you misunderestimate their greed & stupidity
on
iTunes Might Lose Labels
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· Score: 2, Interesting
because apple could have told them to go to fucking hell. and held their ground or even smearing the record labels in advertising.
Not likely, for two reasons:
Digital sales are still a drop in the overall music market.
The greed of the record industry is only rivaled by their stupidity.
Here are some nice quotes to demonstrate #2:
The other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the industry has to do with "interoperability" of services and devices. Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format...Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point. "If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less," she said. "If they open it up to having more flexibility with the iPod, I think they'd sell more iPods.Apple already dominates online sales, so opening their format and their players are just going to lose them money. They make almost all their money on iPod sales, so they'd probably lose money if they increased their song downloads by 50% if it cost them even 5% of their iPod sales. And increasing prices, the way the record industry wants to do, is not going to increase sales.
Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG, discussed the state of the overall digital market at a media and technology conference three months ago and said that Mr. Jobs "has got two revenue streams: one from our music and one from the sale of his iPods." "I've got one revenue stream," Mr. Lack said, joking that it would require a medical professional to locate. "It's not pretty."Excuse me? You pay for nothing in disutribution costs, pay for no part of running the store, get 70% of every sale as pure profit, and this "doesn't look pretty"? You fucking whore, Mr. Lack.
The record industry has seen that online sales do pay off, but now their letting their instiable greed get in the way of basic common sense, and even good business sense. If Jobs tells them to screw off, they're very likely to say "okay", and proceed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
A "decent" gaming rig today costs $2000+ if you want to stay current with games because PC games are constantly pushing the edge of systems.
Nonsense. Games take about 2 to three years to develop, and are almost always based on the hardware available when development started, not when it ends. So if you buy a game realeased in October 2005 that started development in October 2003, it should run just fine on a card from 2003. Doom 3 was built on technology that came out with the first Geforce card, for example. You don't need an SLI Geforce 7800 GTX setup to play games when an ATI 9700 will do you just fine 99% of the time.
Complaints had little to nothing to do with it. A replacement program was not very important because the iPod was still a NEW PRODUCT. If you had a bad battery, it most likely crapped out within your warranty, and you could get it replaced for free. Now that iPods have been out for another couple of years, it's a different story.
A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card.
Not if you want to use a high end card from the last year you don't. 6800's and 7800's need to be paired with a fast cpu, or else they are waiting for the processor. Still cheaper than getting a G5 tower, but not *that* cheap.
Put it this way. If you work for someone, and they don't pay you, have they stolen from you?
Considering there's no copying involved, I don't see how your analogy is the best put forward. Here's a better one: you ever watch football? When a receiver fails to make a catch for whatever reason, does that mean that the team lost yardage? Of course not, you can't "lose" something you never had in the first place.
So the sum total amount of money "lost to piracy" is zero and will always be zero. That doesn't mean it's not wrong or illegal, the same way arson manages to be wrong and illegal, even though it's not theft.
How about the absence of terrorist attacks on the homeland? I'd say that's one tangible benefit.
Except there is no sign whatsoever that the Patriot Act, endless detentions or other increases in law enforcment powers at the expense of civil rights have prevented any terrorist attacks. So no, there have been no tangible benefits.
You MIGHT get your electric bill down to $20 if you don't use ANY AC or electric fans - until the electric company raises its rates because its revenue is dropping. My mom used to try to conserve heating gas in the winter, but she finally decided it was too damn cold, and the bills were going up anyway, no matter how low she tried to turn it.
I wasn't talking so much about making signifigant sacrificies so much as the kind of people who blow off the very idea of conservation. So let me rephrase: so why would your mother want to pay $100 a month in electric bills when she could have the same lifestyle/living conditions for $20 a month?
Well, mister "someone should do something about it, just not me", care to enlighten us as to what should he have done?
Hm, looks like I need to repeat myself, with a few slight modifications:
Why do you say that as if someone has EVER SAID ANYTHING LIKE THIS! Here's a hint: no one has ever said "someone should do something about it, just not me", so stop using that straw man argument. Please.
Now in less flambaity tones, sure the guy should have done something about his friend stealing a video card. But the right thing to do was to try and talk some sense into him, not break off all contact and turn him behind his back.
I'm not talking about turning people in for their opinions. I'm talking about turning people in for having purposefully done something wrong, for having given no thought to anyone but themselves. It's a very different matter.
And of course from the point of view of McCarthy and the Stalinists, all the people they persecuted had purposefully done something selfish and wrong. For a less Godwinish example, lets take drug use. Say you find your son/kid brother/cousin using heroin. Now, what's the better thing to do - turn him into the cops so he goes to jail, or drag him off to treatment? My point is that if we want to help our friends when they make stupid mistakes, simply turning them in to law enforcement behind their backs is poor "help" next to taking a personal interest in helping them back on their feet.
However, when it comes to Apple, for all their touted customer centricity, a lawsuit was required to get them to face the iPod battery issue. And when they finally faced the issue, they charged an outrageous $99 for the replacement.
Nope. For starters, the lawsuit had nothing to do with replacement batteries, it had to do with the advertized time you could go between recharging your battery. Which Apple has always said to be "up to X hours". You know, like just about every maker of a device with a rechargable battery has done (laptops are another good example). If your battery failed within warranty, you could get it replaced, under warranty. If it was out of warranty, you could expect to pony up some money to get it fixed, the same as any other product with a warranty. The lawsuit was without meriit.
The $99 replacement program was institued before those lawsuits, anyway. Don't like the price, you can get Apple Care for an iPod for about $50, or get a battery online for about the same and do it yourself. Either way, there is no "battery issue" with the iPod and there never has been.
It just amazes me that many otherwise intelligent people are sucked into the "cult of Apple" and close their mind to anything that causes negative energy in their distorted field of reality.
It's also amazing how many people are ignorant of the existance of the Apple fanboy's evil twin, the anti-Apple fanboy. These are the people who bitch about Slashdot having a story on the Mighty Mouse, claiming it's nothing but hype and the only reason it's posted is because it's Apple, but ignore the story about Logitech's new laser gaming mice. Or in any story about questionable behavior by Apple, someone always says "now if this were Microsoft, you'd all be raising hell". Someone even said that in the article on the Dummies books being banned from the Apple Stores, despite the fact that half of the highly rated comments mentioned what a consumate asshole Steve Jobs is.
My point is that I find it kind of funny that there is so much hype over a mouse that if it were made by any other company it wouldn't have even made a ripple in the web waters.
Like there hasn't been any hype over Logitech's new laser mice? I just imagined a swath of reviews of the buggers on gaming sites? Or that Slashdot had an article comparing their three laser gaming micetwo days ago?
The only thing worse than a kool aid drinking Apple fanboy is a kool aid drinking anti-Apple fanboy.
Can you really look at a seven-week fetus and call that just a "blob of cells"?
Considering a fetus isn't remotely viable until about 24 weeks, the answer would be "yes". And that's before looking at the picture. After looking at the picture, how could you *not* say that was a blob?
Ah yes, the old government needs to get involved where the peopl have already solved the problem argument.
Yes, this is *exactly* the sort of situation where the gvt needs to get involved. A union at least has some modicum of power, but what if the next web page blocked is that of an individual? Who wants to rely on a "public outcry" to prevent corporate shenanigans?
What to do? What to do? Sell to a 10 million uncouth horny boys, or slightly adjust and sell to twice as many customers. I know! I'll write off have my potential customers!
Simply changing Lara to a B-cup isn't going to make 10 million girls run out and buy Tomb Raider XXVI. Besides, why can't game companies make games for different markets, just as movie studios do with movies? Nobody complains that John Woo flicks lack sappy love stories, or that chick flicks don't have enough kung-fu action.
Yes, it is within parameters, which I believe I deliniated in my post.
Not really.
What I said was not a generalization, but a statement of fact about what christians believe based on the text of scripture.
Which Christians, exactly? Getting Christians to agree on something is like trying to get Democrats to agree, or herding cats.
Fetus is "obviously" not a person eh? And why is this? Do you have an absolute definition of person that the rest of us have completely missed all this time, that could've ended this debate years ago?
Did you miss the part of drawing two arbitrary lines? Finding a single point in time is not necessary. But, I guess I should have added "obvious to any reasonable person." You will have hard line Christians who will say that it's a person the moment of fertilization, and you will have hard line feminists who will insist that abortion up till labor starts is just fine. But there are many, many, many more of the former than there are of the later.
t's hard to tell from this whether this is an accusation or not, but given the context I have to assume it is. Well, I take the bible literally wherever it was meant to be taken literally.
And in which parts of the Bible did God say "you can ignore this" or "take careful notes on this"? I rest my case. You can't bank on the infallibility of parts of the Bible when fallible people are deciding what is to be taken literally.
Yet it is quite obvious that the only thing either of you know is the ridiculous abuse of the text by others, and have never actually invested the time to find out what it really teaches.
But it teaches a whole lot of stuff. Bully for you if you've found an interpretation that works for you, though.
Obivously to whom?... I saw an ecogram of a pregnant woman with 2 months pregnancy and the fetus' heart beat like a adult's.
Obvious to anyone with sense. If a heartbeat and even minor brain activity is sign of being fully human, then almost the entire animal kingdom is "human".
So what part of all that had anything do to with what I said? What do anecdotes or separation of church and state have to do with stem cells and AIDS research?
Too many geeks think success is measured by marketshare when it's really measured by profits. Apple Computer is a good example of this - they might not have high marketshare, but who else aside from Apple and Dell have shown consistent profits throughout the dot com bubble/burst?
Nintendo engineers their consoles so they wouldn't take a loss on the hardware, whereas Sony takes a big loss on the hardware at launch and makes it up with license fees on games. Sony might make more cash in the long run, but I think Nintendo's approach is more stable - a bad launch would hurt them less than it would Sony.
It's hard to imagine anyone keeping a straight face while applying for a patent on something as trivial/universal/obvious/pre-existing as as a method of traversing a linear menu.
Everything is obvious once someone else has done it. It's how you transverse the menu. Duh. Apple invented a great way to do it, (the clickwheel), and patented it.
Every MP3 player I've owned, going back to the RIO 300 used a variation of a thumbwheel and click menu. How did Apple decide they "invented" this?
Because they invent it and you are full of crap on other players having a clickwheel? Merely having your controls laid out in a circular fashion does not a clickwheel make. Having a touch sensitive circular disk with buttons on it makes it a clickwheel. And as Apple has a patent on this (the article is about a software patent for the GUI) no other players are going to have one anytime soon.
For years, Nintendo dominated the console market, and for that, they required that all games were authorized by them and I believe even manufactured at one of their own sites. They could do this solely because there was incredible demand for their consoles. When Sony entered the market and support for Nintendo waned, all of a sudden they needed to offer game producers incentives to keep making games for Nintendo consoles.
You do know that Sony makes their money by collecting license fees on games released for the Playstation? And thus all PS2 games require authorization by Sony?
Slashdot Mirror
Not likely, for two reasons:
- Digital sales are still a drop in the overall music market.
- The greed of the record industry is only rivaled by their stupidity.
Here are some nice quotes to demonstrate #2: The other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the industry has to do with "interoperability" of services and devices. Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format...Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point. "If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less," she said. "If they open it up to having more flexibility with the iPod, I think they'd sell more iPods.Apple already dominates online sales, so opening their format and their players are just going to lose them money. They make almost all their money on iPod sales, so they'd probably lose money if they increased their song downloads by 50% if it cost them even 5% of their iPod sales. And increasing prices, the way the record industry wants to do, is not going to increase sales. Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG, discussed the state of the overall digital market at a media and technology conference three months ago and said that Mr. Jobs "has got two revenue streams: one from our music and one from the sale of his iPods." "I've got one revenue stream," Mr. Lack said, joking that it would require a medical professional to locate. "It's not pretty."Excuse me? You pay for nothing in disutribution costs, pay for no part of running the store, get 70% of every sale as pure profit, and this "doesn't look pretty"? You fucking whore, Mr. Lack.The record industry has seen that online sales do pay off, but now their letting their instiable greed get in the way of basic common sense, and even good business sense. If Jobs tells them to screw off, they're very likely to say "okay", and proceed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
A "decent" gaming rig today costs $2000+ if you want to stay current with games because PC games are constantly pushing the edge of systems.
Nonsense. Games take about 2 to three years to develop, and are almost always based on the hardware available when development started, not when it ends. So if you buy a game realeased in October 2005 that started development in October 2003, it should run just fine on a card from 2003. Doom 3 was built on technology that came out with the first Geforce card, for example. You don't need an SLI Geforce 7800 GTX setup to play games when an ATI 9700 will do you just fine 99% of the time.
If it's going to be an external drive, why would you need to stick with 2.5? Why not get a regular (and cheaper) 3.5 instead?
I mean, something is keeping these abused code monkies in thier cubes..
Debt?
Mortgage?
Kids?
Complaints had little to nothing to do with it. A replacement program was not very important because the iPod was still a NEW PRODUCT. If you had a bad battery, it most likely crapped out within your warranty, and you could get it replaced for free. Now that iPods have been out for another couple of years, it's a different story.
Have you looked at your cell phone lately? It could easily be done, and has, by other manufacturers.
Really? What phone manufacuters have easily added a 60 gig hard drive to their phones?
A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card.
Not if you want to use a high end card from the last year you don't. 6800's and 7800's need to be paired with a fast cpu, or else they are waiting for the processor. Still cheaper than getting a G5 tower, but not *that* cheap.
You have a pretty screwed up concept of governmental economics.
So do you if you think a 4 year old laptop going for $50-$300 is somehow $1,000.
Put it this way. If you work for someone, and they don't pay you, have they stolen from you?
Considering there's no copying involved, I don't see how your analogy is the best put forward. Here's a better one: you ever watch football? When a receiver fails to make a catch for whatever reason, does that mean that the team lost yardage? Of course not, you can't "lose" something you never had in the first place.
So the sum total amount of money "lost to piracy" is zero and will always be zero. That doesn't mean it's not wrong or illegal, the same way arson manages to be wrong and illegal, even though it's not theft.
How about the absence of terrorist attacks on the homeland? I'd say that's one tangible benefit.
Except there is no sign whatsoever that the Patriot Act, endless detentions or other increases in law enforcment powers at the expense of civil rights have prevented any terrorist attacks. So no, there have been no tangible benefits.
You MIGHT get your electric bill down to $20 if you don't use ANY AC or electric fans - until the electric company raises its rates because its revenue is dropping. My mom used to try to conserve heating gas in the winter, but she finally decided it was too damn cold, and the bills were going up anyway, no matter how low she tried to turn it.
I wasn't talking so much about making signifigant sacrificies so much as the kind of people who blow off the very idea of conservation. So let me rephrase: so why would your mother want to pay $100 a month in electric bills when she could have the same lifestyle/living conditions for $20 a month?
Well, mister "someone should do something about it, just not me", care to enlighten us as to what should he have done?
Hm, looks like I need to repeat myself, with a few slight modifications:
Why do you say that as if someone has EVER SAID ANYTHING LIKE THIS! Here's a hint: no one has ever said "someone should do something about it, just not me", so stop using that straw man argument. Please.
Now in less flambaity tones, sure the guy should have done something about his friend stealing a video card. But the right thing to do was to try and talk some sense into him, not break off all contact and turn him behind his back.
I'm not talking about turning people in for their opinions. I'm talking about turning people in for having purposefully done something wrong, for having given no thought to anyone but themselves. It's a very different matter.
And of course from the point of view of McCarthy and the Stalinists, all the people they persecuted had purposefully done something selfish and wrong. For a less Godwinish example, lets take drug use. Say you find your son/kid brother/cousin using heroin. Now, what's the better thing to do - turn him into the cops so he goes to jail, or drag him off to treatment? My point is that if we want to help our friends when they make stupid mistakes, simply turning them in to law enforcement behind their backs is poor "help" next to taking a personal interest in helping them back on their feet.
However, when it comes to Apple, for all their touted customer centricity, a lawsuit was required to get them to face the iPod battery issue. And when they finally faced the issue, they charged an outrageous $99 for the replacement.
Nope. For starters, the lawsuit had nothing to do with replacement batteries, it had to do with the advertized time you could go between recharging your battery. Which Apple has always said to be "up to X hours". You know, like just about every maker of a device with a rechargable battery has done (laptops are another good example). If your battery failed within warranty, you could get it replaced, under warranty. If it was out of warranty, you could expect to pony up some money to get it fixed, the same as any other product with a warranty. The lawsuit was without meriit.
The $99 replacement program was institued before those lawsuits, anyway. Don't like the price, you can get Apple Care for an iPod for about $50, or get a battery online for about the same and do it yourself. Either way, there is no "battery issue" with the iPod and there never has been.
It just amazes me that many otherwise intelligent people are sucked into the "cult of Apple" and close their mind to anything that causes negative energy in their distorted field of reality.
It's also amazing how many people are ignorant of the existance of the Apple fanboy's evil twin, the anti-Apple fanboy. These are the people who bitch about Slashdot having a story on the Mighty Mouse, claiming it's nothing but hype and the only reason it's posted is because it's Apple, but ignore the story about Logitech's new laser gaming mice. Or in any story about questionable behavior by Apple, someone always says "now if this were Microsoft, you'd all be raising hell". Someone even said that in the article on the Dummies books being banned from the Apple Stores, despite the fact that half of the highly rated comments mentioned what a consumate asshole Steve Jobs is.
Most products don't have the battery sealed in them, especially when the product costs $299 or more.
No, many of these products do.
Guess what? Those products suck too, for the same reason.
Then guess what? DON'T BUY THEM or BUY A BATTERY AND CHANGE IT YOURSELF. Crybaby.
My point is that I find it kind of funny that there is so much hype over a mouse that if it were made by any other company it wouldn't have even made a ripple in the web waters.
Like there hasn't been any hype over Logitech's new laser mice? I just imagined a swath of reviews of the buggers on gaming sites? Or that Slashdot had an article comparing their three laser gaming mice two days ago?
The only thing worse than a kool aid drinking Apple fanboy is a kool aid drinking anti-Apple fanboy.
Can you really look at a seven-week fetus and call that just a "blob of cells"?
Considering a fetus isn't remotely viable until about 24 weeks, the answer would be "yes". And that's before looking at the picture. After looking at the picture, how could you *not* say that was a blob?
Ah yes, the old government needs to get involved where the peopl have already solved the problem argument.
Yes, this is *exactly* the sort of situation where the gvt needs to get involved. A union at least has some modicum of power, but what if the next web page blocked is that of an individual? Who wants to rely on a "public outcry" to prevent corporate shenanigans?
What to do? What to do? Sell to a 10 million uncouth horny boys, or slightly adjust and sell to twice as many customers. I know! I'll write off have my potential customers!
Simply changing Lara to a B-cup isn't going to make 10 million girls run out and buy Tomb Raider XXVI. Besides, why can't game companies make games for different markets, just as movie studios do with movies? Nobody complains that John Woo flicks lack sappy love stories, or that chick flicks don't have enough kung-fu action.
Yes, it is within parameters, which I believe I deliniated in my post.
Not really.
What I said was not a generalization, but a statement of fact about what christians believe based on the text of scripture.
Which Christians, exactly? Getting Christians to agree on something is like trying to get Democrats to agree, or herding cats.
Fetus is "obviously" not a person eh? And why is this? Do you have an absolute definition of person that the rest of us have completely missed all this time, that could've ended this debate years ago?
Did you miss the part of drawing two arbitrary lines? Finding a single point in time is not necessary. But, I guess I should have added "obvious to any reasonable person." You will have hard line Christians who will say that it's a person the moment of fertilization, and you will have hard line feminists who will insist that abortion up till labor starts is just fine. But there are many, many, many more of the former than there are of the later.
t's hard to tell from this whether this is an accusation or not, but given the context I have to assume it is. Well, I take the bible literally wherever it was meant to be taken literally.
And in which parts of the Bible did God say "you can ignore this" or "take careful notes on this"? I rest my case. You can't bank on the infallibility of parts of the Bible when fallible people are deciding what is to be taken literally.
Yet it is quite obvious that the only thing either of you know is the ridiculous abuse of the text by others, and have never actually invested the time to find out what it really teaches.
But it teaches a whole lot of stuff. Bully for you if you've found an interpretation that works for you, though.
Obivously to whom?... I saw an ecogram of a pregnant woman with 2 months pregnancy and the fetus' heart beat like a adult's.
Obvious to anyone with sense. If a heartbeat and even minor brain activity is sign of being fully human, then almost the entire animal kingdom is "human".
So what part of all that had anything do to with what I said? What do anecdotes or separation of church and state have to do with stem cells and AIDS research?
Too many geeks think success is measured by marketshare when it's really measured by profits. Apple Computer is a good example of this - they might not have high marketshare, but who else aside from Apple and Dell have shown consistent profits throughout the dot com bubble/burst?
Nintendo engineers their consoles so they wouldn't take a loss on the hardware, whereas Sony takes a big loss on the hardware at launch and makes it up with license fees on games. Sony might make more cash in the long run, but I think Nintendo's approach is more stable - a bad launch would hurt them less than it would Sony.
It's hard to imagine anyone keeping a straight face while applying for a patent on something as trivial/universal/obvious/pre-existing as as a method of traversing a linear menu.
Everything is obvious once someone else has done it. It's how you transverse the menu. Duh. Apple invented a great way to do it, (the clickwheel), and patented it.
Every MP3 player I've owned, going back to the RIO 300 used a variation of a thumbwheel and click menu. How did Apple decide they "invented" this?
Because they invent it and you are full of crap on other players having a clickwheel? Merely having your controls laid out in a circular fashion does not a clickwheel make. Having a touch sensitive circular disk with buttons on it makes it a clickwheel. And as Apple has a patent on this (the article is about a software patent for the GUI) no other players are going to have one anytime soon.
For years, Nintendo dominated the console market, and for that, they required that all games were authorized by them and I believe even manufactured at one of their own sites. They could do this solely because there was incredible demand for their consoles. When Sony entered the market and support for Nintendo waned, all of a sudden they needed to offer game producers incentives to keep making games for Nintendo consoles.
You do know that Sony makes their money by collecting license fees on games released for the Playstation? And thus all PS2 games require authorization by Sony?