Why are people defending Apple for reducing consumer choice?
Wait a minute, the consumer clearly has a choice here: the consumer can simply choose not to buy an iPod and buy one of the many other players that amazingly work with a dozen online music stores.
How does Apple limit choice here? How does Apple have a monopoly over online music if one can easily purchase an iRiver and use Napster to purchase music?
Here's an other way to think about it: To use a Playstation 2 game you need to buy a "second piece of hardware" namely a Playstation 2 console. Is this "quite clearly product tying" and an "illegal abuse of a monopoly?" No. Because, you can choose to buy a GameCube or an Xbox (or a PC for that matter) to play games. This is akin to where Apple is now, i.e. no monopoly.
Interesting. Even when I graduated (1991), it was still possible to get a programming/development job on basis of skills/experience alone, regardless of degree (or G.P.A. for that matter).
So a question for those just-graduated (or about to graduate): Does anyone hire "self-taught" programmers anymore?
I've heard from too many people that punching out code all day at work makes them very hesitant to even touch a computer at home. For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
Short answer: it depends.
Long answer:
When I was in elementary/middle/high school, I used to spend long hours programming and couldn't get enough of it.
When I was in college I found myself too distracted by other things to program.
When I was working full time (programming) for a company, even on projects where I worked solo on design and devlopment, I was definitely too tired/spent to touch a computer at home (in fact, I didn't even have one at home -- but this is before the Internet made "being connected" all the time a necessity).
However, as soon as I started doing independent contracting (and working from home) I found that the freedom to schedule my day allowed me to set aside time to program for pleasure. I wrote a couple shareware games, made no real money, but enjoyed having turned one of my passions (programming) back into a hobby.
Now, I run my own company and spend all my time programming -- in essence I've come full circle and now my hobby is my career. From this point of view, I completely agree with Joel's quote, with a caveat: if you enjoy programming computers, and your programming is not "owned" by someone else, then you are in an extremely fortunate minority of people.
So, to answer your question: yes, I really enjoy my job and it's not old or tedious in the least bit, but, it took me some time to get to this point.
For those OS X users interested in thematic keyword search (either in desktop docs or on the Web), take a look at theConcept. Copernic Agent is a somewhat similar product.
for making me want to figure out how to program. But I probably owe special thanks to Ken Arnold for writing curses and giving me a way to move things around on my terminal in a least some facsimile of what I saw in games at the arcade.
And course, had a C compiler not been available in System III, IV, V and BSD, then I would've just sat there playing games instead of learning how to program. Which is why I think every OS should have a development environment included (kudos to Apple for thinking a commercial OS should too).
I'm surprised developers of MMORPGs didn't realize that simulating social interaction on a grand scale introduces the exact same problems a real society has: namely violence, theft and other lawlessness. The solution is to implement exactly what the real world uses: a police or security force as a detterence.
A virtual police or secuirty force that could 1) recognize "crime" and 2) had the authority to "detain" (perhaps indefinitely, depending on the seriousness of the breach) and even fine "criminals" would solve the problem to a large degree. But like real life, there will always be those who want to break the rules and get away with it.
When I was in Kindergarden (1974) every boy wanted the Evil Knievel Stunt Bike due to the outrageous commercial that showed how it could "easily" do pop-up wheelies, jump ramps, and other incredible tricks. Of course, the commercial turned out to be somehwat faked since getting it to do more than fall over after a 3 foot dash proved to require endless patience.
IMHO, there is no better geek book. Sure, it's dated. And sure, it's hefty. But no one has ever so fully embraced the ideas of recursive logic and number theory in sample, in writing and in wit. It's a treasure -- and if you're a geek and haven't read it (or tried to read it) then you don't know what being a geek is.
No, it is indeed a "serious" setback because the system has been deployed (due to executive order from the White House) without ever being succesfully tested in two years. This post-deployment test was critical to quell the critics of the program, and now due to its failure, its clear that although we have a system in place, it doesn't seem to do anything useful but fail.
No, when they say no computer use (if they actually don't define it, which I doubt), they clearly don't mean parking meters, fridges, cars, elevators, etc. The judges and the courts aren't idiots.
That argument is just trying to make things difficult. It's like complaining to Hertz Rent-a-car "How can you rent trucks? How can you rent vans, SUVs, need I go on???"
How much harder is it to keep people off the internet in an age when everything--from parking meters to refrigerators--comes with an IP address.
This is just obfucsation, the fact is: if you're banned from chatrooms, then you're banned from using chatrooms such as IRC or anything that could be considered a "chatroom", if you're banned from accessing the Web, then you're banned from using an HTTP service. Banned. As in, regardless of the source.
Parking meters and refrigerators? Their fine, as long as they're not conduits for banned services.
The post mortems of this and other so-called "iPod Killers" are beginning to expose the difficulty of creating: 1) a sleek, feature rich MP3 player; 2) sleek, intuitive software to run on the player; and 3) sleek, intuitive software to interface with it.
(and optionally a sleek music store to interface with it)
For those who belittle Apple's achievement or dismiss their market success as "clever marketing," the failure of Sony and others to basically get their engineering shit in order should be more than telling: apparently, creating a great MP3 player really is hard.
Not everyone has or wants to use a credit card.
on
iTunes Accepts PayPal
·
· Score: 1
Why would anyone use PayPal to buy from Apple?
All it takes to open up a PayPal account is an exisiting bank account. For those who either can't get credit (too young, bad credit), or are worried about using credit on the Internet (my grandparents), a PayPal account is an excellent alternative for online purchasing. Simply put, Apple wants these users to prefer iiTMS (and thus iPod) when it comes to buying music online.
As someone who watched the SACD v. DVD-Audio format war with a keen interest (I'm sold on high-def multichannel music) I eventually invested in a player that supported both formats, thinking I couldn't lose. But - to my amazement - I did end up losing, not because consumers perferred one format over the other, but becuase most consumers had no interest in the new formats. The result? A dearth of SACD and DVD-Audio reissues and releases. High def audio seems to be dead.
The problem was that remixing old music in multichannel is expensive, so many discs we're simply released in stereo. For most consumers, the audible difference (due to the higher sampling rate) didn't seem quite worth the price (for a new player, for a new disc).
And now here we see a new format war for a high def video. You might think video is different because high def allows for massive content (at DVD quality). But does anyone really believe the studios are going to do this? It's hard to get a consumer to pay a lot of money for just one disc.
If the studios instead focus on delivering HDTV quality movies, then the superiority of the format (over DVD) will only be apparent to those who own HDTVs...a scenario which mirrors the problems with high def audio.
I guess my point (and worry) is: just like high def audio, there will be players that support both formats. And just like high def audio, nobody will care except for videophiles and gadget freaks. So in the end, the "format war" doesn't matter.
IMHO, high def DVD will more likely make its mark as a huge storage medium for PCs and game consoles.
Although the caching solution seems intriguing, the onus should really be on the aggregator authors to do at least local caching for RSS access between "refresh" intervals and even better, use HTTP conditional GETs. It's also important to use sane default "refresh" intervals and constraints.
During our product's development, our debugging refresh interval was 5 minutes and hardcoded to Slashdot. As you can imagine, it didn't take us long to discover Slashdot's unique banning mechanism -- it woke us up to the problem of letting people check feeds way too often (this also before we had implement local caching).
However, if this bandwidth issue keeps getting worse, someone like Akamai is certainly going to think of a corporate solution.
The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries
Um, according to these figures the average age of these "children" in each country was barely five months old (15/40 =.375 years old). Something's fishy here.
That's great to hear. How about the unauthorized channels -- is your stuff on the filesharing networks, and do you think it's had a good/neutral/bad effect on your success?
Yes, our tracks are traded P2P and it doesn't -- and never has bothered us. In fact, we were pretty psyched the first time we found ourselves being traded on Napster back in the day.
I think the conventional wisdom holds true here: if you're making most of your $ from retail CD sales then P2P could be (although this is debatable) a "bad effect." For everyone else it's good to neutral.
"Decent money" is a relative term; in this case meaning "decent" compared to other bands we know earning money from CD sales (i.e. not "decent money" compared to what it takes to make a living - that's why we all have day jobs).
As many people are learning these days, getting a recording contract is basically the same as getting a loan. But -- Courtney Love's ramblings notwithstanding -- a lot of musicians (like me and the others in my band) are willing to enter these deals because:
1) The "loan" buys you recording time, publicity, transportation, expenses, per diems, etc. Things that a starving band can rarely afford.
2) The "loan" is repaid from CD sales. And that's the fair trade because we realize that chances are slim to none we're going to sell enough CDs to cover our costs. But this isn't a bank we're talking about. Nobody's going seize your home or car because your CD sold 100 copies.
3) You typically get to keep merchandise revenue. And that's the silver lining: even though you never see money from your CD sales, you get to earn money on the road.
So, given that a band's goals are usually to afford to keep playing, recording and performing, a record deal sounds ideal. If you end up being the 1 in a million who "makes it" then you're obviously set. If you don't, then at least you got to "live the dream" for a lot longer than you could have you if you had to foot the bill. Along the way, you make some decent press, build up a fan base and basically have a great time.
Win-win I say.
(footnote: since we were dropped by our admittedly shitty label we've made decent money selling CDs and songs online at places like iTunes -- but still nowhere near the amount we received from our "free" loan which paid for our last CD's production and then some).
Slashdot Mirror
Why are people defending Apple for reducing consumer choice?
Wait a minute, the consumer clearly has a choice here: the consumer can simply choose not to buy an iPod and buy one of the many other players that amazingly work with a dozen online music stores.
How does Apple limit choice here? How does Apple have a monopoly over online music if one can easily purchase an iRiver and use Napster to purchase music?
Here's an other way to think about it: To use a Playstation 2 game you need to buy a "second piece of hardware" namely a Playstation 2 console. Is this "quite clearly product tying" and an "illegal abuse of a monopoly?" No. Because, you can choose to buy a GameCube or an Xbox (or a PC for that matter) to play games. This is akin to where Apple is now, i.e. no monopoly.
IMHO, this law suit is just a grab for $.
Interesting. Even when I graduated (1991), it was still possible to get a programming/development job on basis of skills/experience alone, regardless of degree (or G.P.A. for that matter).
So a question for those just-graduated (or about to graduate): Does anyone hire "self-taught" programmers anymore?
I've heard from too many people that punching out code all day at work makes them very hesitant to even touch a computer at home. For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
Short answer: it depends.
Long answer:
When I was in elementary/middle/high school, I used to spend long hours programming and couldn't get enough of it.
When I was in college I found myself too distracted by other things to program.
When I was working full time (programming) for a company, even on projects where I worked solo on design and devlopment, I was definitely too tired/spent to touch a computer at home (in fact, I didn't even have one at home -- but this is before the Internet made "being connected" all the time a necessity).
However, as soon as I started doing independent contracting (and working from home) I found that the freedom to schedule my day allowed me to set aside time to program for pleasure. I wrote a couple shareware games, made no real money, but enjoyed having turned one of my passions (programming) back into a hobby.
Now, I run my own company and spend all my time programming -- in essence I've come full circle and now my hobby is my career. From this point of view, I completely agree with Joel's quote, with a caveat: if you enjoy programming computers, and your programming is not "owned" by someone else, then you are in an extremely fortunate minority of people.
So, to answer your question: yes, I really enjoy my job and it's not old or tedious in the least bit, but, it took me some time to get to this point.
For those OS X users interested in thematic keyword search (either in desktop docs or on the Web), take a look at theConcept. Copernic Agent is a somewhat similar product.
</shameless promotion>
Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked.
and increase the risk of someone throwing it into the trash?
for making me want to figure out how to program. But I probably owe special thanks to Ken Arnold for writing curses and giving me a way to move things around on my terminal in a least some facsimile of what I saw in games at the arcade.
And course, had a C compiler not been available in System III, IV, V and BSD, then I would've just sat there playing games instead of learning how to program. Which is why I think every OS should have a development environment included (kudos to Apple for thinking a commercial OS should too).
But given that it's on Mars (686.98 Earth days to complete one solar revolution), its actual Martian anniversary will come November 19th, 2005.
As evidenced by this image.
I'm surprised developers of MMORPGs didn't realize that simulating social interaction on a grand scale introduces the exact same problems a real society has: namely violence, theft and other lawlessness. The solution is to implement exactly what the real world uses: a police or security force as a detterence.
A virtual police or secuirty force that could 1) recognize "crime" and 2) had the authority to "detain" (perhaps indefinitely, depending on the seriousness of the breach) and even fine "criminals" would solve the problem to a large degree. But like real life, there will always be those who want to break the rules and get away with it.
When I was in Kindergarden (1974) every boy wanted the Evil Knievel Stunt Bike due to the outrageous commercial that showed how it could "easily" do pop-up wheelies, jump ramps, and other incredible tricks. Of course, the commercial turned out to be somehwat faked since getting it to do more than fall over after a 3 foot dash proved to require endless patience.
Almost, it's an early 80s game (1981). You can usually find one on eBay, for example this one.
Another great electronic/board game hybrid was Stop Thief, which is a 70s game (1979). Also easy to find on eBay.
IMHO, there is no better geek book. Sure, it's dated. And sure, it's hefty. But no one has ever so fully embraced the ideas of recursive logic and number theory in sample, in writing and in wit. It's a treasure -- and if you're a geek and haven't read it (or tried to read it) then you don't know what being a geek is.
On Amazon of course. 777 pages of awesome stuff.
No, it is indeed a "serious" setback because the system has been deployed (due to executive order from the White House) without ever being succesfully tested in two years . This post-deployment test was critical to quell the critics of the program, and now due to its failure, its clear that although we have a system in place, it doesn't seem to do anything useful but fail.
why else would you even need such a system
Welcome to politics at its finest.
Who's willing to bet that Google will release their tool (probably with their oft-used "beta" tag) ASAP to steal Yahoo's thunder?
Next up, obfuscated binary:
1 0101
...
0100101111010110
1001101010111101
01010101010
0111100010010111
No, when they say no computer use (if they actually don't define it, which I doubt), they clearly don't mean parking meters, fridges, cars, elevators, etc. The judges and the courts aren't idiots.
That argument is just trying to make things difficult. It's like complaining to Hertz Rent-a-car "How can you rent trucks? How can you rent vans, SUVs, need I go on???"
How much harder is it to keep people off the internet in an age when everything--from parking meters to refrigerators--comes with an IP address.
This is just obfucsation, the fact is: if you're banned from chatrooms, then you're banned from using chatrooms such as IRC or anything that could be considered a "chatroom", if you're banned from accessing the Web, then you're banned from using an HTTP service. Banned. As in, regardless of the source.
Parking meters and refrigerators? Their fine, as long as they're not conduits for banned services.
Really, why is this non-issue a story?
The post mortems of this and other so-called "iPod Killers" are beginning to expose the difficulty of creating:
1) a sleek, feature rich MP3 player;
2) sleek, intuitive software to run on the player; and
3) sleek, intuitive software to interface with it.
(and optionally a sleek music store to interface with it)
For those who belittle Apple's achievement or dismiss their market success as "clever marketing," the failure of Sony and others to basically get their engineering shit in order should be more than telling: apparently, creating a great MP3 player really is hard.
Why would anyone use PayPal to buy from Apple?
All it takes to open up a PayPal account is an exisiting bank account. For those who either can't get credit (too young, bad credit), or are worried about using credit on the Internet (my grandparents), a PayPal account is an excellent alternative for online purchasing. Simply put, Apple wants these users to prefer iiTMS (and thus iPod) when it comes to buying music online.
As someone who watched the SACD v. DVD-Audio format war with a keen interest (I'm sold on high-def multichannel music) I eventually invested in a player that supported both formats, thinking I couldn't lose. But - to my amazement - I did end up losing, not because consumers perferred one format over the other, but becuase most consumers had no interest in the new formats. The result? A dearth of SACD and DVD-Audio reissues and releases. High def audio seems to be dead.
The problem was that remixing old music in multichannel is expensive, so many discs we're simply released in stereo. For most consumers, the audible difference (due to the higher sampling rate) didn't seem quite worth the price (for a new player, for a new disc).
And now here we see a new format war for a high def video. You might think video is different because high def allows for massive content (at DVD quality). But does anyone really believe the studios are going to do this? It's hard to get a consumer to pay a lot of money for just one disc.
If the studios instead focus on delivering HDTV quality movies, then the superiority of the format (over DVD) will only be apparent to those who own HDTVs...a scenario which mirrors the problems with high def audio.
I guess my point (and worry) is: just like high def audio, there will be players that support both formats. And just like high def audio, nobody will care except for videophiles and gadget freaks. So in the end, the "format war" doesn't matter.
IMHO, high def DVD will more likely make its mark as a huge storage medium for PCs and game consoles.
Although the caching solution seems intriguing, the onus should really be on the aggregator authors to do at least local caching for RSS access between "refresh" intervals and even better, use HTTP conditional GETs. It's also important to use sane default "refresh" intervals and constraints.
During our product's development, our debugging refresh interval was 5 minutes and hardcoded to Slashdot. As you can imagine, it didn't take us long to discover Slashdot's unique banning mechanism -- it woke us up to the problem of letting people check feeds way too often (this also before we had implement local caching).
However, if this bandwidth issue keeps getting worse, someone like Akamai is certainly going to think of a corporate solution.
The New York Times reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its results (pdf) for a test of mathematical skills given to 15 year olds in 40 different countries
.375 years old). Something's fishy here.
Um, according to these figures the average age of these "children" in each country was barely five months old (15/40 =
That's great to hear. How about the unauthorized channels -- is your stuff on the filesharing networks, and do you think it's had a good/neutral/bad effect on your success?
Yes, our tracks are traded P2P and it doesn't -- and never has bothered us. In fact, we were pretty psyched the first time we found ourselves being traded on Napster back in the day.
I think the conventional wisdom holds true here: if you're making most of your $ from retail CD sales then P2P could be (although this is debatable) a "bad effect." For everyone else it's good to neutral.
"Decent money" is a relative term; in this case meaning "decent" compared to other bands we know earning money from CD sales (i.e. not "decent money" compared to what it takes to make a living - that's why we all have day jobs).
As many people are learning these days, getting a recording contract is basically the same as getting a loan. But -- Courtney Love's ramblings notwithstanding -- a lot of musicians (like me and the others in my band) are willing to enter these deals because:
1) The "loan" buys you recording time, publicity, transportation, expenses, per diems, etc. Things that a starving band can rarely afford.
2) The "loan" is repaid from CD sales. And that's the fair trade because we realize that chances are slim to none we're going to sell enough CDs to cover our costs. But this isn't a bank we're talking about. Nobody's going seize your home or car because your CD sold 100 copies.
3) You typically get to keep merchandise revenue. And that's the silver lining: even though you never see money from your CD sales, you get to earn money on the road.
So, given that a band's goals are usually to afford to keep playing, recording and performing, a record deal sounds ideal. If you end up being the 1 in a million who "makes it" then you're obviously set. If you don't, then at least you got to "live the dream" for a lot longer than you could have you if you had to foot the bill. Along the way, you make some decent press, build up a fan base and basically have a great time.
Win-win I say.
(footnote: since we were dropped by our admittedly shitty label we've made decent money selling CDs and songs online at places like iTunes -- but still nowhere near the amount we received from our "free" loan which paid for our last CD's production and then some).