1 and 3 have been massively debunked, but I haven't seen anyone tear down #2. Apple does R&D on new products and strategies just like other tech companies, only they don't announce those products until they are in production to be ready for launch. This is so they can avoid debacles like Copeland, their planned replacement for the old Mac OS, and Osborn laptops**, in where the company announced their future product in advance, so no one bought their current laptops and they went out of business.
Apple doesn't develop stuff like the Xserve and then sit on it for no reason. They just don't announce products that aren't ready for launch. When other companies make announcements prematurely, those announcments are called vaporware, and those companies are criticized for it. Apple doesn't do vaporware, and they still get criticized.
Doesn't Apple recognize, that sites like Think Secret actually help Apple?
They don't recognize it because that idea is bizzare nonsense. Apple likes to deliver surprises at their shows. The bigger the surprise, the bigger the press coverage, and greater the number of people who talk about it. Think Secret gives their surprises away, taking away free press coverage and conversation.
And aside from that, what if they are WRONG, and give people the idea that Apple is going to release something they don't actually have, and people are dissapointed? As one poster pointed out, this is exactly what happened when Apple announced the Mini iPod: people were greatly dissapointed in the price.
What makes you think they didn't? Among other problems with his suggestion, there's the fact that state officials wouldn't have jurisdiction to track him that way. And following someone that far without probable cause and without a warrant could be argued to be harrassment/stalking, reguardless of wether you were a private citizen or a cop.
But if we had 100,000,000 cops on duty, they could follow you and trade notes, and no warrant would be required.
Example one: we don't have 1/3 of the population of the U.S. serving on the police force, all on duty at the same time. Did you sit around your house for a while, trying to come up with the dumbest, least relevant comparison you could come up with?
Whereabouts of vehicles, wherein the vehicles are registered to the government, the privilege of driving said vehicles is granted by government
A regulated activity is not a privilege.
and in a country in which the vehicles are driven on roads built by the government and maintained by the government.
Which means, what? They are free to shoot hippies crossing the highway? A highway that we paid for?
I'd encourage him to Read The Fucking Fourth Amendment
Why don't you read "The Fucking Fourth Amendment". How can you be secure in your person and effects if they can track you any time of the night or day? Then read the fucking 9th amendment, which spells out that just because a right isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution, doesn't mean we don't have it.
Privacy is dead. Get over it. But if you don't like it, don't look to the constitution for a right to it, because it ain't there.
SCOTUS were dumbasses on this one. The 4th amendment is ALL about privacy from unwarranted government intrusion, it just doesn't use the word "privacy" in the wording.
Conservatives are the ones that stereotypically pander to law & order issues. Which Supreme Court justices have consistently voted to rubber-stamp police tactics? Which party wrote the PATRIOT act?
What's next, you're going to blame the Asian tsunami on liberals, too?
Refusing to license the DRM to Real was abusing their position.
IT'S APPLES HARDWARE. And they make profits selling hardware, not selling music online. Licensing their DRM to Real could only hurt their own profits, because there is no way to charge enough in licensing to make up for lost iPod sales.
Apple was under no legal or moral obligation to help out one of their compeditors, deal with it.
Name me a single thing that windows does that you can't get another OS to do.
Could you come up with a less relevant comparison? There are entire industries that use only Windows and only use applications written for Windows. Not because they like the operating system, but because they have no choice.
Whereas with portable players, you can buy the SAME song for ANY player and have the same listening experience listening to it, wether you have an iPod or a Zen or an iRiver or a DigitalDJ. Even if an artist signs an exclusive deal for online distribution, like how U2 has with Apple, nothing prevents you from buying the physical cd and putting it on the player of your choice.
No, they have a monopoly on hard drive, or, if you want me to be general, high capacity, media players the way MS has a monopoly on operating systems, or adobe has a monopoly on high end graphics programs. It doesn't matter that there are other alternatives, people don't buy them.
Just making a popular seller does not make you a monopoly. There is nothing about large capacity, small form factor, and buying online that the basic experience can't be duplicated by going with an iRiver or Zen and the Wal-Mart online store.
translates to enormous profits
No, it doesn't. Record lables and credit card companies take the largest share of that 99 cents, or pence in your case. Much of the rest gets eaten up by storage and bandwidth costs. And as far as I know Apple Records still has a dispute with them, and Apple could be smacked hard for getting in the music business. Maybe someday Apple will get "enormous profits" from the iTMS, but not today.
But the point is that they're very few and far between.
Your basis for this assertion is...?
Read my earlier post to which a (at least self-proclaimed) girl gamer had an interesting response. You might also want to pay attention to the female response in this thread.
You might want to pay more attention to this post, which points out that just because women don't necessarily go for ripped guys doesn't mean they objectify any less. For that matter, saying that girls go for super-muscled guys is a complete red herring, because no one was saying that in the first place.
The ironic thing is that this objectification of the male form is a MALE-oriented view.
Again, your basis for this is?
But the truth is that the fantasy is wired for a single gender.
Yeah, if you have to pick one, its no contest: it's wired for women. The next time you're buying groceries, check out the romance novels. Check out the beefcakes that are invariably drawn on the covers. Check out which gender buys said romance novels. Then check out all the fantasy novels written for women by women. Then come to the realization that you are a wuppie pussy, and haven't yet caught on to the fact that women are every bit as capable of sexism, arrogance, chauvinism and violence as men.
It's that it is nothing BUT objectification; the same cartoonish sexuality again and again.
Pfft. Maybe if your game library consists of Rumble Roses and DOA Vollyball. Ludicrously broad generalization. This is just like the poeple who bitch about how women are drawn in comics, ignoring the fact that even guys who are supposed to look like the definitions of 98 lbs weaklings, like Bruce Banner and pre-spider bite Peter Parker, are ripped like Brad Pitt in fight club.
Consider this: large muscles are a symbol of strength and power, qualities that presumably are useful in most games. Ridiculously large breasts and wasp-waists serve no purpose but to appeal to the libinous fantasies of male players. I think this difference is relavant to the discussion.
That's just arguing semantics. The fact still remains that women tend to be huge hypocrites when it comes to looks.
The cultural tendancy to give women less symbolic power
Less symbolic power? Check out a sitcom, any sitcom. Chances are high that the men can't muster enough brain cells to keep breathing without help from the women on the show.
Whats that you say? You will be charging the same amount of money for the point release update as MS is going to charge for an upgrade to their new OS? Wow, you really do have your customers eating from your hand. Quite an accomplishment!
Oh? Considering that for every Microsoft update Apple has put out about 3, why don't you go drink a nice, tall glass of stfu.
The Mini looks looks like another homerun, their first small form factor PC
Don't forget the Cube. The difference between the Mini and the Cube is that the Cube used expensive parts while the Mini probably uses compenents from the iBook line. Oh, and the Cube went for $1300 more than the Mini, IIRC, and also did not come with a monitor.
When Jobs returned, he cranked up the licencing fees when licence renewal time came for the cloners. None of the cloners would go for it because it ruined their business model. (I believe UMAX was an exception to this but I don't remember the details).
Apple and the cloners did renegociate for higher licensing fees. Wether or not the new terms would have worked out for Apple and the cloners, we'll never know, because Jobs killed em off. Cutting off PowerComputing and Umax was agruably a good idea, however, Apple should not have stopped Motorola or IBM from building clones. You REALLY don't want to tick off the people who supply your processors for you. IBM wasn't that mad AFAIK because they actually didn't build clones themselves, but they sublicensed the Mac OS to a couple other companies. However, Motorola had their Supermac line, which they backed up with a five year warranty, which is still damned good for desktop machines.
Moto was PISSED. Before the clones got the axe, PowerPC's were still faster clock for clock than Intel's offerings, but they were also faster in *megahertz* as well. After that, Apple got the cold shoulder, and would almost go an entire year without signifigant processor upgrades.
Which they wound up doing after Jobs returned... and I haven't heard of them since.
Plus it has an LCD screen, voice recorder and FM radio.
True, true and true.
smaller, lighter, just as cheap, and has just as much room
False, false, false, true.
The Shuffle is 2 millimeters shorter, 12 millimeters narrower, and half as thick. The Jetflash weighs 3 grams more, and thats WITHOUT the battery. The 1 gig version is $4 more than the Shuffle of the same size, but the half gig version is 14% more expensive than Apple's.
This ipod shuffle really is just a "me too" product.
Only if you count a cheaper model at half the size to be "me too". Yes, the Jetflash has a voice recorder, for the.0005% of the population that needs one. The built in radio is a nice feature, if the reception is good, for those who want it.
Yeah, the $249 is never going to happen. Rather than gaining marketshare and making a modest profit, they'd be cannibalizing their existing consumer lines. Rather than getting a new iMac in a couple years, a lot of families would upgrade to a MiniMac instead.
Re:This guy is retarded!
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 2
Probably because Royal Tannenbaums sucked ass hardcore. Nothing more than a montage of scence about how fucked up the family was. Sort of like the chick flick "Devine Secrets of the ya ya sisterhood".
Re:Top 5 DVDs in my collection
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 1
I've had good luck with Sonic disks. Can usually burn at 8x, more reliably at 4x. I've had the rare coaster, but at 500 disks for 120 bucks, who cares? Just make sure you verify after burn.
But that's not the point, the point is whether Apple sold music (from iTMS) will play on any other player. No it won't. Reason? Apple don't want it to. They are being sued for exactly those uncompetitive practises right now.
This is a bunch of nonsense. WTF were the people bitching about Sony being anti-compeditive for supporting just ONE format while the iPod supports at LEAST three open formats: aac, mp3 and wav. This is no more anticompeditive than Nintendo releasing games only for the Nintendo.
Slashdot Mirror
1 and 3 have been massively debunked, but I haven't seen anyone tear down #2. Apple does R&D on new products and strategies just like other tech companies, only they don't announce those products until they are in production to be ready for launch. This is so they can avoid debacles like Copeland, their planned replacement for the old Mac OS, and Osborn laptops**, in where the company announced their future product in advance, so no one bought their current laptops and they went out of business.
Apple doesn't develop stuff like the Xserve and then sit on it for no reason. They just don't announce products that aren't ready for launch. When other companies make announcements prematurely, those announcments are called vaporware, and those companies are criticized for it. Apple doesn't do vaporware, and they still get criticized.
Doesn't Apple recognize, that sites like Think Secret actually help Apple?
They don't recognize it because that idea is bizzare nonsense. Apple likes to deliver surprises at their shows. The bigger the surprise, the bigger the press coverage, and greater the number of people who talk about it. Think Secret gives their surprises away, taking away free press coverage and conversation.
And aside from that, what if they are WRONG, and give people the idea that Apple is going to release something they don't actually have, and people are dissapointed? As one poster pointed out, this is exactly what happened when Apple announced the Mini iPod: people were greatly dissapointed in the price.
What makes you think they didn't? Among other problems with his suggestion, there's the fact that state officials wouldn't have jurisdiction to track him that way. And following someone that far without probable cause and without a warrant could be argued to be harrassment/stalking, reguardless of wether you were a private citizen or a cop.
But if we had 100,000,000 cops on duty, they could follow you and trade notes, and no warrant would be required.
Example one: we don't have 1/3 of the population of the U.S. serving on the police force, all on duty at the same time. Did you sit around your house for a while, trying to come up with the dumbest, least relevant comparison you could come up with?
Whereabouts of vehicles, wherein the vehicles are registered to the government, the privilege of driving said vehicles is granted by government
A regulated activity is not a privilege.
and in a country in which the vehicles are driven on roads built by the government and maintained by the government.
Which means, what? They are free to shoot hippies crossing the highway? A highway that we paid for?
I'd encourage him to Read The Fucking Fourth Amendment
Why don't you read "The Fucking Fourth Amendment". How can you be secure in your person and effects if they can track you any time of the night or day? Then read the fucking 9th amendment, which spells out that just because a right isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution, doesn't mean we don't have it.
Privacy is dead. Get over it. But if you don't like it, don't look to the constitution for a right to it, because it ain't there.
SCOTUS were dumbasses on this one. The 4th amendment is ALL about privacy from unwarranted government intrusion, it just doesn't use the word "privacy" in the wording.
Conservatives are the ones that stereotypically pander to law & order issues. Which Supreme Court justices have consistently voted to rubber-stamp police tactics? Which party wrote the PATRIOT act?
What's next, you're going to blame the Asian tsunami on liberals, too?
Police can follow you without a warrant and if you don't like it -- tough.
But they weren't following him. They put a tracker on his car.
In essence, you're not comparing apples to apples.
You were saying?
Refusing to license the DRM to Real was abusing their position.
IT'S APPLES HARDWARE. And they make profits selling hardware, not selling music online. Licensing their DRM to Real could only hurt their own profits, because there is no way to charge enough in licensing to make up for lost iPod sales.
Apple was under no legal or moral obligation to help out one of their compeditors, deal with it.
Name me a single thing that windows does that you can't get another OS to do.
Could you come up with a less relevant comparison? There are entire industries that use only Windows and only use applications written for Windows. Not because they like the operating system, but because they have no choice.
Whereas with portable players, you can buy the SAME song for ANY player and have the same listening experience listening to it, wether you have an iPod or a Zen or an iRiver or a DigitalDJ. Even if an artist signs an exclusive deal for online distribution, like how U2 has with Apple, nothing prevents you from buying the physical cd and putting it on the player of your choice.
No, they have a monopoly on hard drive, or, if you want me to be general, high capacity, media players the way MS has a monopoly on operating systems, or adobe has a monopoly on high end graphics programs. It doesn't matter that there are other alternatives, people don't buy them.
Just making a popular seller does not make you a monopoly. There is nothing about large capacity, small form factor, and buying online that the basic experience can't be duplicated by going with an iRiver or Zen and the Wal-Mart online store.
translates to enormous profits
No, it doesn't. Record lables and credit card companies take the largest share of that 99 cents, or pence in your case. Much of the rest gets eaten up by storage and bandwidth costs. And as far as I know Apple Records still has a dispute with them, and Apple could be smacked hard for getting in the music business. Maybe someday Apple will get "enormous profits" from the iTMS, but not today.
Whoops, thanks for the correction. But hey, this stuff happened almost a decade ago, so don't sue me. :-)
But the point is that they're very few and far between.
Your basis for this assertion is...?
Read my earlier post to which a (at least self-proclaimed) girl gamer had an interesting response. You might also want to pay attention to the female response in this thread.
You might want to pay more attention to this post, which points out that just because women don't necessarily go for ripped guys doesn't mean they objectify any less. For that matter, saying that girls go for super-muscled guys is a complete red herring, because no one was saying that in the first place.
The ironic thing is that this objectification of the male form is a MALE-oriented view.
Again, your basis for this is?
But the truth is that the fantasy is wired for a single gender.
Yeah, if you have to pick one, its no contest: it's wired for women. The next time you're buying groceries, check out the romance novels. Check out the beefcakes that are invariably drawn on the covers. Check out which gender buys said romance novels. Then check out all the fantasy novels written for women by women. Then come to the realization that you are a wuppie pussy, and haven't yet caught on to the fact that women are every bit as capable of sexism, arrogance, chauvinism and violence as men.
That's alright, my friend's boss at Burger King was named Cindy Meadows.
is 'feminazi'
Yes, the one good thing that Rush Limbaugh has done for society, is creating the term feminazi.
It's that it is nothing BUT objectification; the same cartoonish sexuality again and again.
Pfft. Maybe if your game library consists of Rumble Roses and DOA Vollyball. Ludicrously broad generalization. This is just like the poeple who bitch about how women are drawn in comics, ignoring the fact that even guys who are supposed to look like the definitions of 98 lbs weaklings, like Bruce Banner and pre-spider bite Peter Parker, are ripped like Brad Pitt in fight club.
Consider this: large muscles are a symbol of strength and power, qualities that presumably are useful in most games. Ridiculously large breasts and wasp-waists serve no purpose but to appeal to the libinous fantasies of male players. I think this difference is relavant to the discussion.
That's just arguing semantics. The fact still remains that women tend to be huge hypocrites when it comes to looks.
The cultural tendancy to give women less symbolic power
Less symbolic power? Check out a sitcom, any sitcom. Chances are high that the men can't muster enough brain cells to keep breathing without help from the women on the show.
Whats that you say? You will be charging the same amount of money for the point release update as MS is going to charge for an upgrade to their new OS? Wow, you really do have your customers eating from your hand. Quite an accomplishment!
Oh? Considering that for every Microsoft update Apple has put out about 3, why don't you go drink a nice, tall glass of stfu.
The Mini looks looks like another homerun, their first small form factor PC
Don't forget the Cube. The difference between the Mini and the Cube is that the Cube used expensive parts while the Mini probably uses compenents from the iBook line. Oh, and the Cube went for $1300 more than the Mini, IIRC, and also did not come with a monitor.
When Jobs returned, he cranked up the licencing fees when licence renewal time came for the cloners. None of the cloners would go for it because it ruined their business model. (I believe UMAX was an exception to this but I don't remember the details).
Apple and the cloners did renegociate for higher licensing fees. Wether or not the new terms would have worked out for Apple and the cloners, we'll never know, because Jobs killed em off. Cutting off PowerComputing and Umax was agruably a good idea, however, Apple should not have stopped Motorola or IBM from building clones. You REALLY don't want to tick off the people who supply your processors for you. IBM wasn't that mad AFAIK because they actually didn't build clones themselves, but they sublicensed the Mac OS to a couple other companies. However, Motorola had their Supermac line, which they backed up with a five year warranty, which is still damned good for desktop machines.
Moto was PISSED. Before the clones got the axe, PowerPC's were still faster clock for clock than Intel's offerings, but they were also faster in *megahertz* as well. After that, Apple got the cold shoulder, and would almost go an entire year without signifigant processor upgrades.
Which they wound up doing after Jobs returned... and I haven't heard of them since.
Apple bought them out for $100 million.
Plus it has an LCD screen, voice recorder and FM radio.
.0005% of the population that needs one. The built in radio is a nice feature, if the reception is good, for those who want it.
True, true and true.
smaller, lighter, just as cheap, and has just as much room
False, false, false, true.
The Shuffle is 2 millimeters shorter, 12 millimeters narrower, and half as thick. The Jetflash weighs 3 grams more, and thats WITHOUT the battery. The 1 gig version is $4 more than the Shuffle of the same size, but the half gig version is 14% more expensive than Apple's.
This ipod shuffle really is just a "me too" product.
Only if you count a cheaper model at half the size to be "me too". Yes, the Jetflash has a voice recorder, for the
Right, because Apple is the ONLY computer maker to ever suffer from supply problems.
Yeah, the $249 is never going to happen. Rather than gaining marketshare and making a modest profit, they'd be cannibalizing their existing consumer lines. Rather than getting a new iMac in a couple years, a lot of families would upgrade to a MiniMac instead.
Probably because Royal Tannenbaums sucked ass hardcore. Nothing more than a montage of scence about how fucked up the family was. Sort of like the chick flick "Devine Secrets of the ya ya sisterhood".
I've had good luck with Sonic disks. Can usually burn at 8x, more reliably at 4x. I've had the rare coaster, but at 500 disks for 120 bucks, who cares? Just make sure you verify after burn.
speaking as somebody who had to administer said package for several years in the early 21st century
So, did you manage to get the heck out of Fargo, or did you have to go find work at SEI?
But that's not the point, the point is whether Apple sold music (from iTMS) will play on any other player. No it won't. Reason? Apple don't want it to. They are being sued for exactly those uncompetitive practises right now.
This is a bunch of nonsense. WTF were the people bitching about Sony being anti-compeditive for supporting just ONE format while the iPod supports at LEAST three open formats: aac, mp3 and wav. This is no more anticompeditive than Nintendo releasing games only for the Nintendo.