To argue that all music should be free is a romantic notion, but one that is actually pretty hypocritical when you think about it. I like to drink lots of water, and water is free, and if anybody tried arguing against that I'd get really upset.
Let's look at the consumer end of the issue; the side which is supposed to come out in the top in our economic system.
Drinkable water is a resource. When you use it, it requires infrastructure to store and deliver and clean it; that is much of what you pay for. The more you consume, the less there is for everyone else. Thus it is economically efficient to control water usage by market pricing. If water were free, businesses/consumers would waste more of it and there would be little incentive to save it. Thus, in the end, it's far better that we price water through the free market.
In the case of digitizable art, such as digital music, the infrastructure already exists to deliver it to many people at very low costs. If I listen to a song, I am not depriving anyone else of the song. It is not a depletable resource. It is bits which can be duplicated over and over and over with trivial cost. The best outcome for the consumer is a maximal amount of art that they enjoy at the lowest possible price.
Usually, such a goal can be achieved through competition. However, in art, that's not the case. If you like the Beatles, you'll pay $20 for a CD, even though the Ruttles might only charge $10. Furthermore, there is additional price-fixing between the large labels (as evidenced by recent rulings against them).
What's the solution here? I don't know. Usually, businesses, which have maximizing profits as their goals, are the mediators of this optimization of consumer good. However, in this case, the maximization of profit by businesses is not coinciding with the best interest of the consumer. Furthermore, the profit motive of the businesses isn't coinciding with the best interest of the artists, who tend to sign on to the first thing they see (most good artists are in music because they enjoy music; not because they want to be the next millionaire).
Personally, I feel that there is far too much money in digitized music, and not nearly enough going into real music coming out of people (i.e. live performances). Here's some free digitized music: http://lsjumb.stanford.edu/Soundz/
Anyone else remember playing Hellcats on Mac IIs about ten years ago? It had a mode where you could play on two or three monitors, using the monitors for alternate cockpit views. Fun, fun.
And the problem with emusic.com is that very few people use it, because they can get most of the same content and more from other users on Napster, just as easily.
The contextual menu violates a basic element of interface design; it hides basic commands. Ever watch a Windows user hunt around, right-clicking on different parts of a screen?
By keeping contextual menus as a complement to the interface, rather than the primary method of control, the MacOS prevents most of these violations.
Multi-button mice are much more useful on a single-button mouse OS; You get more buttons to custom configure.
Typicall of mac lover: the beast is on the desk. [...] The cube sucks because you cant put anything on top of it.
The cube is only 8" x 8" on the top. It's not the size of something you would usually put something on top of, since even a letter size piece of paper won't fit. It's more like a large, fanless toaster. I've never seen anyone try to put anything on top of a toaster:p
Since the cube is fanless, there's not much need to put it in a separate room. The G4 towers turn off their fans when they're cool in sleep mode, so they're also fine for living quarters.
The hardware was not *that* pricey. At the time, unix boxes and OSs were extremely expensive. (Remember, that's why Linus wrote Linux). The NeXT surpassed much of the "low end" unix boxes which were out there.
AsciiMac is terrific. It ran at almost full speed on my G3/233, at 1152x870 resolution. I remember running my TV card with it--the video is actually viewable, especially from a distance.
You can probably still download it from the Machack web site.
The majority of the constitution can be boiled down to a simple statement: "You are free to live your life as you choose, so long as you do not impinge on the ability of others to do the same." Wow, simple, basic, easy to understand. Why is this sentiment so hard to grasp and so painful for millions of people?
When you use a shared resource, you often impinge on others. Several shared resources are used by cars, most importantly, roads and clean air. What you worship or what you read does not affect shared resources, and generally does not impinge on others.
To achieve optimum levels, shared resources need to either be monotized (for example, global warming could be compensated for by implementing a carbon tax on fuels) or privatized. You can use free market approaches still, or try to come up with a reasonable command-and-control solution.
20,000. Now, some people make a lot of money and don't think that's expensive for the car, but 90% of people do think that's rather steep for a 2 seater non-sports car.
The car is a version 1.0. As version 1.0, it's going to be expensive and non-ideal. Refinements happen.
The only reason I haven't switched to LCD for my desktop is that I don't know of any quality digital switches, so all my computers can share it
Here's one: http://www.drbott.com/prod/MSDVI.html Since it's a digital interface, quality is not a huge issue, like it is with analog video switchboxes/cables.
And I personally find the RIAA to be scum. However, that doesn't make it right to rip them off. If I decide I don't like the business practices of BMW, that doesn't make it right to go start stealing cars from their dealers. The same is true for this. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The RIAA has a huge amount of monopoly power as the representative of the largest labels. Therefore, unlike BMW, which has little market power, the RIAA is subject to much regulation, since it cannot be primarily regulated by markets as BMW is.
One of the biggest problems with electric cars is that all of the batteries are serious ground poluters. Without proper disposal of the batteries we will just have a different type of pollution.
Battery disposal issues pale in comparison with fuel leakage issues. Gas leakage is very hard to fix since just about every underground tank leaks, and many cars also leak. Thus, we have problems with groundwater or soil contamination with MTBE, lead (though not much anymore), and other gas components. It's a much more difficult problem to fix than battery disposal. Battery disposal just requires recycling of the batteries, like what is currently done with car lead-acid batteries.
I agree that hybrids are the best idea, unfortunately the Honda costs ~$19000, which as a student is out of my price range.
They're a good idea in the short run. $19k is just the price on the first model. With competition and further development, prices can fall quickly.
The optical intellimouse is nice technology, but the ergonomic implementation is poor. It is too large for small hands. It has four buttons, but the two side buttons are almost useless. Because they're mounted on the side, pushing them pushes the mouse over as well, unless you keep a tight grip on the mouse (which is bad for your hands). I've come to the conclusion that the people who put the buttons on the side are pretty clueless. If you have a loose grip on the mouse, watch carefully when you press the side button. It's likely that you squeeze the mouse, pushing on the right side with your fingers to counter force from the button pressing on the left side.
This is a less efficient motion than a downward click, which has your desk to provide an opposite force. Furthermore, it's a less accurate click, because it will tend to shift the mouse position more than a downward click.
Regarding the community envy, I think you've got that backwards on this one. MS ridiculed the NC concept (which is a superset of this "new invention"), and now they're touting it as the Next Great Thing.
This is a common Microsoft marketing strategy. If there's something interesting that might become the "next wave" that someone else is doing, they say "Hogwash! Our strategy is the best, and it will rule forever." Quietly though, they copy and improve on the "next wave" strategy, and eventually present it as their own.
Sometimes this presentation is real, and sometimes it is vapor just to scare incoming competitors away. I'm not sure which one this is. Historically, Microsoft is quite predictable.
Anyone here remember Apple's OpenDoc? Remember how well it was received? Embeddable content like graphics files is okay, but who in hell needs to embed movies or sounds in their word processor documents?
For what it's worth, most applications which can handle graphics (word processors, etc) on the Mac can also handle embedded Quicktime content (sounds and video and animation).
They've been able to do this almost as long as Quicktime has been around. Search for "Wild Magic", a hack that some Apple person wrote. It was probably around *1993*.
If they can bill for it, they know you used it. There goes your privacy.
That is not necessarily true. There are several papers written on anonymous electronic payment schemes. Do a search. I'm sure one has even appeared here before.
Judge Jackson is just trying to shave off 5+ years of court cost to the public, most of which don't even care if M$ is a monopoly or not.
The court costs are a very minor aspect in a case such as this. Every day, the US loses millions of dollars in its economy because of inefficiencies created by the monopoly pricing power of microsoft. Every day, Microsoft earns millions in excess profit because of its abuse of monopoly power.
Obviously, Microsoft wants the case to drag on as long as possible, so they can continue to earn their millions of monopoly-derived money.
Everyone else's best interest is served by having the case proceed as quickly as possible.
If it was just a year ago, it seems awfully fast for it to be *so slow*. However maybe if it's 2 years ago, it's about time. Goes to show that the release of the iMac was all show & style (not necessarily a bad thing, i guess) but not much ooomph.
The iMac was released two years ago, running at the same speed as the lowest-end G3, 233 Mhz. I run a G3/233 as my home machine, and it works fine, and is not at all slow (the voodoo 3 card helps a bit too). 2-year-old Computer slowness is really only a big factor if you're really stressing the resources of the computer (for example, running Windows). There's never much oomph in consumer computers.
$500 is not that much. It's about the cost of the 192MB compact flash cards. It's about what i paid for my first 40MB hard drive.
Naturally, as you state, the prices will fall once there is incentive to do so, such as competition and lowered costs. Right now they're basically only competing with CF cards, so they can price the drives at the revenue maximizing point.
As far as Excel being "the best spreadsheet app of its type", have you really used Gnumeric? You probably should try it.
No serious spreadsheet user would choose Gnumeric over Excel (unless they had a very tiny budget). Gnumeric is far more buggy, has far fewer features, and is slower than Excel. The advantages are that it runs under unix and is free. Perhaps in a couple years Gnumeric will be close to where Excel is now, if the development team works very hard on it.
This is not to say that Excel is all that great. It is just the best general spreadsheet out there because Microsoft eliminated most of its competition in spreadsheets through its bundling practices. This is quite unfortunate. The loss of competition has left Excel stagnant (but still far, far ahead of Gnumeric).
Will mp3 or other sound compression methods be relevant at all three or five years from now? You can get about 2:1 lossless compression on typical CD-quality music, vs about 12:1 with mp3. Six times the file size takes up six times the bandwidth.
In three to five years, that sort of bandwidth should be commonplace, correct?
For what it's worth, the actual license fees that go to Rambus is probably only a few dollars, and is really not noticable to the consumer (but is lots of free money for Rambus). The reason that RDRAM prices have been so inflated was supply/demand, not the license fees.
Joker actually charges 12 Euro per year, which comes out to less than $12 US per year. Part of that money still goes to NSI, by the way. Joker sees very little of this money.
It's still too much to pay, though. The cost of adding a line to a DNS file is not $12/year. While you and I are happy to pay $12, the real cost of domain registration is much lower, and if the market were truly competitive, prices would drop near $0.
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Let's look at the consumer end of the issue; the side which is supposed to come out in the top in our economic system.
Drinkable water is a resource. When you use it, it requires infrastructure to store and deliver and clean it; that is much of what you pay for. The more you consume, the less there is for everyone else. Thus it is economically efficient to control water usage by market pricing. If water were free, businesses/consumers would waste more of it and there would be little incentive to save it. Thus, in the end, it's far better that we price water through the free market.
In the case of digitizable art, such as digital music, the infrastructure already exists to deliver it to many people at very low costs. If I listen to a song, I am not depriving anyone else of the song. It is not a depletable resource. It is bits which can be duplicated over and over and over with trivial cost. The best outcome for the consumer is a maximal amount of art that they enjoy at the lowest possible price.
Usually, such a goal can be achieved through competition. However, in art, that's not the case. If you like the Beatles, you'll pay $20 for a CD, even though the Ruttles might only charge $10. Furthermore, there is additional price-fixing between the large labels (as evidenced by recent rulings against them).
What's the solution here? I don't know. Usually, businesses, which have maximizing profits as their goals, are the mediators of this optimization of consumer good. However, in this case, the maximization of profit by businesses is not coinciding with the best interest of the consumer. Furthermore, the profit motive of the businesses isn't coinciding with the best interest of the artists, who tend to sign on to the first thing they see (most good artists are in music because they enjoy music; not because they want to be the next millionaire).
Personally, I feel that there is far too much money in digitized music, and not nearly enough going into real music coming out of people (i.e. live performances). Here's some free digitized music: http://lsjumb.stanford.edu/Soundz/
(Or would that be the problem with Napster?)
By keeping contextual menus as a complement to the interface, rather than the primary method of control, the MacOS prevents most of these violations.
Multi-button mice are much more useful on a single-button mouse OS; You get more buttons to custom configure.
Many of the slower x86 notebooks are passively cooled, and are certainly smaller than a file cabinet.
The ones using the P3 only hit the fan when the load gets somewhat high.
The cube is only 8" x 8" on the top. It's not the size of something you would usually put something on top of, since even a letter size piece of paper won't fit. It's more like a large, fanless toaster. I've never seen anyone try to put anything on top of a toaster :p
Since the cube is fanless, there's not much need to put it in a separate room. The G4 towers turn off their fans when they're cool in sleep mode, so they're also fine for living quarters.
The hardware was not *that* pricey. At the time, unix boxes and OSs were extremely expensive. (Remember, that's why Linus wrote Linux). The NeXT surpassed much of the "low end" unix boxes which were out there.
You can probably still download it from the Machack web site.
When you use a shared resource, you often impinge on others. Several shared resources are used by cars, most importantly, roads and clean air. What you worship or what you read does not affect shared resources, and generally does not impinge on others.
To achieve optimum levels, shared resources need to either be monotized (for example, global warming could be compensated for by implementing a carbon tax on fuels) or privatized. You can use free market approaches still, or try to come up with a reasonable command-and-control solution.
The car is a version 1.0. As version 1.0, it's going to be expensive and non-ideal. Refinements happen.
Here's one: http://www.drbott.com/prod/MSDVI.html
Since it's a digital interface, quality is not a huge issue, like it is with analog video switchboxes/cables.
The RIAA has a huge amount of monopoly power as the representative of the largest labels. Therefore, unlike BMW, which has little market power, the RIAA is subject to much regulation, since it cannot be primarily regulated by markets as BMW is.
Battery disposal issues pale in comparison with fuel leakage issues. Gas leakage is very hard to fix since just about every underground tank leaks, and many cars also leak. Thus, we have problems with groundwater or soil contamination with MTBE, lead (though not much anymore), and other gas components. It's a much more difficult problem to fix than battery disposal. Battery disposal just requires recycling of the batteries, like what is currently done with car lead-acid batteries.
I agree that hybrids are the best idea, unfortunately the Honda costs ~$19000, which as a student is out of my price range.
They're a good idea in the short run. $19k is just the price on the first model. With competition and further development, prices can fall quickly.
This is a less efficient motion than a downward click, which has your desk to provide an opposite force. Furthermore, it's a less accurate click, because it will tend to shift the mouse position more than a downward click.
This is a common Microsoft marketing strategy. If there's something interesting that might become the "next wave" that someone else is doing, they say "Hogwash! Our strategy is the best, and it will rule forever." Quietly though, they copy and improve on the "next wave" strategy, and eventually present it as their own.
Sometimes this presentation is real, and sometimes it is vapor just to scare incoming competitors away. I'm not sure which one this is. Historically, Microsoft is quite predictable.
But mostly, I just like this picture. Half Third Reich, half Pansygates.
For what it's worth, most applications which can handle graphics (word processors, etc) on the Mac can also handle embedded Quicktime content (sounds and video and animation).
They've been able to do this almost as long as Quicktime has been around. Search for "Wild Magic", a hack that some Apple person wrote. It was probably around *1993*.
That is not necessarily true. There are several papers written on anonymous electronic payment schemes. Do a search. I'm sure one has even appeared here before.
Please tell me how many quality notebook x86 machines you can buy without buying windows bundled with the computer.
The court costs are a very minor aspect in a case such as this. Every day, the US loses millions of dollars in its economy because of inefficiencies created by the monopoly pricing power of microsoft. Every day, Microsoft earns millions in excess profit because of its abuse of monopoly power.
Obviously, Microsoft wants the case to drag on as long as possible, so they can continue to earn their millions of monopoly-derived money.
Everyone else's best interest is served by having the case proceed as quickly as possible.
The iMac was released two years ago, running at the same speed as the lowest-end G3, 233 Mhz. I run a G3/233 as my home machine, and it works fine, and is not at all slow (the voodoo 3 card helps a bit too). 2-year-old Computer slowness is really only a big factor if you're really stressing the resources of the computer (for example, running Windows). There's never much oomph in consumer computers.
Naturally, as you state, the prices will fall once there is incentive to do so, such as competition and lowered costs. Right now they're basically only competing with CF cards, so they can price the drives at the revenue maximizing point.
No serious spreadsheet user would choose Gnumeric over Excel (unless they had a very tiny budget). Gnumeric is far more buggy, has far fewer features, and is slower than Excel. The advantages are that it runs under unix and is free. Perhaps in a couple years Gnumeric will be close to where Excel is now, if the development team works very hard on it.
This is not to say that Excel is all that great. It is just the best general spreadsheet out there because Microsoft eliminated most of its competition in spreadsheets through its bundling practices. This is quite unfortunate. The loss of competition has left Excel stagnant (but still far, far ahead of Gnumeric).
In three to five years, that sort of bandwidth should be commonplace, correct?
For what it's worth, the actual license fees that go to Rambus is probably only a few dollars, and is really not noticable to the consumer (but is lots of free money for Rambus). The reason that RDRAM prices have been so inflated was supply/demand, not the license fees.
It's still too much to pay, though. The cost of adding a line to a DNS file is not $12/year. While you and I are happy to pay $12, the real cost of domain registration is much lower, and if the market were truly competitive, prices would drop near $0.