And I love it:) I'm sitting here waving around my spankin' new 17" and smiling like an idiot. Luckily you don't have to wave it too hard to get the cool sounds.
And the SMS data display is just kinda neat anyways. I had no idea it was so detailed... now I know that my desk leans 3 points to the left.
Cheers.
Re:The diplomatic response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
You nailed it: it's all about presentation. Of cousre, I always hesitate to criticize or give advice to open source projects since I'm getting the stuff for free, but if they wanted to manage their customer relations better something like this would be how to do it.
I give up. You're right. I look forward to the day when everything has DRM. Maybe in another few years they'll find a way to keep me from lending a book or CD to a friend. Once they've got complete control the world will surely be a better place.
Okay, so the gist of your argument seems to be that since the record companies aren't willing to do this stuff without DRM, we can credit all the benefits of online music to DRM. Your premise is right, but I think your conclusion is quite a stretch.
And I'll say one more time: not everyone needs to know how to rip mp3's for piracy to be rampant. Only one person in the whole world needs to, and then all the non-tech-savvy people (including my mom!) can download this stuff on P2P, most not even realizing it's illegal. The need for DRM is a total red herring. Before there were any legal downloads, piracy was at it's alltime peak. And those media channels are still wide open and not going anywhere in the next decade. DRM has no effect on piracy. None. Zip. Zero. Which means it was a complete waste of time and money for all involved. But somehow I don't think you're going to accept that fact, even though every song on iTunes is available through P2P right now and will be fore the forseeable future. Ah well.
Online music is not notably cheaper than CD's either. And people most assuredly will jump to anarchy: that's exactly what they did until iTunes came around. And it wasn't morality that got the better of them, or the wonders of DRM. It was good, reliable service that was worth paying for. That is what I wish companies would realize was their true weapon against piracy.
It's true, I don't have much trust in the government. But I don't have any more trust in corporations. I don't have a big picture solution to health care... does anyone? But it seems from looking around that socialized medicine is marginally better.
It seems you're hardly thinking though what I'm saying, but here goes anyways. I've got nothing better to do on a weeknight:)
1) I'm not talking about any of that -- one CD purchase, one rip, and the track is on kazaa, gnutella, whatever, and can be downloaded by anyone in the world. This has nothing to do with iTunes. Because of this, DRM is pointless.
2) DRM has nothing to do with iTunes being more convenient. It would be just as convenient without DRM. So I ask again, how is DRM worth anything if it doesn't make iTunes better and it doesn't stop piracy.
3) Okay, we can be pedantic about it: replace "defeat" with "reduce" and my point still stands. Especially since nothing, not even DRM, defeats piracy. So all you can do is reduce. And the convenience is what is reducing piracy, not DRM. Do you think anyone uses iTunes _because_ of DRM? No, they use it because of convenience and at best they ignore the DRM.
4) Your one valid point: yes it matters to record companies. But that's only because... drum roll... they're stupid! They don't understand that DRM isn't stopping piracy and it never will. And that generally the better they treat their customers the more business they'll have.
5) They are locked in: why do you think they backed down on variable pricing? Because they wanted to make less money? It was because the only DRM that Apple supports is their own FairPlay and Apple owns the portable MP3 market. If they were willing to sell songs without DRM, they could bypass Apple and still get them on the iPod.
6) DRM isn't going anywhere, you're right. Neither is corporate stupidity and poor treatment of customers. Doesn't mean I have to like it. I don't think that DRM is Apple's fault, but they're not innocent either. They're taking advantage of the record company's DRM to lock in consumers. Care to try playing iTunes tracks on something other than an iPod? I know there's other sources of music without DRM and I use some of them. And I buy from iTunes when convenient, and when I do I dislike the fact that it's got DRM.
Then at the last day they repeated the question and most people said they understood why some of them did what they did and that they themselves might do the same thing.
That's interesting to hear. I've long thought that most of the people who hate Nazis would have done the same things if they were in the same situation. Surprised to hear some backing of that, but refreshing.
Personally, I think unless we understand the motives of the holocaust we're doomed to repeat it again.
Sorry, but I can't follow the latest standards at my job. If I did, I'd block out a couple percentage points of the market, and at the volume my employer is working, that would be millions of dollars. Seriously: millions.
The latest standards aren't even that great from a purely academic standpoint, as sadly you can't achieve the same consistency in font sizing across browsers with CSS as you can with FONT SIZE. And CSS pages seem far more prone to overlapping elements than tabled layouts. But aside from that, even if we assume that the latest standards were perfection, they still don't work for a non-negligable percentage of users. The real "standard" is the user base, no matter what anyone likes to say.
If you're following the latest standards closely, you're probably not working at a company that is making good money on the internet as its primary income. And if you are, then you're costing yourself a heck of a lot of money and you better hope the shareholders don't find out.
99% of people can't tell the original ACC iTunes track from an mp3 re-rip anyways.
It sounds as though DRM isn't a problem, then.
And thus it isn't a solution either. Yet it does matter to the 1% of people who do notice the difference, like me.
Removing DRM in favor of nothing is not a better option.
Really? Since all it takes is one person on the planet to do a CD rip and plop it in their sharing folder for all the pirates of the world to have access, tell me how DRM is worth anything at all? The reason people buy from iTunes is because it's easier than messing with bittorrent or limewire or kazaa or whatever. That improved customer experience is what can defeat piracy. In fact it already has begun to do so. If those same tracks were sold without DRM, it couldn't possibly matter since they're all available through the familiar pirate sources already, in most cases before they're even available on iTunes. And as you point out, it would be a lot cheaper to run the music store without DRM, and the record companies wouldn't have been locked in to working with apple (who now gets to dictate their prices), a non-DRM solution would have been better for consumers, record companies, and the middlemen.
But leave it to big business to build themselves a cage and then marvel at it's ingenuity.
My idea? Yeah: don't bother with DRM at all. The whole thing is a red herring. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't stop piracy. 99% of people can't tell the original ACC iTunes track from an mp3 re-rip anyways. Plus people are still buying these songs on CD and ripping them at even higher quality than iTunes. These unauthorized versions are all available right now. In fact there's a larger catalog of music available illegally than legally. DRM had done nothing whatsoever to stop that. All it does is get in the way of legitimate users. Anyone using iTunes is a paying customer and has already proven themselves not to be part of the problem. Like me.
So why do people use iTunes? Convenience, reliability, and maybe even a bit of ethics. And that's worth my $0.99. I like using iTunes. But it pisses me off that I'm not trusted with to legally use my own property however I wish to. Vendor lock-in sucks. Especially considering that I can buy a CD or get an illegal copy and have more freedom. It's absurd.
Because the largest reason it sucks is that it's controlled by one company and so it encourages vendor lock-in, which sucks. If we can get rid of it completely, that's would be my first choice. But as everyone seems to be accepting their new digitally restricted life, seems like that's not going to happen. So my next best hope would be that it is opened up so that it at least doesn't force vendor lock-in.
I don't think it especially sucks, it's probably the best DRM out there. But DRM is lousy in general and it's sad that people are not only accepting of it but actually jumping up to defend it.
iTunes DRM is no worse than other DRM... so it's not a matter of comparing. But I'm a bit saddened that we're accepting that one company should hold the keys (literally) to enjoying our purchased music, and can dictate which platforms we can play our music on. It's a lame concept that people are all too willing to accept, in my opinion.
Seems easy to say which is worse. Imitation is great... it means we get various refined versions of a new idea and people can choose. The public usually benefits. This is what progress is all about: incremental improvements building on the ideas of others.
Litigation on the other hand is just a way to squash competition without benefiting anyone but the litigant. It's a crap business tactic and a sign of a company who fears they can't add to the mix.
And FYI I'm no Apple fanboy... I think iTunes DRM sucks and they should drop it entirely or at the very least open it up so it's a standard.
What is preventing folks from entering the country legally?
Government mandated quotas: The US only lets a small number of people enter from each country. The number allowed from each country varies, but for many countries it is not enough, so a person from that country would have to stay where they are or enter the US illegally.
I remember Steve Jobs saying something similar about the NeXT Cube. Only problem is that real people have budgets. The Earth Simulator may be inexpensive for what it is, too, but you're not going to sell very many of them.
I haven't used Ruby or Rails. I only read the ten minute tutorial that got posted here a while back. Actually reminds me a lot of a object wrapper I wrote for perl that built class heirarchies automatically from a DB schema. It was pretty cool if I do say so myself, and so is Ruby on Rails.
However: I don't think it matters. In my experience it doesn't matter that much what programming language or model you use. Object oriented or procedural, strongly typed or loosely typed, monolithic or microscopic, chocolate or vanilla. Everything eventually bows to the reality of inherent complexity. I've seen each style done right and wrong, and if they're done right, the differences sort of wash out over time. My prediction is that Ruby on Rails is great for prototyping, but if you ever have a large buisness project that grows and develops for years it'll end up no more productive and maintainable than any other competently written code base, and probably no less productive either.
I'm not saying none of these choices matter: they do. There are certain things I've written that are much more sensible OO than procedural and visa-versa. In the end you make decisions on how to go about a particular project, and if you've made the right ones five years later you can still carefully move at a crawl and bring new people into the codebase with only a few weeks of training. And I don't think any technology shift will notably beat that. I'm still a believer that there's no silver bullet that will make development (especially long term development) a breeze.
Though it requires a small investment, it's definitely possible and worthwhile to set up a practical backup solution. I had all my data on a Powerbook with a 120GB HD, but I purchased a 250 GB external hard drive and left it on my desk at home. Every few weeks I'd plug it in and click on "backup" (the drive came with backup software called silverkeeper). The initial backup took a little over 30 minutes, and incremental backups took 5 or 10.
Last month my laptop was stolen, and though I was pretty upset, at least I didn't lose a meaningful amount of data. I just picked up a new MacBook Pro, plugged in the hard drive, and restored in a little over 30 minutes.
So there is a practical backup solution out there. That's mine. You're right that DVD's are certainly not it. But I'm pretty happy with mine. Unless two geographically seperated disks die in the same timeframe, I'm good.
From a logistical perspective how does it matter whether we're keeping people in Mexico or out of the US? I wasn't saying that this is the same thing as the Berlin wall... the politics and context are totally different. I'm just saying that short of prison level security, how do we propose to keep all these immigrants out? I don't think I'm invoking fear, I'm just looking at it pragmatically. Show me how we can otherwise secure a border that size. Give me historical examples where people were kept from where they wanted to go without lethal force.
Folowing from that, if people get in, then what? Do we treat them as criminals or citizens. Most would argue criminals, it seems. But if these people are willing to do honest work for money, how does treating them as criminals (or indentured servitude in the case of work visas) make our society better?
Call me what you want, but I think these are legitimate concerns and questions.
I have a pair of pet cockatiels. My favorite re-application of a learned word: at various times of excitement or reward we'd say "good boy!" to the male. He'd repeat it back when we'd say it. Then, eventually he got into the habit of saying it after sex with the female cockatiel. It was pretty funny to see them go at it, then he'd hop off, stretch his wings and call out "good boy!".
Like stopping the influx of illegal aliens through the southern border
Good luck. It'll never happen... until they pull an East Germany and put full time sniper towers every couple hundred yards with orders to shoot to kill on sight. If you think that's a good idea check how it's fared historically.
I'd rather they make health care public (which has been shown to work well) and completely open the borders so that immigrants (which we'll have in any case) can at least get jobs and be productive members of society. We've already got a decent social structure of materialism that encourages people to work (which is why not everyone is on welfare) and it would work for people born elsewhere, too.
It wasn't until we started closing our borders in the first part of last century that things got so ugly. Until then the US benefitted enormously from immigrants. But a minority of lazy folks got scared of actual competition and here we are today.
Perhaps. I won't argue it further than this... but I don't see that having a spec which may or may not be right is any improvement over having a program that may or may not be right. Either the code works or it doesn't and it doesn't much matter if it matches the spec, since the spec is just as likely to have bugs as the code, in my less than conclusive experience. That's not to say specs are bad.
In other words I'm not convinced that A is seperate from B. I think you've got a problem space called AB and that's that.
Slashdot Mirror
And I love it :) I'm sitting here waving around my spankin' new 17" and smiling like an idiot. Luckily you don't have to wave it too hard to get the cool sounds.
And the SMS data display is just kinda neat anyways. I had no idea it was so detailed... now I know that my desk leans 3 points to the left.
Cheers.
You nailed it: it's all about presentation. Of cousre, I always hesitate to criticize or give advice to open source projects since I'm getting the stuff for free, but if they wanted to manage their customer relations better something like this would be how to do it.
Cheers.
I give up. You're right. I look forward to the day when everything has DRM. Maybe in another few years they'll find a way to keep me from lending a book or CD to a friend. Once they've got complete control the world will surely be a better place.
Cheers.
Okay, so the gist of your argument seems to be that since the record companies aren't willing to do this stuff without DRM, we can credit all the benefits of online music to DRM. Your premise is right, but I think your conclusion is quite a stretch.
And I'll say one more time: not everyone needs to know how to rip mp3's for piracy to be rampant. Only one person in the whole world needs to, and then all the non-tech-savvy people (including my mom!) can download this stuff on P2P, most not even realizing it's illegal. The need for DRM is a total red herring. Before there were any legal downloads, piracy was at it's alltime peak. And those media channels are still wide open and not going anywhere in the next decade. DRM has no effect on piracy. None. Zip. Zero. Which means it was a complete waste of time and money for all involved. But somehow I don't think you're going to accept that fact, even though every song on iTunes is available through P2P right now and will be fore the forseeable future. Ah well.
Online music is not notably cheaper than CD's either. And people most assuredly will jump to anarchy: that's exactly what they did until iTunes came around. And it wasn't morality that got the better of them, or the wonders of DRM. It was good, reliable service that was worth paying for. That is what I wish companies would realize was their true weapon against piracy.
Cheers.
It's true, I don't have much trust in the government. But I don't have any more trust in corporations. I don't have a big picture solution to health care... does anyone? But it seems from looking around that socialized medicine is marginally better.
Cheers.
It seems you're hardly thinking though what I'm saying, but here goes anyways. I've got nothing better to do on a weeknight :)
1) I'm not talking about any of that -- one CD purchase, one rip, and the track is on kazaa, gnutella, whatever, and can be downloaded by anyone in the world. This has nothing to do with iTunes. Because of this, DRM is pointless.
2) DRM has nothing to do with iTunes being more convenient. It would be just as convenient without DRM. So I ask again, how is DRM worth anything if it doesn't make iTunes better and it doesn't stop piracy.
3) Okay, we can be pedantic about it: replace "defeat" with "reduce" and my point still stands. Especially since nothing, not even DRM, defeats piracy. So all you can do is reduce. And the convenience is what is reducing piracy, not DRM. Do you think anyone uses iTunes _because_ of DRM? No, they use it because of convenience and at best they ignore the DRM.
4) Your one valid point: yes it matters to record companies. But that's only because... drum roll... they're stupid! They don't understand that DRM isn't stopping piracy and it never will. And that generally the better they treat their customers the more business they'll have.
5) They are locked in: why do you think they backed down on variable pricing? Because they wanted to make less money? It was because the only DRM that Apple supports is their own FairPlay and Apple owns the portable MP3 market. If they were willing to sell songs without DRM, they could bypass Apple and still get them on the iPod.
6) DRM isn't going anywhere, you're right. Neither is corporate stupidity and poor treatment of customers. Doesn't mean I have to like it. I don't think that DRM is Apple's fault, but they're not innocent either. They're taking advantage of the record company's DRM to lock in consumers. Care to try playing iTunes tracks on something other than an iPod? I know there's other sources of music without DRM and I use some of them. And I buy from iTunes when convenient, and when I do I dislike the fact that it's got DRM.
Cheers.
What's the extra $150 for?
:)
So you can feel special. Isn't that what all this consumerism/materialism is about anyways? (Says I from a 17" MacBook Pro
Cheers.
Then at the last day they repeated the question and most people said they understood why some of them did what they did and that they themselves might do the same thing.
That's interesting to hear. I've long thought that most of the people who hate Nazis would have done the same things if they were in the same situation. Surprised to hear some backing of that, but refreshing.
Personally, I think unless we understand the motives of the holocaust we're doomed to repeat it again.
Cheers.
Sorry, but I can't follow the latest standards at my job. If I did, I'd block out a couple percentage points of the market, and at the volume my employer is working, that would be millions of dollars. Seriously: millions.
The latest standards aren't even that great from a purely academic standpoint, as sadly you can't achieve the same consistency in font sizing across browsers with CSS as you can with FONT SIZE. And CSS pages seem far more prone to overlapping elements than tabled layouts. But aside from that, even if we assume that the latest standards were perfection, they still don't work for a non-negligable percentage of users. The real "standard" is the user base, no matter what anyone likes to say.
If you're following the latest standards closely, you're probably not working at a company that is making good money on the internet as its primary income. And if you are, then you're costing yourself a heck of a lot of money and you better hope the shareholders don't find out.
Cheers.
99% of people can't tell the original ACC iTunes track from an mp3 re-rip anyways.
It sounds as though DRM isn't a problem, then.
And thus it isn't a solution either. Yet it does matter to the 1% of people who do notice the difference, like me.
Removing DRM in favor of nothing is not a better option.
Really? Since all it takes is one person on the planet to do a CD rip and plop it in their sharing folder for all the pirates of the world to have access, tell me how DRM is worth anything at all? The reason people buy from iTunes is because it's easier than messing with bittorrent or limewire or kazaa or whatever. That improved customer experience is what can defeat piracy. In fact it already has begun to do so. If those same tracks were sold without DRM, it couldn't possibly matter since they're all available through the familiar pirate sources already, in most cases before they're even available on iTunes. And as you point out, it would be a lot cheaper to run the music store without DRM, and the record companies wouldn't have been locked in to working with apple (who now gets to dictate their prices), a non-DRM solution would have been better for consumers, record companies, and the middlemen.
But leave it to big business to build themselves a cage and then marvel at it's ingenuity.
Cheers.
I'm referring to DRM on the iTunes Music Store. There's no encoder/decoder for that that doesn't come from Apple, either software or hardware.
Cheers.
My idea? Yeah: don't bother with DRM at all. The whole thing is a red herring. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't stop piracy. 99% of people can't tell the original ACC iTunes track from an mp3 re-rip anyways. Plus people are still buying these songs on CD and ripping them at even higher quality than iTunes. These unauthorized versions are all available right now. In fact there's a larger catalog of music available illegally than legally. DRM had done nothing whatsoever to stop that. All it does is get in the way of legitimate users. Anyone using iTunes is a paying customer and has already proven themselves not to be part of the problem. Like me.
So why do people use iTunes? Convenience, reliability, and maybe even a bit of ethics. And that's worth my $0.99. I like using iTunes. But it pisses me off that I'm not trusted with to legally use my own property however I wish to. Vendor lock-in sucks. Especially considering that I can buy a CD or get an illegal copy and have more freedom. It's absurd.
Cheers.
Because the largest reason it sucks is that it's controlled by one company and so it encourages vendor lock-in, which sucks. If we can get rid of it completely, that's would be my first choice. But as everyone seems to be accepting their new digitally restricted life, seems like that's not going to happen. So my next best hope would be that it is opened up so that it at least doesn't force vendor lock-in.
:)
Fat chance of that happening either
Cheers.
I don't think it especially sucks, it's probably the best DRM out there. But DRM is lousy in general and it's sad that people are not only accepting of it but actually jumping up to defend it.
Cheers.
iTunes DRM is no worse than other DRM... so it's not a matter of comparing. But I'm a bit saddened that we're accepting that one company should hold the keys (literally) to enjoying our purchased music, and can dictate which platforms we can play our music on. It's a lame concept that people are all too willing to accept, in my opinion.
Cheers.
Seems easy to say which is worse. Imitation is great... it means we get various refined versions of a new idea and people can choose. The public usually benefits. This is what progress is all about: incremental improvements building on the ideas of others.
Litigation on the other hand is just a way to squash competition without benefiting anyone but the litigant. It's a crap business tactic and a sign of a company who fears they can't add to the mix.
And FYI I'm no Apple fanboy... I think iTunes DRM sucks and they should drop it entirely or at the very least open it up so it's a standard.
Cheers.
What is preventing folks from entering the country legally?
Government mandated quotas: The US only lets a small number of people enter from each country. The number allowed from each country varies, but for many countries it is not enough, so a person from that country would have to stay where they are or enter the US illegally.
Cheers.
it's prices inexpesively for what it is
I remember Steve Jobs saying something similar about the NeXT Cube. Only problem is that real people have budgets. The Earth Simulator may be inexpensive for what it is, too, but you're not going to sell very many of them.
Cheers.
I haven't used Ruby or Rails. I only read the ten minute tutorial that got posted here a while back. Actually reminds me a lot of a object wrapper I wrote for perl that built class heirarchies automatically from a DB schema. It was pretty cool if I do say so myself, and so is Ruby on Rails.
However: I don't think it matters. In my experience it doesn't matter that much what programming language or model you use. Object oriented or procedural, strongly typed or loosely typed, monolithic or microscopic, chocolate or vanilla. Everything eventually bows to the reality of inherent complexity. I've seen each style done right and wrong, and if they're done right, the differences sort of wash out over time. My prediction is that Ruby on Rails is great for prototyping, but if you ever have a large buisness project that grows and develops for years it'll end up no more productive and maintainable than any other competently written code base, and probably no less productive either.
I'm not saying none of these choices matter: they do. There are certain things I've written that are much more sensible OO than procedural and visa-versa. In the end you make decisions on how to go about a particular project, and if you've made the right ones five years later you can still carefully move at a crawl and bring new people into the codebase with only a few weeks of training. And I don't think any technology shift will notably beat that. I'm still a believer that there's no silver bullet that will make development (especially long term development) a breeze.
But what do I know? Use what makes sense to you.
Cheers.
Though it requires a small investment, it's definitely possible and worthwhile to set up a practical backup solution. I had all my data on a Powerbook with a 120GB HD, but I purchased a 250 GB external hard drive and left it on my desk at home. Every few weeks I'd plug it in and click on "backup" (the drive came with backup software called silverkeeper). The initial backup took a little over 30 minutes, and incremental backups took 5 or 10.
Last month my laptop was stolen, and though I was pretty upset, at least I didn't lose a meaningful amount of data. I just picked up a new MacBook Pro, plugged in the hard drive, and restored in a little over 30 minutes.
So there is a practical backup solution out there. That's mine. You're right that DVD's are certainly not it. But I'm pretty happy with mine. Unless two geographically seperated disks die in the same timeframe, I'm good.
Cheers.
From a logistical perspective how does it matter whether we're keeping people in Mexico or out of the US? I wasn't saying that this is the same thing as the Berlin wall... the politics and context are totally different. I'm just saying that short of prison level security, how do we propose to keep all these immigrants out? I don't think I'm invoking fear, I'm just looking at it pragmatically. Show me how we can otherwise secure a border that size. Give me historical examples where people were kept from where they wanted to go without lethal force.
Folowing from that, if people get in, then what? Do we treat them as criminals or citizens. Most would argue criminals, it seems. But if these people are willing to do honest work for money, how does treating them as criminals (or indentured servitude in the case of work visas) make our society better?
Call me what you want, but I think these are legitimate concerns and questions.
Cheers.
I have a pair of pet cockatiels. My favorite re-application of a learned word: at various times of excitement or reward we'd say "good boy!" to the male. He'd repeat it back when we'd say it. Then, eventually he got into the habit of saying it after sex with the female cockatiel. It was pretty funny to see them go at it, then he'd hop off, stretch his wings and call out "good boy!".
Cheers.
Like stopping the influx of illegal aliens through the southern border
Good luck. It'll never happen... until they pull an East Germany and put full time sniper towers every couple hundred yards with orders to shoot to kill on sight. If you think that's a good idea check how it's fared historically.
I'd rather they make health care public (which has been shown to work well) and completely open the borders so that immigrants (which we'll have in any case) can at least get jobs and be productive members of society. We've already got a decent social structure of materialism that encourages people to work (which is why not everyone is on welfare) and it would work for people born elsewhere, too.
It wasn't until we started closing our borders in the first part of last century that things got so ugly. Until then the US benefitted enormously from immigrants. But a minority of lazy folks got scared of actual competition and here we are today.
Cheers.
Perhaps. I won't argue it further than this... but I don't see that having a spec which may or may not be right is any improvement over having a program that may or may not be right. Either the code works or it doesn't and it doesn't much matter if it matches the spec, since the spec is just as likely to have bugs as the code, in my less than conclusive experience. That's not to say specs are bad.
In other words I'm not convinced that A is seperate from B. I think you've got a problem space called AB and that's that.
Cheers.
Are you really replying to Linus here? That was his quote you quoted :)
Cheers.