Back when something like this happened to me I actually had gone over the limit of enabled computers because of sequential disk failures. I emailed apple, they reset my account, I logged in again and reenabled my computer and was back up in no time.
Later on, when my daughter had the same problem, they had actually added a "reset all my activations" button.
Did you call Apple about this? They were completely ready to accomodate me, I'm sure they'd have done the same for you.
You may be attributing the improvement to the wrong thing.
I haven't had many BSODs on any *NT-based* Windows on good hardware, and newer computer hardware (which is what you're likely to be running XP on) tends to be better and more reliable. Plus it tends to leave out entire subsystems that had long been a source of problems... when's the last time you saw a computer with an AT bus? Even a serial port is getting less common (particularly on laptops), and hopefully the PS2 ports will soon go the same way. On older hardware Windows is still as prone to freaking out from driver problems as ever.
Why is this relevant?
Well, because this article is about older hardware.
I found Windows 2000 worked just fine on my Toshiba Libretto, with a 133/266 Mhz Pentium (no MMX) and 64M of RAM. It was the growth in applications that made it gradually less attractive and made me spend more time using FreeBSD with a lightweight window manager instead of Windows before a leaky air conditioner finally washed it out... newer applications that I needed to switch to Windows for wouldn't run comfortably on the computer.
Office applications, whether OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are just too bloated. The OS you're running is less of an issue when they come into the picture.
If you look this "Partner Companies" page at cdbaby, you see that virtually all those services are paying them about the same amount per song, regardless of whether they're supposedly a flat or variable price service. Looks like they are happy to use the fixed price model when the "label" is interested in it.
I wonder if all the talk from the labels about iTMS "inevitably" going to variable pricint is really an attempt to defuse a move the other way, to fixed pricing at other services.
There are some excellent classical CDs for more like $10.00 than $30.00, if you don't insist on the big name conductors and orchestras. Sure, sometimes those "International Generic Orchestra" titles are a disappointment but there have been some real gems.
My original point was that this is a gimmick, and not a sensible idea for normal music distribution. So it seems we agree.
Your original point seemed to be that this was not just a gimmick, but someohow a "bad thing" as well. My point is that it's not just a gimmick, it's a gimmick that actually adds value to the album when compared to most of the other gimmicks out there, and so it's a "good thing".
You're still missing the point. This isn't a "new medium", it's a special edition album in exotic packaging. The price is $30.00 because they think they can get $30.00 for it, not because it cost $10.00 more to make.
Let's say the flash drive adds $10.00 to the cost of producing the album. I don't know if that's high or low, but that's your figure. That's not out of line for the cost of packaging for "special" albums, whether it's an MP3 player or a special folder or an art-book with metal covers. It's high, but these prices are all over the map.
But the price of special editions is all over the map, too, and not closely related to the cost of production. It's all style, and flash (in the marketing, not the memory, sense), and gaming the system. It's setting a price point to attract the people willing to pay $30.00 for an album, and the people willing to pay for a gimmick, and the people who just bought a 128M flash card for $30.00 and figure the music's free, and the people who add up the $1.00 a pop it'd cost at iTMS and figure the flash card's free, and the completists who HAVE to get the special silk-wrapped CD case or the album in the funny-shaped box, and the collectors and speculators...
It doesn't matter if the flash drive costs 100 times as much as a CD, because that's not where the price comes from.
Yes, it would. At least by myself and anyone else who understands the concept of lossy compression.
If people like you were a significant portion of the market, you'd have a good case.
Whatever cut they're making now, they could drop the price by $10 and make the same cut without the flash drive.
They could, if the price of an album was related to its packaging. But it isn't, so they wouldn't.
You seem to have this idea that music is sold as a commodity like beer or sugar, and the price of the music is based on the result of price competition between equivalent musicians. Like you go into the store and buy the cheapest "angsty pop" or "bouncy pop" on the shelf. Well, maybe you do... I don't know.
They were quite shitty gaming consoles but more than adequate series 60 smartphones for the price.
And they probably sold better than similarly designed adequate-to-decent phones would have... for the price. But is a decent but unconventional phone going to sell the 6 million units Nokia was looking for? How well would something designed to be a good phone first, with the same gaming capabilities, have sold?
Either way, there's no advantage to a flash drive other than the gimmick factor.
Music is not sold "by the byte". A CD with 30 tracks on it in compressed format would not be expected to sell for less than (say) a 2- or 3- CD set with the same tracks on it. Given that an album typically costs $10-$20 for 10-15 songs, it's not at all unreasonable for a 30 track CD set to cost 30 dollars... whether it's one compressed CD or three uncompressed ones.
So the point you're missing is that there's no disadvantage to the free flash drive that's bundled with the 30 songs and additional material either.
If that $20 hard drive conks out in 2 or 3 years or quits working the first time the dog knocks the machine over, Microsoft is going to have a ton of angry customers.
So why is it that there was so much controversy about Microsoft killing Netscape by bundling IE with Windows
Because people are stupid.
The real problem with bundling IE is that they did it in a way that makes HTML a backdoor into your system. There's no way to secure IE except by unbundling the HTML and internet-access controls.
The pepole griping about the Sony "rootkit" DRM now should have been just as irate back around 1997 when Microsoft started shipping it with Active Desktop.
Would you mind using SOME mechanism to indicate what you're quoting and what you're writing? Life's too short.
The point I'm trying to get at is NOT that you should be supporting the RIAA, but that allofmp3 is not ethically superior to just ripping the tracks from a peer-to-peer net.
And... it may be that I DO have content I'm not entitled to under law, because I don't know ofor a fact that none of the artists who have sold their music directly were entitled to do so under their contracts.
And I'm not even going to TRY to defend that kind of contract. Because that's also beside the point.
The bottom line... "allofmp3 is legal" is not equivalent to "allofmp3 is ethical". If anything, you're on firmer ethical ground if you're outright ripping the tracks off.
Finally, no, being illegal is not the only thing stopping me from doing something unethical, but we obviously have different definitions of "unethical".
Clearly.
It is your decision to be a performing artist.
It is their decision to be recording artists.
If they choose to participate in a system that distributes music in ways that you do not feel you can ethically support, then you're free to opt out and not buy their music.
But if you're not going to buy their music from them, or through the distribution channels that they have chosen to participate in, then the only ethical option I see is to do without that music.
If you buy their music from the Russian Mafia instead of the RIAA Mafia, all you're doing is supporting a different corrupt system. It seems to me more honest to simply pirate the tracks in defiance of the law.
Just because I don't feed the music cartels and reward the artists that are stupid or greedy enough to sign with them doesn't make me unethical, but perhaps you supporting the corrupt system might take your ethics-meter down a few pegs.
The vast majority of my music collection are tracks by unsigned artists and legal recordings of public performances, many purchased directly from the performers at performances. Where my options are to buy label music or do without, I occasionally choose the labels. But I don't pretend that there's a third option.
Ah, no, it's a buffer overflow. So it's a bug specific to Microsoft's implementation of Javascript (Jscript). Separate code base from other implementations.
That statement implies that there is already tiered pricing at iTMS and there isn't!
The statement doesn't imply anything about the current pricing at iTMS. Any such conclusion is an inference on the part of the reader, because the possibility that Apple would have introduced tiered pricing at iTMS without at least *three* duplicate articles breathlessly announcing the fact is so remote that the possibility never entered my head.
So, I inferred that you were simply reacting to the headline.
Obviously my inference was as fallacious as yours.
Because IE is the only browser using a display library which has a security model of "wait until you're deep in the system's shared libraries and THEN try and figure out where the code you're about to run came from" instead of "don't implement a mechanism to allow code out of the sandbox, leave that decision to the application that called you".
This was such an obviously bad idea even back in 1997 that I'm still boggled by the fact that anyone with any understanding of programming runs IE or allows their users to run it.
I have *never* purchased music, online or otherwise, that I didn't hear from somewhere first*.
And guess whose payola determines what that music is, for most people?
But a lot of people go to the iTMS and just browse around, listen to samples, and buy stuff that sounds good. Sometimes the sample's just too short and you guess wrong... and you're out a buck. But it works.
And guess whose payola DOESN'T determine the music you find that way?
So think of it this way: they're just trying to force Apple to take their payola.
The recording labels are mad they aren't controlling the price or distribution of the music as they have in the past with CD's. THAT is what they want. They've lost control and they want it back.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when something like this happened to me I actually had gone over the limit of enabled computers because of sequential disk failures. I emailed apple, they reset my account, I logged in again and reenabled my computer and was back up in no time.
Later on, when my daughter had the same problem, they had actually added a "reset all my activations" button.
Did you call Apple about this? They were completely ready to accomodate me, I'm sure they'd have done the same for you.
Can you quote the part of the post you believe to be relevant to the parent comment?
You may be attributing the improvement to the wrong thing.
I haven't had many BSODs on any *NT-based* Windows on good hardware, and newer computer hardware (which is what you're likely to be running XP on) tends to be better and more reliable. Plus it tends to leave out entire subsystems that had long been a source of problems... when's the last time you saw a computer with an AT bus? Even a serial port is getting less common (particularly on laptops), and hopefully the PS2 ports will soon go the same way. On older hardware Windows is still as prone to freaking out from driver problems as ever.
Why is this relevant?
Well, because this article is about older hardware.
I found Windows 2000 worked just fine on my Toshiba Libretto, with a 133/266 Mhz Pentium (no MMX) and 64M of RAM. It was the growth in applications that made it gradually less attractive and made me spend more time using FreeBSD with a lightweight window manager instead of Windows before a leaky air conditioner finally washed it out... newer applications that I needed to switch to Windows for wouldn't run comfortably on the computer.
Office applications, whether OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are just too bloated. The OS you're running is less of an issue when they come into the picture.
If you look this "Partner Companies" page at cdbaby, you see that virtually all those services are paying them about the same amount per song, regardless of whether they're supposedly a flat or variable price service. Looks like they are happy to use the fixed price model when the "label" is interested in it.
I wonder if all the talk from the labels about iTMS "inevitably" going to variable pricint is really an attempt to defuse a move the other way, to fixed pricing at other services.
This is already allowed for in the sales figures.
There are some excellent classical CDs for more like $10.00 than $30.00, if you don't insist on the big name conductors and orchestras. Sure, sometimes those "International Generic Orchestra" titles are a disappointment but there have been some real gems.
And don't forget used record stores.
My original point was that this is a gimmick, and not a sensible idea for normal music distribution. So it seems we agree.
Your original point seemed to be that this was not just a gimmick, but someohow a "bad thing" as well. My point is that it's not just a gimmick, it's a gimmick that actually adds value to the album when compared to most of the other gimmicks out there, and so it's a "good thing".
You're still missing the point. This isn't a "new medium", it's a special edition album in exotic packaging. The price is $30.00 because they think they can get $30.00 for it, not because it cost $10.00 more to make.
Let's say the flash drive adds $10.00 to the cost of producing the album. I don't know if that's high or low, but that's your figure. That's not out of line for the cost of packaging for "special" albums, whether it's an MP3 player or a special folder or an art-book with metal covers. It's high, but these prices are all over the map.
But the price of special editions is all over the map, too, and not closely related to the cost of production. It's all style, and flash (in the marketing, not the memory, sense), and gaming the system. It's setting a price point to attract the people willing to pay $30.00 for an album, and the people willing to pay for a gimmick, and the people who just bought a 128M flash card for $30.00 and figure the music's free, and the people who add up the $1.00 a pop it'd cost at iTMS and figure the flash card's free, and the completists who HAVE to get the special silk-wrapped CD case or the album in the funny-shaped box, and the collectors and speculators...
It doesn't matter if the flash drive costs 100 times as much as a CD, because that's not where the price comes from.
Yes, it would. At least by myself and anyone else who understands the concept of lossy compression.
If people like you were a significant portion of the market, you'd have a good case.
Whatever cut they're making now, they could drop the price by $10 and make the same cut without the flash drive.
They could, if the price of an album was related to its packaging. But it isn't, so they wouldn't.
You seem to have this idea that music is sold as a commodity like beer or sugar, and the price of the music is based on the result of price competition between equivalent musicians. Like you go into the store and buy the cheapest "angsty pop" or "bouncy pop" on the shelf. Well, maybe you do... I don't know.
They were quite shitty gaming consoles but more than adequate series 60 smartphones for the price.
And they probably sold better than similarly designed adequate-to-decent phones would have... for the price. But is a decent but unconventional phone going to sell the 6 million units Nokia was looking for? How well would something designed to be a good phone first, with the same gaming capabilities, have sold?
Either way, there's no advantage to a flash drive other than the gimmick factor.
Music is not sold "by the byte". A CD with 30 tracks on it in compressed format would not be expected to sell for less than (say) a 2- or 3- CD set with the same tracks on it. Given that an album typically costs $10-$20 for 10-15 songs, it's not at all unreasonable for a 30 track CD set to cost 30 dollars... whether it's one compressed CD or three uncompressed ones.
So the point you're missing is that there's no disadvantage to the free flash drive that's bundled with the 30 songs and additional material either.
I wonder if anyone over there is thinking, "Maybe we should just stick with robots."
But that trick never works.
If that $20 hard drive conks out in 2 or 3 years or quits working the first time the dog knocks the machine over, Microsoft is going to have a ton of angry customers.
You don't say?
So why is it that there was so much controversy about Microsoft killing Netscape by bundling IE with Windows
Because people are stupid.
The real problem with bundling IE is that they did it in a way that makes HTML a backdoor into your system. There's no way to secure IE except by unbundling the HTML and internet-access controls.
The pepole griping about the Sony "rootkit" DRM now should have been just as irate back around 1997 when Microsoft started shipping it with Active Desktop.
MS isn't getting the retail price, they are getting a wholesale price.
On the other hand, MS is probably paying less for the parts than you or I or even most distributors do.
Would you mind using SOME mechanism to indicate what you're quoting and what you're writing? Life's too short.
The point I'm trying to get at is NOT that you should be supporting the RIAA, but that allofmp3 is not ethically superior to just ripping the tracks from a peer-to-peer net.
And... it may be that I DO have content I'm not entitled to under law, because I don't know ofor a fact that none of the artists who have sold their music directly were entitled to do so under their contracts.
And I'm not even going to TRY to defend that kind of contract. Because that's also beside the point.
The bottom line... "allofmp3 is legal" is not equivalent to "allofmp3 is ethical". If anything, you're on firmer ethical ground if you're outright ripping the tracks off.
It costs more than a CD
The audio's lower quality
You get about 3 times as many songs as you would on a CD.
You can burn it to CD.
This is like them releasing it as an iTMS exclusive, except:
It's not DRMed.
They throw in a 128M flash drive for free.
Finally, no, being illegal is not the only thing stopping me from doing something unethical, but we obviously have different definitions of "unethical".
Clearly.
It is your decision to be a performing artist.
It is their decision to be recording artists.
If they choose to participate in a system that distributes music in ways that you do not feel you can ethically support, then you're free to opt out and not buy their music.
But if you're not going to buy their music from them, or through the distribution channels that they have chosen to participate in, then the only ethical option I see is to do without that music.
If you buy their music from the Russian Mafia instead of the RIAA Mafia, all you're doing is supporting a different corrupt system. It seems to me more honest to simply pirate the tracks in defiance of the law.
Just because I don't feed the music cartels and reward the artists that are stupid or greedy enough to sign with them doesn't make me unethical, but perhaps you supporting the corrupt system might take your ethics-meter down a few pegs.
The vast majority of my music collection are tracks by unsigned artists and legal recordings of public performances, many purchased directly from the performers at performances. Where my options are to buy label music or do without, I occasionally choose the labels. But I don't pretend that there's a third option.
Ah, no, it's a buffer overflow. So it's a bug specific to Microsoft's implementation of Javascript (Jscript). Separate code base from other implementations.
That statement implies that there is already tiered pricing at iTMS and there isn't!
The statement doesn't imply anything about the current pricing at iTMS. Any such conclusion is an inference on the part of the reader, because the possibility that Apple would have introduced tiered pricing at iTMS without at least *three* duplicate articles breathlessly announcing the fact is so remote that the possibility never entered my head.
So, I inferred that you were simply reacting to the headline.
Obviously my inference was as fallacious as yours.
Because IE is the only browser using a display library which has a security model of "wait until you're deep in the system's shared libraries and THEN try and figure out where the code you're about to run came from" instead of "don't implement a mechanism to allow code out of the sandbox, leave that decision to the application that called you".
This was such an obviously bad idea even back in 1997 that I'm still boggled by the fact that anyone with any understanding of programming runs IE or allows their users to run it.
Read
The
"Fine"
Article
The third word is actually not "Fine", but if you were in the military you'll be able to figure it out.
I have *never* purchased music, online or otherwise, that I didn't hear from somewhere first*.
And guess whose payola determines what that music is, for most people?
But a lot of people go to the iTMS and just browse around, listen to samples, and buy stuff that sounds good. Sometimes the sample's just too short and you guess wrong... and you're out a buck. But it works.
And guess whose payola DOESN'T determine the music you find that way?
So think of it this way: they're just trying to force Apple to take their payola.
The recording labels are mad they aren't controlling the price or distribution of the music as they have in the past with CD's. THAT is what they want. They've lost control and they want it back.
Erm, that's basically what Joel is saying.