That's 'yes', 'no' and 'ask again later' covered, shall we shoot for the whole set of magic 8 ball tags on this story? 'Outlook good' might be hard to find support for...
Good old America, the only place that can call something a world series without noticing they haven't invited any other countries... but back on topic, the chart rules when Gnarls Barkley hit number 1 excluded songs that were truly internet only, you had to have a physical CD or vinyl release. You were allowed to issue the download up to a week before the physical release hit the shops, and it was this rule that allowed them to number 1 before the physical release hit the shops. Recently the rules have been changed and a true internet only release now is allowed in the British charts.
If you don't like adverts, block them! I have no problem with Wikipedia taking ads, frankly, I'd find a blocked ad that I don't see far less intrusive than their constant begging for donations.
Given that natural resources are in limited supply, prices will rise as supplies get used up. Leaving oil in the ground is actually an excellent way of making money.
One prediction that's been going round for years but has never really happened is the Apple Office-killer. Sure Pages and Keynote are nice, but there is an obvious gap where you woudl expect the spreadsheet and database to be, and those MacPro desktop machines are conspicuously overdue for a speedbump. I think Apple are saving up for something big...
I predict Apple will go agressively after the business market, this upgrade cycle would be the perfect time to convince businesses to 'switch', especially if iWork had all 4 expected apps, robust compatibility with office documents, and the pricetag of (MacPro + Leopard + "iWorkPro") is significantly less than (Vista capable pc + Vista + Office 2007), which seems entirely possible. Throw in the expected 8-core MacPro, a bit of dual boot hype and garnish with XServes, and it's a tasty package.
As for the iPhone and widescreen video iPod, I wouldn't be at all surprised if these were actually one device not two. A 360 degree clamshell design that's a very scratch-resistant shuffle when closed, a phone when 180 degrees open and a widescreen video iPod when 360 degrees open sounds like a highly marketable device to me, especially if Apple leverage their close ties with flash memory producers to give it good video storage space without a hard drive. Nokia tried hard with the N93, but they ended up with a rubik cube designed by a committee. Apple product design head Jonathan Ive must have been looking at that thing and laughing.
I'd ask why the songs in question are being distributed by MTV and it's bretheren, radio stations (a list of over 1000 should be easy to compile if these are common tracks), and elsewhere on the net (the BBC's radio archive and the band's myspace pages should provide good examples) with out similar prosecutions.
If the reply is that these are not CD quality, then lead into explainaing to the judge that the shared files are lossy, and only contain a small fraction of the CD information, and therefore don't deserve the full penalty, and then lead into the 2nd option:
If the reply is that these are licenced, follow up by asking the price per play per listener for these licences (referencing any past payola convictions the prosecution may have), and why your client is being charged more (by a factor that should be suitably ludicrous for the judge to perk up a bit).
The reason for this line of approach is to that I think a judgement of guilty with a fine equivalent to the fee a net radio station would bay for the same distribution would be an even bigger win than a not guilty verdict if it forms a legal precedent... if the prosecution see that you are heading towards that destination then I suspect your next question should be "do you want to give my client $lots and drop the case?"
All these studies seem to ignore that fact that faster speed limits reduce the number of cars on the roads. It's not a case of 'coping with x cars per hour' on a road, it's a case of getting x cars to their destinations. Get a car to where it's going, and x is reduced by one, slow cars down (as the UK highways agency is so fond of doing in the name of reducing congestion), and x goes up.
Cars have a non-zero length. At a speed of 16 feet per second, a 16 foot car takes 1 second to pass any given point. Add this to a 2 second gap between cars, and 1 car will pass by every 3 seconds. 50% more cars will pass by if there is a car every 2 seconds.
It's hard to say if Sony is having a bad Christmas or not round here, as their 'we can't be bothered' attitude to Europe means they forgot to send us any. The Wiis are all sold, which means Microsoft are probably picking up extra sales from worred parents who would be left without a 'big present' for little Timmy if that nice salesman hadn't convinced them to go for the Xbox 360.
Apple are either being incredibly clever holding back the iPod shuffle knowing the 'next present up the ladder' is their own Nano, or they seriously miscalculated demand, since they are practically unobtainable here.
I think the real problem for the Games market is that there were no really 'big' must-have games this year. I'd have bought a Wii if the Mario Game was out, a PS3 if it and GT5 was out, and a Xbox360 if hell froze over. My spend on games this Christmas is zero, and I'm not the only one.
Yes, it's annoying that the small form factor keyboard on the powerbook hasn't got a forward-delete key, and even more so on the 17" which is big enough to fit a full keyboard but still gets the mini one. No, an operating system update is not capable of adding extra keys to your keyboard.
This is a valid complaint, but it's NOT a complaint about OS X, it's a complaint about hardware, and (arguably) so is the one about laptop screen dimming.
Because Adobe (makers of Photoshop) would sue them for yet another abuse of their monopoly.
One major reason I hate Microsoft are that they break the law repeatedly, and show no remorse or sign that they will stop breaking the law in future.
Another is that they owe their success to luck rather than skill. If IBM hadn't made a very bad deal with them in the early days of the PC, Microsoft would be nowhere.
I assume that Apple have always been very keen to keep new products under wraps, because that (and getting as close as possible to 'build to order') means they can sell the last few of a product that's about to be superceded, not to remove accusations of vapourware.
I'm not sure this is still a wise thing to do when they are entering new markets, as the much rumoured iPhone would do (if it exists). I need a new phone, but I'm holding off until Macworld San Franciso because of the rumours, rather than being tied in to a 12 or 18 month deal on a cometitor's product - which must be good for Apple if the rumours are true, and better if they publically said "we will ship an iPhone soon", as more people would wait.
For a lot of people, the point is the Cell chip. It's related to the PowerPC line of cpus that Apple recently dropped, making it somewhere fairly comfortable for Apple coders who don't fancy going over to x86, anyone who doesn't like the idea of coding for x86's archtecture, or anyone who buys into the Cell Alliance hype that these chips will be in every device in the world in 10 years time.
A lot of music software developers are excited about the DSP power in the Cell chip, since on paper it wipes the floor with other DSP-in-a-box products like the Soundart Chameleon or the Kyma/Capybara combination.
I call FUD. 30 is a random number an analyst pulled out of his ass, and should be treated as such, especially as we don't know who paid the analyst to say that.
Nobody knows how many units Sony will make before they kill off the PS3, nobody knows the component price cuts that will happen before then, nobody knows the unit price drops they will make, and only Sony know the margins, the R&D cost and the deals they have with all games manufacturers. Factor in cross-subsidising of the profit or loss on sales and develpment of Cell and Blu-Ray plus blue-ray movie sales, random numbers for advertising budgets, devkit profits or losses, online service profits or losses and currency fluctuation profits or losses, and you end up with a pretty indefinable number to divide by the analyst's guess at an average profit per game.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Civilisation didn't actually start with the US constitution! The *original* copyright was actually 21 years, specified in the British Statute of Anne in 1710, unless you count the licencing act of 1662, which granted rights that never expired.
While I'm in favour of much shorter copyright terms, I'm not sure your analogy works very well, since dead garbagemen don't clear up much rubbish, but dead musicians do sell a lot of records.
There is no renewal of copyright under British law.
We do have one exception though, Peter Pan not only never grows up, he never goes out of copyright either. This is because there was a massive public outcry when London's biggest childrens's hospital was threatening to close if they lost the income from Peter Pan, the rights to which the author bequeathed to the hospital in his will.
Music copyrights are messy, because there is a copyright on the song, and seperately on the performance and recording of the song (called 'mechanical copyright'). If my understanding is correct, Cliff Richard's early work will only be coming out of mechanical copyright. This means a prospective seller of these works would have to pay rights for the songs but not the recordings, in they same way they would if they made cover-versions of the songs.
I believe that our British copyright law was not backdated last itme it was extended, so works recorded before the life + 70 tariff do not get an extension. Oddly enough this was something Hollywood actually lobbied strongly for, as there were quite a lot or films in production that were based on 'just out of copyright' works that would have gone back into copyright (I think this was the case with character of Sherlock Holmes when the previous extension was backdated).
While telling Courtney Love that she suddenly has to rely on her own 'talents' might be popular, dead artists do sometimes have nice widows and children to support, and this rule would cause problems where there are shared authorships - would you allow me to copy half a Lennon/McCartney compositon because they are 50% dead?
I'd find this a lot easier to make recommendations for if I knew the original poster's taste in games. I can't stand first-person shooters, and am not at all put off by 'cutesy' graphics, so Yoshi's Island is on my list, but all variants of Doom, Quake, Half-Life etc. are not. It's also difficult not to be biased by games that were great technical leaps, but not actually great to play, such as 'Elite' on the BBC Micro or Nintendo's Star Fox, which I enjoy for nostalgia reasons, but if you were not there first time round won't impress at all.
I'll pick a few games that I think are 'peak of genre' stand-outs.
Wetrix (N64 version) - On the face of it, a low-selling game based on a nasty sounding concept (3-D tetris) is an odd recommendation, but the saving grace of this game is it's beautiful learning curve, you'll be having fun in the first 10 minutes, and thinking deeply about optimal strategy after 6 months. Finishing the 'standard' game by scoring a billion points is the achievement I'm most proud of in my gaming career.
Yoshi's Island - Miyamoto's 2-d masterpiece, idea-packed and finely balanced. While it's technical brilliance is easily overshadowed today, it's polish, balance and sense of fun are not.
M.A.M.E. - indulge your nostalgia for arcade games without having the tedium of time travel. Go conquest that game you didn't quite have enough quarters to be good at first time round.
When age starts to take it's toll, consider switching to online games. Bad reflexes and needing to take frequent breaks map onto lag and connection drops, so these games are often (by coincidence) ideal for older gamers. I play Runescape, which is well suited to gamers of all ages for exactly this reason.
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That's 'yes', 'no' and 'ask again later' covered, shall we shoot for the whole set of magic 8 ball tags on this story? 'Outlook good' might be hard to find support for...
Good old America, the only place that can call something a world series without noticing they haven't invited any other countries... but back on topic, the chart rules when Gnarls Barkley hit number 1 excluded songs that were truly internet only, you had to have a physical CD or vinyl release. You were allowed to issue the download up to a week before the physical release hit the shops, and it was this rule that allowed them to number 1 before the physical release hit the shops. Recently the rules have been changed and a true internet only release now is allowed in the British charts.
Actually, it was banned on my favourite music torrent site (one which prefers it's identity to be hidden) an hour ago.
I don't find AdWords obtrusive... well not since I added http://.googlesyndication.com/* to my adblock list.
If you don't like adverts, block them! I have no problem with Wikipedia taking ads, frankly, I'd find a blocked ad that I don't see far less intrusive than their constant begging for donations.
Given that natural resources are in limited supply, prices will rise as supplies get used up. Leaving oil in the ground is actually an excellent way of making money.
One prediction that's been going round for years but has never really happened is the Apple Office-killer. Sure Pages and Keynote are nice, but there is an obvious gap where you woudl expect the spreadsheet and database to be, and those MacPro desktop machines are conspicuously overdue for a speedbump. I think Apple are saving up for something big...
I predict Apple will go agressively after the business market, this upgrade cycle would be the perfect time to convince businesses to 'switch', especially if iWork had all 4 expected apps, robust compatibility with office documents, and the pricetag of (MacPro + Leopard + "iWorkPro") is significantly less than (Vista capable pc + Vista + Office 2007), which seems entirely possible. Throw in the expected 8-core MacPro, a bit of dual boot hype and garnish with XServes, and it's a tasty package.
As for the iPhone and widescreen video iPod, I wouldn't be at all surprised if these were actually one device not two. A 360 degree clamshell design that's a very scratch-resistant shuffle when closed, a phone when 180 degrees open and a widescreen video iPod when 360 degrees open sounds like a highly marketable device to me, especially if Apple leverage their close ties with flash memory producers to give it good video storage space without a hard drive. Nokia tried hard with the N93, but they ended up with a rubik cube designed by a committee. Apple product design head Jonathan Ive must have been looking at that thing and laughing.
I'd ask why the songs in question are being distributed by MTV and it's bretheren, radio stations (a list of over 1000 should be easy to compile if these are common tracks), and elsewhere on the net (the BBC's radio archive and the band's myspace pages should provide good examples) with out similar prosecutions.
If the reply is that these are not CD quality, then lead into explainaing to the judge that the shared files are lossy, and only contain a small fraction of the CD information, and therefore don't deserve the full penalty, and then lead into the 2nd option:
If the reply is that these are licenced, follow up by asking the price per play per listener for these licences (referencing any past payola convictions the prosecution may have), and why your client is being charged more (by a factor that should be suitably ludicrous for the judge to perk up a bit).
The reason for this line of approach is to that I think a judgement of guilty with a fine equivalent to the fee a net radio station would bay for the same distribution would be an even bigger win than a not guilty verdict if it forms a legal precedent... if the prosecution see that you are heading towards that destination then I suspect your next question should be "do you want to give my client $lots and drop the case?"
All these studies seem to ignore that fact that faster speed limits reduce the number of cars on the roads. It's not a case of 'coping with x cars per hour' on a road, it's a case of getting x cars to their destinations. Get a car to where it's going, and x is reduced by one, slow cars down (as the UK highways agency is so fond of doing in the name of reducing congestion), and x goes up.
Cars have a non-zero length. At a speed of 16 feet per second, a 16 foot car takes 1 second to pass any given point. Add this to a 2 second gap between cars, and 1 car will pass by every 3 seconds. 50% more cars will pass by if there is a car every 2 seconds.
The problem is that Wiis are in such short supply over here that Zelda (while it's undoubtedly a great game) isn't yet a big seller.
It's hard to say if Sony is having a bad Christmas or not round here, as their 'we can't be bothered' attitude to Europe means they forgot to send us any. The Wiis are all sold, which means Microsoft are probably picking up extra sales from worred parents who would be left without a 'big present' for little Timmy if that nice salesman hadn't convinced them to go for the Xbox 360.
Apple are either being incredibly clever holding back the iPod shuffle knowing the 'next present up the ladder' is their own Nano, or they seriously miscalculated demand, since they are practically unobtainable here.
I think the real problem for the Games market is that there were no really 'big' must-have games this year. I'd have bought a Wii if the Mario Game was out, a PS3 if it and GT5 was out, and a Xbox360 if hell froze over. My spend on games this Christmas is zero, and I'm not the only one.
Yes, it's annoying that the small form factor keyboard on the powerbook hasn't got a forward-delete key, and even more so on the 17" which is big enough to fit a full keyboard but still gets the mini one.
No, an operating system update is not capable of adding extra keys to your keyboard.
This is a valid complaint, but it's NOT a complaint about OS X, it's a complaint about hardware, and (arguably) so is the one about laptop screen dimming.
Apart from being the the IATA airport code for Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Fayetteville, Arkansas, what on earth is an XNA?
Because Adobe (makers of Photoshop) would sue them for yet another abuse of their monopoly.
One major reason I hate Microsoft are that they break the law repeatedly, and show no remorse or sign that they will stop breaking the law in future.
Another is that they owe their success to luck rather than skill. If IBM hadn't made a very bad deal with them in the early days of the PC, Microsoft would be nowhere.
I assume that Apple have always been very keen to keep new products under wraps, because that (and getting as close as possible to 'build to order') means they can sell the last few of a product that's about to be superceded, not to remove accusations of vapourware.
I'm not sure this is still a wise thing to do when they are entering new markets, as the much rumoured iPhone would do (if it exists). I need a new phone, but I'm holding off until Macworld San Franciso because of the rumours, rather than being tied in to a 12 or 18 month deal on a cometitor's product - which must be good for Apple if the rumours are true, and better if they publically said "we will ship an iPhone soon", as more people would wait.
For a lot of people, the point is the Cell chip. It's related to the PowerPC line of cpus that Apple recently dropped, making it somewhere fairly comfortable for Apple coders who don't fancy going over to x86, anyone who doesn't like the idea of coding for x86's archtecture, or anyone who buys into the Cell Alliance hype that these chips will be in every device in the world in 10 years time.
A lot of music software developers are excited about the DSP power in the Cell chip, since on paper it wipes the floor with other DSP-in-a-box products like the Soundart Chameleon or the Kyma/Capybara combination.
equal and opposite reaxion?
His kids probably wanted some decent independent label music, not the trash that Daddy's marketing department spends millions hyping.
I call FUD. 30 is a random number an analyst pulled out of his ass, and should be treated as such, especially as we don't know who paid the analyst to say that.
Nobody knows how many units Sony will make before they kill off the PS3, nobody knows the component price cuts that will happen before then, nobody knows the unit price drops they will make, and only Sony know the margins, the R&D cost and the deals they have with all games manufacturers. Factor in cross-subsidising of the profit or loss on sales and develpment of Cell and Blu-Ray plus blue-ray movie sales, random numbers for advertising budgets, devkit profits or losses, online service profits or losses and currency fluctuation profits or losses, and you end up with a pretty indefinable number to divide by the analyst's guess at an average profit per game.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Civilisation didn't actually start with the US constitution! The *original* copyright was actually 21 years, specified in the British Statute of Anne in 1710, unless you count the licencing act of 1662, which granted rights that never expired.
While I'm in favour of much shorter copyright terms, I'm not sure your analogy works very well, since dead garbagemen don't clear up much rubbish, but dead musicians do sell a lot of records.
There is no renewal of copyright under British law.
We do have one exception though, Peter Pan not only never grows up, he never goes out of copyright either. This is because there was a massive public outcry when London's biggest childrens's hospital was threatening to close if they lost the income from Peter Pan, the rights to which the author bequeathed to the hospital in his will.
Music copyrights are messy, because there is a copyright on the song, and seperately on the performance and recording of the song (called 'mechanical copyright'). If my understanding is correct, Cliff Richard's early work will only be coming out of mechanical copyright. This means a prospective seller of these works would have to pay rights for the songs but not the recordings, in they same way they would if they made cover-versions of the songs.
I believe that our British copyright law was not backdated last itme it was extended, so works recorded before the life + 70 tariff do not get an extension. Oddly enough this was something Hollywood actually lobbied strongly for, as there were quite a lot or films in production that were based on 'just out of copyright' works that would have gone back into copyright (I think this was the case with character of Sherlock Holmes when the previous extension was backdated).
While telling Courtney Love that she suddenly has to rely on her own 'talents' might be popular, dead artists do sometimes have nice widows and children to support, and this rule would cause problems where there are shared authorships - would you allow me to copy half a Lennon/McCartney compositon because they are 50% dead?
I'd find this a lot easier to make recommendations for if I knew the original poster's taste in games. I can't stand first-person shooters, and am not at all put off by 'cutesy' graphics, so Yoshi's Island is on my list, but all variants of Doom, Quake, Half-Life etc. are not. It's also difficult not to be biased by games that were great technical leaps, but not actually great to play, such as 'Elite' on the BBC Micro or Nintendo's Star Fox, which I enjoy for nostalgia reasons, but if you were not there first time round won't impress at all.
I'll pick a few games that I think are 'peak of genre' stand-outs.
Wetrix (N64 version) - On the face of it, a low-selling game based on a nasty sounding concept (3-D tetris) is an odd recommendation, but the saving grace of this game is it's beautiful learning curve, you'll be having fun in the first 10 minutes, and thinking deeply about optimal strategy after 6 months. Finishing the 'standard' game by scoring a billion points is the achievement I'm most proud of in my gaming career.
Yoshi's Island - Miyamoto's 2-d masterpiece, idea-packed and finely balanced. While it's technical brilliance is easily overshadowed today, it's polish, balance and sense of fun are not.
M.A.M.E. - indulge your nostalgia for arcade games without having the tedium of time travel. Go conquest that game you didn't quite have enough quarters to be good at first time round.
When age starts to take it's toll, consider switching to online games. Bad reflexes and needing to take frequent breaks map onto lag and connection drops, so these games are often (by coincidence) ideal for older gamers. I play Runescape, which is well suited to gamers of all ages for exactly this reason.