It used to be that you couldn't, they showed the answer to Google but hid it for everyone else. That scumminess appears to be gone, I suspect Google bitchslapped their pagerank for it...
I don't mind lots and lots of details, if the details make sense in the context of the movie's universe. What bugs me is when the details don't make sense and "explanations" just end up ruining the suspension of disbelief.
Then there's the outright spoonfeeding of things that are going on in the movie. I've heard more than a few people here in Sweden wonder if the average Hollywood movie could be an indication of there being some truth behind the "dumb american" stereotype...
There is no single correct answer to that, indeed any extreme is thinkable from "Any amount of sex is okay, but no violence" to the opposite extreme of "any amount of violence is okay, but no sex"
You missed "No amount of sex or violence is okay" and "Any amount of sex and violence is okay". There are definitely those out there with biases in those directions...
I've alrady pointed out that it's not quite as simple as merely "documents" although the term "documents" is often used when addressing people who don't understand computers very well because it makes it easy to give them a general idea.
That said, there is to my knowledge not a perfect adherence to a single standard in this area but I still find it fascinating that you criticize Apple and OS X applications for these perceived inconsistencies while defending Windows and the countless apps for that platform that behave seemingly at random...
Yes you have. You (as an average person) might have bought the movie at a later point in time when you did have n dollars.
No, as you yourself wrote, I MIGHT end up buying the movie later on. This is an uncertainty and neither you nor I can say how likely it is that this person would later have purchased the movie.
And while you try to twist it into "it's all about economics" the truth is that morality is also a part of this, if I feel a movie isn't worth my money but I have a choice between pirating that movie and watching paint dry I may still choose to pirate and watch the movie. You may consider this inherently wrong but I just don't see it.
There's also the fact that it may not be a "want" but a "can" in the saving money department. That is to say, a person with a very low income may very well choose to pirate a movie rather than going without (and please, if you come back with a reply about how this person should clearly get a second job rather than waste his/her time watching movies then may I suggest you kill yourself and spare the world of your cynical asshattery? (Yes, I've heard that "counter-argument" way too many times to count)).
That's not an answer to my point which was that you were wrong in categorically stating that when pirating something you're always depriving somebody of something.
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
iTunes has a reason to keep running even without its window. It plays music and communicates with iOS devices and can do so even when the window is gone.
Pressing "the red X" generally results in the document or window that is open closing but the application staying active. The exception to this is smaller "single-purpose" applications where the window pretty much is the application but these are quite rare.
And no, your point does not "still stand" because it doesn't make any sense.
I've never seen any OS X apps behave very far from Apple's user interface guidelines.
On Windows OTOH I've seen way too many applications that behave unpredictably when it comes to minimize and close. Some "minimize" but remain running with an icon visible, others use the close button this way with minimize simply minimizing to the taskbar. Some will shut down but also start an "agent" application that runs minimized to the tray and so on...
A lot of anonymous cowards claiming that it's unreasonable to go past 250 GB even with a 100+ Mbps connection.
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month. Hell, on a few occasions I've used more in a week. And that's only downstream.
$30,000 from the label is taken out of the money you were supposed to get from them, but maybe you're assuming that everyone is that one musician who tops the chart with his/her first album?
$3,000 spent on a home studio along with the help of a friend or two will drastically improve your chances compared to not spending money at all.
You're also assuming that the members of that rock band, all of them in their 20s and who have been playing in various bands since they were 12-13 years old, all have absolutely no knowledge of what sound they're after or how to achie...
These days? Yes, it is. However, for the longest time it wasn't.
Well, more specifically there were quite a few apps that did have it except they:
Didn't integrate with your mp3 player/phone (minor point, yes).
Only had the library as an afterthought (meaning most users didn't really use it anyway).
Were horribly unstable (the Winamp library was infamous for crashing if you just looked at it funny).
Were user unfriendly (meaning that using the library function was clunky at best and just continuing to treat your music collection as a bunch of files in directories made more sense).
Basically, iTunes was one of the first music players to actually have a decent implementation of the "library paradigm". This coupled with my earlier points make it a perfectly valid option for those running OS X. If I used Windows I would not be using iTunes.
Well, FTP does predate the OSI model by a few years.
Basically, FTP was created a very long time ago and those designing it were never told about things like the OSI model when they were in school because, surprise surprise, there were no such things when they were in school...
It's not really a nightmare for firewalls, it's a nightmare when you have a NATed connection which is understandable because NAT the way it is used these days is an ugly ugly hack.
Also, people who like the "library paradigm" (as opposed to the previously dominant "directory structure and a bunch of playlists", "directory structure and just add the files you want to listen to now from the directory structure every time and use 'j' in Winamp to find the song you're looking for" and of course the "no sorting whatsoever, just dump whatever you want right now into Winamp" paradigms of music sorting that were popular for a long time).
And finally there's the fact that if you own an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod those sync through iTunes and it's actually easier to just use iTunes than to either try to use a 3rd party solution just for the sake of it or to do the whole "Oh I normally use foobar/winamp/whatever, I only use iTunes for syncing" thing.
That said, I would probably not use iTunes if my only computer was running Windows and didn't have decent specs, for some reason the Windows version of iTunes is much more sluggish than the OS X version...
My issue with Spotify is that it doesn't integrate with my existing library.
This is mainly an issue because most of my favorite music just isn't available through Spotify or there are only a few songs by the band/musician in question available.
If it would integrate with iTunes so that it preferred the local copy but could be told to use the Spotify copy it'd be extremely nice.
I actually got Spotify Premium when I bought my current cellphone (free for six months) and so far I've barely used it, I just find myself downloading stuff so I can keep it in the same library as all my other music anyway (because it's a pain in the ass to have to different applications, means I can't use the iTunes Remote app to control it among other things).
It's a great idea but one-size-fits-all isn't always true.
So the RIAA-associated record companies aren't selling as many albums now? I didn't say they were in the first place.
My claim was that the "business of music" was shifting toward "amateurs/semi-pros" rather than big labels signing a handful of musicians/performers/shaking asses and promoting them to death. You're not really disproving me here.
Oh, and here's another analysis of the Bain chart (key points: hit records, re-buying albums as CDs). Just in case you didn't bother to read your own link (hint: it wasn't exactly screaming "PIRACY SI KILLINGZ TEH MUZIK!!!1").
Sure, you will need to make an investment. However, if you make the right investment then $3,000 spent on the right home studio gear today, combined with someone with talent to handle it, will take you a lot further than $30,000 out of the money the label promised you. Remember, your buddy who's doing this as a favor/because it's good practice/because you're buying him pizza isn't billing you hundreds of dollars per hour for labor and hundreds of dollars per hour for "equipment rental" and similar shenanigans that the label will try to push on you (to minimize the amount of money you'll get from them in the end).
So yeah, you'll need to spend a little on hardware but nothing like what used to be required and nothing like what the studio will want to "bill" you for. Sure, if you want to replicate the sound that someone else managed to come up with after a year in a very expensive custom studio that's going to be nearly impossible (or take you a long time) but with the right setup you won't be far off.
As for the "couple of hundred dollars", yeah that won't get you much unless you or your band already have a bunch of gear (not that unusual though to see bands where the members are all in their twenties and have gathered a big pile of various audio hardware for both live and studio performance).
I'm an amateur musician, but among the semi-professionals I know no one has any delusions about breaking into the music industry anymore. It's really changed the landscape because the industry itself has shrunk dramatically.
Got any numbers to back up your claims that the music industry has "shrunk dramatically"?
From what I've seen with people I know it definitely seems that if anything for amateur/semi-pro musicians the possibilities have grown. At least this is true for those who have ambitions beyond "playing covers in local bars".
Fifteen years ago if you produced and pressed your own album in a small run you were considered a nobody (didn't matter if it was 5,000 copies, you still weren't as "pro" as the guy with a minor record deal who's first album fizzled and who's second album release only involved 500 copies so the label would fulfill it's contractual obligations). These days there's no shame in it, if anything "I don't want to be screwed over by the labels" is a perfectly valid reason rather than a lame excuse (as it used to be).
Fifteen years ago if you gave your music away for free (be it online or as actual CDs) that meant nothing, it probably would've gotten people talking about how you were trying to game the charts by claiming the albums as sales. These days it's ok to put up a website to share your music (perhaps with a link to iTunes for those who want to pay for it).
Fifteen years ago the only real chance you had of making a video that ended up getting seen by 100,000 viewers was a record deal and letting the studio bring in their pros to create your video (taking the cost of this out of the money they were going to pay you). These days you can get that many viewers if you have a good band, a friend with a HD cam or a DSLR and another friend who's kind of good with FCP or Premiere (just film a few shows, get a little more material to match the mood of the song, edit and upload to youtube).
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
I think the UN disagrees with you. According to them everyone does have the right to food.
Well I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who has not-so-fond memories of raiding the offices of other teams to scavenge parts for office chairs*. Or arguing with the helpdesk guys over whether or not a 17" CRT barely capable of pushing 1024x768@72Hz while displaying anything green as black really counts as a functional monitor (hint: they claimed it did).
So sure, if you have a decent setup to begin with then it might be understandable that management wants some estimates of just how much productivity will increase. But when you have equipment that barely works, computers that are almost ten years old with barely enough RAM to run a web browser and a monitor that is liable to either give you cancer or just explode in your face I don't think there's any question that efficiency will go up remarkably if new equipment is purchased. At that point not buying new gear is just management being cheap to the point of being stupid (or "dumsnål" as it's called in swedish).
* Despite the thieving of chair parts it still seemed like every other week someone would call in sick because of back pain caused by the ancient office chairs we were using.
Oh yeah, I'm no longer employed there and I wouldn't go back there if they offered to double my current salary.
You forgot the part where those with higher ranks always get upgrades first and those with most pull with those in charge of the money always get the new hardware to their department first as well.
Not saying it's like this in every company but in a lot of places corporate politics is a bitch (and if anything it's worse in larger companies, if you just have a couple of hundred employees it's hard to hide a pattern of favoritism).
Slashdot Mirror
It used to be that you couldn't, they showed the answer to Google but hid it for everyone else. That scumminess appears to be gone, I suspect Google bitchslapped their pagerank for it...
I don't mind lots and lots of details, if the details make sense in the context of the movie's universe. What bugs me is when the details don't make sense and "explanations" just end up ruining the suspension of disbelief.
Then there's the outright spoonfeeding of things that are going on in the movie. I've heard more than a few people here in Sweden wonder if the average Hollywood movie could be an indication of there being some truth behind the "dumb american" stereotype...
There is no single correct answer to that, indeed any extreme is thinkable from "Any amount of sex is okay, but no violence" to the opposite extreme of "any amount of violence is okay, but no sex"
You missed "No amount of sex or violence is okay" and "Any amount of sex and violence is okay". There are definitely those out there with biases in those directions...
I've alrady pointed out that it's not quite as simple as merely "documents" although the term "documents" is often used when addressing people who don't understand computers very well because it makes it easy to give them a general idea.
That said, there is to my knowledge not a perfect adherence to a single standard in this area but I still find it fascinating that you criticize Apple and OS X applications for these perceived inconsistencies while defending Windows and the countless apps for that platform that behave seemingly at random...
Yes you have. You (as an average person) might have bought the movie at a later point in time when you did have n dollars.
No, as you yourself wrote, I MIGHT end up buying the movie later on. This is an uncertainty and neither you nor I can say how likely it is that this person would later have purchased the movie.
And while you try to twist it into "it's all about economics" the truth is that morality is also a part of this, if I feel a movie isn't worth my money but I have a choice between pirating that movie and watching paint dry I may still choose to pirate and watch the movie. You may consider this inherently wrong but I just don't see it.
There's also the fact that it may not be a "want" but a "can" in the saving money department. That is to say, a person with a very low income may very well choose to pirate a movie rather than going without (and please, if you come back with a reply about how this person should clearly get a second job rather than waste his/her time watching movies then may I suggest you kill yourself and spare the world of your cynical asshattery? (Yes, I've heard that "counter-argument" way too many times to count)).
That's not an answer to my point which was that you were wrong in categorically stating that when pirating something you're always depriving somebody of something.
Please troll^H^H^Hy again.
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
iTunes has a reason to keep running even without its window. It plays music and communicates with iOS devices and can do so even when the window is gone.
Pressing "the red X" generally results in the document or window that is open closing but the application staying active. The exception to this is smaller "single-purpose" applications where the window pretty much is the application but these are quite rare.
And no, your point does not "still stand" because it doesn't make any sense.
I've never seen any OS X apps behave very far from Apple's user interface guidelines.
On Windows OTOH I've seen way too many applications that behave unpredictably when it comes to minimize and close. Some "minimize" but remain running with an icon visible, others use the close button this way with minimize simply minimizing to the taskbar. Some will shut down but also start an "agent" application that runs minimized to the tray and so on...
A lot of anonymous cowards claiming that it's unreasonable to go past 250 GB even with a 100+ Mbps connection.
As someone who has a 100/100 Mbps connection this seems weird, I can easily use more bandwidth than that in a month. Hell, on a few occasions I've used more in a week. And that's only downstream.
$30,000 from the label is taken out of the money you were supposed to get from them, but maybe you're assuming that everyone is that one musician who tops the chart with his/her first album?
$3,000 spent on a home studio along with the help of a friend or two will drastically improve your chances compared to not spending money at all.
You're also assuming that the members of that rock band, all of them in their 20s and who have been playing in various bands since they were 12-13 years old, all have absolutely no knowledge of what sound they're after or how to achie...
Oh wait, I forgot, you're just a troll.
These days? Yes, it is. However, for the longest time it wasn't.
Well, more specifically there were quite a few apps that did have it except they:
Basically, iTunes was one of the first music players to actually have a decent implementation of the "library paradigm". This coupled with my earlier points make it a perfectly valid option for those running OS X. If I used Windows I would not be using iTunes.
Well, FTP does predate the OSI model by a few years.
Basically, FTP was created a very long time ago and those designing it were never told about things like the OSI model when they were in school because, surprise surprise, there were no such things when they were in school...
It's not really a nightmare for firewalls, it's a nightmare when you have a NATed connection which is understandable because NAT the way it is used these days is an ugly ugly hack.
Mac users?
Also, people who like the "library paradigm" (as opposed to the previously dominant "directory structure and a bunch of playlists", "directory structure and just add the files you want to listen to now from the directory structure every time and use 'j' in Winamp to find the song you're looking for" and of course the "no sorting whatsoever, just dump whatever you want right now into Winamp" paradigms of music sorting that were popular for a long time).
And finally there's the fact that if you own an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod those sync through iTunes and it's actually easier to just use iTunes than to either try to use a 3rd party solution just for the sake of it or to do the whole "Oh I normally use foobar/winamp/whatever, I only use iTunes for syncing" thing.
That said, I would probably not use iTunes if my only computer was running Windows and didn't have decent specs, for some reason the Windows version of iTunes is much more sluggish than the OS X version...
Yeah, but that's importing the iTunes library into Spotify, not integrating Spotify into iTunes.
Wrong direction. When I wrote "integrate with iTunes" i meant "into iTunes" not "import the iTunes library".
My issue with Spotify is that it doesn't integrate with my existing library.
This is mainly an issue because most of my favorite music just isn't available through Spotify or there are only a few songs by the band/musician in question available.
If it would integrate with iTunes so that it preferred the local copy but could be told to use the Spotify copy it'd be extremely nice.
I actually got Spotify Premium when I bought my current cellphone (free for six months) and so far I've barely used it, I just find myself downloading stuff so I can keep it in the same library as all my other music anyway (because it's a pain in the ass to have to different applications, means I can't use the iTunes Remote app to control it among other things).
It's a great idea but one-size-fits-all isn't always true.
So the RIAA-associated record companies aren't selling as many albums now? I didn't say they were in the first place.
My claim was that the "business of music" was shifting toward "amateurs/semi-pros" rather than big labels signing a handful of musicians/performers/shaking asses and promoting them to death. You're not really disproving me here.
Oh, and here's another analysis of the Bain chart (key points: hit records, re-buying albums as CDs). Just in case you didn't bother to read your own link (hint: it wasn't exactly screaming "PIRACY SI KILLINGZ TEH MUZIK!!!1").
Sure, you will need to make an investment. However, if you make the right investment then $3,000 spent on the right home studio gear today, combined with someone with talent to handle it, will take you a lot further than $30,000 out of the money the label promised you. Remember, your buddy who's doing this as a favor/because it's good practice/because you're buying him pizza isn't billing you hundreds of dollars per hour for labor and hundreds of dollars per hour for "equipment rental" and similar shenanigans that the label will try to push on you (to minimize the amount of money you'll get from them in the end).
So yeah, you'll need to spend a little on hardware but nothing like what used to be required and nothing like what the studio will want to "bill" you for. Sure, if you want to replicate the sound that someone else managed to come up with after a year in a very expensive custom studio that's going to be nearly impossible (or take you a long time) but with the right setup you won't be far off.
As for the "couple of hundred dollars", yeah that won't get you much unless you or your band already have a bunch of gear (not that unusual though to see bands where the members are all in their twenties and have gathered a big pile of various audio hardware for both live and studio performance).
I'm an amateur musician, but among the semi-professionals I know no one has any delusions about breaking into the music industry anymore. It's really changed the landscape because the industry itself has shrunk dramatically.
Got any numbers to back up your claims that the music industry has "shrunk dramatically"?
From what I've seen with people I know it definitely seems that if anything for amateur/semi-pro musicians the possibilities have grown. At least this is true for those who have ambitions beyond "playing covers in local bars".
Fifteen years ago if you produced and pressed your own album in a small run you were considered a nobody (didn't matter if it was 5,000 copies, you still weren't as "pro" as the guy with a minor record deal who's first album fizzled and who's second album release only involved 500 copies so the label would fulfill it's contractual obligations). These days there's no shame in it, if anything "I don't want to be screwed over by the labels" is a perfectly valid reason rather than a lame excuse (as it used to be).
Fifteen years ago if you gave your music away for free (be it online or as actual CDs) that meant nothing, it probably would've gotten people talking about how you were trying to game the charts by claiming the albums as sales. These days it's ok to put up a website to share your music (perhaps with a link to iTunes for those who want to pay for it).
Fifteen years ago the only real chance you had of making a video that ended up getting seen by 100,000 viewers was a record deal and letting the studio bring in their pros to create your video (taking the cost of this out of the money they were going to pay you). These days you can get that many viewers if you have a good band, a friend with a HD cam or a DSLR and another friend who's kind of good with FCP or Premiere (just film a few shows, get a little more material to match the mood of the song, edit and upload to youtube).
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
I think the UN disagrees with you. According to them everyone does have the right to food.
Well I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who has not-so-fond memories of raiding the offices of other teams to scavenge parts for office chairs*. Or arguing with the helpdesk guys over whether or not a 17" CRT barely capable of pushing 1024x768@72Hz while displaying anything green as black really counts as a functional monitor (hint: they claimed it did).
So sure, if you have a decent setup to begin with then it might be understandable that management wants some estimates of just how much productivity will increase. But when you have equipment that barely works, computers that are almost ten years old with barely enough RAM to run a web browser and a monitor that is liable to either give you cancer or just explode in your face I don't think there's any question that efficiency will go up remarkably if new equipment is purchased. At that point not buying new gear is just management being cheap to the point of being stupid (or "dumsnål" as it's called in swedish).
* Despite the thieving of chair parts it still seemed like every other week someone would call in sick because of back pain caused by the ancient office chairs we were using.
Oh yeah, I'm no longer employed there and I wouldn't go back there if they offered to double my current salary.
You forgot the part where those with higher ranks always get upgrades first and those with most pull with those in charge of the money always get the new hardware to their department first as well.
Not saying it's like this in every company but in a lot of places corporate politics is a bitch (and if anything it's worse in larger companies, if you just have a couple of hundred employees it's hard to hide a pattern of favoritism).