You point out a very serious issue coming down the pipe for capitalism. I have this wierd vision of millions of robots and computers producing all we could ever want and yet the world be filled with poor people who have no jobs.
This recent recession is the first step down that path. It appears that a recovery is in full swing and that the economy is set to do very well next year, but employment is still not exected to make much of a recovery. Much of this is because computer technology has allowed for the elimination of many jobs.
We can expect that with each new recession, the job losses will grow, and the recovery of jobs will become slower and slower even as the economy rebounds faster and faster. Ideally this means there should be more for all of us, but because of capitalism, it means there will be more for the rich, not more for all.
But the problem is that in a globla economy, production of these items is a race to the bottom. The country that can produce the items for the cheapest wins. Money moves into china because they can make it cheaper than Taiwan or Japan. Then it moves to vietnam, then somewhere else.
The way you win this battle to the bottom is by keeping your costs as low as possible. If you pay people a pittance, give them no health care, retirement, etc, then you can make things cheaper. If they unionize or otherwise try to increase your costs, you move the operation to someplace cheaper.
This is a forumla for making the rich richer and the poor poorer in the long run. That's not good for anybody.
Look at how the survey was conducted though. They asked them what kind of TV shows they liked and about their behavior since. If somebody has a violent tendancy, aren't they going to tend to prefer watching violent television and playing violent games?
Also, note that this isn't saying amount of exposure to a program, it is reflecting what they liked. Some may have watched hundreds of episodes of Starskey and Hutch, with no violent consequence, and in the survey showed a preference to watch Sanford and Son. This is talking about what they liked, which doesn't necessarily denote influence over them but rather their influence over channel choices.
What's most telling are the other questions, how much they identified with the violent characters, and how realistic they judged them to be. Once again this does not reflect anything about the shows themselves but rather the mentality of the viewer and their ability to discern reality from fiction.
And yes the haitian thing is stupid PC hyper sensitivity. You aren't killing hatians in the game as a racial thing. It's a hatian gang, they are causing problems, you kill them. Nuff said.
A game is absolutely not freedom of speech. And I'm a liberal (well, mostly). A game is a (usually) commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through software.
A book is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets, through... paper.
A newspaper is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets, through... well paper again.
A song is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through lyrics and musical sounds (or sometimes not so musical if you've ever heard any power noise)
Do you get my drift or shall I continue?
The difference is that you/watch/ Scarface, but you/participate in/ Vice City. You don't watch the fictional leader bash in someone's head with a baseball bat (switching movies), you choose to do it yourself, and that's where the battle-line is: Do we allow or prohibit people from living out fantasies inside a computer game?
I participate in books. I read them and I have to imagine what the world looks like and what the characters do. I can live out my fantasies in books, or even in television. I mean who wouldn't like to go ride around on the Starship Enterprise and almost kill people because to actually kill them would violate some principal or something.
There is no facet of life where we ever prohibit people from engaging in fantasy, and every indication is that it's a necessary part of the human mind. We act out an agression fantasy in a video game, or by reading fight club, or by watching fight club. We do this to get out the urge to really go kill people in the real world.
I have killed virtual hatians. I have derived enjoyment from killing virtual hatians. I don't hate hatians, or much of anybody in fact, but in the context of the GAME, it's quite fun. I go around and see how many cops I can kill before they get me, and it's a hoot. We have friends over and take turns going on violent rampages. And then we go home and sleep peacefully without ever a thought of grabbing a samurai sword and decapitating random passers by. I see nothing immoral in this act because IT IS A GAME.
There is zero scientific evidence to suggest conclusively that there is a link between people playing violent video games or watching violent movies and then being lead to commit those acts. Yes, some people, already posessing of violent tendancies will go and commit various acts inspired by these media. But it's never been proven to be the cause, it's always the symptom, and more often than not it's just a cheap legal excuse to try to get a lighter sentance (the game made me do it; how can you put me in jail for life?)
Before video games existed some of the greatest attrocities in human history were committed. People read Catcher in the Rye and decided to assassinate presidents. There's no sign that the violence in these games is hurting anybody, and it may in fact be helping. I know that logging on to a game and blowing the crap out of people for an hour or two is stress relieving. I do that and then I don't feel any urge to take my anger out on my wife or my pets.
So, relax and go kill some virtual hatians. It'll all be okay.
I'm ruining my excellent karma by pointing this out, but take a look at all the "insightful" posts modded 4+. they are ALL ANTI-BUSH, and anti-war. Why do you think that is.
Yes, they are anti-bush and anti-war because Bush has forwarded a very dangerous foreign policy and started a pre-emptive war against a foe who was, quite clearly, a minimal threat to us. As am I, if you didn't figure that out.
Having said that, I still hope that this all works out like Bush thinks it will. If in the end we have one less dictator in the middle east, and a friendlier middle east, then I'll admit that he made a good choice. Saddam getting arreseted seems like a big step in the right direction, but we'll know in the next few weeks what difference it makes.
Personally I just think it's damn dangerous to go in and topple countries and hope you can control where the pieces fall at the end of the day. If I had my way, the anti-saddam forces that had existed in Iraq would have been given the support they needed way back in the early 90's. Working through the UN, making it impossible for Saddam to get WMD through rigorous inspections, and backing anti-saddam factions. That's how this should have happened. Too late now, but we'll see how it goes.
I've seen a few threads complaining about the realism of the show, but let's put in perspective against all the science fiction we've seen on television and film. I think this was by far one of the best compromises between realism and razzle dazzle. Sure there was sound in space, but it always muffled and subtle, making it kinda spooky and mostly realistic.
So kudos to the producers, I was really worried that this would suck (especially when I heard about the "cylons look like us" plot line), but it turned out to be very good. It honored the original while going places the original never dreamed. So if they can make a series that keeps faithful to the good start they got here, I'm all for it.
Okay seriously, there were like 3 or 4 scenes of sex. Mostly it was a quick way to establish the relationships between people. You knew they were romantically involved because they were gettin some.
I'm rather sensitive to shows being tarted up, but I think that they did a decent job with it here. The cylon woman seducing baltar finally gave a good reason why somebody might betray their entire civilization. His betrayal always seemed somewhat contrived in the original, but this was totally believable and it was interesting to see the interplay of his selfishness and guilt.
Yes technically there is no sound in space, but I think they did the best job I've scene outside of 2001 for making space feel like space. Yes you could hear things but they were always kinda ghostly and subtle, not the loud streaks of laser beams and such that have so plagued the sci-fi tv realm.
Yes, it would be more realistic to do no sound at all but I think they found a wonderful compromise between realism and razzle dazzle.
Any gains from a pump-and-dump would be outweighed by the massive loses from being perceived as an untrustworthy entity to do business with.
That depends entirely on whether their investors made money on the deal. People tend to only get pissed off when they lose money because of unethical behavior. Unethical behavior that makes them money is usually fine by them.
The thing is, if SCO has anything thrown out of court, then the presumption will be that none of their lawsuits have merit (which would likely be true). They can sue anybody they want at that point and their stock will continute to plumet and their reputation will continue to diminish.
If SCO doesn't have some substantial for this judge by the deadline, I'm predicting this gets tossed out and the SCO drama will collapse under it's own weight. The only thing that'll prop up the SCO price is all the people selling it short rushing to buy stock to make their huge returns.
There's not reason you can't do that, but my guess is that there's going to be two things that will ultimately be different with Redhat ES:
1) Incorporation of non-free software in the distribution. This isn't possible if they are giving away ISO's. Now they are obligated to provide source for the GPL stuff, but not everything, and this saves them the hassle of trying to create a packaged but cripled distro
2) RedHat support - whiteboxlinux may have just about everything redhat has, but it won't have some guy at redhat that you can call.
My assumption is that redhat went this route because of the first issue. I mean, they've never had to offer support for any of their downloadble software, so the second issue seems moot.
Re:Considering...
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but for ~$400 you are only getting the computer itself. Here you are paying $299 for a computer and monitor.
It's not an amazing deal, and not really that different from some other things, but it'll be interesting to see what an AOL controlled PC does. I also wonder if the support costs associated with the computers will drive the ultimate cost of this beyond what AOL can handle.
At this point SCO is screwed, they are playing poker with somebody who has way more money and is perfectly willing to call their bluff. When the suit against IBM fails, yes, the rest falls apart. SCO is hoping that if they can stir up enough trouble IBM will try to buy them, etc, just to clean this situation up.
IBM isn't going to do this, but what other choice does SCO have? If they back out of the suits, they'll be just as doomed, and it will happen faster. So they buy for time, and do everything they can to give IBM a reason to end this standoff.
It might get laughed out of court. Ultimately SCO will have to convince a judge that they have some sort of legitimate case. I suspect though if they thought they'd have a good chance, they'd sue a small low profile company to establish a legal precedent against a weak oponent.
At this point they are trying to spread fear into the community. They are trying to get IBM to settle rather than have this drag out and potentially hurt IBM's business. The more big names they can drag into the morass, the better for them.
The REAL fix is for the news media to pick up on the real story and for the public to reject the system. There was an uproar that killed the Pentium3 CPU serial numbers, this is far nastier. The problem is that they are going to spend a fortune on disinformation and propaganda campaign claiming that it is a good thing.
Ultimately these DRM things are just going to piss consumers off. Remember all the limitations built into Divx, the competitor to DVD. It died because it was complicated and annoying and consumers didn't want to put up with it.
Basically to the consumer, something that is hindered by DRM cannot have the appearance of being hindered. For example, with Itunes, I can play it on my computer, I can play it on my ipod and I can burn it to CD. But if I try to play it on something other than an IPod or a PC, I hit the DRM wall, and it loses it's appeal. I thought Itunes was wonderful until I tried to figure out how to get the files to play on Linux and realized it was impossible. I've not bought a thing from there since.
The funny thing is that if there was a way to unencrypt the Itunes files, I'd buy a lot more music through Itunes. Until I can play that music anywhere I want to, I'd rather buy the CD and rip it.
I got spamassassin up and running in about 5 minutes using the nice RPM package for it. Didn't need to do much in the way of hand configuring and it worked just fine.
They won't be making it any cheaper than ITunes because ITunes, by Apple's own admission, already doesn't make any money. Now conceivably they could make it a money loser given that they have huge piles of money to throw at it, but then there's serious anti-trust issues. Leveraging their OS monopoly to create a monopoly on music sales is a definite no no for them.
The interesting thing here is that this sets the potential for the RIAA and Microsoft to have a monopoly battle royale. If Microsoft tries to leverage their monopoly position to drive down the royalties the RIAA has to pay, then this whole thing might end up in court. With any luck they'd destroy eachother and make the world a better place:)
I wonder what the RIAA would have said if you'd gone to them and told them that they'd eventually have to compete with the maker of DOS in the music distribution business.
I'm wondering if we can expect some lawsuits to follow this move. First of all, companies that rely on popup ads, are likely to be pissed. Second of all, companies who sell popup blocking software are going to be screwed. I wonder if Microsoft's move could get killed under anti-trust oversight.
Simply put, the Matrix-In-A-Matrix theory is dramatically untenable. It undermines any possible resolution in the films because there can always be another Matrix enclosing the last, another dream to wake up from, as it were.
Yes, that's right. Ever seen the movie eXistenZ? People enter VR, and then within VR, enter VR, and you eventually realize that nobody has any clue what's real and what isn't anymore.
The problem with not using the matrix in a matrix concept is that a lot of the stuff from the second movie doesn't make any sense. How can a computer program predict the future actions of a human being who can exist outside of it? It all would be a lot more reasonable if Neo turned out to be a program as well.
Being one of those matrix in a matrix theorists who is going to be leaving to see the movie in 10 minutes, I must thank the editors for pre-ruining the movie.
I imagine that if Apple was only in the business of selling IPods they'd do just what you are saying. But Apple also wants you buying their computers. By supporting WMV, then they'd be providing a foot hold for Microsoft in their camp, and they definitely don't want that.
ITunes was released for Windows, as a way to get more people into the Apple family. Itunes only works effectively with an IPod, and if they can get you to buy into the IPod and ITunes, then they can start convincing you of how nice it would be to own an IBook, etc.
The power of Apple is it's ability to integrate everything together so well. You just hook stuff together and it just works. Sure it's proprietary, and you pay a premium, but damn if it doesn't do it's job beautifully. Apple long ago gave up on having a business computer. Now it's all about being a media console. Buy music, make music, buy movies, make movies, all through one device in a fashionable case.
God if only more games were released for the Apple, I'd be all over it:). Maybe they'll release a game console/set top box. Seems the next logical step in their game plan.
Your exactly right. There's still value in people who find talent, get it recorded and market it, but with the distribution channels changing, the major labels aren't going to have a choke hold on that process anymore.
If Apple plays it's cards right, they'll make it easy for even the smallest label or promoter to get music onto their system. This allows for smaller producers to provide music for smaller and smaller niches. Most of these won't make big money, but some will, and it will increase the likelyhood that small bands can make a living.
The major labels might stick around, but my sense is that they'll take a serious downfall as the margins they've been getting fat on will shrink. Apple said they aren't looking to make a profit on ITunes, and that means, that if another label can come and offer them break even pricing at 49 cents a track or 10 cents a track, Apple will do it in a heart beat, and that's what will kill the labels.
Right now the power here is in that hands of the music industry because most of their music is still sold through the traditional channels. If they didn't feel like selling through ITunes, they could do so with little pain.
Where it gets interesting is when on-line distribution does become the primary distribution mechanism, the music companies are going to lose their power because they no longer hold the keys to the kingdom. Why would an artist sign a deal with Warner or Sony when they could sell music directly to Apple and take home more money?
The failure of the music industry to make a palatable alternative that they can control will be their demise.
Yes, it could have more battery life but then it would be larger (like the model they show). Since its small size and weight are what make it perfect for sitting in pockets or running with without getting sore hands, that wouldn't be that useful to me. Actually, what would be simple is just having removable batteries. Yes, it would have to be slightly bigger, but only slightly. Then I could buy a spare to keep charged for longer uses.
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You point out a very serious issue coming down the pipe for capitalism. I have this wierd vision of millions of robots and computers producing all we could ever want and yet the world be filled with poor people who have no jobs.
This recent recession is the first step down that path. It appears that a recovery is in full swing and that the economy is set to do very well next year, but employment is still not exected to make much of a recovery. Much of this is because computer technology has allowed for the elimination of many jobs.
We can expect that with each new recession, the job losses will grow, and the recovery of jobs will become slower and slower even as the economy rebounds faster and faster. Ideally this means there should be more for all of us, but because of capitalism, it means there will be more for the rich, not more for all.
But the problem is that in a globla economy, production of these items is a race to the bottom. The country that can produce the items for the cheapest wins. Money moves into china because they can make it cheaper than Taiwan or Japan. Then it moves to vietnam, then somewhere else.
The way you win this battle to the bottom is by keeping your costs as low as possible. If you pay people a pittance, give them no health care, retirement, etc, then you can make things cheaper. If they unionize or otherwise try to increase your costs, you move the operation to someplace cheaper.
This is a forumla for making the rich richer and the poor poorer in the long run. That's not good for anybody.
Look at how the survey was conducted though. They asked them what kind of TV shows they liked and about their behavior since. If somebody has a violent tendancy, aren't they going to tend to prefer watching violent television and playing violent games?
Also, note that this isn't saying amount of exposure to a program, it is reflecting what they liked. Some may have watched hundreds of episodes of Starskey and Hutch, with no violent consequence, and in the survey showed a preference to watch Sanford and Son. This is talking about what they liked, which doesn't necessarily denote influence over them but rather their influence over channel choices.
What's most telling are the other questions, how much they identified with the violent characters, and how realistic they judged them to be. Once again this does not reflect anything about the shows themselves but rather the mentality of the viewer and their ability to discern reality from fiction.
And yes the haitian thing is stupid PC hyper sensitivity. You aren't killing hatians in the game as a racial thing. It's a hatian gang, they are causing problems, you kill them. Nuff said.
A game is absolutely not freedom of speech. And I'm a liberal (well, mostly). A game is a (usually) commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through software.
... paper.
/watch/ Scarface, but you /participate in/ Vice City. You don't watch the fictional leader bash in someone's head with a baseball bat (switching movies), you choose to do it yourself, and that's where the battle-line is: Do we allow or prohibit people from living out fantasies inside a computer game?
A book is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets, through
A newspaper is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets, through... well paper again.
A song is (usually) a commercial attempt to engage our minds, hearts, and wallets through lyrics and musical sounds (or sometimes not so musical if you've ever heard any power noise)
Do you get my drift or shall I continue?
The difference is that you
I participate in books. I read them and I have to imagine what the world looks like and what the characters do. I can live out my fantasies in books, or even in television. I mean who wouldn't like to go ride around on the Starship Enterprise and almost kill people because to actually kill them would violate some principal or something.
There is no facet of life where we ever prohibit people from engaging in fantasy, and every indication is that it's a necessary part of the human mind. We act out an agression fantasy in a video game, or by reading fight club, or by watching fight club. We do this to get out the urge to really go kill people in the real world.
I have killed virtual hatians. I have derived enjoyment from killing virtual hatians. I don't hate hatians, or much of anybody in fact, but in the context of the GAME, it's quite fun. I go around and see how many cops I can kill before they get me, and it's a hoot. We have friends over and take turns going on violent rampages. And then we go home and sleep peacefully without ever a thought of grabbing a samurai sword and decapitating random passers by. I see nothing immoral in this act because IT IS A GAME.
There is zero scientific evidence to suggest conclusively that there is a link between people playing violent video games or watching violent movies and then being lead to commit those acts. Yes, some people, already posessing of violent tendancies will go and commit various acts inspired by these media. But it's never been proven to be the cause, it's always the symptom, and more often than not it's just a cheap legal excuse to try to get a lighter sentance (the game made me do it; how can you put me in jail for life?)
Before video games existed some of the greatest attrocities in human history were committed. People read Catcher in the Rye and decided to assassinate presidents. There's no sign that the violence in these games is hurting anybody, and it may in fact be helping. I know that logging on to a game and blowing the crap out of people for an hour or two is stress relieving. I do that and then I don't feel any urge to take my anger out on my wife or my pets.
So, relax and go kill some virtual hatians. It'll all be okay.
I'm ruining my excellent karma by pointing this out, but take a look at all the "insightful" posts modded 4+. they are ALL ANTI-BUSH, and anti-war. Why do you think that is.
Yes, they are anti-bush and anti-war because Bush has forwarded a very dangerous foreign policy and started a pre-emptive war against a foe who was, quite clearly, a minimal threat to us. As am I, if you didn't figure that out.
Having said that, I still hope that this all works out like Bush thinks it will. If in the end we have one less dictator in the middle east, and a friendlier middle east, then I'll admit that he made a good choice. Saddam getting arreseted seems like a big step in the right direction, but we'll know in the next few weeks what difference it makes.
Personally I just think it's damn dangerous to go in and topple countries and hope you can control where the pieces fall at the end of the day. If I had my way, the anti-saddam forces that had existed in Iraq would have been given the support they needed way back in the early 90's. Working through the UN, making it impossible for Saddam to get WMD through rigorous inspections, and backing anti-saddam factions. That's how this should have happened. Too late now, but we'll see how it goes.
I've seen a few threads complaining about the realism of the show, but let's put in perspective against all the science fiction we've seen on television and film. I think this was by far one of the best compromises between realism and razzle dazzle. Sure there was sound in space, but it always muffled and subtle, making it kinda spooky and mostly realistic.
So kudos to the producers, I was really worried that this would suck (especially when I heard about the "cylons look like us" plot line), but it turned out to be very good. It honored the original while going places the original never dreamed. So if they can make a series that keeps faithful to the good start they got here, I'm all for it.
Okay seriously, there were like 3 or 4 scenes of sex. Mostly it was a quick way to establish the relationships between people. You knew they were romantically involved because they were gettin some.
I'm rather sensitive to shows being tarted up, but I think that they did a decent job with it here. The cylon woman seducing baltar finally gave a good reason why somebody might betray their entire civilization. His betrayal always seemed somewhat contrived in the original, but this was totally believable and it was interesting to see the interplay of his selfishness and guilt.
Yes technically there is no sound in space, but I think they did the best job I've scene outside of 2001 for making space feel like space. Yes you could hear things but they were always kinda ghostly and subtle, not the loud streaks of laser beams and such that have so plagued the sci-fi tv realm.
Yes, it would be more realistic to do no sound at all but I think they found a wonderful compromise between realism and razzle dazzle.
Any gains from a pump-and-dump would be outweighed by the massive loses from being perceived as an untrustworthy entity to do business with.
That depends entirely on whether their investors made money on the deal. People tend to only get pissed off when they lose money because of unethical behavior. Unethical behavior that makes them money is usually fine by them.
The thing is, if SCO has anything thrown out of court, then the presumption will be that none of their lawsuits have merit (which would likely be true). They can sue anybody they want at that point and their stock will continute to plumet and their reputation will continue to diminish.
If SCO doesn't have some substantial for this judge by the deadline, I'm predicting this gets tossed out and the SCO drama will collapse under it's own weight. The only thing that'll prop up the SCO price is all the people selling it short rushing to buy stock to make their huge returns.
There's not reason you can't do that, but my guess is that there's going to be two things that will ultimately be different with Redhat ES:
1) Incorporation of non-free software in the distribution. This isn't possible if they are giving away ISO's. Now they are obligated to provide source for the GPL stuff, but not everything, and this saves them the hassle of trying to create a packaged but cripled distro
2) RedHat support - whiteboxlinux may have just about everything redhat has, but it won't have some guy at redhat that you can call.
My assumption is that redhat went this route because of the first issue. I mean, they've never had to offer support for any of their downloadble software, so the second issue seems moot.
Yes, but for ~$400 you are only getting the computer itself. Here you are paying $299 for a computer and monitor.
It's not an amazing deal, and not really that different from some other things, but it'll be interesting to see what an AOL controlled PC does. I also wonder if the support costs associated with the computers will drive the ultimate cost of this beyond what AOL can handle.
At this point SCO is screwed, they are playing poker with somebody who has way more money and is perfectly willing to call their bluff. When the suit against IBM fails, yes, the rest falls apart. SCO is hoping that if they can stir up enough trouble IBM will try to buy them, etc, just to clean this situation up.
IBM isn't going to do this, but what other choice does SCO have? If they back out of the suits, they'll be just as doomed, and it will happen faster. So they buy for time, and do everything they can to give IBM a reason to end this standoff.
It might get laughed out of court. Ultimately SCO will have to convince a judge that they have some sort of legitimate case. I suspect though if they thought they'd have a good chance, they'd sue a small low profile company to establish a legal precedent against a weak oponent.
At this point they are trying to spread fear into the community. They are trying to get IBM to settle rather than have this drag out and potentially hurt IBM's business. The more big names they can drag into the morass, the better for them.
The REAL fix is for the news media to pick up on the real story and for the public to reject the system. There was an uproar that killed the Pentium3 CPU serial numbers, this is far nastier. The problem is that they are going to spend a fortune on disinformation and propaganda campaign claiming that it is a good thing.
Ultimately these DRM things are just going to piss consumers off. Remember all the limitations built into Divx, the competitor to DVD. It died because it was complicated and annoying and consumers didn't want to put up with it.
Basically to the consumer, something that is hindered by DRM cannot have the appearance of being hindered. For example, with Itunes, I can play it on my computer, I can play it on my ipod and I can burn it to CD. But if I try to play it on something other than an IPod or a PC, I hit the DRM wall, and it loses it's appeal. I thought Itunes was wonderful until I tried to figure out how to get the files to play on Linux and realized it was impossible. I've not bought a thing from there since.
The funny thing is that if there was a way to unencrypt the Itunes files, I'd buy a lot more music through Itunes. Until I can play that music anywhere I want to, I'd rather buy the CD and rip it.
I got spamassassin up and running in about 5 minutes using the nice RPM package for it. Didn't need to do much in the way of hand configuring and it worked just fine.
Their e-mail to me got trapped by my spam filter.
They won't be making it any cheaper than ITunes because ITunes, by Apple's own admission, already doesn't make any money. Now conceivably they could make it a money loser given that they have huge piles of money to throw at it, but then there's serious anti-trust issues. Leveraging their OS monopoly to create a monopoly on music sales is a definite no no for them.
:)
The interesting thing here is that this sets the potential for the RIAA and Microsoft to have a monopoly battle royale. If Microsoft tries to leverage their monopoly position to drive down the royalties the RIAA has to pay, then this whole thing might end up in court. With any luck they'd destroy eachother and make the world a better place
I wonder what the RIAA would have said if you'd gone to them and told them that they'd eventually have to compete with the maker of DOS in the music distribution business.
I'm wondering if we can expect some lawsuits to follow this move. First of all, companies that rely on popup ads, are likely to be pissed. Second of all, companies who sell popup blocking software are going to be screwed. I wonder if Microsoft's move could get killed under anti-trust oversight.
Simply put, the Matrix-In-A-Matrix theory is dramatically untenable. It undermines any possible resolution in the films because there can always be another Matrix enclosing the last, another dream to wake up from, as it were.
Yes, that's right. Ever seen the movie eXistenZ? People enter VR, and then within VR, enter VR, and you eventually realize that nobody has any clue what's real and what isn't anymore.
The problem with not using the matrix in a matrix concept is that a lot of the stuff from the second movie doesn't make any sense. How can a computer program predict the future actions of a human being who can exist outside of it? It all would be a lot more reasonable if Neo turned out to be a program as well.
Being one of those matrix in a matrix theorists who is going to be leaving to see the movie in 10 minutes, I must thank the editors for pre-ruining the movie.
I imagine that if Apple was only in the business of selling IPods they'd do just what you are saying. But Apple also wants you buying their computers. By supporting WMV, then they'd be providing a foot hold for Microsoft in their camp, and they definitely don't want that.
:). Maybe they'll release a game console/set top box. Seems the next logical step in their game plan.
ITunes was released for Windows, as a way to get more people into the Apple family. Itunes only works effectively with an IPod, and if they can get you to buy into the IPod and ITunes, then they can start convincing you of how nice it would be to own an IBook, etc.
The power of Apple is it's ability to integrate everything together so well. You just hook stuff together and it just works. Sure it's proprietary, and you pay a premium, but damn if it doesn't do it's job beautifully. Apple long ago gave up on having a business computer. Now it's all about being a media console. Buy music, make music, buy movies, make movies, all through one device in a fashionable case.
God if only more games were released for the Apple, I'd be all over it
Your exactly right. There's still value in people who find talent, get it recorded and market it, but with the distribution channels changing, the major labels aren't going to have a choke hold on that process anymore.
If Apple plays it's cards right, they'll make it easy for even the smallest label or promoter to get music onto their system. This allows for smaller producers to provide music for smaller and smaller niches. Most of these won't make big money, but some will, and it will increase the likelyhood that small bands can make a living.
The major labels might stick around, but my sense is that they'll take a serious downfall as the margins they've been getting fat on will shrink. Apple said they aren't looking to make a profit on ITunes, and that means, that if another label can come and offer them break even pricing at 49 cents a track or 10 cents a track, Apple will do it in a heart beat, and that's what will kill the labels.
Right now the power here is in that hands of the music industry because most of their music is still sold through the traditional channels. If they didn't feel like selling through ITunes, they could do so with little pain.
Where it gets interesting is when on-line distribution does become the primary distribution mechanism, the music companies are going to lose their power because they no longer hold the keys to the kingdom. Why would an artist sign a deal with Warner or Sony when they could sell music directly to Apple and take home more money?
The failure of the music industry to make a palatable alternative that they can control will be their demise.
Yes, it could have more battery life but then it would be larger (like the model they show). Since its small size and weight are what make it perfect for sitting in pockets or running with without getting sore hands, that wouldn't be that useful to me.
Actually, what would be simple is just having removable batteries. Yes, it would have to be slightly bigger, but only slightly. Then I could buy a spare to keep charged for longer uses.