You think your filesharing is helping the majors' profits? I disagree. I think the record companies have ample access to their own books, and the reason they are claiming to be losing money to filesharing is because...they are. Sure, maybe you are occasionally buying obscure reissues that nobody else has heard about. And maybe a lot of your friends are doing the same thing. But the majors don't make the bulk of their profits from those small runs. Due to the economies of scale and distribution, they make their profits from the multiplatinum blockbusters. So yeah, maybe they're selling 2,000 more Metric Resistance, 5,000 more Goldfrapp here and there. But downside is that they're selling "only" 3 million of the latest Justin Timberlake instead of 9 million. Or 2 million of the latest Beyonce instead of 6 million. Or 2 million of Evanescence instead of 5 million. These are huge studio backed acts that you hear about incessantly and you figure must be moving massive amounts like the Eagles or Foreigner or Supertramp or Cheap Trick used to do back in the day. Except they're not. They're just selling "okay" because every teenager knows how to download the tracks for free off Kazaa or burn a copy of their friend's CD. Check the charts yourself. You'll be surprised at how little these ubiquitous, overexposed acts are actually selling in contrast to the mountain of hype they're generating.
Also with HDD's packed with thousands of songs, today's music is forced to compete with pristine, digitally remastered stuff from 20 or 30 years ago. And to be frank, 21st century music is by and large getting its ass kicked. Kids today are much more cognizant of '80s and '70s music than kids from the 1970s were appreciative of scratchy old 45's from the 1950s and older stuff from the '40s. There was a sea change in production values that took place starting in the late sixties and continuing into the '70s. As a result of that, any one of those dinosaur rock groups from the late '70s had just as much ear candy as the today's pop. So there's no reason anymore to automatically prefer, new, fresh stuff to the classics. The machine of innovation is running out of gas, and the fact that the older stuff is so easily available for free is just making it worse for up and coming acts.
Don't kid yourself. The majors are hurting. Not they don't deserve to, with the recycled, warmed over dreck they're feeding us. But they are in serious pain, and it's only going to get worse for them. And like any wounded animal, they're fighting tooth and nail, hoping to keep the vultures at bay.
In Sun v Microsoft, the injunction was granted against a defendant in the case. Who would the SCO injunction enjoin? Reasonably only IBM. With SuSE, Redhat, and innumerable small Linux vendors afoot, and very willing and able to distribute Linux, an injuction only vs. IBM would have little impact on SCO's bottom line.
However, I could see that pissing of IBM majorly. They'd probably have to really take off the kid gloves at that point.
So mebbe ve should velcome zees how-do-u-say een-jank-shan?
Are you ACTUALLY suggesting that a chimp was raped by a man?
Not suggesting, but wondering if it could be the case. Certainly one would have to be foolish to imagine that in the history of our two species a human and a chimp have never engaged in intercourse. Although it seems highly likely that any resulting conception would be unviable, imagine that there was a miracle birth which eventually led to this group of "giant apes" that's been discovered. Perhaps it would turn out they were 3/4 chimp and 1/4 human, for example. Wouldn't that cause a major ethical storm? Would they be entitled to full human rights? Would they be experimented upon against their will? It's an interesting issue, albeit one fairly well explored in different form by Charleton Heston, Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter.
I was a bit curious as to the reason why there seems to be no speculation about this "giant ape" being a chimpanzee/human hybrid. Of course, humans have a different number of chromosomes than the other great apes, but that in itself doesn't seem to be an absolute bar to cross-breeding. The answer seems to be in this article, where it basically says that human DNA has a number of chromosomal "inversions" with respect to chimpanzee DNA, and those inversions would lead to cross-breeding sterility.
Why is it that you can accept that learning ability is to an extent hard-wired, but you are so dismissive of the idea that social temperament is to an extent hard-wired?
This probably would've been filed under the "too obvious to write about" category in the days when people routinely had four or more children.
2) Linux code should be de-SCOed to prevent this sort of problem from continuing to flair up
Okay, so Linux gets de-SCO'ed. What's to stop "Fyoo-Byar, Inc." from getting someone to contribute "stolen" code from one of their own obscure but valid patents into Linux or a similar open source OS, waiting a few years for the kernel to be embedded everywhere, and then suing everyone as SCO has done? It seems to me that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The thing is, it's quite possible that traditional software has stolen code too, but they're more shielded from this kind of action because the source is not exposed to public examination.
So, is this really about SCO desperately looking for revenue anywhere, or could McBride be a front man for someone else trying to permanently destroy the viability of Open Source in general?
This whole Snapster thing is just silly to me. If you're gonna go through that whole rigamarole, why not just dish out the measly 10 bucks a month and get unlimited streams from any number of the online streaming companies?
Elsewhere you wrote:
In theory, when you photocopy a book you are infringing copyright. But "fair use" means that if you don't do it with bad intentions or on an industrial scale, you don't go to jail. [emphasis mine]
That's often stated but not quite true. It's not the case that "fair use" is an infringement you get away with. It is defined (in the USCA) as specifically "not an infringement of copyright." I suppose it would be more accurate to say that you are doing something which would ordinarily be an infringement, but because it's fair use, it turns out not to be an infringement at all.
I know of a case in the New York Small Claims court where a person won a default judgment for $3000 against Microsoft. A default judgment means they never showed up in Court to defend themselves against the suit. His cause of action (claim) was that upgrading his computer to Windows XP caused his scanner and other peripherals to stop functioning, and he lost work as a result.
The amazing thing was that Microsoft never contested the judgment. They paid him!
It's funny. For once, a tech company gets it right, and people complain. Why 7.1 audio? What if the thing can hook up to your TV/stereo so you can play its movies and games on a bigger screen? If they can design the capability for the best possible audio now, without adding significantly to the retail price, then let's have it, instead of having a kludgey audio upgrade later on.
But instead, slashdotters prefer the equivalent of "you'll never need more than 640K RAM" so that they can chuckle at Sony's incompetence.
Sony? Open? Sony makes good quality products but they love to push their proprietary technology. MagicGate Memory Sticks, MD, memory MagicGate Memory Sticks, Palm OS w/ proprietary extensions, DDCD (w/ Philips), 2.88Mb ED disks, etc. And I'm pretty sure they were among the first to massively copy protect their Japanese music releases. Their plan is world domination, just like Microsoft. They just do it with products that people love, instead of products that people hate but have no choice except to use.
OK, so Kazaa usage trickles down to near zero. Now what? No more downloading Three Dog Night's unreleased studio sessions? No swapping of the full catalog of Fishbone? In other words, no more impulse downloading of dozens of old, obscure songs you'd never actually pay for anyway, even at 25 cents a song. How's this supposed to help CD sales, again?
Do they really think people are going to go back to buying the latest hits at $17.99 a pop when it's still so easy, even without major filesharing programs, to burn a copy of the lastet CD from someone else in your dorm, or to swap mp3s over IM with trusted friends only?
I don't begrudge their attempts to pursue legal remedies but at this point the barn door is wide open and the horse is halfway to the next county.
Considering that they haven't gotten past the stage of "crappy powerpoint slides" and "committee-to-form a committee," shouldn't the working name be more like C++2x?
On the face of it, SCO's claim seems outrageous. How could the outcome of IBM's suit affect those people who have already purchased AIX? It's as if I bought a car from GM, but it turned out GM had violated Ford's patents. Would I then be required to "destroy" my car? No, GM would pay damages and that would be that.
But SCO is saying, this is not like a purchase. A software license is more like a rental. I lease my car to you in perpetuity, provided that you agree to attach a Taiwanese flag to the antenna. You comply for a few years, then put a PRC flag in the window. What's more, you sublease the car to someone else, also in perpetuity. I see that person tooting around in my automobile with a PRC flag. Now I want to repossess my vehicle. Guess what, the sublicensee is out of luck.
Now, if SCO's claim is valid, that they have the right to "virally" nullify a license they took no direct part in, what does this say about the overall safety of closed-source commercially licensed software? Once the floodgates have been opened, we'd see a deluge of lawsuits threatening to retroactively invalidate every license from Windows to PlayStation2. At that point, Free/Open software is going to look a hell of a lot more attractive. SCO, like the proverbial enemy of our enemy, could wind up being a friend.
Too late though, to stop them from being gobbled up alive by IBM's pinstriped assassins.
(Some points in this comment were previously elucidated upon in this post by jlrader2.)
Perhaps even more significantly... how does this really differ from a decent OS or Desktop-Env? I mean in GNOME I can have a Mozilla window open in a quarter of my screen, a terminal window running Mutt in another corner, OpenOffice in another part and nautilus file browser for the rest, etc.
That's an interesting point. The need or desire for a product such as Haystack, with all your information visible at once, really demonstrates something we all know intuitively but rarely say out loud:
The paradigm of the overlapping windowing system has been a failure.
We are forced to resort to tabs, to multiple desktops, to transparent windows, to menu bars...all kludges which exist mainly because overlapping windows tend to obscure more of our information than they reveal. We're constantly forced to move, resize, minimize and maximize. Particularly if you are stuck with MS Windows...the OS out of the box comes with no way to tell a window: Don't let other windows overlap you. Or to say to a programs: Always start your window in that one corner of my screen. Or to tell two windows: Lock together on your edge so I can use you as a unit.
My Kyocera 6035 will run for approx 4 days with moderate phone and PDA use. If the phone is turned off, it'll last for over a month.
Interesting. (And informative +1). But what I was thinking about is the inevitable situation where your cellphone's battery dies. I realize this doesn't happen to super well-organized and methodical people who recharge every night, but it's happened to me on more than a few occasions. I don't wan't to be sans PDA because I've used up the battery yakking. And I suppose one could carry a spare battery around, but again, that defeats the purpose of consolidating the objects.
Most combo devices have speakerphones built in.
Sorry, I should've said, "Can't talk and tap at the same time without being a dick.;-) Just my opinion, but I think speakerphones of any kind are extremely rude unless the phones are full duplex *and* you're in a secluded location like a car so as not to annoy others *and* the other person can hear you very clearly. Cell phones have the first part covered but if you're driving you certainly ought not be tapping and talking too, and as for the last part, "very clearly" and "cellphones" don't really belong in the same sentence.
But, even if you do, so what? That's just part of the decision making process of switching carriers.
I see. Combo phones aren't inconvenient, but even if they are, so what, just deal with it, eh? Somehow that's not up to the standard of your other answers. The "so what" is that if your new carrier doesn't support the old phone, you're back to using two gadgets again, or you're forced to buy a new combo phone. And they are much more costly than regular phones. The upshot is that a combo phone is just one more way to potentially "lock" you into one carrier. And realizing that is "just part of the decision making process of" deciding whether you want a combo phone in the first place.
Nevertheless, you make some good points and I might even consider trying a combo phone which is on the smaller side and not too expensive. If the PDA part isn't up to snuff, at least I'll have a phone with large selection of downloadable games.
BTW, my understanding of a FUDder is that it is someone who deliberately is trying to woo people away from the beloved gadget/OS/programming language out of malice or some hidden agenda. Not just anybody who happens to raise issues about the subject. I could care less if everyone buys combo phones, in fact it would surely be a Good Thing since it would lower prices in general and lead to an improvement in the areas where the devices are lacking.
1) Combo will either be too big for an ideal phone or too small for an ideal pda.
2) PDAs should have long battery life. But they don't when part of a power-guzzling cellphone.
3) Can't talk and tap at the same time. Unless you've brought along the earpiece attachment. But then there you go carrying two objects again.
4) PDA/cellphones usually seem to be less expandable or a few OS versions behind the latest solo PDAs.
5) In the US, switching to a different wireless carrier means switching to a different phone. With a combo unit, you'd have to switch to a different PDA too.
I think people are slightly missing the point of how a "timed" subscription service would work in practice. Nobody would get stuck with 7,500 useless songs because the purpose of these services is to not build up a collection. You download a few songs, maybe transfer them to a portable if you want, listen to them until you get tired of them, then delete the lot of them and download some brand new songs. There's no need to keep a "collection" of songs because you would have broadband access to the music provider's servers, and you could always re-download an old favorite if you felt like it. The download would probably stream so you could get instant gratification.
For someone who might currently subscribe to streaming radio (as opposed to people who are automatically dead set against a rental scheme), this would function as an upgrade to what's available now in the guise of services like Launch.com, Musicmatch MX, Live365, and Real Radio. Basically, you'd get to listen to any song you want, in any order you want for a flat free with no commercials. And if you want to "share" with a friend who has the same service, you just send them a pointer to the song on the server, no need to email them the file itself. And you'd get to put your current playlist on your portable too. For current streaming subscribers, this is a proposition with no downside.
Now, is this going to appeal to everybody? No, but it doesn't have to. But I think it would appeal to the type of people who don't see the point in buying DVD's instead of just renting them, or in buying books instead of going to the library. The sort of people who don't like to clutter their lives with excessive "ownership." And I think it's fair to say, judging by the success of libraries, and Netflix, and Blockbuster, and PPV, that there are plenty of people who fit into that category.
I should add that I'm not one of those people. I still have books from 30 years ago, old issues of.info magazine in the closet, and LP vinyl records I haven't touched in 20 years or more. I'm a packrat. But I've got friends who will read a novel and then throw it out immediately afterwords (gasp!), who reuse the same, crufty, dollar VHS tape over and over again for that one TV show they record every week, and who probably think their "collection" of 15 compact discs takes up too much space.
Except that, regarding the issue at hand, they are not competing. Specifically, they are not competing on price. Disney box office prices are the same as Warner's, are the same as Fox's, Universal's. etc. Of course, the studios don't set the box office prices directly, but the prices are a result of the uniform rates they charge the distributors. In a truly competitive structure, a desperate MGM would charge discount rates vs. a soaring Sony, so that they could on price compete where they're unable to on quality. So the argument here is that the MPAA, as the negotiating arm of the studio system, does function as a cartel by ensuring that its product is undifferentiatable on the basis of price.
Slashdot Mirror
You think your filesharing is helping the majors' profits? I disagree. I think the record companies have ample access to their own books, and the reason they are claiming to be losing money to filesharing is because...they are. Sure, maybe you are occasionally buying obscure reissues that nobody else has heard about. And maybe a lot of your friends are doing the same thing. But the majors don't make the bulk of their profits from those small runs. Due to the economies of scale and distribution, they make their profits from the multiplatinum blockbusters. So yeah, maybe they're selling 2,000 more Metric Resistance, 5,000 more Goldfrapp here and there. But downside is that they're selling "only" 3 million of the latest Justin Timberlake instead of 9 million. Or 2 million of the latest Beyonce instead of 6 million. Or 2 million of Evanescence instead of 5 million. These are huge studio backed acts that you hear about incessantly and you figure must be moving massive amounts like the Eagles or Foreigner or Supertramp or Cheap Trick used to do back in the day. Except they're not. They're just selling "okay" because every teenager knows how to download the tracks for free off Kazaa or burn a copy of their friend's CD. Check the charts yourself. You'll be surprised at how little these ubiquitous, overexposed acts are actually selling in contrast to the mountain of hype they're generating.
Also with HDD's packed with thousands of songs, today's music is forced to compete with pristine, digitally remastered stuff from 20 or 30 years ago. And to be frank, 21st century music is by and large getting its ass kicked. Kids today are much more cognizant of '80s and '70s music than kids from the 1970s were appreciative of scratchy old 45's from the 1950s and older stuff from the '40s. There was a sea change in production values that took place starting in the late sixties and continuing into the '70s. As a result of that, any one of those dinosaur rock groups from the late '70s had just as much ear candy as the today's pop. So there's no reason anymore to automatically prefer, new, fresh stuff to the classics. The machine of innovation is running out of gas, and the fact that the older stuff is so easily available for free is just making it worse for up and coming acts.
Don't kid yourself. The majors are hurting. Not they don't deserve to, with the recycled, warmed over dreck they're feeding us. But they are in serious pain, and it's only going to get worse for them. And like any wounded animal, they're fighting tooth and nail, hoping to keep the vultures at bay.
In Sun v Microsoft, the injunction was granted against a defendant in the case. Who would the SCO injunction enjoin? Reasonably only IBM. With SuSE, Redhat, and innumerable small Linux vendors afoot, and very willing and able to distribute Linux, an injuction only vs. IBM would have little impact on SCO's bottom line.
However, I could see that pissing of IBM majorly. They'd probably have to really take off the kid gloves at that point.
So mebbe ve should velcome zees how-do-u-say een-jank-shan?
"W32/Nachi.worm"...sounds like a new spinoff group from Japan's pop-idol Hello! Project
I can't decide which makes my eyes bleed more --ALL CAPS with proper paragraph breaks, or normal type but as one interminably run-on paragraph...
Not suggesting, but wondering if it could be the case. Certainly one would have to be foolish to imagine that in the history of our two species a human and a chimp have never engaged in intercourse. Although it seems highly likely that any resulting conception would be unviable, imagine that there was a miracle birth which eventually led to this group of "giant apes" that's been discovered. Perhaps it would turn out they were 3/4 chimp and 1/4 human, for example. Wouldn't that cause a major ethical storm? Would they be entitled to full human rights? Would they be experimented upon against their will? It's an interesting issue, albeit one fairly well explored in different form by Charleton Heston, Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter.
I was a bit curious as to the reason why there seems to be no speculation about this "giant ape" being a chimpanzee/human hybrid. Of course, humans have a different number of chromosomes than the other great apes, but that in itself doesn't seem to be an absolute bar to cross-breeding. The answer seems to be in this article, where it basically says that human DNA has a number of chromosomal "inversions" with respect to chimpanzee DNA, and those inversions would lead to cross-breeding sterility.
If anybody's still reading this topic, here's my question: Is there a correlation between introversion and ticklishness? I suspect "yes."
Perhaps an informal poll would be helpful.
Do you consider yourself ticklish? Y/N
Do you consider yourself interoverted? Y/N
Why is it that you can accept that learning ability is to an extent hard-wired, but you are so dismissive of the idea that social temperament is to an extent hard-wired?
This probably would've been filed under the "too obvious to write about" category in the days when people routinely had four or more children.
So that's what happened to Mike Abrash??? Who woulda thunk...oh Hawash...
Never mind...dumb story anway...
2) Linux code should be de-SCOed to prevent this sort of problem from continuing to flair up
Okay, so Linux gets de-SCO'ed. What's to stop "Fyoo-Byar, Inc." from getting someone to contribute "stolen" code from one of their own obscure but valid patents into Linux or a similar open source OS, waiting a few years for the kernel to be embedded everywhere, and then suing everyone as SCO has done? It seems to me that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The thing is, it's quite possible that traditional software has stolen code too, but they're more shielded from this kind of action because the source is not exposed to public examination.
So, is this really about SCO desperately looking for revenue anywhere, or could McBride be a front man for someone else trying to permanently destroy the viability of Open Source in general?
This whole Snapster thing is just silly to me. If you're gonna go through that whole rigamarole, why not just dish out the measly 10 bucks a month and get unlimited streams from any number of the online streaming companies?
Elsewhere you wrote:
In theory, when you photocopy a book you are infringing copyright. But "fair use" means that if you don't do it with bad intentions or on an industrial scale, you don't go to jail. [emphasis mine]
That's often stated but not quite true. It's not the case that "fair use" is an infringement you get away with. It is defined (in the USCA) as specifically "not an infringement of copyright." I suppose it would be more accurate to say that you are doing something which would ordinarily be an infringement, but because it's fair use, it turns out not to be an infringement at all.
I know of a case in the New York Small Claims court where a person won a default judgment for $3000 against Microsoft. A default judgment means they never showed up in Court to defend themselves against the suit. His cause of action (claim) was that upgrading his computer to Windows XP caused his scanner and other peripherals to stop functioning, and he lost work as a result.
The amazing thing was that Microsoft never contested the judgment. They paid him!
... 7.1 channel Audio
Why?
It's a HANDHELD!!!
It's funny. For once, a tech company gets it right, and people complain. Why 7.1 audio? What if the thing can hook up to your TV/stereo so you can play its movies and games on a bigger screen? If they can design the capability for the best possible audio now, without adding significantly to the retail price, then let's have it, instead of having a kludgey audio upgrade later on.
But instead, slashdotters prefer the equivalent of "you'll never need more than 640K RAM" so that they can chuckle at Sony's incompetence.
What -- reading and sending email isn't "time online"?
That is a bug/feature of the Harris Poll surveys. They always ask how much time you spend on time excluding email.
Sony? Open? Sony makes good quality products but they love to push their proprietary technology. MagicGate Memory Sticks, MD, memory MagicGate Memory Sticks, Palm OS w/ proprietary extensions, DDCD (w/ Philips), 2.88Mb ED disks, etc. And I'm pretty sure they were among the first to massively copy protect their Japanese music releases. Their plan is world domination, just like Microsoft. They just do it with products that people love, instead of products that people hate but have no choice except to use.
OK, so Kazaa usage trickles down to near zero. Now what? No more downloading Three Dog Night's unreleased studio sessions? No swapping of the full catalog of Fishbone? In other words, no more impulse downloading of dozens of old, obscure songs you'd never actually pay for anyway, even at 25 cents a song. How's this supposed to help CD sales, again?
Do they really think people are going to go back to buying the latest hits at $17.99 a pop when it's still so easy, even without major filesharing programs, to burn a copy of the lastet CD from someone else in your dorm, or to swap mp3s over IM with trusted friends only?
I don't begrudge their attempts to pursue legal remedies but at this point the barn door is wide open and the horse is halfway to the next county.
Considering that they haven't gotten past the stage of "crappy powerpoint slides" and "committee-to-form a committee," shouldn't the working name be more like C++2x?
I know, I know, you came on board as soon as you could figure out how to program TCP/IP into your new Digi-Comp 1.
Third, was the comment necessary?
/. so long his first post was about whether DESQview was compatible with his Kaypro 2000 laptop.
You must be new to slashdot.
New?
^^ by garcia (6573)
Garcia's been on
On the face of it, SCO's claim seems outrageous. How could the outcome of IBM's suit affect those people who have already purchased AIX? It's as if I bought a car from GM, but it turned out GM had violated Ford's patents. Would I then be required to "destroy" my car? No, GM would pay damages and that would be that.
But SCO is saying, this is not like a purchase. A software license is more like a rental. I lease my car to you in perpetuity, provided that you agree to attach a Taiwanese flag to the antenna. You comply for a few years, then put a PRC flag in the window. What's more, you sublease the car to someone else, also in perpetuity. I see that person tooting around in my automobile with a PRC flag. Now I want to repossess my vehicle. Guess what, the sublicensee is out of luck.
Now, if SCO's claim is valid, that they have the right to "virally" nullify a license they took no direct part in, what does this say about the overall safety of closed-source commercially licensed software? Once the floodgates have been opened, we'd see a deluge of lawsuits threatening to retroactively invalidate every license from Windows to PlayStation2. At that point, Free/Open software is going to look a hell of a lot more attractive. SCO, like the proverbial enemy of our enemy, could wind up being a friend.
Too late though, to stop them from being gobbled up alive by IBM's pinstriped assassins.
(Some points in this comment were previously elucidated upon in this post by jlrader2.)
Perhaps even more significantly... how does this really differ from a decent OS or Desktop-Env? I mean in GNOME I can have a Mozilla window open in a quarter of my screen, a terminal window running Mutt in another corner, OpenOffice in another part and nautilus file browser for the rest, etc.
That's an interesting point. The need or desire for a product such as Haystack, with all your information visible at once, really demonstrates something we all know intuitively but rarely say out loud:
The paradigm of the overlapping windowing system has been a failure.
We are forced to resort to tabs, to multiple desktops, to transparent windows, to menu bars...all kludges which exist mainly because overlapping windows tend to obscure more of our information than they reveal. We're constantly forced to move, resize, minimize and maximize. Particularly if you are stuck with MS Windows...the OS out of the box comes with no way to tell a window: Don't let other windows overlap you. Or to say to a programs: Always start your window in that one corner of my screen. Or to tell two windows: Lock together on your edge so I can use you as a unit.
My Kyocera 6035 will run for approx 4 days with moderate phone and PDA use. If the phone is turned off, it'll last for over a month.
;-)
Interesting. (And informative +1). But what I was thinking about is the inevitable situation where your cellphone's battery dies. I realize this doesn't happen to super well-organized and methodical people who recharge every night, but it's happened to me on more than a few occasions. I don't wan't to be sans PDA because I've used up the battery yakking. And I suppose one could carry a spare battery around, but again, that defeats the purpose of consolidating the objects.
Most combo devices have speakerphones built in.
Sorry, I should've said, "Can't talk and tap at the same time without being a dick.
Just my opinion, but I think speakerphones of any kind are extremely rude unless the phones are full duplex *and* you're in a secluded location like a car so as not to annoy others *and* the other person can hear you very clearly. Cell phones have the first part covered but if you're driving you certainly ought not be tapping and talking too, and as for the last part, "very clearly" and "cellphones" don't really belong in the same sentence.
But, even if you do, so what? That's just part of the decision making process of switching carriers.
I see. Combo phones aren't inconvenient, but even if they are, so what, just deal with it, eh?
Somehow that's not up to the standard of your other answers. The "so what" is that if your new carrier doesn't support the old phone, you're back to using two gadgets again, or you're forced to buy a new combo phone. And they are much more costly than regular phones. The upshot is that a combo phone is just one more way to potentially "lock" you into one carrier. And realizing that is "just part of the decision making process of" deciding whether you want a combo phone in the first place.
Nevertheless, you make some good points and I might even consider trying a combo phone which is on the smaller side and not too expensive. If the PDA part isn't up to snuff, at least I'll have a phone with large selection of downloadable games.
BTW, my understanding of a FUDder is that it is someone who deliberately is trying to woo people away from the beloved gadget/OS/programming language out of malice or some hidden agenda. Not just anybody who happens to raise issues about the subject. I could care less if everyone buys combo phones, in fact it would surely be a Good Thing since it would lower prices in general and lead to an improvement in the areas where the devices are lacking.
1) Combo will either be too big for an ideal phone or too small for an ideal pda.
2) PDAs should have long battery life. But they don't when part of a power-guzzling cellphone.
3) Can't talk and tap at the same time. Unless you've brought along the earpiece attachment. But then there you go carrying two objects again.
4) PDA/cellphones usually seem to be less expandable or a few OS versions behind the latest solo PDAs.
5) In the US, switching to a different wireless carrier means switching to a different phone. With a combo unit, you'd have to switch to a different PDA too.
For someone who might currently subscribe to streaming radio (as opposed to people who are automatically dead set against a rental scheme), this would function as an upgrade to what's available now in the guise of services like Launch.com, Musicmatch MX, Live365, and Real Radio. Basically, you'd get to listen to any song you want, in any order you want for a flat free with no commercials. And if you want to "share" with a friend who has the same service, you just send them a pointer to the song on the server, no need to email them the file itself. And you'd get to put your current playlist on your portable too. For current streaming subscribers, this is a proposition with no downside.
Now, is this going to appeal to everybody? No, but it doesn't have to. But I think it would appeal to the type of people who don't see the point in buying DVD's instead of just renting them, or in buying books instead of going to the library. The sort of people who don't like to clutter their lives with excessive "ownership." And I think it's fair to say, judging by the success of libraries, and Netflix, and Blockbuster, and PPV, that there are plenty of people who fit into that category.
I should add that I'm not one of those people. I still have books from 30 years ago, old issues of
Except that, regarding the issue at hand, they are not competing. Specifically, they are not competing on price. Disney box office prices are the same as Warner's, are the same as Fox's, Universal's. etc. Of course, the studios don't set the box office prices directly, but the prices are a result of the uniform rates they charge the distributors. In a truly competitive structure, a desperate MGM would charge discount rates vs. a soaring Sony, so that they could on price compete where they're unable to on quality. So the argument here is that the MPAA, as the negotiating arm of the studio system, does function as a cartel by ensuring that its product is undifferentiatable on the basis of price.