And it's been the alternative for almost 20 years strong now... The Macintosh.
That's how it was billed when IBM was the monopolistic enemy, and that's still how it's billed.
It works well, it's got a strong, happy, following... the only criticism is that it costs slightly more, but then that's a side effect of such a dominant monopoly as Microsoft.
Jacobs said in an interview late last night that a successful lawsuit would do little to reverse the damage done by the paper Halderman published Monday about his research, and any suit would likely hurt the research community by making computer scientists think twice about researching copy-protection technology.
from the article?
He's acknowledged that he couldn't reverse the damage, but he ever said that Halderman wasn't worth it, financially. He can't recover $10m in damages (especially punitive) from a grad student, and he couldn't really hold the school liable for the student's research. So it was left unsaid that there was little fiscal or tactical gain in winning a lawsuit, only bad press and egg on their face by drawing attention to their MediaMax software.
The real question: What 'idiot' at BMG *paid* for SunnCom to develop, and then again to use, MediaMax?
Why is it a game only played on the PC? The game is only playable because you can change the motherboard, power supply, and case?
You don't need to upgrade the motherboard on the Mac; you can upgrade CPUs from G3 -> G4 -> dual G4 (quite unlike a PC which *forces* motherboards to be paired with generational CPUS), and the same with power supplies, which are just as generational as the CPU. And cases... I suppose that's one thing, being able to upgrade the case. But that's the *only* thing that makes a difference between the game on Mac or PC platforms.
Reiterate: You have to upgrade the powersupply when you upgrade the CPU a generation, and you have to upgrade the motherboard when you upgrade the CPU a generation. If you only stick within a generation, then you don't have to. Oh, and ram too.
On a Mac, you don't have to upgrade the motherboard, powersupply, or ram to switch generations. If you want more motherboard features... then you use PCI cards... is that what you're complaining about?
The previous poster already said 'making backup copies'
Assuming you have a backup copy, then you don't have to relicense or redownload anything. You just copy them back into iTunes. You *can*, because I've done this in practice multiple times, transferring them from laptop to iPod to desktop and back.
As per 'expanding and recompressing' the parent also said 'burned CDs'. You can burn audio CDs (thus expand 12x) and I suppose the 'recompressing' part is converting said audio CD into mp3?
And don't be so insulting about Apple Kool Aide, it's not becoming of you. Me, I've bought 5 songs to see what the sound quality is like. It's better than the MP3s I rip from CDs I own using iTunes, at the least, and that's the benchmark to which I hew to.
To be clear: 128kbps 48KHz AAC from iTMS sound better than 224kbps 44KHz MP3 from iTunes on exactly the same hardware. Since I listen to my music primarily in MP3 format, or on my iPod, then yes, AAC >> MP3. Everyone needs to decide for themselves of course, since you possibly have a better setup, but on my system, AAC >> MP3.
And the irony is that you boycott the RIAA until they begin distributing a good product at a fair price. That's where the conflict is. *I* believe that a $1 AAC file is a good product at a fair price. I think a copy protected $18 CD is a crappy product at a poor price.
You need to state upfront what your definition of 'good product' and 'fair price' is for any kind of intelligent discussion. We need a baseline from you.
They're also suing potential customers (12 year olds with no money *yet* but the desire to listen to music) and mistakenly suing customers (65 year old grandmas using Macs, who since they don't use Kazaa, have probably bought at least *one* CD in their 65 years, more likely more, especially as gifts if not for their own sake).
In the business world, anyone with money is a potential customer, and the process of courtship is what determines whether you get that money or not.
So essentially you're willing to play the piecemeal upgrade game on the PC, but not the Mac?
I mean from where I stand, it's not radically different, except you never change the case or power supply. I've cobbled together at least 6 PCs in my lifetime from parts and upgrades and recycling. I'm new to the Mac universe, but I do believe my 933MHz PowerMac (heck, even someone's old 450MHz G4 PowerMac) could be similarly 'recycled'.
Migrate half these things to the 'new' 1.25GHz G4, shuffle some things into the old 450MHz G4, and get new parts for the 933MHz G4 and I have 3 fully functional machines of relatively decent performance: 450MHz -> 1 GHz 933MHz -> dual 1.25GHz New 1.25GHz
Differences include the fact that you can't buy any old case or power supply, unlike a PC, and are stuck with the motherboard that comes with said case and powersupply, but everything else is user upgradeable, and I plan to take full advantage of that with my PowerMac.
Whether it's about right or wrong is irrelevant, you misread the parent post and Expose. Windows can tile/cascade windows to the screen so every screen is visible on the desktop.
Expose scales (as opposed to resize, stick with me for a moment) all the windows to fit on the screen.
Say you have a DVD window, an active IM window, a browser with a Flash animation, and a Terminal doing a Mozilla compile.
In Windows, tile would fit them all to screen, and resize them; this means the DVD might be cropped, the IM window stretched horizontally and squished vertically (with the text rewrapped), the browser similarly squished and the Flash animation cropped like the DVD window, and your terminal will be resized like the IM window, with the contents similarly rewraped.
In 10.3 (Panther) each window is scaled. Antialiased, proportional, and resampled. The DVD window might shrink to 80%, but there's no cropping of the content. The IM might shrink to 30%, but there's no resize and rewrap. The text is scaled appropriately, shrunken, instead of rewrapped. The browser with the Flash animation is similarly scaled, lets say to 50%, and the Terminal is kept full size.
The best you could say is that Windows fitted all the windows onto the screen, but did not keep each window congruent to itself; it would crop, rewrap, alter the window content to fit, while OS X does not; it changes the zoom factor, instead.
An analogy between the two can be found in virtual desktop space and increased DPI. The Windows tile function is akin to the Photoshop Zoom function '100%', and anything bigger than the desktop is cropped and scroll bars are presented. The Expose function is akin to the Photoshop Zoom function 'Fit to screen', where the content is resampled into the desktop resolution, thereby giving you access to more of the data at once, even if it's resampled.
That's the best I can describe it to someone who doesn't know what Expose is.
You still won't be able to download those songs after you put them up from Kazaa:P
Realistically, the balance of content doesn't change because there's no Kazaa client for Mac, and there's still not a huge 'library' if you're only counting small individual uploads to the network. You need large network effects to propagate the songs you upload across the whole network.
So the analogy to books would be: Bookstore, information for sale Internet, information for free
There are certainly some things you can find on the internet you won't find in a library, and vice versa. The same applies to P2P (internet) as opposed to music stores (book stores)
The G5, architecturally, is much more similar to an Opteron (64bit and 2.0GHz) than a P4, and a dual Opteron setup has been seen/measured to be superior to a 3.2GHz P4.
Points to consider: G5 more similar than not to an Opteron Dual 2.0GHz Opterons are equiv or slightly better than a 3.2GHz P4 Software can still be tuned for the G5 (plus IBM's autovectorizing XLC compiler) G5 possesses Altivec, which is more effective, in general, than the P4's or the Opteron's SIMD offering
So considering I've never used either, but knowing what I do about the architecture, I expect the Alienware to perform slightly below the dual G5, for only $1k less. This is comparing a $4k machine with a $3k machine. If you strip out the ram to base levels, it's $2,999 vs $2,766, so you only save $233 and you get slightly less performance.
So essentially you need some critical mass of stuff online... somehow convince all the people with all the content to all use the network and pay to upload stuff you can get.
Because if you look at it that way, Apple is paying the upload bandwidth and hosting costs that P2P forces the users to deal with.
You get no reliable library on P2P because that's not the way it's designed. If you want rare, obscure, or reliable stuff, you need things like iTMS or MMS. If you want popular, current, modern stuff, then P2P is fine.
So if for $1 per song I can access all of Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra (from master even), that is just *impossible* on P2P because no one on P2P has access, likes, or owns those songs, than Apple can make mucho money.
It's because the two systems operate on different premises:
iTMS: Reliable access, fixed content, diverse nature P2P: Free, whatever is popular
There is *always* a chance to find Nat on P2P, but the chances are much higher you'll find Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, or Backstreet Boys, just because of the demographic of users and the number of copies available in the first place.
An Opteron can clock no *higher* than 2GHz, no different than a G5. Architecturally an Opteron is very similar to a G5, more similar to a G5 than a P4, except that the G5 has a more efficient SIMD unit.
An Athlon64 does clock higher than a G5 so on a basic Apples to apples comparison will perform higher... but an Athlon64 also cannot be put into a dual system, and still has a weaker SIMD unit, so it all pans out.
Every system has a merit, and the mere existence of competition drives performance up. Without AMD, Intel would not drive the P4 nearly so hard. Now without Intel+AMD, IBM would not drive the PPC 970 so hard, and vice versa. Everyone has a role to play, and dismissing one of the actors only does your own party a disservice. Competition serves the consumer and customer, not slavish loyalty or fanboyism.
I *welcome* every advance in the PC world because it drives Apple harder to compete. In reflection, if you prefer the AMD, you should similarly welcome every innovation and release from Apple and Intel to drive along AMD, or Apple and AMD to drive along Intel.
How Pro Apple the entire article is, without ever referencing Apple itself. Every single one of the artists in the article use PowerBooks, and BT has even had his own PowerBook Ad for Apple ^^
Its a good thing that anyone (though I favor and root for Apple) can take technology and turn it into something useful for the non-techhead, though a musician is arguably more 'technically' skilled than unskilled.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's been the alternative for almost 20 years strong now... The Macintosh.
That's how it was billed when IBM was the monopolistic enemy, and that's still how it's billed.
It works well, it's got a strong, happy, following... the only criticism is that it costs slightly more, but then that's a side effect of such a dominant monopoly as Microsoft.
He's acknowledged that he couldn't reverse the damage, but he ever said that Halderman wasn't worth it, financially. He can't recover $10m in damages (especially punitive) from a grad student, and he couldn't really hold the school liable for the student's research. So it was left unsaid that there was little fiscal or tactical gain in winning a lawsuit, only bad press and egg on their face by drawing attention to their MediaMax software.
The real question: What 'idiot' at BMG *paid* for SunnCom to develop, and then again to use, MediaMax?
By coincidence he also didn't figure out he didn't have much chance of winning *anything*, financial or otherwise, did he?
Haha! I've been using WIndows for years, and Mac OS X for the past 3, and *I* didn't know about the right mouse button trick!
:)
Thanks for the tip
Ease up on us, we're not all quick thinkers like you.
Why is it a game only played on the PC? The game is only playable because you can change the motherboard, power supply, and case?
You don't need to upgrade the motherboard on the Mac; you can upgrade CPUs from G3 -> G4 -> dual G4 (quite unlike a PC which *forces* motherboards to be paired with generational CPUS), and the same with power supplies, which are just as generational as the CPU. And cases... I suppose that's one thing, being able to upgrade the case. But that's the *only* thing that makes a difference between the game on Mac or PC platforms.
Reiterate: You have to upgrade the powersupply when you upgrade the CPU a generation, and you have to upgrade the motherboard when you upgrade the CPU a generation. If you only stick within a generation, then you don't have to. Oh, and ram too.
On a Mac, you don't have to upgrade the motherboard, powersupply, or ram to switch generations. If you want more motherboard features... then you use PCI cards... is that what you're complaining about?
So you'd rather pay $12.99 for 2 good songs, 4 okay songs, and 8 crappy songs, than pay $3.96 for 4 songs you like from the same selection?
I dunno, that sounds reasonable to me... you get songs you like *and* you save money.
Or just buy the whole damn album for $9.99... you get the songs you like, you get crap you don't, and you save $2.
Why do you even use a FILESYSTEM then? Go navigate around your hard disk using nodes, tracks, sectors, and cylinders!
The previous poster already said 'making backup copies'
Assuming you have a backup copy, then you don't have to relicense or redownload anything. You just copy them back into iTunes. You *can*, because I've done this in practice multiple times, transferring them from laptop to iPod to desktop and back.
As per 'expanding and recompressing' the parent also said 'burned CDs'. You can burn audio CDs (thus expand 12x) and I suppose the 'recompressing' part is converting said audio CD into mp3?
And don't be so insulting about Apple Kool Aide, it's not becoming of you. Me, I've bought 5 songs to see what the sound quality is like. It's better than the MP3s I rip from CDs I own using iTunes, at the least, and that's the benchmark to which I hew to.
To be clear: 128kbps 48KHz AAC from iTMS sound better than 224kbps 44KHz MP3 from iTunes on exactly the same hardware. Since I listen to my music primarily in MP3 format, or on my iPod, then yes, AAC >> MP3. Everyone needs to decide for themselves of course, since you possibly have a better setup, but on my system, AAC >> MP3.
And the irony is that you boycott the RIAA until they begin distributing a good product at a fair price. That's where the conflict is. *I* believe that a $1 AAC file is a good product at a fair price. I think a copy protected $18 CD is a crappy product at a poor price.
You need to state upfront what your definition of 'good product' and 'fair price' is for any kind of intelligent discussion. We need a baseline from you.
They're also suing potential customers (12 year olds with no money *yet* but the desire to listen to music) and mistakenly suing customers (65 year old grandmas using Macs, who since they don't use Kazaa, have probably bought at least *one* CD in their 65 years, more likely more, especially as gifts if not for their own sake).
In the business world, anyone with money is a potential customer, and the process of courtship is what determines whether you get that money or not.
So essentially you're willing to play the piecemeal upgrade game on the PC, but not the Mac?
I mean from where I stand, it's not radically different, except you never change the case or power supply. I've cobbled together at least 6 PCs in my lifetime from parts and upgrades and recycling. I'm new to the Mac universe, but I do believe my 933MHz PowerMac (heck, even someone's old 450MHz G4 PowerMac) could be similarly 'recycled'.
Add PCI RAID
Upgrade AGP video card
Add PCI video card + 2nd monitor
Replace HDs
Install SuperDrives
Replace 450MHz G4->1GHz G4
Replace 933MHz G4 -> Dual 1.25GHz G4
Upgrade the RAM
Install FireWire 800+USB2 cards
Install Airport cards
Migrate half these things to the 'new' 1.25GHz G4, shuffle some things into the old 450MHz G4, and get new parts for the 933MHz G4 and I have 3 fully functional machines of relatively decent performance:
450MHz -> 1 GHz
933MHz -> dual 1.25GHz
New 1.25GHz
Differences include the fact that you can't buy any old case or power supply, unlike a PC, and are stuck with the motherboard that comes with said case and powersupply, but everything else is user upgradeable, and I plan to take full advantage of that with my PowerMac.
Whether it's about right or wrong is irrelevant, you misread the parent post and Expose. Windows can tile/cascade windows to the screen so every screen is visible on the desktop.
Expose scales (as opposed to resize, stick with me for a moment) all the windows to fit on the screen.
Say you have a DVD window, an active IM window, a browser with a Flash animation, and a Terminal doing a Mozilla compile.
In Windows, tile would fit them all to screen, and resize them; this means the DVD might be cropped, the IM window stretched horizontally and squished vertically (with the text rewrapped), the browser similarly squished and the Flash animation cropped like the DVD window, and your terminal will be resized like the IM window, with the contents similarly rewraped.
In 10.3 (Panther) each window is scaled. Antialiased, proportional, and resampled. The DVD window might shrink to 80%, but there's no cropping of the content. The IM might shrink to 30%, but there's no resize and rewrap. The text is scaled appropriately, shrunken, instead of rewrapped. The browser with the Flash animation is similarly scaled, lets say to 50%, and the Terminal is kept full size.
The best you could say is that Windows fitted all the windows onto the screen, but did not keep each window congruent to itself; it would crop, rewrap, alter the window content to fit, while OS X does not; it changes the zoom factor, instead.
An analogy between the two can be found in virtual desktop space and increased DPI. The Windows tile function is akin to the Photoshop Zoom function '100%', and anything bigger than the desktop is cropped and scroll bars are presented. The Expose function is akin to the Photoshop Zoom function 'Fit to screen', where the content is resampled into the desktop resolution, thereby giving you access to more of the data at once, even if it's resampled.
That's the best I can describe it to someone who doesn't know what Expose is.
You still won't be able to download those songs after you put them up from Kazaa :P
Realistically, the balance of content doesn't change because there's no Kazaa client for Mac, and there's still not a huge 'library' if you're only counting small individual uploads to the network. You need large network effects to propagate the songs you upload across the whole network.
Opterons consistently kick G5s in the pants? I want to know more, please :)
So the analogy to books would be:
Bookstore, information for sale
Internet, information for free
There are certainly some things you can find on the internet you won't find in a library, and vice versa. The same applies to P2P (internet) as opposed to music stores (book stores)
The G5, architecturally, is much more similar to an Opteron (64bit and 2.0GHz) than a P4, and a dual Opteron setup has been seen/measured to be superior to a 3.2GHz P4.
Points to consider:
G5 more similar than not to an Opteron
Dual 2.0GHz Opterons are equiv or slightly better than a 3.2GHz P4
Software can still be tuned for the G5 (plus IBM's autovectorizing XLC compiler)
G5 possesses Altivec, which is more effective, in general, than the P4's or the Opteron's SIMD offering
So considering I've never used either, but knowing what I do about the architecture, I expect the Alienware to perform slightly below the dual G5, for only $1k less. This is comparing a $4k machine with a $3k machine. If you strip out the ram to base levels, it's $2,999 vs $2,766, so you only save $233 and you get slightly less performance.
You speak authoritatively as an owner and user of a G5, OS X, and one buttoned mice, right?
Or are you *imagining* everything about a Mac without having used it?
Hmm, doesn't look like there's a Mac client ^^;
So then you'd pay to use the network, and pay for other users to upload and download from you (Bandwidth and hosting charges)?
Because that's not quite 'free' in the way Kazaa is. And of course, I don't think Kazaa has any licensed works yet.
So essentially you need some critical mass of stuff online... somehow convince all the people with all the content to all use the network and pay to upload stuff you can get.
Because if you look at it that way, Apple is paying the upload bandwidth and hosting costs that P2P forces the users to deal with.
You get no reliable library on P2P because that's not the way it's designed. If you want rare, obscure, or reliable stuff, you need things like iTMS or MMS. If you want popular, current, modern stuff, then P2P is fine.
So if for $1 per song I can access all of Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra (from master even), that is just *impossible* on P2P because no one on P2P has access, likes, or owns those songs, than Apple can make mucho money.
It's because the two systems operate on different premises:
iTMS: Reliable access, fixed content, diverse nature
P2P: Free, whatever is popular
There is *always* a chance to find Nat on P2P, but the chances are much higher you'll find Brittany Spears, Garth Brooks, or Backstreet Boys, just because of the demographic of users and the number of copies available in the first place.
Bleah, that's just silly.
An Opteron can clock no *higher* than 2GHz, no different than a G5. Architecturally an Opteron is very similar to a G5, more similar to a G5 than a P4, except that the G5 has a more efficient SIMD unit.
An Athlon64 does clock higher than a G5 so on a basic Apples to apples comparison will perform higher... but an Athlon64 also cannot be put into a dual system, and still has a weaker SIMD unit, so it all pans out.
Every system has a merit, and the mere existence of competition drives performance up. Without AMD, Intel would not drive the P4 nearly so hard. Now without Intel+AMD, IBM would not drive the PPC 970 so hard, and vice versa. Everyone has a role to play, and dismissing one of the actors only does your own party a disservice. Competition serves the consumer and customer, not slavish loyalty or fanboyism.
I *welcome* every advance in the PC world because it drives Apple harder to compete. In reflection, if you prefer the AMD, you should similarly welcome every innovation and release from Apple and Intel to drive along AMD, or Apple and AMD to drive along Intel.
How Pro Apple the entire article is, without ever referencing Apple itself. Every single one of the artists in the article use PowerBooks, and BT has even had his own PowerBook Ad for Apple ^^
Its a good thing that anyone (though I favor and root for Apple) can take technology and turn it into something useful for the non-techhead, though a musician is arguably more 'technically' skilled than unskilled.
Haha, imagine, an iSight + iBook + Darwing Streaming Server + scripts + .Mac
:)
Live feeds of the con
Did you notice the Dr. Pepper Wolverine was drinking the X-Men? It was kind of amusing :)
Why are you asking me?
You understand perfectly then, don't you? Why do you say, "I don't get it" if you do?
And that's the heart of American consumerism, isn't it? Class mobility through ownership of goods?