In most places outside North America, the person who makes a call pays for both sides of the connection. In the US, each side pays for their half. So if you're calling a mobile phone in Europe, you have to pay more because you're paying for the airwaves as well as for your own connection.
Making land-line callers in the US pay more to call a mobile phone is bullshit. In the US, mobile phone users are already paying for their side of the connections, so this is double-charging consumers.
Seems like Microsoft took down the page. (Here's the Google cached copy.)
Maybe Microsoft just created this page for Slashdot to link to. Instead of their marketing team putting in time and effort to create a real campaign, they put together some generic arguments and to see how well they fly over on Slashdot. Now they'll take the Slashdot arguments and turn them into a real campaign. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but Microsoft isn't stupid, and this thread gives them a lot of valuable information.
The first reply to your post was correct. With Southwest, you accumulate free flights twice as fast when you book online. If you buy four round-trips online, you get a free round-trip. If you use the phone or a travel agent, you need to buy 8 round-trip tickets for a free one.
So there is discrimination happening here. If you can't use the web site, you have to pay more. But blind people can't use it.
If technologies like TiVo take off and research shows that no one watches ads anymore (at least 20-30 years away), ads will start appearing on top of tv-shows. This is already done for soccer games because there's no time for commercial breaks.
Also, there will always be product placement throughout television -- Charles Schwab halftimes, Nestle "Crunch Time" in basketball, weather reports brought to you by Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, etc etc.
It will be a long time before TiVo devices are ubiquitous, but even then, there will be plenty of chances for companies to market on television. I prefer the HBO business model, but consumer price points will prevent that for the masses.
Where were you located? My mom still has a rotary phone outside Washington, DC, and it still works fine. I've also used rotaries in Charlottesville, VA, with no problems. I've never heard of anywhere just not supporting rotary anymore. In fact, this article had me looking at some cool antique rotary phones on eBay. Some of the old french-style ones are hella sexy. I'd suck if they don't work in Silicon Valley anymore.
It's definitely good for consumers to have too much competition. But hey, when have Warren Buffett and Gates cared about consumers. They just want to make money. And you make more money in a heavily competed industry by bringing companies together, taking away redundant assets and services, and (unfortunately) removing customer choice.
There's a post about 10 above mine about Gates liking monopolies, so he'd probably like to make a telecom monopoly too. It's funny, but it's so true. But the root of it is that you can make more money with less competition. That's business. You just have to be careful not to piss off too many consumers or make a scene while doing it. (Something Microsoft hasn't been good at recently.)
The telecommunications industry is definitely ripe for consolidation. There is just too much bandwidth and too much telecom competition for any company to be very profitable. The article predicts that L3, with Warren Buffett's investment, will buy up the assets of WorldCom and Qwest to consolidate their customer bases, reduce costs, and lower competition. Since Gates has a relationship with Buffett, and current investments in L3 and WorldCom assets, he will be in a powerful position in the telecom industry after the mergers go through. But he'll still only own about 5-10% of L3. Then the article goes completely off a limb and states:
Gates could approach Buffett to buy it all. Gates would own the Internet.
This is stupid. If Gates (or probably Microsoft) wanted to own telecom, he could just buy it now at lower prices. He has enough money to buy L3, Qwest and WorldCom now. Why would he wait for consolidation to occur, the market to improve, and the price of these companies to probably triple?
Sure, Gates could own the infrastructure. But if he was still interested in infrastructure, why did he stop investing in MSN? Over the past few years Microsoft has abandoned most of its infrastructure projects and focused once again on software. And the Qwest/L3 investments are years old, back when MS cared about MSN.
Saying that Gates is trying to buy the telecom industry is just flamebait. There's nothing recent to suggest that he's trying to do that.
Thats an interesting point about tracks first being released (in very small amounts) on CD first. I've also heard of DJs doing studio work and testing out the crowd reaction and overall mastering by spinning the track in clubs on CD, before the track ever gets released to anyone. This was done all the time in Chicago when house started, but on acetate then.
But for the most part I've just seen van Dyk and Tiesto play their own tracks on CD, well after they've been put to vinyl. It makes sense... they wrote the tracks, they've heard them thousands of times, so they don't need to see the vinyl or deal with deteriorating records.
the only downside is the price, $500USD, but thats relatively cheap to a stack of vinyl, or your Technics 1200's.
But you can't get any decent house/trance/dnb music on CD. At least not in a timely basis. Look at the BBC Dance Charts. You can only get about 20% of those songs on CD. And probably only 10% of the current "hot" remix. But at the right stores you can get 80-90% of them on vinyl right now. So even though a CD set-up is cheaper than a vinyl set-up, you can't do nearly as much with it.
With vinyl you can see how the music progresses just by looking at the grooves. With a light shining sideways on a record, you can see the quiet areas (dark) and the climaxes (lighter) and beat changes (differing reflective qualities), and know what to expect. When the needle on one record is about to come to a dark spot, you know the beat's about to drop out, and if you're mixing another table in, you can plan accordingly.
You can't do that with CD. With CDs you have to memorize the offsets of all the breaks and drops. It makes mixing music a lot more difficult and for the most part, the quality diminishes. However, when DJs have their own songs, they commonly use CDs because they know the songs so well already, and they don't want to deal with the deteriorating quality that records have.
Re:Scratching isn't simply sped up audio
on
Digital DJ Turntable
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have some turntables and I definitely agree that vinyl is a whole lot sexier than cds. But CD djs are definitely taking over the low-end of clubs. At an average dance club, most patrons don't know or care that the music is on CDs. It's unfortunate.
Vinyl will continue to be the medium of choice, though, because most house and trance songs just aren't available on CD. And you can see the musical progression on a record, so you can easily line up phrases (32-measures) and see where breaks are without the need to completely know a song 64 measures ahead.
What it comes down to is the quality of mixes you can create on each medium. You can create a much better experience, as a dj, if you can see the grooves and know where the climaxes and breaks are with relation to the needle. Until you can do that with CDs (with some visualization firmware), and until decent tracks are released on CD, vinyl will remain.
That said, going to good clubs you still see greats like Tiesto and van Dyk using CDs for about 15-25% of the tracks they play.
You're right about the violation of due process... but I think the bigger issue is that the FBI took things that merely benefitted from the altered cable modems, not just the devices that perpetrated the crime.
It's almost the equivalent of stealing water and having your house and car taken because you used the water to water your lawn, mop your floors, and wash your car.
They should have just taken the cable modems and possibly the ethernet cables, but anything more is rediculous.
On a sarcastic note, I wonder if Slashdot's equipment will get stolen now because we're "stealing" all the Toledo Blade's bandwidth? Both Buckeye CableSystem and the Toledo Blade are owned by Block Communications:).
Essential mixes are pretty good when they first come out, and are probably less cheesy than the Radio 1 dance charts:). They do get old fast though. You can still listen to a lot of them, and other mixes, on Shoutcast servers though. The better Shoutcast servers also tend to delete older mixes as they reach 2 months old. You can also find mixes from Digweed's Kiss 100 weekly and a number of Manchester radio mixes. You can't save them though.
You're mostly right about UK owning the dance scene right now, as well as Germany and The Netherlands with van Dyk and Tiesto. But I think the US does have a fighting chance in the growing house scene, with Mark Farina and other SF/NY natives. Domestic house vinyl has been getting pretty good too, but still 3 out of 4 good house tracks are european.
You can say this all you want, but there is so much music out there that you can't buy anywhere in the US. Look at the BBC dance charts for instance. You can't buy any of those singles on CD. You can't buy more than 10 of them on vinyl easily because by the time they get on the charts, their first releases are sold out. And a good half of them will never be exported to the US anyway.
You could download most of them on Audiogalaxy, though. And if they get rereleased and exported to the US, people will know about them and they'll sell at record stores. Otherwise the only way to hear these songs is to buy dj compilations (usually with a 3-month delay to the charts) or go spend $40 covers going to dance clubs.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
What I was saying was essentially what the post before yours said. Music-as-data that has a degree of randomness to it when played. Yes, it is a lot like jazz improvisation, but the improvisation is done by the music player using some logic embedded in the music file/format. This way, listeners don't have to go to concerts to listen to improv. The artist sets what improvisations are acceptible so that while every play is slightly different (or possibly drastically different), each play is a creation of the artist.
And the post before yours is right, now that I think about it... this has been done before. But I'd like to see it done by more than just groundbreaking electronic artists like Autechre.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
I found a good article about Cage's work here. His most notable performance piece was 4'33, consisting of a man coming out on stage, and sitting at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds while occasionally flipping his sheets of music. It shifted the focus from the stage to the audience, making audience members aware of all the sounds around them.
One thing that Cage's performances had that lowercase music doesn't, however, is variability. Each Cage performance was slightly different. I would really welcome a movement such as this in popular music, where songs have variability of notes, measures, keys, or whatever an artist would like. It would make listening to the same song over and over on the radio much more interesting. And it's completely possible with today's technology.
Maybe this is why I like listening to dj mixes online... they're always new and different.
It will be interesting to see how violent these games are. With the recurring parental backlash against violent video games after high-school shootings and other events, will those same people start complaining about the government creating these games? This issue gets increasingly complex considering the Army is partially trying to recruit high school students under 18.
Given this situation, I suspect these games would primarily be based on military strategy with an emphasis on non-violent missions.
Adobe didn't patent everyday palettes, they patented palettes that could be docked together into one unit that could be flipped through and modified easily and intuitively. Before this functionality came out in Photoshop 4 (or so), it hadn't been seen before. It's not an automatic thing to implement in Windows or MacOS; it took considerable user testing and engineering to make them work seemlessly.
There are certainly a lot of obvious software features turned into patents. The USPO needs to stop allowing those. But when companies actually work to create new ideas, they should have a way to protect them.
While I enjoy seeing Microsoft having to respect it's competitor's products, would application developers even develop for a stripped-down version of Windows? So many developers rely on Windows libraries that are part of Internet Explorer (wininet.lib) or Office (ODBC/database libraries) that it would be difficult for them to change their current applications to support a Windows without them.
My conclusion is that if there was a stripped-down version of Windows, there wouldn't be many applications developed for it. So no consumers would use it. Then Microsoft could continue to add Windows "features" that deprecate third-party software usage, and just point to the modular Windows when anyone complains.
The Las Vegas airport is rediculously close to the strip. If you've ever flown in there, you feel like you could walk to the strip and gamble during your layover. And the monorail does go down from the strip towards the airport, so practically it will connect the two. Though it doesn't look like there will be a dedicated airport monorail stop to begin with. Check out the map in the article.
Even if decryption is done in the headphones, it's not hard to get the analog data. Just tear apart the headphones, take off the speaker, and hook up the two wires previously connected to the speaker to a standard audio cord. Plug the cord into your microphone jack on your computer, record the music, voila. You don't lose very much quality if you solder the wires well and use a decent sound card.
Slashdot Mirror
In most places outside North America, the person who makes a call pays for both sides of the connection. In the US, each side pays for their half. So if you're calling a mobile phone in Europe, you have to pay more because you're paying for the airwaves as well as for your own connection.
Making land-line callers in the US pay more to call a mobile phone is bullshit. In the US, mobile phone users are already paying for their side of the connections, so this is double-charging consumers.
Seems like Microsoft took down the page. (Here's the Google cached copy.)
Maybe Microsoft just created this page for Slashdot to link to. Instead of their marketing team putting in time and effort to create a real campaign, they put together some generic arguments and to see how well they fly over on Slashdot. Now they'll take the Slashdot arguments and turn them into a real campaign. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but Microsoft isn't stupid, and this thread gives them a lot of valuable information.
The first reply to your post was correct. With Southwest, you accumulate free flights twice as fast when you book online. If you buy four round-trips online, you get a free round-trip. If you use the phone or a travel agent, you need to buy 8 round-trip tickets for a free one.
So there is discrimination happening here. If you can't use the web site, you have to pay more. But blind people can't use it.
If technologies like TiVo take off and research shows that no one watches ads anymore (at least 20-30 years away), ads will start appearing on top of tv-shows. This is already done for soccer games because there's no time for commercial breaks.
Also, there will always be product placement throughout television -- Charles Schwab halftimes, Nestle "Crunch Time" in basketball, weather reports brought to you by Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, etc etc.
It will be a long time before TiVo devices are ubiquitous, but even then, there will be plenty of chances for companies to market on television. I prefer the HBO business model, but consumer price points will prevent that for the masses.
Where were you located? My mom still has a rotary phone outside Washington, DC, and it still works fine. I've also used rotaries in Charlottesville, VA, with no problems. I've never heard of anywhere just not supporting rotary anymore. In fact, this article had me looking at some cool antique rotary phones on eBay. Some of the old french-style ones are hella sexy. I'd suck if they don't work in Silicon Valley anymore.
It's definitely good for consumers to have too much competition. But hey, when have Warren Buffett and Gates cared about consumers. They just want to make money. And you make more money in a heavily competed industry by bringing companies together, taking away redundant assets and services, and (unfortunately) removing customer choice.
There's a post about 10 above mine about Gates liking monopolies, so he'd probably like to make a telecom monopoly too. It's funny, but it's so true. But the root of it is that you can make more money with less competition. That's business. You just have to be careful not to piss off too many consumers or make a scene while doing it. (Something Microsoft hasn't been good at recently.)
The telecommunications industry is definitely ripe for consolidation. There is just too much bandwidth and too much telecom competition for any company to be very profitable. The article predicts that L3, with Warren Buffett's investment, will buy up the assets of WorldCom and Qwest to consolidate their customer bases, reduce costs, and lower competition. Since Gates has a relationship with Buffett, and current investments in L3 and WorldCom assets, he will be in a powerful position in the telecom industry after the mergers go through. But he'll still only own about 5-10% of L3. Then the article goes completely off a limb and states:
Gates could approach Buffett to buy it all. Gates would own the Internet.
This is stupid. If Gates (or probably Microsoft) wanted to own telecom, he could just buy it now at lower prices. He has enough money to buy L3, Qwest and WorldCom now. Why would he wait for consolidation to occur, the market to improve, and the price of these companies to probably triple?
Sure, Gates could own the infrastructure. But if he was still interested in infrastructure, why did he stop investing in MSN? Over the past few years Microsoft has abandoned most of its infrastructure projects and focused once again on software. And the Qwest/L3 investments are years old, back when MS cared about MSN.
Saying that Gates is trying to buy the telecom industry is just flamebait. There's nothing recent to suggest that he's trying to do that.
Thats an interesting point about tracks first being released (in very small amounts) on CD first. I've also heard of DJs doing studio work and testing out the crowd reaction and overall mastering by spinning the track in clubs on CD, before the track ever gets released to anyone. This was done all the time in Chicago when house started, but on acetate then.
But for the most part I've just seen van Dyk and Tiesto play their own tracks on CD, well after they've been put to vinyl. It makes sense... they wrote the tracks, they've heard them thousands of times, so they don't need to see the vinyl or deal with deteriorating records.
the only downside is the price, $500USD, but thats relatively cheap to a stack of vinyl, or your Technics 1200's.
But you can't get any decent house/trance/dnb music on CD. At least not in a timely basis. Look at the BBC Dance Charts. You can only get about 20% of those songs on CD. And probably only 10% of the current "hot" remix. But at the right stores you can get 80-90% of them on vinyl right now. So even though a CD set-up is cheaper than a vinyl set-up, you can't do nearly as much with it.
With vinyl you can see how the music progresses just by looking at the grooves. With a light shining sideways on a record, you can see the quiet areas (dark) and the climaxes (lighter) and beat changes (differing reflective qualities), and know what to expect. When the needle on one record is about to come to a dark spot, you know the beat's about to drop out, and if you're mixing another table in, you can plan accordingly.
You can't do that with CD. With CDs you have to memorize the offsets of all the breaks and drops. It makes mixing music a lot more difficult and for the most part, the quality diminishes. However, when DJs have their own songs, they commonly use CDs because they know the songs so well already, and they don't want to deal with the deteriorating quality that records have.
I have some turntables and I definitely agree that vinyl is a whole lot sexier than cds. But CD djs are definitely taking over the low-end of clubs. At an average dance club, most patrons don't know or care that the music is on CDs. It's unfortunate.
Vinyl will continue to be the medium of choice, though, because most house and trance songs just aren't available on CD. And you can see the musical progression on a record, so you can easily line up phrases (32-measures) and see where breaks are without the need to completely know a song 64 measures ahead.
What it comes down to is the quality of mixes you can create on each medium. You can create a much better experience, as a dj, if you can see the grooves and know where the climaxes and breaks are with relation to the needle. Until you can do that with CDs (with some visualization firmware), and until decent tracks are released on CD, vinyl will remain.
That said, going to good clubs you still see greats like Tiesto and van Dyk using CDs for about 15-25% of the tracks they play.
How do I know what music to buy?
You're right about the violation of due process... but I think the bigger issue is that the FBI took things that merely benefitted from the altered cable modems, not just the devices that perpetrated the crime.
:).
It's almost the equivalent of stealing water and having your house and car taken because you used the water to water your lawn, mop your floors, and wash your car.
They should have just taken the cable modems and possibly the ethernet cables, but anything more is rediculous.
On a sarcastic note, I wonder if Slashdot's equipment will get stolen now because we're "stealing" all the Toledo Blade's bandwidth? Both Buckeye CableSystem and the Toledo Blade are owned by Block Communications
Essential mixes are pretty good when they first come out, and are probably less cheesy than the Radio 1 dance charts :). They do get old fast though. You can still listen to a lot of them, and other mixes, on Shoutcast servers though. The better Shoutcast servers also tend to delete older mixes as they reach 2 months old. You can also find mixes from Digweed's Kiss 100 weekly and a number of Manchester radio mixes. You can't save them though.
You're mostly right about UK owning the dance scene right now, as well as Germany and The Netherlands with van Dyk and Tiesto. But I think the US does have a fighting chance in the growing house scene, with Mark Farina and other SF/NY natives. Domestic house vinyl has been getting pretty good too, but still 3 out of 4 good house tracks are european.
You can say this all you want, but there is so much music out there that you can't buy anywhere in the US. Look at the BBC dance charts for instance. You can't buy any of those singles on CD. You can't buy more than 10 of them on vinyl easily because by the time they get on the charts, their first releases are sold out. And a good half of them will never be exported to the US anyway.
You could download most of them on Audiogalaxy, though. And if they get rereleased and exported to the US, people will know about them and they'll sell at record stores. Otherwise the only way to hear these songs is to buy dj compilations (usually with a 3-month delay to the charts) or go spend $40 covers going to dance clubs.
And the post before yours is right, now that I think about it... this has been done before. But I'd like to see it done by more than just groundbreaking electronic artists like Autechre.
One thing that Cage's performances had that lowercase music doesn't, however, is variability. Each Cage performance was slightly different. I would really welcome a movement such as this in popular music, where songs have variability of notes, measures, keys, or whatever an artist would like. It would make listening to the same song over and over on the radio much more interesting. And it's completely possible with today's technology.
Maybe this is why I like listening to dj mixes online... they're always new and different.
At least we get to see doctored nude photos of George W!
Given this situation, I suspect these games would primarily be based on military strategy with an emphasis on non-violent missions.
There are certainly a lot of obvious software features turned into patents. The USPO needs to stop allowing those. But when companies actually work to create new ideas, they should have a way to protect them.
The latest versions of both Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office are available for Macintosh.
My conclusion is that if there was a stripped-down version of Windows, there wouldn't be many applications developed for it. So no consumers would use it. Then Microsoft could continue to add Windows "features" that deprecate third-party software usage, and just point to the modular Windows when anyone complains.
It is expected to have 350 to 400 hours of original content per year.
Yeah, but with one hour of original content per day, how intellectually stimulating could it be?
The Las Vegas airport is rediculously close to the strip. If you've ever flown in there, you feel like you could walk to the strip and gamble during your layover. And the monorail does go down from the strip towards the airport, so practically it will connect the two. Though it doesn't look like there will be a dedicated airport monorail stop to begin with. Check out the map in the article.
Even if decryption is done in the headphones, it's not hard to get the analog data. Just tear apart the headphones, take off the speaker, and hook up the two wires previously connected to the speaker to a standard audio cord. Plug the cord into your microphone jack on your computer, record the music, voila. You don't lose very much quality if you solder the wires well and use a decent sound card.