Strange things happen. Whenever the technicalities of music compression are discussed you will find a lot of people claiming that mp3 is indistinguishable from the original CD. When it comes to downloading everyone will say that the compressed music is vastly inferior...
It's not like that's ever stopped them before. Heck, they could always post a dupe.
Thanks to a glimpse into the mysterious future I know that he nearly did. This story was about to give a repeat performance. Someone must have warned him...
The editors are on the offence today. Dupes may be lame. Tripes and quadrupes are new though. Wonder how far Taco will take it. Here's hoping to see people complain about a decaquintupe before the day is over.
I would guess, that under-appreciation varies from place to place. Some American stinkers never even make the theatres elsewhere on the planet and I guess that only a really small number of foreign films have any kind of success in America. My favourite film at the moment is Rushmore, a relatively popular film in English-speaking countries, but not even dubbed to German as far as I know. The Filthy Critic has been an invaluable guide to find Films that would otherwise not have been noticed by me and avoid others that I might have watched.
A little advice: Trust your friends recommendations. Last week I saw Bugsy Malone after a friend insisted. The description sounded horrible (basically a prohibition-era gangster musical with an all kids cast), but the film was really good.
can you say Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake?
Sure I can. But the problem with your list is that the most recent title was released in 1995. Shareware used to be alive and kicking. The question is if it is just suffering from a little exhaustion, or laying down to die.
There is a reason that successors to those titles didn't follow the shareware model anymore. When presentation became a really big deal in computer games the binary sizes became to big to distribute them over modem. Now we have broadband and people are able and willing to download files hundreds of megabytes big (just look at the mod scene for various shooters; EV:Nova is over 100Mb as well). But sometime in the intervening years the perceived difference in quality between boxed and download-able offerings became big enough to tarnish the image of shareware games for good
Now for the Mac side of things: Just around the time that PC gaming really took off we started to get starved for games. While big games where ported the overall selection was small. So we had no choice than to take a closer look at what shareware had to offer.
Maybe shareware will make a comeback on the PC side. People are complaining about a lack of innovation in games anyway (and as far as I know most PC shareware games are 'yet another puzzle game' anyway). Big publishers are reluctant to take risks with new ideas. Broadband is getting really popular. Maybe these factors combined will keep the scene alive long enough until the medics arrive.
That depends. But CDs don't have a fixed number of songs. They do however have a relatively fixed price (new releases cost the same; so do older ones). To tell you the truth I don't really look at the price tag when shopping for music. I have a general feeling, what I am going to pay but I am definitely not a price conscious shopper. Anyway--I just found a receipt for CDs I bought recently. I guess that the prices vary from country to country. Here is what I paid in Austria (currency: Euro)
Johnny Cash--American IV: The Man Comes Around. EUR17.99, 15 Tracks, ~EUR1.2/Track
Turner--A Pack Of Lies. EUR16.99, 13 Tracks, ~EUR1.3/Track
The Hives--Barely Legal. EUR15.99, 14 Tracks ~EUR1.14/Track
Terranova--Hitchhiking Nonstop With No Particular Destination. EUR15.99, 12 Tracks ~EUR1.3/Track
?1 is pretty close to equal $1, but stuff like taxes makes a one to one comparison pretty difficult. If $1 per track is really cheaper than what I pay now then I'm all for it. Some albums may have up to 30 tracks though, while others may have eight or less. If the number of tracks would influence the price of the album then a lot of people would be inclined to produce even more filler material than they might do now.
If the billing is handled the same way as it is with.Mac then I would probably end up paying the same as people in the US (FYI: $99.95 translated to EUR96.20 on that). If it is the same as the Apple store then I would end up paying a lot more ($29.99 vs EUR42).
Offtopic: Does anyone know how to get the euro-symbol to work from a mac in slashdot? If I write it in here it gets changed to a question mark. € doesn't work.
I believe, that there are different kinds of music consumers. On the one side we have the Top-40 audience. They only want the hits. They buy CD-singles and compilations, download single songs from file-sharing services and listen to heavy-rotation radio stations. On the other side we have the album buyers. They buy the full album, adore soulseek, and hate most of the radio stations. I am sure that there are different in-between types of music listeners, but for the sake of simplicity let's just look at these two.
If you only like hits then that is what you will keep buying. I would hope, that full albums will not be priced number of songs*$0.99. So album buyers will still listen to all songs an artist has to offer. A lot of artists will continue to make the music they want to and not only machine-selected hits.
If this is true. Well--that's bad. If it isn't then that's even worse. I read the register piece before I followed the link to wired. I know nothing about the possible security measures and exploits that could have been involved in this. And that is exactly the point. From what I read all information that wired really had, was the claims of some self-declared hackers and the statement of some security expert.
If that is enough to get an article like that one published--then why bother to actually try to hack/social engineer/whatever into the AOL database. Just claim something and watch the bad press hit AOL. I never used any of their products (well apart from iChat that kinda ties into their IM-network), but they are in enough trouble as it is. In this case there is such a thing as bad publicity. I am appalled by an article that consists of a whole lot of nothing and ends with "You see all those commercials saying AOL 8.0 is so secure," said Dan. "If people knew how insecure their data was they probably wouldn't use it."
You only read what you wanted to. The article explicitly states, that piracy is in fact destroying musicians. According to this very article no more than twenty albums are professionally produced in China per year. One of the artists interviewed for this article states, that he was only able to 'make' it because he has a rich and famous mother helping him to produce and promote his first album.
It is true that some artists make their living, because they can use their popularity to secure corporate sponsorship deals. Their only other source of possible income is to tour all year, or to quote from the article: "In China, we have to give so many concerts that we do not have time to rest our voices."
The problem is, that new artist have no way to get their music to any kind of big audience. They can't get an album produced, therefore they can't get on the radio and therefore they can't get the popularity needed to register on the radar of corporations. If that is the future of music I'm starting to feel sick.
If you plan to use it professionally then nothing is really stopping you from creating different users for different genres. Every user has his own iTunes Library by default. Then you can have as many times 32.000 as you wish. And it's easier to switch than the library-copy workaround posted somewhere else.
According to the article the system was implemented without prior warning. What they should do is educated the users on how to implement spam filtering on their machines and not stop messages from going through at all.
In my e-mail client spam is marked in a different color, and by now the success rate seems pretty good, but I still don't trust it enough to auto-delete them. Spam sucks, but false positives not getting through might be worse than boobie mail getting blocked. In this case members of a governing body are affected. They should be working on legislation against spam, instead of having their hands held by the IT department.
Another poster pointed out possible shortcomings of the Archos Jukebox, but that is not really the point, is it? You want us to explain why you would prefer one product over another? That's not really possible. Looking at the sheer amount of pictures posted to iPod around the world gallery show that some consider it a viable product.
A friend of mine (a windows using friend at that) looked at a lot of available mp3 players around christmas and he got an iPod. It is the best portable music player on the market right now. If you are willing to settle for anything less then it is not my business to set you straight.
Buying a Monet is not the same as buying a movie on DVD. Buying a print would be the same. I still agree with your sentiment, that you should be able to do with it whatever you feel like. The media companies don't agree though. For them buying a DVD is not the same as buying a print. According to them all you get is permission to access their content in whatever way they deem acceptable. Not ownership.
Glad that this was rumored for quite a while, so I didn't get a GBA yet. But I read something that kinda annoys me:
The unit will not have a headphone jack; Nintendo has created a special adapter for the GBA SP that plugs into the link port which enables users to plug in standard headphones. Sold seperately, of course.
That is evil. Is the link port the one you use to connect to the GameCube, or the one you use to play against others?
Making available simple hardware upgrades for a couple of years @ $299 a shot may delay the wholesale upgrade by a year but would also give Apple an opportunity to collect some money on a more reliable basis that someone else gets now.
That does indeed sound great. I wish computers would be so simple to upgrade, that everyone can do it. Maybe Apple made some calculations and decided against entering the upgrades market. Profit might simply be higher in letting those willing to modify their machines go elsewhere and waiting the extra year for the rest.
Apple doesn't care about third party suppliers when they think they can do better. The hired the developers of SoundJam away from Casady & Greene and came out with iTunes. And then there was the whole Watson thing.
Am I mistaken in assuming that you just pulled all those numbers from somewhere the sun doesn't shine? There is a slight chance that they don't have anything to do with reality and Apple would rather keep the market of upgraders as small as it currently is. You know -- so they sell more new machines instead of processor upgrades. I got my assumption from the same place you found your numbers, so make of it what you want.
What benefit would using ogg instead of mp3 get you? I suppose that you rip your cd's in that format (downloads are still mostly mp3, aren't they). Are the file-sizes smaller? Does it sound better? Is the encoding faster?
I know that mp3 is not frei*, but you probably will still be able encode and decode them in years to come. I don't know what ogg has to offer over mp3 that would justify supporting two, basically interchangeable formats, on one player. I know that the ipod does wav and aiff, but those have been around and popular for a long time.
*frei=german for free as in speech, the opposite of being locked up. My suggestion for expressing the free as in speech concept in one single word. Merry Christmas.
I disabled pop-ups on my browser, so all it does is usually open another empty browser window, which doesn't bother me too much. I never tried the java client, but I have to say, that infrequent pop-ups are a small price to pay for a really nice file sharing environement. Plus I have found that the people on the mac hubs are really helpfull if someone should choose to actually take advantage of the chat feature.
It seems like this one has been out on the windows side of the computing world for quite some time. The OSX client is pretty new, but it is really nice. You connect to a chat room or hub and can then search download from the other participants in that room. There are not to many mac rooms at the moment, but media content is plattform agnostic anyway. Get it at www.neo-modus.com
And I know that you shouldn't steal music. Up until now I never did. But I happen to own an iPod and it really pisses me off, when I can't put the music from a legally obtained cd on it just because some record companies think that they are funny. Copy protection won't stop me from stealing music - it will me get started.
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Strange things happen. Whenever the technicalities of music compression are discussed you will find a lot of people claiming that mp3 is indistinguishable from the original CD. When it comes to downloading everyone will say that the compressed music is vastly inferior...
Thanks to a glimpse into the mysterious future I know that he nearly did. This story was about to give a repeat performance. Someone must have warned him...
Sometimes I really wish Slashdot had a +1 depressing option for moderators.
The editors are on the offence today. Dupes may be lame. Tripes and quadrupes are new though. Wonder how far Taco will take it. Here's hoping to see people complain about a decaquintupe before the day is over.
I would guess, that under-appreciation varies from place to place. Some American stinkers never even make the theatres elsewhere on the planet and I guess that only a really small number of foreign films have any kind of success in America. My favourite film at the moment is Rushmore, a relatively popular film in English-speaking countries, but not even dubbed to German as far as I know. The Filthy Critic has been an invaluable guide to find Films that would otherwise not have been noticed by me and avoid others that I might have watched.
A little advice: Trust your friends recommendations. Last week I saw Bugsy Malone after a friend insisted. The description sounded horrible (basically a prohibition-era gangster musical with an all kids cast), but the film was really good.
Sure I can. But the problem with your list is that the most recent title was released in 1995. Shareware used to be alive and kicking. The question is if it is just suffering from a little exhaustion, or laying down to die.
There is a reason that successors to those titles didn't follow the shareware model anymore. When presentation became a really big deal in computer games the binary sizes became to big to distribute them over modem. Now we have broadband and people are able and willing to download files hundreds of megabytes big (just look at the mod scene for various shooters; EV:Nova is over 100Mb as well). But sometime in the intervening years the perceived difference in quality between boxed and download-able offerings became big enough to tarnish the image of shareware games for good
Now for the Mac side of things: Just around the time that PC gaming really took off we started to get starved for games. While big games where ported the overall selection was small. So we had no choice than to take a closer look at what shareware had to offer.
Maybe shareware will make a comeback on the PC side. People are complaining about a lack of innovation in games anyway (and as far as I know most PC shareware games are 'yet another puzzle game' anyway). Big publishers are reluctant to take risks with new ideas. Broadband is getting really popular. Maybe these factors combined will keep the scene alive long enough until the medics arrive.
That depends. But CDs don't have a fixed number of songs. They do however have a relatively fixed price (new releases cost the same; so do older ones). To tell you the truth I don't really look at the price tag when shopping for music. I have a general feeling, what I am going to pay but I am definitely not a price conscious shopper. Anyway--I just found a receipt for CDs I bought recently. I guess that the prices vary from country to country. Here is what I paid in Austria (currency: Euro)
Johnny Cash--American IV: The Man Comes Around. EUR17.99, 15 Tracks, ~EUR1.2/Track
Turner--A Pack Of Lies. EUR16.99, 13 Tracks, ~EUR1.3/Track
The Hives--Barely Legal. EUR15.99, 14 Tracks ~EUR1.14/Track
Terranova--Hitchhiking Nonstop With No Particular Destination. EUR15.99, 12 Tracks ~EUR1.3/Track
?1 is pretty close to equal $1, but stuff like taxes makes a one to one comparison pretty difficult. If $1 per track is really cheaper than what I pay now then I'm all for it. Some albums may have up to 30 tracks though, while others may have eight or less. If the number of tracks would influence the price of the album then a lot of people would be inclined to produce even more filler material than they might do now.
If the billing is handled the same way as it is with .Mac then I would probably end up paying the same as people in the US (FYI: $99.95 translated to EUR96.20 on that). If it is the same as the Apple store then I would end up paying a lot more ($29.99 vs EUR42).
Offtopic: Does anyone know how to get the euro-symbol to work from a mac in slashdot? If I write it in here it gets changed to a question mark. € doesn't work.
I believe, that there are different kinds of music consumers. On the one side we have the Top-40 audience. They only want the hits. They buy CD-singles and compilations, download single songs from file-sharing services and listen to heavy-rotation radio stations. On the other side we have the album buyers. They buy the full album, adore soulseek, and hate most of the radio stations. I am sure that there are different in-between types of music listeners, but for the sake of simplicity let's just look at these two.
If you only like hits then that is what you will keep buying. I would hope, that full albums will not be priced number of songs*$0.99. So album buyers will still listen to all songs an artist has to offer. A lot of artists will continue to make the music they want to and not only machine-selected hits.
If this is true. Well--that's bad. If it isn't then that's even worse. I read the register piece before I followed the link to wired. I know nothing about the possible security measures and exploits that could have been involved in this. And that is exactly the point. From what I read all information that wired really had, was the claims of some self-declared hackers and the statement of some security expert.
If that is enough to get an article like that one published--then why bother to actually try to hack/social engineer/whatever into the AOL database. Just claim something and watch the bad press hit AOL. I never used any of their products (well apart from iChat that kinda ties into their IM-network), but they are in enough trouble as it is. In this case there is such a thing as bad publicity. I am appalled by an article that consists of a whole lot of nothing and ends with "You see all those commercials saying AOL 8.0 is so secure," said Dan. "If people knew how insecure their data was they probably wouldn't use it."
You only read what you wanted to. The article explicitly states, that piracy is in fact destroying musicians. According to this very article no more than twenty albums are professionally produced in China per year. One of the artists interviewed for this article states, that he was only able to 'make' it because he has a rich and famous mother helping him to produce and promote his first album.
It is true that some artists make their living, because they can use their popularity to secure corporate sponsorship deals. Their only other source of possible income is to tour all year, or to quote from the article: "In China, we have to give so many concerts that we do not have time to rest our voices."
The problem is, that new artist have no way to get their music to any kind of big audience. They can't get an album produced, therefore they can't get on the radio and therefore they can't get the popularity needed to register on the radar of corporations. If that is the future of music I'm starting to feel sick.
If you plan to use it professionally then nothing is really stopping you from creating different users for different genres. Every user has his own iTunes Library by default. Then you can have as many times 32.000 as you wish. And it's easier to switch than the library-copy workaround posted somewhere else.
Right. That comparison from September 2001 is really interesting. And so relevant to the topic at hand.
Not yet anyway. But they would surely love to
According to the article the system was implemented without prior warning. What they should do is educated the users on how to implement spam filtering on their machines and not stop messages from going through at all.
In my e-mail client spam is marked in a different color, and by now the success rate seems pretty good, but I still don't trust it enough to auto-delete them. Spam sucks, but false positives not getting through might be worse than boobie mail getting blocked. In this case members of a governing body are affected. They should be working on legislation against spam, instead of having their hands held by the IT department.
Another poster pointed out possible shortcomings of the Archos Jukebox, but that is not really the point, is it? You want us to explain why you would prefer one product over another? That's not really possible. Looking at the sheer amount of pictures posted to iPod around the world gallery show that some consider it a viable product.
A friend of mine (a windows using friend at that) looked at a lot of available mp3 players around christmas and he got an iPod. It is the best portable music player on the market right now. If you are willing to settle for anything less then it is not my business to set you straight.
Buying a Monet is not the same as buying a movie on DVD. Buying a print would be the same. I still agree with your sentiment, that you should be able to do with it whatever you feel like. The media companies don't agree though. For them buying a DVD is not the same as buying a print. According to them all you get is permission to access their content in whatever way they deem acceptable. Not ownership.
You wouldn't. You might want to when playing against others though. That's why I asked. Well, having to pay extra for a dongle still is evil.
Glad that this was rumored for quite a while, so I didn't get a GBA yet. But I read something that kinda annoys me:
That is evil. Is the link port the one you use to connect to the GameCube, or the one you use to play against others?
Mind if I borrow your time machine? New Years eve was pretty fun. I'd like to do that again.
That does indeed sound great. I wish computers would be so simple to upgrade, that everyone can do it. Maybe Apple made some calculations and decided against entering the upgrades market. Profit might simply be higher in letting those willing to modify their machines go elsewhere and waiting the extra year for the rest.
Apple doesn't care about third party suppliers when they think they can do better. The hired the developers of SoundJam away from Casady & Greene and came out with iTunes. And then there was the whole Watson thing.
Am I mistaken in assuming that you just pulled all those numbers from somewhere the sun doesn't shine? There is a slight chance that they don't have anything to do with reality and Apple would rather keep the market of upgraders as small as it currently is. You know -- so they sell more new machines instead of processor upgrades. I got my assumption from the same place you found your numbers, so make of it what you want.
What benefit would using ogg instead of mp3 get you? I suppose that you rip your cd's in that format (downloads are still mostly mp3, aren't they). Are the file-sizes smaller? Does it sound better? Is the encoding faster?
I know that mp3 is not frei*, but you probably will still be able encode and decode them in years to come. I don't know what ogg has to offer over mp3 that would justify supporting two, basically interchangeable formats, on one player. I know that the ipod does wav and aiff, but those have been around and popular for a long time.
*frei=german for free as in speech, the opposite of being locked up. My suggestion for expressing the free as in speech concept in one single word. Merry Christmas.
I disabled pop-ups on my browser, so all it does is usually open another empty browser window, which doesn't bother me too much. I never tried the java client, but I have to say, that infrequent pop-ups are a small price to pay for a really nice file sharing environement. Plus I have found that the people on the mac hubs are really helpfull if someone should choose to actually take advantage of the chat feature.
It seems like this one has been out on the windows side of the computing world for quite some time. The OSX client is pretty new, but it is really nice. You connect to a chat room or hub and can then search download from the other participants in that room. There are not to many mac rooms at the moment, but media content is plattform agnostic anyway. Get it at www.neo-modus.com
And I know that you shouldn't steal music. Up until now I never did. But I happen to own an iPod and it really pisses me off, when I can't put the music from a legally obtained cd on it just because some record companies think that they are funny. Copy protection won't stop me from stealing music - it will me get started.
I am at least a bit short of being l33t. Hence 31336. Which in turn is stolen from an old geeks ins space episode...