If you really know HTML/Javascript for your client side code, it will work in other browsers anyway. It's only bad coding that works in IE only. If you used ActiveX client side, that's a security problem that I would think a major defense company would have already eliminated.
The US has plenty of infrastructure for electricity and roads. But for plenty of people, low population density is a good thing and they'll gladly trade off not being profitable to a telecom to be able to live in an area where they can easily afford a large home on a relatively large chunk of land.
That said, I'm all for Internet becoming a public utility.
You really got your facts backwards. Aside from the fact that AOL has been spun off again, AOL is the one who bought Time Warner back when their stock price could buy a small country.
Verizon is rolling backwards in technology. First, they stopped rolling out new FiOS. Then, they forced their remaining customers onto Uverse with a flawed modem. Now, they're giving up and rolling all the way back to dial-up. Probably gaining mostly customers who chose AOL so they wouldn't have to deal with Verizon.
Seriously, the NVG510 modem they rolled out for Uverse has a flaw that blocks the Internet from working for hours or days at a time and redirects all web traffic to an error page. There is a workaround involving rooting the modem and changing some settings and DNS servers, but the only firmware updates Verizon has put out are to block people from rooting the modem.
At the time that was happening everybody was like "wait, Time Warner has publishing, TV, print media, movies, and AOL has... email?".
At the time, I was thinking AOL only thinks of the Internet as "content" rather than a global interconnected network. And it's become even more true today to the average consumer. Buying a content company is a lot more logical than you would think - but they were a bit early, considering they had dial-up to work with.
musicians get paid too much and music isn't worth a dollar a song.
For the junk that gets massively popular, yes that's true. That's why they need to sell millions of copies and let their labels reap in most of the profits. There are better musicians out there, but since they keep most of their $1/song and don't need to spend crazy amounts of money advertising, they're happy to remain relatively obscure.
Oh there's absolutely a market for people like you. It's just a small one. For everyone else, $10/mo. could easily be spent buying new and used CD's and building a collection of hundreds of CD's (and the corresponding digital rips) for less money. It's part of why Spotify is going to have a hard time attracting enough of an audience to a high monthly price tag.
You bring up an interesting point. Streaming movies, which is exponentially more expensive from production through distribution, is a cheaper subscription than a music streaming service. And then there's the fact that a lot of Netflix films have music in them too. That suggests their price is really too high.
Wait...so you trust Paypal more than...anyone? I suppose it's not so bad if you're paying with it as opposed to accepting payments through them, but they're far from innocent.
Most people wouldn't mind paying $1 a month, but will not pay $12 once a year. Yes, that makes no sense, since it's the same amount of money, but that's how people are.
And I could pay my mortgage in an annual payment 12x what I normally pay. It's the same amount of money. Good budgeting is just simpler if everything is in monthly installments. I hate that my local city only charges utilities once every 2 months. I budget my car insurance by putting $x aside each month into a special account so that I don't have to pay in a lump sum.
How do you collect $1/mo. per user? The fees for individual transactions are mostly percentage-based anyway - especially if you're doing any high volume. Require a debit card or ACH where the fees are lower if you have to. Or charge $1.15/mo. if you want monthly and anyone who wants it monthly will probably pay that extra bit.
For an argument that's valid today - a band that does its own marketing can completely rid themselves of their label now. They can sell physical CD's on-demand via Amazon CreateSpace, digital MP3 via iTunes/Amazon, streaming via Spotify/Pandora. They can book their own live gigs. And none of that requires a record label. And more and more independent artists are doing just that and making a decent living with far less success than is required with a label taking a cut. And fans are more empowered than ever to fund the art they want with things like Kickstarter.
It's not only too high, it doesn't account for the other use-cases people have for Spotify. Want to listen to an album before you buy it? Spotify free. And if I like the album, I'd rather buy it or the tracks I like than pay a monthly fee. Because why pay monthly for something you can have in perpetuity. Even though a lot of people use Photoshop and Microsoft Office, a lot of others (me included) will never buy again because of the lack of a truly standalone product. Let me decide when to pay money again to upgrade, otherwise I'm happy to stay on Office 2003 forever.
Because every printer mfgr has a complex driver system that doesn't work the same as normal driver installation.
You can't simply install the driver at all. You can't choose "Have Disk" and install from INF at all. The only way to add a printer is during the "plug the printer in now" step of a massive installation program.
This is really not how USB drivers are supposed to work.
My hometown was guilty of too much fluoride. Thankfully I missed out on the horrible brown fluoride stains that a lot of other people seemed to have. There is such a thing as too much. My teeth were mostly developed before I moved there, but I do have just a hint of the white streaks of mild fluorosis.
If Verizon can afford to drop The Weather Channel (a NBCUniversal property) from FiOS TV without warning, without lowering the monthly price for subscribers, replacing it with an inferior product (Accuweather, and I can't figure out which is more useless, their TV channel or their inaccurate forecasts)
I've never found Accuweather as a data source to be that inaccurate (I use the app), but I see The Weather Channel as being pretty useless. 90% of the channel's content is reality programming. And the other 10% is generated at the local cable office's headend. Really, I generally trust the NWS and their web site and have no use for a dedicated channel, but it's a small market that does care about seeing it on a TV on-demand. Anyone else can use their phone or computer. Not worth that many subscriber dollars to keep TWC.
I admit, I stopped ripping with iTunes for that reason. The metadata is supposed to be embedded in the files. But iTunes must store some of that in the library and doesn't update the files properly. Now I do all my ripping with XLD. And save the album art in the folder as folder.jpg in case I ever browse the folder from Windows (it makes it the folder icon). That way if iTunes ever breaks the album art, I can use KID3 or something similar to repair it.
I'd prefer to keep context in my car radio, so it resumes playing where it left off. Even if I've listened to music elsewhere since. My current phone has no MicroSD - not that I'm unhappy with my Nexus 5.
and once you have that why the heck would you use an ipod?
Well - a lot of radio controls are convoluted for a thumb drive player, but work great when controlling an iPod over USB. I have a radio that does both.
The main reason for wanting a separate device is the huge upcharge to dedicate 32GB (or more) of storage on your phone. That upcharge is even larger for Apple devices, but I haven't had time yet to build my own system.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really know HTML/Javascript for your client side code, it will work in other browsers anyway. It's only bad coding that works in IE only. If you used ActiveX client side, that's a security problem that I would think a major defense company would have already eliminated.
You also lose the ability to easily do a standard chargeback since you're dealing with a middleman for your payments.
The US has plenty of infrastructure for electricity and roads. But for plenty of people, low population density is a good thing and they'll gladly trade off not being profitable to a telecom to be able to live in an area where they can easily afford a large home on a relatively large chunk of land.
That said, I'm all for Internet becoming a public utility.
Time Warner bought them out like 10 years ago.
You really got your facts backwards. Aside from the fact that AOL has been spun off again, AOL is the one who bought Time Warner back when their stock price could buy a small country.
Verizon is rolling backwards in technology. First, they stopped rolling out new FiOS. Then, they forced their remaining customers onto Uverse with a flawed modem. Now, they're giving up and rolling all the way back to dial-up. Probably gaining mostly customers who chose AOL so they wouldn't have to deal with Verizon.
Seriously, the NVG510 modem they rolled out for Uverse has a flaw that blocks the Internet from working for hours or days at a time and redirects all web traffic to an error page. There is a workaround involving rooting the modem and changing some settings and DNS servers, but the only firmware updates Verizon has put out are to block people from rooting the modem.
At the time that was happening everybody was like "wait, Time Warner has publishing, TV, print media, movies, and AOL has ... email?".
At the time, I was thinking AOL only thinks of the Internet as "content" rather than a global interconnected network. And it's become even more true today to the average consumer. Buying a content company is a lot more logical than you would think - but they were a bit early, considering they had dial-up to work with.
The bands that let their music be on spoitfy are saying "here have our music for free dear listener"
I'm not saying that they are raking in tons of money, but they're not giving it away for free either. Otherwise, Spotify might be somewhat profitable.
musicians get paid too much and music isn't worth a dollar a song.
For the junk that gets massively popular, yes that's true. That's why they need to sell millions of copies and let their labels reap in most of the profits. There are better musicians out there, but since they keep most of their $1/song and don't need to spend crazy amounts of money advertising, they're happy to remain relatively obscure.
Oh there's absolutely a market for people like you. It's just a small one. For everyone else, $10/mo. could easily be spent buying new and used CD's and building a collection of hundreds of CD's (and the corresponding digital rips) for less money. It's part of why Spotify is going to have a hard time attracting enough of an audience to a high monthly price tag.
You bring up an interesting point. Streaming movies, which is exponentially more expensive from production through distribution, is a cheaper subscription than a music streaming service. And then there's the fact that a lot of Netflix films have music in them too. That suggests their price is really too high.
Wait...so you trust Paypal more than...anyone? I suppose it's not so bad if you're paying with it as opposed to accepting payments through them, but they're far from innocent.
Most people wouldn't mind paying $1 a month, but will not pay $12 once a year. Yes, that makes no sense, since it's the same amount of money, but that's how people are.
And I could pay my mortgage in an annual payment 12x what I normally pay. It's the same amount of money. Good budgeting is just simpler if everything is in monthly installments. I hate that my local city only charges utilities once every 2 months. I budget my car insurance by putting $x aside each month into a special account so that I don't have to pay in a lump sum.
How do you collect $1/mo. per user? The fees for individual transactions are mostly percentage-based anyway - especially if you're doing any high volume. Require a debit card or ACH where the fees are lower if you have to. Or charge $1.15/mo. if you want monthly and anyone who wants it monthly will probably pay that extra bit.
So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?
Have you heard of Social Security? It's like that, but for rich people.
For an argument that's valid today - a band that does its own marketing can completely rid themselves of their label now. They can sell physical CD's on-demand via Amazon CreateSpace, digital MP3 via iTunes/Amazon, streaming via Spotify/Pandora. They can book their own live gigs. And none of that requires a record label. And more and more independent artists are doing just that and making a decent living with far less success than is required with a label taking a cut. And fans are more empowered than ever to fund the art they want with things like Kickstarter.
It's not only too high, it doesn't account for the other use-cases people have for Spotify. Want to listen to an album before you buy it? Spotify free. And if I like the album, I'd rather buy it or the tracks I like than pay a monthly fee. Because why pay monthly for something you can have in perpetuity. Even though a lot of people use Photoshop and Microsoft Office, a lot of others (me included) will never buy again because of the lack of a truly standalone product. Let me decide when to pay money again to upgrade, otherwise I'm happy to stay on Office 2003 forever.
Because every printer mfgr has a complex driver system that doesn't work the same as normal driver installation.
You can't simply install the driver at all. You can't choose "Have Disk" and install from INF at all. The only way to add a printer is during the "plug the printer in now" step of a massive installation program.
This is really not how USB drivers are supposed to work.
Oops....well, the frontend uses Chinese-built CPUs...
Why does China use American computer chips in its super computers?
Citation? I Think you have your facts wrong
My hometown was guilty of too much fluoride. Thankfully I missed out on the horrible brown fluoride stains that a lot of other people seemed to have. There is such a thing as too much. My teeth were mostly developed before I moved there, but I do have just a hint of the white streaks of mild fluorosis.
If Verizon can afford to drop The Weather Channel (a NBCUniversal property) from FiOS TV without warning, without lowering the monthly price for subscribers, replacing it with an inferior product (Accuweather, and I can't figure out which is more useless, their TV channel or their inaccurate forecasts)
I've never found Accuweather as a data source to be that inaccurate (I use the app), but I see The Weather Channel as being pretty useless. 90% of the channel's content is reality programming. And the other 10% is generated at the local cable office's headend. Really, I generally trust the NWS and their web site and have no use for a dedicated channel, but it's a small market that does care about seeing it on a TV on-demand. Anyone else can use their phone or computer. Not worth that many subscriber dollars to keep TWC.
They have ESPN, because that's the only way ABC will license Disney Channel. They ALWAYS have to be bundled.
I admit, I stopped ripping with iTunes for that reason. The metadata is supposed to be embedded in the files. But iTunes must store some of that in the library and doesn't update the files properly. Now I do all my ripping with XLD. And save the album art in the folder as folder.jpg in case I ever browse the folder from Windows (it makes it the folder icon). That way if iTunes ever breaks the album art, I can use KID3 or something similar to repair it.
I'd prefer to keep context in my car radio, so it resumes playing where it left off. Even if I've listened to music elsewhere since. My current phone has no MicroSD - not that I'm unhappy with my Nexus 5.
and once you have that why the heck would you use an ipod?
Well - a lot of radio controls are convoluted for a thumb drive player, but work great when controlling an iPod over USB. I have a radio that does both.
The main reason for wanting a separate device is the huge upcharge to dedicate 32GB (or more) of storage on your phone. That upcharge is even larger for Apple devices, but I haven't had time yet to build my own system.
And yes, I mostly buy in CD format.
At least the more recent Zune players support AAC.