This patent application was filed at the end of 2005... why is it just now coming up? It may have just attracted attention, but the reason for the patent may be less of an issue as the mountain it's made out to be. It could be nothing more than preventing some upstart such as BE/OS or someone else like IBM with OS/2 from providing computers with an advertising revenue stream in competition to the MS stranglehold on the desktop. Maybe they don't want another i-Opener on the market.
"We have free computers for your school. The advertising will pay for them."
(2) Remove digital data distribution and instead distribute media in the form of a sealed, enclosed device (with speakers, no other outputs) that only plays the media that you have purchased.
Just like my toddler's toys. The duck goes "Quack" the cow goes "Moo"
It's not a question of licensees choosing WM DRM because they trust it more than FairPlay - Apple doesn't license FairPlay at all, so Windows Media is the only choice for a third party.
There may be lots of licensees, but the consumers are ignoring it for the most part. Some consumers have been bitten by the format and avoid it entirely.
Don't flame me for FUD. I am relating facts. You are free to repeat the process to verify the problem. You will need an RCA Lyra flash player, a Windows Computer and some other computer with any OS.
My son is an example. He has an RCA Lyra. It plays MP3's and WMA files. He was at a friends house and did what kids do. He copied a few songs onto the player using drag and drop. The player was in the Flash Drive mode, not the DRM Sync mode. Some songs would play, some would not. This should not be a problem. The protected songs that won't play are simply considered broken due to DRM and should be deleted. This is where things got very sour very quickly. You can't delete the broken songs from anywhere except from the computer that put them there! The player won't delete them, the home computer with Windows can't delete them, and even a Linux box can't delete them. Permission is denied. Who in their brain dead design decided you can't delete files you can't play?
I found about it because at first my son just thought the files were in the wrong format and asked help converting them to MP3. They are songs and should play. I let him know about DRM (he didn't know) and told him to delete them. This is when we found out the true nasty implentation of DRM in the Plays for Sure format. Since there is no way to tell on the PC if the files are DRM WMA or WMA and the potential for problems, we have moved away from anything WMA. Because my son had to go back to the friends house to remove the files from the player, his friend also learned the evils of DRM gone bad. Plays for Sure doesn't and won't delete either. MP3s play for sure.
The solution was to RE-Rip in MP3. (middle school boys, no credit card, no online store sales) The defualt settings in some bundled media players for ripping CD's is bad.
Parents buying computers for their kids for college/hs are going to care about one thing: Price.
Ummm No! Most parrents look at the course requirements. After meeting the requirements, second is price. Some schools require XP & IE for their applications, Web applications, and/or secure wireless connectivity client. Not all schools or classes in a school have Microsoft requirements so Linux and Mac are OK. As Linux and Apple become more common alternatives to the MS monoculture, pressure is on the schools to become platform agnostic.
In many places the requirements instead of listing a platform simply list file compatabilities such as Acrobat 5, Flash 9, Firefox 5, Wireless G, etc.
eMusic and cdbaby are not competition. A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
They have not reached critical mass yet with artists and consumers. They are gaining traction.
Artists ripped-off by the cartel have jumped ship to go it their own way are doing fine without Clear Chanel.
Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection at better quality encoding. eMusic is encoded at 192K Variable bitrate while iTunes is encoded at 128K fixed bitrate. eMusic prices are lower. What's there not to like other than limited mainstream selections?
Older music is a little hard to find. Most anything that make it popular was done through the RIAA cartel. Since they are locked in, the content will never make it to e-music in my lifetime since the Sonny Bonno act.
Well, now that Olan Mills has gone bankrupt, all those negatives are probably lost forever!
True! One more reason to not do obsolete studios.
Yay.
At least now I can decide when to toss the negatives instead of it being decided for me. I would like to get some reprints of my growing up years as they are faded. My kids won't have that problem.
A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
One has access to Clear Chanel and one is completely locked out. Look to some of the acts gaining popularity on MySpace or Utube. Then check the other outlets and include iTunes. They distribute inde artists. Don't count the lack of listing on Billboard Magazine charts as an indicator of poor quality. Lots of good quality music simply isn't exposed to the masses.
If AMD could not buy any advertising at any price and were always not considered in hardware reviews because they were too obscure and unknown, you would find even if they were good, most people would pass them by. Would you buy AMD if nobody bothered to review them?
Back to my earlier point, If the independants got airtime and had music given airtime with the mainstream pop hits, they would then get on the charts and be noticed. Getting critical mass without a major RIAA label is almost impossible. Utube and MySpace are starting to break that mold. Many popular inde acts without RIAA support are doing well. Most of them are on iTunes. Send your local radio station some promotional CD's for your great local band. See how often you are mentioned or songs played. You will quickly find it's a dead end.
Independant artists face the same problems that OS2, Be OS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc face in the MS world. Apple is the acknowledged #2 player and you can find Apple software at your local retailer. Try finding Turbo Tax for Linux. You won't find Linux apps at your local Best Buy even though it may be a bigger bargan for consumers if it sold next to Vista. Linux is starting to be noticed. By the same token, some artists are gaining notice on MySpace and Utube. Much of their music is not in the local record shop, but at the other outlets.
Getting popular without the distribution/marketing chanel is almost impossible. Not being popular doesn't mean the music isn't good.
But if you want to buy the latest Weird Al or Madonna album, there's only source.
If the consumers move on to the competition such as Youtube, Google Video, etc for promotion of independent artists and they do well, then Madonna and Weird Al may follow the money away from the expensive fat man in the middle like Bare Naked Ladies on e-music.
The only way to get competition is to allow every label to produce the same CD from the same artist. Only then will price drop to realistic levels.
Not quite. AMD does not make exact copies of Intel chips. They make same genere chips. They produce something that is compatible with the X86 instruction set, but from there things are not the same. Remember Tom's Hardware testing Intel's Speed Step technology by removing a heatsink and then doing the same to an AMD chip? Try sticking a current AMD chip in an Intel based motherboard. The two acts are not the same. They both run Windows.
It's more like others are able to make and market Country and Western, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Classical, etc., and can get equal access to radio airtime. The others become noticed as a good act and their prices are lower! Instead of Brittney from an RIAA member, I can get Suzanne instead from an indipendent store. The two acts are not the same. They both put young chick pop music on CD. One is $16.95 and the other is $8.95 side by side at your local retailer. If they both had good radio airtime and sounded a lot alike, which would you buy. (made up names for arguement sake)
With microprocessors, there is competition. But in music, there is no competition.
Pay attention to e-Music and CD Baby. They are the competition.
...what on earth is the point of skywriting in a scale so large the only way to see it is on a crummy flightplan?
Dig further. It includes the GPS logs including ground speed, altitude, lat and lon recorded every couple minutes. You can tell when they hit the jetstream (or maybe the throtle) as level flight went from around 300 knots to 500.
Ever find anything current, classic, or popular in there?
I mostly found stuff I never ever heard of in there. When VHS first came out, stuff in those bins was stuff like "How to Watch Football". Most stuff in cut-outs is along the same lines. I do pick up used product quite often. I pick up the classics that were popular before the loudness wars started. I've picked some classic ELO, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Chicago, etc. at good prices.
It's a sad shame when better quality recordings can be found used than you can find new.
I'd better shut-up now. Goodwill might start charging $33.00 for these classic recordings.
The Janus DRM license actually forbade the use of ogg.
MS did not single out ogg.
wrote an offensive license forbidding non-MS media formats on portable devices
MS had to back peddle on that one.
This is a clear violation of the wrist-slapping that Judge CKK had administered at the conclusion of the company's anti-trust lawsuit, which she oversaw.
MS explination of the reason for that in the license
Microsoft legal beagle Rick Rule explained that a "lower-level business person," ignorant of the anti-trust settlement's provisions, had blundered.
This is why most Plays for Sure players also will play MP3's such as the RCA Lyra and Creative Zen.
It is not the consumer's problem regarding what happens to unsold CDs
If the unsold CD's were sold by adjusting the price, they would not be unsold. How many unsold DVD players get sent back to be destroyed? They are discounted and sold anyway. I can buy a DVD player for about the price of 2 CD's. Production and developement and IP property value is much higher in the DVD player than in the 2 Cd's.
Another reasonable and well thought out claim from the RIAA. Someone inform Intel that a single transistor should still cost about a dollar, they're losing money by the fistful.
They figured out how to make them faster better cheaper. Have you seen Intel's R & D budget? Intel has figured you can make a profit in volume sales. Making lots of units at low prices can cover very high production costs. They spend lots on their product to improve the quality and value. I wish I could say the same for the RIAA who in the same time frame have not improved the number of minutes or tracks on a CD and reduced quality by over compression, loss of dynamic range, and technical problems with CD's that don't work and break things.
Q1 outlook 2007 for R & D for Intel;
Expenses (R&D plus MG&A): Between $2.6 billion and $2.7 billion. In addition, the company expects a first-quarter restructuring charge of approximately $50 million.
If the RIAA kept up with Intel in the same time frame, they would have CD's out with the $33 price point, but would have to kept up with the times. The 8088 processor ran 4.77 Megahertz. Most current Prescott P4's run at 3,400 Megahertz (3.4 GHZ)
The 8088 had 49,000 transistors in 1978. The 286 had 134,000 transistors in 1982. The 386 had 275,000 in 1985. The 486 had 1.2 million in 1989. The pentium in 1993 had 3.1 million transistors.
Since we are looking at a time frame of "The RIAA 'Key Facts' page claims that based on the 1983 price of CDs, the 1996 price should have been $33.86." we can take the numbers from Intel's 1983 processor the 286 at 134,000 transistors and the 1996 Pentium processor at 3.1 million transistors. (Pentium II in developement at 7.5 million transistors released a year later in 1976)
In the same time frame the CD went from 8-12 tracks average to 8-12 tracks average. To keep up with technology like the computer, it would have had to go from about 10 tracks to about 300 tracks at about the same selling price. Napster almost reached that value.
If Intel tried to continue selling 4.77 MHZ CPU chips today at adjusted for inflation prices, they too would have volume sales problems. Somebody wake up the RIAA and have them smell the coffee.
How about you all agree to stop marketing the CDs and just let the people choose what they think is good, rather than trying to tell them?
That is the problem. The consumer just doesn't get it so they have to be told. Lets face it. Consumers instead of buying CD's with their disposable income are buying games, DVD's, electronic toys such as big screen TV sets, portable music players, digital cameras, laptop computers, pay per view TV,.... It just isn't fair. They should be buyng $33.00 CD's instead like they used to. They shouldn't be buying all that other stuff instead of CD's.
If they should cost more, they would! It's simple supply vs demand!
No it is not. Ask what happens to unsold CD's at the local music store. Prices are artificialy high by created shortage. Surplus is returned, not sold on a discount. Ask your local retailer what happens to unsold titles that waste valuable floor space.
"The folks over at Techdirt just put up a great story today, with the RIAA claiming the cost of a CD has gone down significantly relative to the consumer price index.
Since the value has gone down considerably, market forces should cause the price to fall. The industry does not push quality, they push loud (compressed clipped recordings) over dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. They also push DRM further reducing value (CD may hose my computer, won't play in the car, and won't rip to my iPod). The biggie is ther is competition to the disposable dollar in games, DVD's, other toys such as cell phones and broadband internet that take away from CD buying dollars. When I spend $60 a month for broadband, there are fewer entertainment dollars left to spend on CD's. The bang for the buck just isn't there.
Now they think they are under priced? What are they smoking? Hey guys, time for a reality check. A good buggy whip adjusted for inflation should run for about $75.00, but they don't sell very well anymore. Time for a reality check.
At the bottom of the page is tha item that unless you buy chips with the license, the minimum for doing it yourself is $15,000 USD. If you are making a limited quanity of an item, the minimum can be a showstopper unless you buy chips from someone else, which may also be a little expensive. Dropping MP3 can save a chunk of change since a free alternative exists.
Someone with a close eye on their account will notice the missing money and pull up recent transactions online. Armed with reciepts and a printout of the impossible to make dual purchases with one card in two locations, the compromised machine can be shut down (de-authorised) and legal proceedings started. This attack has a name attached to the business using the terminal.
The attack is proof of concept, but it leaves too much of a trail.
Actually I took my pictures with Olan Mills (just before they went bankrupt) specifically because they would hand over the copyright (it was a special deal that you got all the pictures on a DVD - the copyright thing was a side effect).
The last time I dealt with Olan Mills, DVD's didn't exist yet. They did not have anything except photo packages, they kept the negatives and copyright. They insisted on putting their logo on the front of their photos even if you didn't want it. I guess its a sort of watermark before digital watermarking.
A GPS bug is nothing more than an easier way for the cops to tail you. A sophisticated criminal would have a RF scanner that would alert him/her to the device, and then re-plant on grandma's old caprice in the parking lot of a food mart.
The article is about warentless search of your OnStar system, not a planted bug. It's about getting prior records of where you have been before becomming a suspect of intrest. It's like getting your phone records without a warrent. Getting a wire tap is one thing. Getting past phone history is another.
Let's not forget that should you find it and keep it, you will be charged with theft. The law will not see this as your property. If you find it and destroy it you will be charged with destruction of property and made to compensate the state for its (inflated) value.
Sounds like time to get creative. Think plausable deniability. Find the unit, Drive to a parking structure to block GPS signal. Remove unit and set it on the plastic bumper. Carefully drive to a carwash and make sure the carwash did a good job. You didn't steal it, it fell off in the carwash. Check the GPS records. They don't lie.
If the police could teach a satellite the 'fingerprint' of your car. And then track you any time you were within view. Dozens at a time. Hundreds. Thousands. Would this be just egregious as snapping a GPS box to your ride?
It might suck for those in LA or Arizona, but it would not be much of a problem in my rainy climate. There would only be a few days a year there could be an issue.
Anyone got a link to a GPS jammer? that would help the criminals, simply JAM the gps signal for only 20 feet around you and their tracking is rendered 100% useless.
That's only one half of the link. Think about it. The GPS is a reciever. The location information is then transmitted. It's a little less accurate, but the cell phone link can provide some location information. Your best defense is a good cell phone signal detector such as they use for classified meetings. If you are constantly in range of an operating cell phone while in motion, it's time to look under the car and remove anything held in place by a magnet. Not all units broadcast all the time the vehicle is in motion. (Most units drop cell connection when stopped to conserve batery power. They can be called at any time to check current location and operational status. Some units log travels and then phone home and report the trip.) Crossing a river and tossing it overboard does wonders to the GPS reception and cell signal.
Slashdot Mirror
This patent application was filed at the end of 2005... why is it just now coming up?
It may have just attracted attention, but the reason for the patent may be less of an issue as the mountain it's made out to be. It could be nothing more than preventing some upstart such as BE/OS or someone else like IBM with OS/2 from providing computers with an advertising revenue stream in competition to the MS stranglehold on the desktop. Maybe they don't want another i-Opener on the market.
"We have free computers for your school. The advertising will pay for them."
MS.. "Umm think again. We patented the model"
(2) Remove digital data distribution and instead distribute media in the form of a sealed, enclosed device (with speakers, no other outputs) that only plays the media that you have purchased.
Just like my toddler's toys. The duck goes "Quack" the cow goes "Moo"
It's not a question of licensees choosing WM DRM because they trust it more than FairPlay - Apple doesn't license FairPlay at all, so Windows Media is the only choice for a third party.
There may be lots of licensees, but the consumers are ignoring it for the most part. Some consumers have been bitten by the format and avoid it entirely.
Don't flame me for FUD. I am relating facts. You are free to repeat the process to verify the problem. You will need an RCA Lyra flash player, a Windows Computer and some other computer with any OS.
My son is an example. He has an RCA Lyra. It plays MP3's and WMA files. He was at a friends house and did what kids do. He copied a few songs onto the player using drag and drop. The player was in the Flash Drive mode, not the DRM Sync mode. Some songs would play, some would not. This should not be a problem. The protected songs that won't play are simply considered broken due to DRM and should be deleted. This is where things got very sour very quickly. You can't delete the broken songs from anywhere except from the computer that put them there! The player won't delete them, the home computer with Windows can't delete them, and even a Linux box can't delete them. Permission is denied. Who in their brain dead design decided you can't delete files you can't play?
I found about it because at first my son just thought the files were in the wrong format and asked help converting them to MP3. They are songs and should play. I let him know about DRM (he didn't know) and told him to delete them. This is when we found out the true nasty implentation of DRM in the Plays for Sure format. Since there is no way to tell on the PC if the files are DRM WMA or WMA and the potential for problems, we have moved away from anything WMA. Because my son had to go back to the friends house to remove the files from the player, his friend also learned the evils of DRM gone bad. Plays for Sure doesn't and won't delete either. MP3s play for sure.
The solution was to RE-Rip in MP3. (middle school boys, no credit card, no online store sales) The defualt settings in some bundled media players for ripping CD's is bad.
In order to be accepted, you must travel into the future, install Firefox 5 on your machine, and come back in one piece.
I see you didn't sign up for the same quantum mechanics class I did.
Parents buying computers for their kids for college/hs are going to care about one thing: Price.
Ummm No! Most parrents look at the course requirements. After meeting the requirements, second is price. Some schools require XP & IE for their applications, Web applications, and/or secure wireless connectivity client. Not all schools or classes in a school have Microsoft requirements so Linux and Mac are OK. As Linux and Apple become more common alternatives to the MS monoculture, pressure is on the schools to become platform agnostic.
In many places the requirements instead of listing a platform simply list file compatabilities such as Acrobat 5, Flash 9, Firefox 5, Wireless G, etc.
eMusic and cdbaby are not competition. A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
They have not reached critical mass yet with artists and consumers. They are gaining traction.
Artists ripped-off by the cartel have jumped ship to go it their own way are doing fine without Clear Chanel.
Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection at better quality encoding. eMusic is encoded at 192K Variable bitrate while iTunes is encoded at 128K fixed bitrate. eMusic prices are lower. What's there not to like other than limited mainstream selections?
Older music is a little hard to find. Most anything that make it popular was done through the RIAA cartel. Since they are locked in, the content will never make it to e-music in my lifetime since the Sonny Bonno act.
Well, now that Olan Mills has gone bankrupt, all those negatives are probably lost forever!
True! One more reason to not do obsolete studios.
Yay.
At least now I can decide when to toss the negatives instead of it being decided for me. I would like to get some reprints of my growing up years as they are faded. My kids won't have that problem.
A quick search for very popular atists and bands, both new and old, turns up nothing.
One has access to Clear Chanel and one is completely locked out. Look to some of the acts gaining popularity on MySpace or Utube. Then check the other outlets and include iTunes. They distribute inde artists. Don't count the lack of listing on Billboard Magazine charts as an indicator of poor quality. Lots of good quality music simply isn't exposed to the masses.
If AMD could not buy any advertising at any price and were always not considered in hardware reviews because they were too obscure and unknown, you would find even if they were good, most people would pass them by. Would you buy AMD if nobody bothered to review them?
Back to my earlier point, If the independants got airtime and had music given airtime with the mainstream pop hits, they would then get on the charts and be noticed. Getting critical mass without a major RIAA label is almost impossible. Utube and MySpace are starting to break that mold. Many popular inde acts without RIAA support are doing well. Most of them are on iTunes. Send your local radio station some promotional CD's for your great local band. See how often you are mentioned or songs played. You will quickly find it's a dead end.
Independant artists face the same problems that OS2, Be OS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc face in the MS world. Apple is the acknowledged #2 player and you can find Apple software at your local retailer. Try finding Turbo Tax for Linux. You won't find Linux apps at your local Best Buy even though it may be a bigger bargan for consumers if it sold next to Vista. Linux is starting to be noticed. By the same token, some artists are gaining notice on MySpace and Utube. Much of their music is not in the local record shop, but at the other outlets.
Getting popular without the distribution/marketing chanel is almost impossible. Not being popular doesn't mean the music isn't good.
But if you want to buy the latest Weird Al or Madonna album, there's only source.
If the consumers move on to the competition such as Youtube, Google Video, etc for promotion of independent artists and they do well, then Madonna and Weird Al may follow the money away from the expensive fat man in the middle like Bare Naked Ladies on e-music.
The only way to get competition is to allow every label to produce the same CD from the same artist. Only then will price drop to realistic levels.
Not quite. AMD does not make exact copies of Intel chips. They make same genere chips.
They produce something that is compatible with the X86 instruction set, but from there things are not the same. Remember Tom's Hardware testing Intel's Speed Step technology by removing a heatsink and then doing the same to an AMD chip? Try sticking a current AMD chip in an Intel based motherboard. The two acts are not the same. They both run Windows.
It's more like others are able to make and market Country and Western, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Classical, etc., and can get equal access to radio airtime. The others become noticed as a good act and their prices are lower! Instead of Brittney from an RIAA member, I can get Suzanne instead from an indipendent store. The two acts are not the same. They both put young chick pop music on CD. One is $16.95 and the other is $8.95 side by side at your local retailer. If they both had good radio airtime and sounded a lot alike, which would you buy. (made up names for arguement sake)
With microprocessors, there is competition. But in music, there is no competition.
Pay attention to e-Music and CD Baby. They are the competition.
...what on earth is the point of skywriting in a scale so large the only way to see it is on a crummy flightplan?
Dig further. It includes the GPS logs including ground speed, altitude, lat and lon recorded every couple minutes. You can tell when they hit the jetstream (or maybe the throtle) as level flight went from around 300 knots to 500.
You must not buy cut-outs or used product.
Ever find anything current, classic, or popular in there?
I mostly found stuff I never ever heard of in there. When VHS first came out, stuff in those bins was stuff like "How to Watch Football". Most stuff in cut-outs is along the same lines. I do pick up used product quite often. I pick up the classics that were popular before the loudness wars started. I've picked some classic ELO, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Chicago, etc. at good prices.
It's a sad shame when better quality recordings can be found used than you can find new.
I'd better shut-up now. Goodwill might start charging $33.00 for these classic recordings.
Clarification is in order.
l _music_monopoly_bid/
The Janus DRM license actually forbade the use of ogg.
MS did not single out ogg.
wrote an offensive license forbidding non-MS media formats on portable devices
MS had to back peddle on that one.
This is a clear violation of the wrist-slapping that Judge CKK had administered at the conclusion of the company's anti-trust lawsuit, which she oversaw.
MS explination of the reason for that in the license
Microsoft legal beagle Rick Rule explained that a "lower-level business person," ignorant of the anti-trust settlement's provisions, had blundered.
This is why most Plays for Sure players also will play MP3's such as the RCA Lyra and Creative Zen.
Thanks for the nice link. It covers it nicely.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/accidenta
Tin foil hats will still suspect this was not an accident. They just got caught.
It is not the consumer's problem regarding what happens to unsold CDs
If the unsold CD's were sold by adjusting the price, they would not be unsold. How many unsold DVD players get sent back to be destroyed? They are discounted and sold anyway. I can buy a DVD player for about the price of 2 CD's. Production and developement and IP property value is much higher in the DVD player than in the 2 Cd's.
Another reasonable and well thought out claim from the RIAA. Someone inform Intel that a single transistor should still cost about a dollar, they're losing money by the fistful.
m
m icroprocessor_timeline.pdf
They figured out how to make them faster better cheaper. Have you seen Intel's R & D budget? Intel has figured you can make a profit in volume sales. Making lots of units at low prices can cover very high production costs. They spend lots on their product to improve the quality and value. I wish I could say the same for the RIAA who in the same time frame have not improved the number of minutes or tracks on a CD and reduced quality by over compression, loss of dynamic range, and technical problems with CD's that don't work and break things.
Q1 outlook 2007 for R & D for Intel;
Expenses (R&D plus MG&A): Between $2.6 billion and $2.7 billion. In addition, the company expects a first-quarter restructuring charge of approximately $50 million.
http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/bus_outlook.ht
If the RIAA kept up with Intel in the same time frame, they would have CD's out with the $33 price point, but would have to kept up with the times. The 8088 processor ran 4.77 Megahertz. Most current Prescott P4's run at 3,400 Megahertz (3.4 GHZ)
The 8088 had 49,000 transistors in 1978. The 286 had 134,000 transistors in 1982. The 386 had 275,000 in 1985. The 486 had 1.2 million in 1989. The pentium in 1993 had 3.1 million transistors.
Since we are looking at a time frame of "The RIAA 'Key Facts' page claims that based on the 1983 price of CDs, the 1996 price should have been $33.86." we can take the numbers from Intel's 1983 processor the 286 at 134,000 transistors and the 1996 Pentium processor at 3.1 million transistors. (Pentium II in developement at 7.5 million transistors released a year later in 1976)
In the same time frame the CD went from 8-12 tracks average to 8-12 tracks average. To keep up with technology like the computer, it would have had to go from about 10 tracks to about 300 tracks at about the same selling price. Napster almost reached that value.
Intel data gleaned from; PDF aleart.. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/core2duo/pdf/
If Intel tried to continue selling 4.77 MHZ CPU chips today at adjusted for inflation prices, they too would have volume sales problems. Somebody wake up the RIAA and have them smell the coffee.
How about you all agree to stop marketing the CDs and just let the people choose what they think is good, rather than trying to tell them?
That is the problem. The consumer just doesn't get it so they have to be told. Lets face it. Consumers instead of buying CD's with their disposable income are buying games, DVD's, electronic toys such as big screen TV sets, portable music players, digital cameras, laptop computers, pay per view TV,.... It just isn't fair. They should be buyng $33.00 CD's instead like they used to. They shouldn't be buying all that other stuff instead of CD's.
If they should cost more, they would! It's simple supply vs demand!
No it is not. Ask what happens to unsold CD's at the local music store. Prices are artificialy high by created shortage. Surplus is returned, not sold on a discount. Ask your local retailer what happens to unsold titles that waste valuable floor space.
"The folks over at Techdirt just put up a great story today, with the RIAA claiming the cost of a CD has gone down significantly relative to the consumer price index.
Since the value has gone down considerably, market forces should cause the price to fall. The industry does not push quality, they push loud (compressed clipped recordings) over dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. They also push DRM further reducing value (CD may hose my computer, won't play in the car, and won't rip to my iPod). The biggie is ther is competition to the disposable dollar in games, DVD's, other toys such as cell phones and broadband internet that take away from CD buying dollars. When I spend $60 a month for broadband, there are fewer entertainment dollars left to spend on CD's. The bang for the buck just isn't there.
Now they think they are under priced? What are they smoking? Hey guys, time for a reality check. A good buggy whip adjusted for inflation should run for about $75.00, but they don't sell very well anymore. Time for a reality check.
It is no longer a dime anymore. The IC prices are not listed online, but the per device prices are for hardware items.
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/hardware.html
At the bottom of the page is tha item that unless you buy chips with the license, the minimum for doing it yourself is $15,000 USD. If you are making a limited quanity of an item, the minimum can be a showstopper unless you buy chips from someone else, which may also be a little expensive. Dropping MP3 can save a chunk of change since a free alternative exists.
It's the PNG/GIF thing all over again.
Someone with a close eye on their account will notice the missing money and pull up recent transactions online. Armed with reciepts and a printout of the impossible to make dual purchases with one card in two locations, the compromised machine can be shut down (de-authorised) and legal proceedings started. This attack has a name attached to the business using the terminal.
The attack is proof of concept, but it leaves too much of a trail.
Actually I took my pictures with Olan Mills (just before they went bankrupt) specifically because they would hand over the copyright (it was a special deal that you got all the pictures on a DVD - the copyright thing was a side effect).
The last time I dealt with Olan Mills, DVD's didn't exist yet. They did not have anything except photo packages, they kept the negatives and copyright. They insisted on putting their logo on the front of their photos even if you didn't want it. I guess its a sort of watermark before digital watermarking.
A GPS bug is nothing more than an easier way for the cops to tail you. A sophisticated criminal would have a RF scanner that would alert him/her to the device, and then re-plant on grandma's old caprice in the parking lot of a food mart.
The article is about warentless search of your OnStar system, not a planted bug. It's about getting prior records of where you have been before becomming a suspect of intrest. It's like getting your phone records without a warrent. Getting a wire tap is one thing. Getting past phone history is another.
Let's not forget that should you find it and keep it, you will be charged with theft. The law will not see this as your property. If you find it and destroy it you will be charged with destruction of property and made to compensate the state for its (inflated) value.
Sounds like time to get creative. Think plausable deniability. Find the unit, Drive to a parking structure to block GPS signal. Remove unit and set it on the plastic bumper. Carefully drive to a carwash and make sure the carwash did a good job. You didn't steal it, it fell off in the carwash. Check the GPS records. They don't lie.
If the police could teach a satellite the 'fingerprint' of your car. And then track you any time you were within view. Dozens at a time. Hundreds. Thousands. Would this be just egregious as snapping a GPS box to your ride?
It might suck for those in LA or Arizona, but it would not be much of a problem in my rainy climate. There would only be a few days a year there could be an issue.
Anyone got a link to a GPS jammer? that would help the criminals, simply JAM the gps signal for only 20 feet around you and their tracking is rendered 100% useless.
That's only one half of the link. Think about it. The GPS is a reciever. The location information is then transmitted. It's a little less accurate, but the cell phone link can provide some location information. Your best defense is a good cell phone signal detector such as they use for classified meetings. If you are constantly in range of an operating cell phone while in motion, it's time to look under the car and remove anything held in place by a magnet. Not all units broadcast all the time the vehicle is in motion. (Most units drop cell connection when stopped to conserve batery power. They can be called at any time to check current location and operational status. Some units log travels and then phone home and report the trip.) Crossing a river and tossing it overboard does wonders to the GPS reception and cell signal.