24/7 support is only automatically meaningful for hardware support. 24/7 software support is only meaningful if the people providing the support:
Are more than phone drones
Trust your evaluation of the problem is really exposure of a bug and don't call it user error
Have ready access to developers and source code and can provide patches/fixes in a quick time period
If any of the above elements are missing -- phone drones who have to run you ragged before escalating to someone with a pulse, fingerpointing about software/hardware "user error", no developer/source access -- you are fucked, and you might as well be posting on Ask Slashdot, since you'll probably get a worthwhile answer there faster than from support. In fact, I know people who will pay consultants when they have problems because the consultancies usually have better contacts and can get beyond level 2 support faster than Joe Support Contract could ever hope to.
MP3 is more than good enough for bootlegs, where the sound quality is often really bad to begin with. Many of my most treasured recordings are either surreptitious cassette recordings with body mics or soundboard cassettes; all have been duped many times before I ever got them, and some are 15-20 years old.
Brittney Spears isn't any more tolerable because she's in 44Khz Stereo with a 100:1 S/N ratio, and my Replacements bootlegs aren't any less enjoyable because they've got audible tape hiss, crap edits and a tonal range of about 8Khz..
This should come as no surprise. Do you seriously think that corporations with marketing budgets that run into the millions of dollars are going to balk at spending $10k gobbling "their" name in whatever namespace becomes available?
The entire exercise in TLDs is a farce and is rapidly beginning to resemble a money-generating scheme for the registrars and ICANN. "Existing TLD business slow? Make new TLDS! Profit from registration frenzy!"
The only way to prevent corporate entities from hogging the namespaces is to have strict government regulations that would restrict TLDs to their chartered purpose, with the emphasis on enforcement at the registrar level -- these are the people with a profit motive to bend the rules. Strict regulation of multi-name ownership would help too, so that companies don't register thousands of names that get registered to "protect" trademarks but never get used.
And EVEN THAT is dubious, since it would require at minimum a major agreement among G7 governments to enforce. And even then it's doubtful that such a transnational agreement would work or get finalized in my lifetime.
The real answer is to scrap TLDs. Their intended purposes are unenforceable and their meaning is so diluted as to be meaningless. They're not necessary or useful unless some real, enforceable rules are in place.
The guys in the server room would probably be much more excited to get a kick-ass RS/6000 if it meant they could stick Linux on it.
The guys in the server room who clean the crap off the floor get hot and bothered by operating systems. The guys these people clean up after only care about getting the job done right.
For the midmarket they don't have to get standards right, they only have to have a certain amount of internal consistency with their own products. Lack of or weak interoperability has been their chief means of extiniguishing others that try to compete with them. This also spawns a fawning aftermarket of developers that come out with products that attempt to work around MS interoperability problems.
A non-compete clause has two basic functions. One, it "protects" the company from its competitors (they can't hire the talent with specilized skills in the field) and from your market value, by innhibiting you from changing jobs (long time spent unemployed or working outside your field at lower wages).
A non-compete compensation package that basically paid you for the period you were not employed would satisfy part 1 but not part 2, since you would have the ability to basically quit any time you wanted and pick up a pay check until you could go to work for the competitor. They're not going to pay you to fsck around until the competition can hire you.
I'd ask for 3 weeks of pay for each year of service, and full health benefits for the entire non-compete period. This ensures that they give you something in severance to help tide you over, and gives you an incentive to not job hop often since the payout will be dependent on your long-term loyalty.
I'd also negotatiate the non-compete to be contingent only on resignation or termination for cause, and not on involuntary economic termination. Who wants to get laid off AND told they can't get a job?
If they can "require" a non-compete at all your bargaining power is probably weak to begin with. If you can negotiate something that "gives" them something without demanding a free ride from them, you're likely to get something in return.
Multimegabit consumer internet access cannot work with the current "all the packets you can eat" fixed pricing that most ISPs (but strangely not colocation facilities) have.
The upstream capacity cannot be purchased for $79.95/month in 20Mbit increments, more like $1000/mo for 1.5Mbit incrememnts, plus carrier charges. (I'm betting that there's some price break to go to DS-3, and again some break to OC-3, but the equipment and circuits are more expensive).
ISPs of such high-speed service would need to charge you by the packet or byte. This would enable "hogs" who necessitate upstream connectivity purchases to pay for the service they're using. You can always gamble that most people will sit idle most of them time (my home service averages 58 bytes/sec, with full-time DNS/Web/Mail service), but it doesn't take too many people @20Mbit/sec running servers or deciding to download all the ISOs they can find to choke off an OC-3.
But the difference is they haven't made a major effort to provide this stuff to the US market. Imagine an a Chinese or Indian web site where you could download ISOs of every commercially available application, fully cracked for no serial numbers. A satellite that offered all US channels for free with existing Dish or DirecTV equipment.
There's a lot of money being made on the US with these make-believe monopolies "protected" by patents and copyrights, and this money contributes significantly to the US economy.
That was it. You're right, it wasn't central to the plotline of the book, but it was central to the "why" things were the way they were. I've often found that the backstories of SciFi books are more interesting than the stories themselves.
I read a scifi book in the past year that was set in the "near" future (~50 years or so). The book was partly about how the US had fallen apart, primarily because its economy had been wiped out by the Chinese who had made available for free via Satellite any and every "protected" bit of American intellectual property.
This crushed the US economy because instead of being good at doing something, the US instead became good at owning the rights to something. In an economy where those rights are protected, this can make you rich and powerful. When someone can take them away, those rights are nearly worthless.
I wonder to what extent the US economy is really vulnerable to this kind of exploitation -- could the Chinese or some other nation suddenly decide that US IP rules are just too much and actively work to break their power by pirating US designs, content and so on?
Just saw Vincent Price in "Last Man On Earth" last night (an Italian horror version of the Matheson book "I Am Legend" which was made into "The Omega Man" in the US).
I've always wondered what I would do in a situation of mass breakdown. With a full population, I think I'd head for a cold, rural area and hope that the climate was warm enough to feed myself but cold and rural enough to keep the parasites away.
If everyone was gone, I think an Urban lifestyle would be great. Loads of canned goods, fuel, medicine and extant housing. There's enough wood in the desks and decorative trim of my office building alone to heat a house in Minnesota for an entire winter. I'd imagine there's enough diesel to provide continuous electricity for the next 20 years.
I've seen it where a vendor packages the same installation with multiplatform installs, but its usually a bunch of different files for seperate platforms. This usually means that while an update will take place for a "current" device, the updates seldom get made for older/existing devices.
It'd be an impressive act of hardware/software engineering if each new nVidia video card were actually driver-compatible with the old card's drivers, only required new drivers to get new features. But I'm guessing it doesn't work this way.
I think the biggest problem is driver obsolesence. I have an "ancient" ATI Rage 128 video card (an AIW to be precise) and ATI has never delivered more than a "beta" set of drivers and applications (TV, etc) for the AIW128 cards under Windows 2000. I'm doubting there will EVER be another set of drivers or tuner software for this card from ATI.
The video card people seem to have like three people that write drivers, and they're always busy writing drivers for the "current" crop of cards, until the cards actually are available, at which point they switch to writing drivers for the "next" slate of cards and the "old" cards simply do not get new or improved drivers written for them. A new OS often means getting stuck with the OEM drivers provided in the OS.
I'm perfectly happy with my ATI-128 performance in the games I've played it with. I've toyed with hunting down a $120 GEForce2 card, but for the reasons you stated I'm missing the why part other than getting drivers more modern and optimized drivers than I'll ever see for my existing card.
I don't see how any ISP can make any money offering xDSL for a fixed rate. I know the gamble is most lines sit idle most of the time (mine averages 58/bytes second, w/BIND, Sendmail, Apache and three PCs connected), but at the same time it only takes a a few dozen people maxing their lines out to seriously dent an OC-3, and not every ISP has that much bandwidth.
The idea of metering isn't as bad as it sounds -- one thing that keeps ISPs from rolling out serious bandwidth (1.5Mbps SDSL for everyone) is that ISPs are afraid that they won't be able to meet the demands of that much bandwidth because the marginal income outpaces the marginal cost. Charging by the packet, ISPs could easily offer as much bandwidth as you want WITHOUT having to worry about where the cash for the next OC-3 will come from.
Well, that kind of thinking doesn't work on the interent, and it is the reason why the biggies - AOL for example - will eventually collapse.
Which is why AOL hasn't become one of the most signficant media forces in recorded history and is currently filing bankruptcy.
Not to disagree with the principles behind your opinion, but the facts available suggest otherwise. AOL's marriage with Time Warner allows them to entirely short-circuit your plan. Time Warner owns huge CATV systems, in effect making AOL a telecomms provider AND an ISP at the same time.
My guess is that the telecomms companies realize that the residual income is really in providing services over the wire, not just the wire itself and once their technology is capable of providing a video-like signal, they too will enter the content-provider business.
The real threat here is the lazy American consumer who is interested in consuming entertainment, and an entertainment industry who makes their money acting as gatekeeper between the consumers of entertainment and the entertainers. THEY are the ones who dislike bidirectional broadband (makes anyone a producer, eliminates the middle man).
Well, you only suffer one generation loss when editing an MP3. The audio editor I use converts it to uncompressed audio for the editing process, it only gets saved as an MP3 if you re-export it. It doesn't get decompressed-recompressed each time an edit is run on the file.
I'm not an audio expert, but as far as I'm concerned the generational loss of decent 128k MP3s has been something I haven't noticed. Besides, I'm primarily referring to "consumer" editing, not professional multitrack editing, where I presume other more suitable file formats exist.
Is there any hard data as to the generational degredation of Mp3 streams with subsequent de/compression cycles? I know that early ATRAC versions had this problem, but current ATRAC seems relatively immune within a reasonable number of generations (like fewer than 20).
Sorry to sound bitter and cynical. I just cant see it taking off with MP3 already established, and with people already having forked out their cash for portable mp3 players.
The portable player market is pretty big, but the home player market isn't. I just bought an Apex 703 DVD/CD/MP3 player this weekend, and my choices for MP3 players were pretty small -- it was either Apex or none at all, at least in a sane price range.
The licensing costs of the Fraunhoffer patents are pretty high for a free software group that doesn't have a revenue stream, but at the same time I'm left wondering if the "computer media" world doesn't stay behind MP3 and instead splinters into a half-dozen other formats if we might not have that preference vacuum filled with a CSS-style protected media format. The advantage that MP3 seems to have is that it's an "open" format -- you can copy it, edit it, change it and so on without a lot of RIAA nonsense.
Other systems may encompass this openness as well, but without the "average user" market acceptance that MP3 has they really go nowhere. I'd like to see MP3 get even wider acceptance by hardware makers, which can only happen through market acceptance.
CSS is as much about playback control as it is copy control -- *how* does region coding affect copyright enforcement again? Oh, that's right. The OVERWHELMING majority of individuals have been mass-exporting cassettes overseas before the movie has been into or left overseas theaters. The "professional" grey market importers, the player re-chippers and the pro pirates will be stopped for sure. It has been beat to death by the DeCSS people, CSS doesn't do anything for people creating bit-by-bit copies of DVDs, either.
At least be honest here, the entertainment industry isn't interested in *any* copying of "their" works, fair or foul, and they seem to be headed to a single-use, approved-region-and-player control mentality. Whether I'm copying a DVD to cassette to view at the cabin or whether I'm ripping a CD to play on an MP3 player, they would really much rather I had to pay for a seperate copy of each one, and they'd love to see me pay each time I used it (DIVX anyone?).
Then what exactly am I getting when I purchase music? The music industry seems to be making an implied claim of licensing by placing content controls on their intellecutual property. Without these claims of license, I should be able to copy the intellectual content and redistribute as I see fit. Just because they don't have a click-through when you play a CD doesn't mean there's not some license that accompanies it.
Isn't this basically the same argument that we get away with all the time at when it comes to software? We're licensing the intellectual property from the vendor, not the fsck'n media. In fact, we've lost/damaged the media to applications and called the vendor (we "registered" the software) and they sent us new media for a nominal fee (like, $10 or something on a $3k license). In fact, when we buy multiple licenses we only get 1 CD and are expected to dupe it or otherwise copy it to other distribution media ourselves.
Why doesn't this apply to music? I can accept the idea that an album originally sold on vinyl that has been put onto CD *AND* that has gone through extra special processing or contains extra material is different than the original. But when it's just a transfer to CD from the *same* masters used to make the album I don't see where it's any different than supplying an application on floppy vs. CD ROM. The intellectual content is otherwise the same, just delivered differently.
Slashdot Mirror
-
Are more than phone drones
- Trust your evaluation of the problem is really exposure of a bug and don't call it user error
- Have ready access to developers and source code and can provide patches/fixes in a quick time period
If any of the above elements are missing -- phone drones who have to run you ragged before escalating to someone with a pulse, fingerpointing about software/hardware "user error", no developer/source access -- you are fucked, and you might as well be posting on Ask Slashdot, since you'll probably get a worthwhile answer there faster than from support. In fact, I know people who will pay consultants when they have problems because the consultancies usually have better contacts and can get beyond level 2 support faster than Joe Support Contract could ever hope to.MP3 is more than good enough for bootlegs, where the sound quality is often really bad to begin with. Many of my most treasured recordings are either surreptitious cassette recordings with body mics or soundboard cassettes; all have been duped many times before I ever got them, and some are 15-20 years old.
Brittney Spears isn't any more tolerable because she's in 44Khz Stereo with a 100:1 S/N ratio, and my Replacements bootlegs aren't any less enjoyable because they've got audible tape hiss, crap edits and a tonal range of about 8Khz..
Since they're one of the great examples of killing a better product through inept marketing.
This should come as no surprise. Do you seriously think that corporations with marketing budgets that run into the millions of dollars are going to balk at spending $10k gobbling "their" name in whatever namespace becomes available?
The entire exercise in TLDs is a farce and is rapidly beginning to resemble a money-generating scheme for the registrars and ICANN. "Existing TLD business slow? Make new TLDS! Profit from registration frenzy!"
The only way to prevent corporate entities from hogging the namespaces is to have strict government regulations that would restrict TLDs to their chartered purpose, with the emphasis on enforcement at the registrar level -- these are the people with a profit motive to bend the rules. Strict regulation of multi-name ownership would help too, so that companies don't register thousands of names that get registered to "protect" trademarks but never get used.
And EVEN THAT is dubious, since it would require at minimum a major agreement among G7 governments to enforce. And even then it's doubtful that such a transnational agreement would work or get finalized in my lifetime.
The real answer is to scrap TLDs. Their intended purposes are unenforceable and their meaning is so diluted as to be meaningless. They're not necessary or useful unless some real, enforceable rules are in place.
The guys in the server room would probably be much more excited to get a kick-ass RS/6000 if it meant they could stick Linux on it.
The guys in the server room who clean the crap off the floor get hot and bothered by operating systems. The guys these people clean up after only care about getting the job done right.
For the midmarket they don't have to get standards right, they only have to have a certain amount of internal consistency with their own products. Lack of or weak interoperability has been their chief means of extiniguishing others that try to compete with them. This also spawns a fawning aftermarket of developers that come out with products that attempt to work around MS interoperability problems.
A non-compete clause has two basic functions. One, it "protects" the company from its competitors (they can't hire the talent with specilized skills in the field) and from your market value, by innhibiting you from changing jobs (long time spent unemployed or working outside your field at lower wages).
A non-compete compensation package that basically paid you for the period you were not employed would satisfy part 1 but not part 2, since you would have the ability to basically quit any time you wanted and pick up a pay check until you could go to work for the competitor. They're not going to pay you to fsck around until the competition can hire you.
I'd ask for 3 weeks of pay for each year of service, and full health benefits for the entire non-compete period. This ensures that they give you something in severance to help tide you over, and gives you an incentive to not job hop often since the payout will be dependent on your long-term loyalty.
I'd also negotatiate the non-compete to be contingent only on resignation or termination for cause, and not on involuntary economic termination. Who wants to get laid off AND told they can't get a job?
If they can "require" a non-compete at all your bargaining power is probably weak to begin with. If you can negotiate something that "gives" them something without demanding a free ride from them, you're likely to get something in return.
I wonder what Micros~1 has offered HP in return for taking a competing product off the market.
...the priviledge of continuing to sell MS software and OS?
Multimegabit consumer internet access cannot work with the current "all the packets you can eat" fixed pricing that most ISPs (but strangely not colocation facilities) have.
The upstream capacity cannot be purchased for $79.95/month in 20Mbit increments, more like $1000/mo for 1.5Mbit incrememnts, plus carrier charges. (I'm betting that there's some price break to go to DS-3, and again some break to OC-3, but the equipment and circuits are more expensive).
ISPs of such high-speed service would need to charge you by the packet or byte. This would enable "hogs" who necessitate upstream connectivity purchases to pay for the service they're using. You can always gamble that most people will sit idle most of them time (my home service averages 58 bytes/sec, with full-time DNS/Web/Mail service), but it doesn't take too many people @20Mbit/sec running servers or deciding to download all the ISOs they can find to choke off an OC-3.
But the difference is they haven't made a major effort to provide this stuff to the US market. Imagine an a Chinese or Indian web site where you could download ISOs of every commercially available application, fully cracked for no serial numbers. A satellite that offered all US channels for free with existing Dish or DirecTV equipment.
There's a lot of money being made on the US with these make-believe monopolies "protected" by patents and copyrights, and this money contributes significantly to the US economy.
That was it. You're right, it wasn't central to the plotline of the book, but it was central to the "why" things were the way they were. I've often found that the backstories of SciFi books are more interesting than the stories themselves.
I read a scifi book in the past year that was set in the "near" future (~50 years or so). The book was partly about how the US had fallen apart, primarily because its economy had been wiped out by the Chinese who had made available for free via Satellite any and every "protected" bit of American intellectual property.
This crushed the US economy because instead of being good at doing something, the US instead became good at owning the rights to something. In an economy where those rights are protected, this can make you rich and powerful. When someone can take them away, those rights are nearly worthless.
I wonder to what extent the US economy is really vulnerable to this kind of exploitation -- could the Chinese or some other nation suddenly decide that US IP rules are just too much and actively work to break their power by pirating US designs, content and so on?
Just saw Vincent Price in "Last Man On Earth" last night (an Italian horror version of the Matheson book "I Am Legend" which was made into "The Omega Man" in the US).
I've always wondered what I would do in a situation of mass breakdown. With a full population, I think I'd head for a cold, rural area and hope that the climate was warm enough to feed myself but cold and rural enough to keep the parasites away.
If everyone was gone, I think an Urban lifestyle would be great. Loads of canned goods, fuel, medicine and extant housing. There's enough wood in the desks and decorative trim of my office building alone to heat a house in Minnesota for an entire winter. I'd imagine there's enough diesel to provide continuous electricity for the next 20 years.
Does "same driver package" eq "same driver .dlls"?
I've seen it where a vendor packages the same installation with multiplatform installs, but its usually a bunch of different files for seperate platforms. This usually means that while an update will take place for a "current" device, the updates seldom get made for older/existing devices.
It'd be an impressive act of hardware/software engineering if each new nVidia video card were actually driver-compatible with the old card's drivers, only required new drivers to get new features. But I'm guessing it doesn't work this way.
Sure, and my car's engine designs are pretty well known as well. I'm about as likely to spend the time optimizing either one.
I think the biggest problem is driver obsolesence. I have an "ancient" ATI Rage 128 video card (an AIW to be precise) and ATI has never delivered more than a "beta" set of drivers and applications (TV, etc) for the AIW128 cards under Windows 2000. I'm doubting there will EVER be another set of drivers or tuner software for this card from ATI.
The video card people seem to have like three people that write drivers, and they're always busy writing drivers for the "current" crop of cards, until the cards actually are available, at which point they switch to writing drivers for the "next" slate of cards and the "old" cards simply do not get new or improved drivers written for them. A new OS often means getting stuck with the OEM drivers provided in the OS.
I'm perfectly happy with my ATI-128 performance in the games I've played it with. I've toyed with hunting down a $120 GEForce2 card, but for the reasons you stated I'm missing the why part other than getting drivers more modern and optimized drivers than I'll ever see for my existing card.
I don't see how any ISP can make any money offering xDSL for a fixed rate. I know the gamble is most lines sit idle most of the time (mine averages 58/bytes second, w/BIND, Sendmail, Apache and three PCs connected), but at the same time it only takes a a few dozen people maxing their lines out to seriously dent an OC-3, and not every ISP has that much bandwidth.
The idea of metering isn't as bad as it sounds -- one thing that keeps ISPs from rolling out serious bandwidth (1.5Mbps SDSL for everyone) is that ISPs are afraid that they won't be able to meet the demands of that much bandwidth because the marginal income outpaces the marginal cost. Charging by the packet, ISPs could easily offer as much bandwidth as you want WITHOUT having to worry about where the cash for the next OC-3 will come from.
Well, that kind of thinking doesn't work on the interent, and it is the reason why the biggies - AOL for example - will eventually collapse.
Which is why AOL hasn't become one of the most signficant media forces in recorded history and is currently filing bankruptcy.
Not to disagree with the principles behind your opinion, but the facts available suggest otherwise. AOL's marriage with Time Warner allows them to entirely short-circuit your plan. Time Warner owns huge CATV systems, in effect making AOL a telecomms provider AND an ISP at the same time.
My guess is that the telecomms companies realize that the residual income is really in providing services over the wire, not just the wire itself and once their technology is capable of providing a video-like signal, they too will enter the content-provider business.
The real threat here is the lazy American consumer who is interested in consuming entertainment, and an entertainment industry who makes their money acting as gatekeeper between the consumers of entertainment and the entertainers. THEY are the ones who dislike bidirectional broadband (makes anyone a producer, eliminates the middle man).
Well, you only suffer one generation loss when editing an MP3. The audio editor I use converts it to uncompressed audio for the editing process, it only gets saved as an MP3 if you re-export it. It doesn't get decompressed-recompressed each time an edit is run on the file.
I'm not an audio expert, but as far as I'm concerned the generational loss of decent 128k MP3s has been something I haven't noticed. Besides, I'm primarily referring to "consumer" editing, not professional multitrack editing, where I presume other more suitable file formats exist.
Is there any hard data as to the generational degredation of Mp3 streams with subsequent de/compression cycles? I know that early ATRAC versions had this problem, but current ATRAC seems relatively immune within a reasonable number of generations (like fewer than 20).
Sorry to sound bitter and cynical. I just cant see it taking off with MP3 already established, and with people already having forked out their cash for portable mp3 players.
The portable player market is pretty big, but the home player market isn't. I just bought an Apex 703 DVD/CD/MP3 player this weekend, and my choices for MP3 players were pretty small -- it was either Apex or none at all, at least in a sane price range.
The licensing costs of the Fraunhoffer patents are pretty high for a free software group that doesn't have a revenue stream, but at the same time I'm left wondering if the "computer media" world doesn't stay behind MP3 and instead splinters into a half-dozen other formats if we might not have that preference vacuum filled with a CSS-style protected media format. The advantage that MP3 seems to have is that it's an "open" format -- you can copy it, edit it, change it and so on without a lot of RIAA nonsense.
Other systems may encompass this openness as well, but without the "average user" market acceptance that MP3 has they really go nowhere. I'd like to see MP3 get even wider acceptance by hardware makers, which can only happen through market acceptance.
CSS is as much about playback control as it is copy control -- *how* does region coding affect copyright enforcement again? Oh, that's right. The OVERWHELMING majority of individuals have been mass-exporting cassettes overseas before the movie has been into or left overseas theaters. The "professional" grey market importers, the player re-chippers and the pro pirates will be stopped for sure. It has been beat to death by the DeCSS people, CSS doesn't do anything for people creating bit-by-bit copies of DVDs, either.
At least be honest here, the entertainment industry isn't interested in *any* copying of "their" works, fair or foul, and they seem to be headed to a single-use, approved-region-and-player control mentality. Whether I'm copying a DVD to cassette to view at the cabin or whether I'm ripping a CD to play on an MP3 player, they would really much rather I had to pay for a seperate copy of each one, and they'd love to see me pay each time I used it (DIVX anyone?).
Then what exactly am I getting when I purchase music? The music industry seems to be making an implied claim of licensing by placing content controls on their intellecutual property. Without these claims of license, I should be able to copy the intellectual content and redistribute as I see fit. Just because they don't have a click-through when you play a CD doesn't mean there's not some license that accompanies it.
Really? Like the oil's all sitting at the bottom of the spindle and not lubricating the top end of the platter?
Isn't this basically the same argument that we get away with all the time at when it comes to software? We're licensing the intellectual property from the vendor, not the fsck'n media. In fact, we've lost/damaged the media to applications and called the vendor (we "registered" the software) and they sent us new media for a nominal fee (like, $10 or something on a $3k license). In fact, when we buy multiple licenses we only get 1 CD and are expected to dupe it or otherwise copy it to other distribution media ourselves.
Why doesn't this apply to music? I can accept the idea that an album originally sold on vinyl that has been put onto CD *AND* that has gone through extra special processing or contains extra material is different than the original. But when it's just a transfer to CD from the *same* masters used to make the album I don't see where it's any different than supplying an application on floppy vs. CD ROM. The intellectual content is otherwise the same, just delivered differently.