaders, stream processors or whatever they're called). Hopefully, I'd get a smooth video and just lose a few fps in the game, effectively as if I was playing the game on a lesser model of the same card with less resources available.
What incentive does Dell have to only provide the free upgrade to Windows users? This could be an honest mistake, but if I were a conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) I'd assume Microsoft have something to do with this.
I have a 5.1 receiver, and a HDTV with HDMI in and optical out. Unfortunately, the incoming sound over HDMI does not get routed through to the optical output by my TV.
If the ATI/AMD cards only do standard 5.1 audio (Dolby Digital or DTS I guess) over HDMI, then the audio controller doesn't really add much. As nearly all motherboards in the last 3 years have an optical/coax output all you're really doing is saving a cable. Maybe there's some additional benefit I'm missing?
Apparently a lot of the puzzles/storylines for Warcraft Adventures made it into World of Warcraft as quests - there probably isn't enough original content to resurrect the project.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/c123.html
OK, I probably wasn't very clear. What I'm saying is that there are a load of people who have been in the industry for around 7-10 years who are no better in their field than people with 2 or 3 years of experience, but earn a crapload more money simply because they managed to ride out the dot-com bust. These guys generally managed to make themselves indispensable somehow, which admittedly is a skill in itself.
Also, given how new some Web 2.0 technologies are (AJAX springs to mind, but probably isn't the best example) the extra experience doesn't always justify the extra pay. Although I'll readily admit there's more to being good at your job than knowing the latest trends.
I fully appreciate that most people will have developed their skills massively and are fully justified in earning more than the newly qualified folks... I just don't think that newer graduates have been on a equal footing of late. Also, I just wanted to point out that as far as I'm concerned, I don't wish I could've participated in the boom because I like bean-bags, it's the return to higher salaries that's of more interest.
Apologies, just realised the article was talking about AUS$ not US$, so my salary comparisons aren't quite right. It should be AUS$140k - AUS$165k.
I've been working in IT since just after the bubble burst (I graduated in CompSci mid-2003 and joined a corporate graduate scheme at a time when you were grateful for any IT job at all) and to be honest the corporations can keep their bean-bags, I'd just like my salary to be brought in line with those who survived the crash and are still on incredibly inflated salaries.
Here in London, a web expert (read: someone who knows a bit of HTML/CSS/Javascript and has been working in IT since around 2000) can easily be on £60k-£70k, which equates to $120k-$140k, as a result of being in the right place at the right time during the last boom. Someone just starting out in the profession with the same skills would have been lucky to get £25k after a couple of years experience until recently. The recent Web 2.0 boom and a shortage of people with the right skills means that the salary gap is now closing, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
Completely agree. Microsoft went out of their way and spent a lot of money on making it easy for games developers to develop for windows. They even have the graphics hardware manufacturers on board.
If Linux/Apple want more game development for their platforms, they need to court the developers in a similar way. I'm sure the open source community is capable of coming up with something, and I'm not just talking OpenGL - DirectX is more than just graphics after all.
Sure the content is already available free via your favourite BitTorrent site, but the difference is that distributing TV-rips of BBC shows is illegal. If the BBC put their content online DRM free, they would basically be telling people that it's OK to download, transcode, share etc. all of their content which would surely have a more significant impact on their revenue than P2P does at the moment. How many times do you watch that content from TPB once you've downloaded it anyway? Personally I tend to watch stuff from BitTorrent once and then leave it languishing somewhere on my hard drive probably never to be watched again, so the time limit imposed by DRM will make no difference to me as long as the content remains free.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the BBC doesn't have the intellectual property rights to some of the shows they broadcast, so probably have no choice but to use DRM to get those content owners on board (actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the iPlayer is limited to home-grown content only - anyone know for sure?).
Unfortunately your licence fee doesn't go very far - DVD sales of shows like the office, red dwarf etc. provide a massive source of income for the BBC (and a significant chunk of UK exports). The BBC is not going to give up this revenue stream easily (the creation of new programming would suffer) which is why some form of DRM is necessary.
I'm fairly sure ID software are continuing to support games on other platforms (via OpenGL).
1 /1856212&from=rss), so the 'Games for Windows' strategy is hardly producing the monopoly I'm sure Microsoft are hoping for (although in the Windows domain it may help drive Vista adoption at some point for the above reasons).
EA even recently stated they would be releasing a bunch of games for the Mac (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/1
Personally, I don't know of any off-the-shelf-and-easy-to-implement open source DRM solution the BBC could have gone for, and given the choice between using Microsoft DRM and getting an iPlayer out the door now or building something in house that could take years I can see why the BBC made the decision they did.
I'm from the UK, love the BBC, not overly keen on Microsoft. The BBC's promise to keep things under review and aim to get something for other platforms out in ~2 years is good enough for me.
Plus, I haven't heard of any rivals (ITV/Sky/Virgin) promising a non-Microsoft implementation and as far as I know the Channel4 on demand software (http://www.channel4.com/4od/index.html) doesn't even work on Vista let alone non-MS platforms.
The hacks from the article only work because these games still support DirectX 9 and DirectX 9 is available under XP. I'm guessing it will be an entirely different challenge to get DirectX 10 running under XP, which will obviously be required when games no longer support DirectX 9.
Admittedly, it will be a while before we see games that are DirectX10-only, but I doubt Microsoft will be getting too worried yet.
Come on now, the article is trying to stay clear of the silly sci-fi stuff.