That sort of works, but the problems I think you're going to hit are that
a) burned CDs are more fragile than proper pressed ones - I don't want to hand over any kind of serious money for them, certainly.
b) burned CDs are something the vast majority of people can do without even going as far as the shop. If I'm not going to get a 'proper' pressed CD with fancy booklet and packaging of the sort that isn't easy to do one-off runs of in a shop, then I might as well cut out the middleman and get it straight from the artist's (or label's) website and write it myself.
No, that's the whole point of the article. Microsoft can cut as many cheap deals with OEMs as they like (in certain sectors of the world these are already down to around $3 a copy, in a desperate bid to fight rampant piracy). But when the memory, disk and CPU footprint means the hardware itself needs to be $50-$100 more expensive than a thin Linux install just to hold and run everything, they struggle to compete.
If my employer expects me to use such a website on the move, he'll be the one paying for my laptop. And so he'll be the one buying me an expensive, Windows-running quick thing. I no longer care whether such poor design has been implemented, although if I know the team responsible I'd have a polite word anyway; it's genuinely poor design.
I've never met an example of any of the others that did such a ludicrous thing, so it hadn't occured to me that they might be an issue.
Besides, who uses the Eee as their only machine? It's absolutely perfect for its intended job, which is a cheap, ultra-portable toy for situations you wouldn't want to have either a hulking desktop or a painfully expensive 'proper' laptop with you anyway.
It's because they have specific hardware acceleration for H.264, just like all other iPods. They don't have that for generic Flash, and the general ARM CPU isn't good enough to use the current interpreter.
I've not heard the music yet (it should be sitting at home after kicking off the download, but I haven't unpacked it to place in iTunes and onto myPod), but what I've read about it so far doesn't suggest it's terribly DJable anyway.
"custom on-demand tech to deliver the album that's needed at point of sale" is a really tall order, however. The people who are handing over $300 each are getting a very limited-edition product, with cloth-bound books and hand-signed gilcee prints. That's not something you could download to a shop currently, and even if there was a technological solution somehow that created all those materials it wouldn't carry the same feeling of exclusivity that is one aspect of why people are handing over serious cash.
Being able to run off a custom-printed CD and case is something that can be delivered to a B&M shop easily, but it can be delivered straight to the customer for even smaller overheads, and has been done so.
On another note, all 36 tracks are under a CC license that makes it legal to download them from TPB if you wish anyway - just because it's just the first 9 on the official site doesn't mean they aren't all available elsewhere.
I completely understand your pissed-off-ness. But between the CC license on the files and Trent being a reasonable guy there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting the torrented versions from TPB until the tech people sort out the download issue.
I'm a NIN fan, but not a $300 NIN fan myself. I'm saying thank you very much Trent for the free torrents under the CC licence, buying the local CD release next month (it's less hassle and no more expensive than trying to get it through the website, thanks to the international postage option he's chosen) and that's all. I did spend $5 on the Saul Williams thing, and £14 on Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D just before Christmas, so I'm still a fair bit of a fan.
If Underworld (who sold exclusive download-only packages on their website before Trent did, by the way) shove up a similarly priced fancy set of their next album with Gilcee prints as well, though, you can count me in (if I get in quick enough; they're another band that inspire obsession, and the Tomato factor would sell it anyway), and I already have Radiohead's fancy box version of In Rainbows.
There are lots of people who will hand over serious cash for their favourite bands, yes. A lot more overall than the 2500 who bought this one. You're right that this 2500 won't do it very often, but other bands have other fans.
He's come along a fair bit, actually. On the last album, Year Zero, he stopped whining about how terrible his life was, and switched to accusing George Bush of being a nasty man.
On this new one, it's all instrumental, so you don't have to put up with him complaining about anything at all...
(FAO flamers: I've got a reasonably complete (bought and paid for) NIN collection and have enjoyed seeing him live too. The above is purely in self-deprecation)
I can't remember the licensing details, because I had no intention of doing anything commercial with the files, but at least the singles off With Teeth were up on the website as Garageband files, and the Year Zero Remixed album comes with a DVD containing the multitracks to the whole thing in a variety of formats.
A Fiat Panda is a significantly smaller car, though - a compromise not everyone is able to make (speaking as someone who upgraded from a Panda-sized car to a Golf-variant when my son was on the way, and immediately realised it was the right decision when I tried to put a pushchair in the boot).
It's US gallons; UK Channel 4 quote the mileage as 83.1mpg. As I noted elsewhere before I realised the mistake, the best a current Golf offers is 62.8 mpg Imperial, so if this really were an Imperial value it wouldn't gain you much over the current offering.
The current 1.9 TDI BlueMotion S does 62.8 mpg anyway, if we're talking Proper Gallons instead of the US ones. Which I'd expect a German company to be doing.
All the nasty, difficult to dispose of and full of toxic chemical batteries aren't improving that value by a hell of a lot, then.
Which is doubly confusing, though - I don't regard a downloaded iTunes Store song as a physical item, and I certainly don't see how it materially differs from the (excellent) copy of N+ I downloaded at the weekend from the XBox Live Arcade.
Sadly, no they couldn't fit a lossless track on there. Not because of the 30Gb space limitation, but the lack of bandwidth; HD-DVD's maximum bitrate is only 30Mbit/s, compared to BluRay's 48Mbit/s. To avoid flattening the peaks off the video bitrate (and causing mess in the busiest shots, of which there are plenty in any Michael Bay film) there just wasn't room for a 5.1 TrueHD track in there as well as all the other audio options. It's this limitation, far more than the 30Gb one, that has been the bugbear of HD-DVD mastering teams.
I was about to install SP1 tonight, after downloading it from MSDN. Does this mean I should hold off, or does it only affect people who were going to get it over Windows Update? The write-up seems a bit unclear.
If you've got one of the XBox 360 HD-DVD drives, you can use that, which will bring down the price a little bit. Since Gamestop have already announced that they're refusing to take them for trade-in, getting one on ebay should probably be pretty cheap, too. The BluRay burner is actually useful in its own right for backups or writing your own movies, anyway.
So it's all good, until you get to the price of a blank Blu disc. Anything dual-format, you're not saving much from just buying the movie all over again.
"at some point", possibly. For now, however, there are still enough bugs in the players that you _need_ to keep updating firmware, and that firmware is going to keep checking for region-lock mods.
Sony aren't being unfair by building the 'best' BluRay player (a statement I'm tempted to argue about anyway, since the 5.1 analogue audio output on many standalone players has value to me). But if I worked for Pioneer or Panasonic, I'd have my reservations about the fairness of using game software license money to underwrite the price of that excellent player.
The bright side is that it's only 20th Century Fox that are insisting on using regioning for every disc. Other studios (principally the ones who were originally dual-format, and so amenable to the HD-DVD situation of no regioning anyway) are completely region-free, with the remainder only using it for new releases that have worldwide staggered release dates that reflect the cinema dates.
It makes for an annoying amount of research when buying out-of-region, but it's overall better than DVD was. You'll still need to keep your original player around for your SD discs, however.
Lumines Plus is available for the PS2, however, so if you've got a fully-featured PS3 you can play it by putting the disc in. If you've got a 40Gb PS3 then you're stuffed, yes.
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That sort of works, but the problems I think you're going to hit are that
a) burned CDs are more fragile than proper pressed ones - I don't want to hand over any kind of serious money for them, certainly.
b) burned CDs are something the vast majority of people can do without even going as far as the shop. If I'm not going to get a 'proper' pressed CD with fancy booklet and packaging of the sort that isn't easy to do one-off runs of in a shop, then I might as well cut out the middleman and get it straight from the artist's (or label's) website and write it myself.
No, that's the whole point of the article. Microsoft can cut as many cheap deals with OEMs as they like (in certain sectors of the world these are already down to around $3 a copy, in a desperate bid to fight rampant piracy). But when the memory, disk and CPU footprint means the hardware itself needs to be $50-$100 more expensive than a thin Linux install just to hold and run everything, they struggle to compete.
If my employer expects me to use such a website on the move, he'll be the one paying for my laptop. And so he'll be the one buying me an expensive, Windows-running quick thing. I no longer care whether such poor design has been implemented, although if I know the team responsible I'd have a polite word anyway; it's genuinely poor design.
I've never met an example of any of the others that did such a ludicrous thing, so it hadn't occured to me that they might be an issue.
Besides, who uses the Eee as their only machine? It's absolutely perfect for its intended job, which is a cheap, ultra-portable toy for situations you wouldn't want to have either a hulking desktop or a painfully expensive 'proper' laptop with you anyway.
It's because they have specific hardware acceleration for H.264, just like all other iPods. They don't have that for generic Flash, and the general ARM CPU isn't good enough to use the current interpreter.
I've not heard the music yet (it should be sitting at home after kicking off the download, but I haven't unpacked it to place in iTunes and onto myPod), but what I've read about it so far doesn't suggest it's terribly DJable anyway.
"custom on-demand tech to deliver the album that's needed at point of sale" is a really tall order, however. The people who are handing over $300 each are getting a very limited-edition product, with cloth-bound books and hand-signed gilcee prints. That's not something you could download to a shop currently, and even if there was a technological solution somehow that created all those materials it wouldn't carry the same feeling of exclusivity that is one aspect of why people are handing over serious cash.
Being able to run off a custom-printed CD and case is something that can be delivered to a B&M shop easily, but it can be delivered straight to the customer for even smaller overheads, and has been done so.
On another note, all 36 tracks are under a CC license that makes it legal to download them from TPB if you wish anyway - just because it's just the first 9 on the official site doesn't mean they aren't all available elsewhere.
I completely understand your pissed-off-ness. But between the CC license on the files and Trent being a reasonable guy there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting the torrented versions from TPB until the tech people sort out the download issue.
I'm a NIN fan, but not a $300 NIN fan myself. I'm saying thank you very much Trent for the free torrents under the CC licence, buying the local CD release next month (it's less hassle and no more expensive than trying to get it through the website, thanks to the international postage option he's chosen) and that's all. I did spend $5 on the Saul Williams thing, and £14 on Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D just before Christmas, so I'm still a fair bit of a fan.
If Underworld (who sold exclusive download-only packages on their website before Trent did, by the way) shove up a similarly priced fancy set of their next album with Gilcee prints as well, though, you can count me in (if I get in quick enough; they're another band that inspire obsession, and the Tomato factor would sell it anyway), and I already have Radiohead's fancy box version of In Rainbows.
There are lots of people who will hand over serious cash for their favourite bands, yes. A lot more overall than the 2500 who bought this one. You're right that this 2500 won't do it very often, but other bands have other fans.
He's come along a fair bit, actually. On the last album, Year Zero, he stopped whining about how terrible his life was, and switched to accusing George Bush of being a nasty man.
On this new one, it's all instrumental, so you don't have to put up with him complaining about anything at all...
(FAO flamers: I've got a reasonably complete (bought and paid for) NIN collection and have enjoyed seeing him live too. The above is purely in self-deprecation)
Ah, yes. I'd forgotten all about the cats that don't finish their day job until 17:30, and so can't catch birds any earlier. Sorry.
I can't remember the licensing details, because I had no intention of doing anything commercial with the files, but at least the singles off With Teeth were up on the website as Garageband files, and the Year Zero Remixed album comes with a DVD containing the multitracks to the whole thing in a variety of formats.
A Fiat Panda is a significantly smaller car, though - a compromise not everyone is able to make (speaking as someone who upgraded from a Panda-sized car to a Golf-variant when my son was on the way, and immediately realised it was the right decision when I tried to put a pushchair in the boot).
It's US gallons; UK Channel 4 quote the mileage as 83.1mpg. As I noted elsewhere before I realised the mistake, the best a current Golf offers is 62.8 mpg Imperial, so if this really were an Imperial value it wouldn't gain you much over the current offering.
To answer my own question, I followed the link in TFA to the original report. Where it specifies 83.1mpg in Proper German Gallons.
So that's actually quite a difference, then.
The current 1.9 TDI BlueMotion S does 62.8 mpg anyway, if we're talking Proper Gallons instead of the US ones. Which I'd expect a German company to be doing.
All the nasty, difficult to dispose of and full of toxic chemical batteries aren't improving that value by a hell of a lot, then.
Which is doubly confusing, though - I don't regard a downloaded iTunes Store song as a physical item, and I certainly don't see how it materially differs from the (excellent) copy of N+ I downloaded at the weekend from the XBox Live Arcade.
They're by the till in some games stores, because they're so small that they could be easily pickpocketed from anywhere else.
Also, are you seriously suggesting that a new patent should be valid because I slap "where the item on sale is in position X in the store" on the end?
Sadly, no they couldn't fit a lossless track on there. Not because of the 30Gb space limitation, but the lack of bandwidth; HD-DVD's maximum bitrate is only 30Mbit/s, compared to BluRay's 48Mbit/s. To avoid flattening the peaks off the video bitrate (and causing mess in the busiest shots, of which there are plenty in any Michael Bay film) there just wasn't room for a 5.1 TrueHD track in there as well as all the other audio options. It's this limitation, far more than the 30Gb one, that has been the bugbear of HD-DVD mastering teams.
I was about to install SP1 tonight, after downloading it from MSDN. Does this mean I should hold off, or does it only affect people who were going to get it over Windows Update? The write-up seems a bit unclear.
If you've got one of the XBox 360 HD-DVD drives, you can use that, which will bring down the price a little bit. Since Gamestop have already announced that they're refusing to take them for trade-in, getting one on ebay should probably be pretty cheap, too. The BluRay burner is actually useful in its own right for backups or writing your own movies, anyway.
So it's all good, until you get to the price of a blank Blu disc. Anything dual-format, you're not saving much from just buying the movie all over again.
That's hardly fair though; I struggle to relate it to the sensible way of writing the same C, half the time.
"at some point", possibly. For now, however, there are still enough bugs in the players that you _need_ to keep updating firmware, and that firmware is going to keep checking for region-lock mods.
Sony aren't being unfair by building the 'best' BluRay player (a statement I'm tempted to argue about anyway, since the 5.1 analogue audio output on many standalone players has value to me). But if I worked for Pioneer or Panasonic, I'd have my reservations about the fairness of using game software license money to underwrite the price of that excellent player.
The bright side is that it's only 20th Century Fox that are insisting on using regioning for every disc. Other studios (principally the ones who were originally dual-format, and so amenable to the HD-DVD situation of no regioning anyway) are completely region-free, with the remainder only using it for new releases that have worldwide staggered release dates that reflect the cinema dates.
It makes for an annoying amount of research when buying out-of-region, but it's overall better than DVD was. You'll still need to keep your original player around for your SD discs, however.
Lumines Plus is available for the PS2, however, so if you've got a fully-featured PS3 you can play it by putting the disc in. If you've got a 40Gb PS3 then you're stuffed, yes.