EMI allow 3 transfers to any SDMI compatible device, Universal doesn't.
And right there is where Apple got it right, and this service, like the other copycats, is getting it wrong. Do consumers really want ot have to worry about hundreds or thousands of music titles having any number of different access rights?
Maybe I'm just simple-minded, but I like the idea of uniform pricing, and uniform DRM even more.
As someone who makes a living doing research (in a completely different field), I think you're missunderstanding how scienctific research works.
You wrote, "If I was a scientist and wanted to produce research that showed..."
If you were a scientist you would produce research to test your hypothesis (there is no global warming). You don't necessarily get the results you "wanted to produce" and every scientist knows this and is willing to go with what the evidence shows.
So the idea that a scientist will go to a company and say "Give me money and I'll produce the results you want" makes the assumption that the scientist is willing to be dishonest, otherwise they can make no such statement.
MS says half the crashes users experience are because of 3rd party code, so all of a sudden its 3rd parties who are responsible for crashes and not MS?
Let's look at the half-empty side: MS is still responsible for half of the crashes that occur. That's still way too many crashes due to MS code IMO.
Consider also that MS is a single company vs. how many 3rd party developers from the good to the bad to the ugly?
And what kind of access do they have to the API's and OS vs. Microsoft?
And who's developer tools are those 3rd parties using anyway?
After reading the blurb about the artist who believes some of her(?) works are being infringed by BuyMusic.com, I had a question.
Shouldn't she (or any of the other artists) be able to send a cease and desist letter of their own to buymusic or their ISP? Aren't they then required, by law, to remove the material in question or close the site until they prove the works are non-infringing?
To hear the polititions and "industry" people talk about it, protecting the artist's rights is what the whold bill was about, wasn't it?
The problem I see is that the marketplace isn't being given the chance to decide. Its not like the big 5 record labels are competing against each other to dermine which form (if any) of content control the consumer prefers. Its being decided by the RIAA, and the marketplace is being told, "This is how its going to be!". In fact we've got members of congress who seem willing to legislate that there must be content control and they will (with the help of the industry) decide what it shall be.
If they really want to see what kind of copy prevention the market will put up with, take a look at software. For decades, software companies have tried different schemes, but whenever there is any real competition, the market prefers no copy control, primarily due to the hassles involved (compainies dropping support for a product or going out of business, lost/damaged key disks, dongles that stop working, looking up word 3 in paragraph 5 of page 32 in the manual....).
Its only when there is a monopoly, when the control mechanism can be forced on the consumer, that these types of mechanisms can even be considered. XP product activation, anyone?
That last paragraph describes what I think is the least user-friendly aspect of buymusic.com's model.
Say you purchase 100 songs from them, then want to transfer some songs to your mp3 (wmp?) player. Some will transfer, some won't. How is the user supposed to keep track?
IMO its simply stupid to have several different levels (for lack of a better term) of DRM and saddle the user with the burdon of trying to keep track of which ones they can do what with -short of trying to copy/transer/burn and having it fail.
So at buymusic.com you may be able to purchase "filler" tracks for 79 cents, but the good ones may cost more than 99.
Also keep in mind that you have to double-check what you can do with each song. For 79 cents you may only be able to listen to it on the computer used to download it. The reason some tracks may cost more could also be because you're allowed to do more with them with respect to burning CDs and transferring to other computers/players. All those things alter the "value" you're gettng for the $$.
Be careful though. From what little I've been reading it sounds like you might actually be able to fool the sight into allowing you to purchase and download tracks, but you won't be able to "unlock" them without the correct plugin that only works in IE on Windows.
I may be wrong about that, but that's the way it sounds (and it seems plausible -FWIW).
Ignore my previous post, I didn't grok the "hardware marketing company" vs. "hardware company" difference you were making, though I don't agree with that distinction either.
One thing to note is that Apple has always designed their own motherboards, including the chip sets. They still do. That would seem to make them a hardware company even as you've defined it.
Also consider that the PPC architecture is designed by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance. Thus Apple has had some input in the CPU design as well (how much, I don't know).
Well, the chip set for the motherboard. See the second page of the article, under Miscellany, the second question "I also asked at one point about the Apple-designed chipset..."
I was really hoping we'd find out more about the chip set used in the 970 blades. Oh well.
As far as the database used in this case, I was responding based on the linked article. There they stated the "database" was two drops of blood on a card. If you have any references to the type of database you indicate, housing genetic information for thousands of individuals, I'd love to see it, because I've never heard of it.
With regard to RFLP, using different labs for the purpose of identifying a body may be sufficient, but my understanding is that it isn't for criminal prosecution. Even following identical protocols, there is variability in how well the restriction enzymes work and how the gels run, not to mention all the other variables. These factors decrease reliablity in the comparison.
Yes, using PCR and sequencing you may be able to find SNPs but the fact remains that this requires days worth of lab work. Compare that with how simple it is to take a set of fingerprints and scan them. Having the genetic equivalent of a fingerprint database isn't going to happen anytime soon!
I was going based on the article linked, sounds like they may have changed things somewhere along the line. You actually get a better DNA sample from skin samples than blood, so doing a cheek swab would be better (based on my limited understanding).
OTOH, when I had one of those "swabs" it was more like using a wire brush on the inside of my mouth. I think I would have preferred a finger stick.
Unless the barber is a mean SOB who pulls people's hair out, there will be no usable DNA. Keep in mind its the cells attached to the base of the hair when its pulled out that contain the DNA. The hair itself is just a bunch of protein.
I'm just amazed at how advanced some people seem to think DNA tech is compared to reality.
Other than sex (the Y chromosome is easy enough to find) even the simplest of genetic determinations takes days to perform. Also keep in mind that simple things like hair and eye color can be the result of several different genes.
And race? What specific trait are you even going to base this on? The majority of people (at least in the US) are a genetic mix of races though based on appearance we may place them in one race vs. another.
When it comes to who's best suited for a promotion or who is gay, we're getting into areas which may be essentially impossible to determine genetically. You get into that whole nature/nurture thing.
Bottom line is that its very expensive to do even the simplest genetic tests. They're simply not economical on a large scale and probably won't be in our lifetime.
Its pretty much illegal to require a SSN for just about everything but tax related business. You can even request your driver's license not be your SSN -in other words not even the state can require your SSN for anything other than tax purposes.
Just FYI, these so-called databases are simply two drops of dried blood on a card. There's nothing digitized (yet anyway).
Next point is that these blood tests do not rely on DNA sequences (not directly anyway) but essentially just looking at patterns created when slicing up the DNA with enzymes and looking for genetic markers.
Now comes DNA if it becomes easy to process and there are large databases avalible
I think there is a vast misunderstaning of how difficult it is to process DNA evidince (especially compared to fingerprints) and what these so-called "databases" are.
Starting with the database. Its a collection of blood samples (two drops of blood on a card). Just to process one sample to where it could be compared with another takes several days in a lab. Also, in order for these tests to have the necessary level of validity, they have to be run at the same time and in the same lab. You can't have two different labs running the different samples or even the same lab do it at different times. Compared to this, processing fingerprints in trivial.
So, going back to the article. The police had other reasons to suspect Casiano-Gernandez, so they requested the samples from the military registry in order to have a lab run the comparisons. Its not like you can just fire off a database search from a computer and wait for the result.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wondering how BuyMusic has been doing. Unfortunately (?) I can't visit their web site to see -they don't seem to like my browser.
EMI allow 3 transfers to any SDMI compatible device, Universal doesn't.
And right there is where Apple got it right, and this service, like the other copycats, is getting it wrong. Do consumers really want ot have to worry about hundreds or thousands of music titles having any number of different access rights?
Maybe I'm just simple-minded, but I like the idea of uniform pricing, and uniform DRM even more.
As someone who makes a living doing research (in a completely different field), I think you're missunderstanding how scienctific research works.
You wrote, "If I was a scientist and wanted to produce research that showed..."
If you were a scientist you would produce research to test your hypothesis (there is no global warming). You don't necessarily get the results you "wanted to produce" and every scientist knows this and is willing to go with what the evidence shows.
So the idea that a scientist will go to a company and say "Give me money and I'll produce the results you want" makes the assumption that the scientist is willing to be dishonest, otherwise they can make no such statement.
Let's see, north pole melting -> another Ice Age.
That would be the Ice-Free Ice Age?
Don't suppose any of you were around when party lines were the norm for phones?
Didn't think so.
MS says half the crashes users experience are because of 3rd party code, so all of a sudden its 3rd parties who are responsible for crashes and not MS?
Let's look at the half-empty side: MS is still responsible for half of the crashes that occur. That's still way too many crashes due to MS code IMO.
Consider also that MS is a single company vs. how many 3rd party developers from the good to the bad to the ugly?
And what kind of access do they have to the API's and OS vs. Microsoft?
And who's developer tools are those 3rd parties using anyway?
After reading the blurb about the artist who believes some of her(?) works are being infringed by BuyMusic.com, I had a question.
Shouldn't she (or any of the other artists) be able to send a cease and desist letter of their own to buymusic or their ISP? Aren't they then required, by law, to remove the material in question or close the site until they prove the works are non-infringing?
To hear the polititions and "industry" people talk about it, protecting the artist's rights is what the whold bill was about, wasn't it?
The problem I see is that the marketplace isn't being given the chance to decide. Its not like the big 5 record labels are competing against each other to dermine which form (if any) of content control the consumer prefers. Its being decided by the RIAA, and the marketplace is being told, "This is how its going to be!". In fact we've got members of congress who seem willing to legislate that there must be content control and they will (with the help of the industry) decide what it shall be.
If they really want to see what kind of copy prevention the market will put up with, take a look at software. For decades, software companies have tried different schemes, but whenever there is any real competition, the market prefers no copy control, primarily due to the hassles involved (compainies dropping support for a product or going out of business, lost/damaged key disks, dongles that stop working, looking up word 3 in paragraph 5 of page 32 in the manual....).
Its only when there is a monopoly, when the control mechanism can be forced on the consumer, that these types of mechanisms can even be considered. XP product activation, anyone?
Its already kinda almost (not really) happening.
Order a large pizza from Pizza Hut, get a free DVD (my kids just got All Dogs Go to Heaven 2).
That last paragraph describes what I think is the least user-friendly aspect of buymusic.com's model.
Say you purchase 100 songs from them, then want to transfer some songs to your mp3 (wmp?) player. Some will transfer, some won't. How is the user supposed to keep track?
IMO its simply stupid to have several different levels (for lack of a better term) of DRM and saddle the user with the burdon of trying to keep track of which ones they can do what with -short of trying to copy/transer/burn and having it fail.
At least Apple kept it simple.
A better comparison would be:
Songs starting at 79 cents each
vs.
All songs are 99 cents each.
So at buymusic.com you may be able to purchase "filler" tracks for 79 cents, but the good ones may cost more than 99.
Also keep in mind that you have to double-check what you can do with each song. For 79 cents you may only be able to listen to it on the computer used to download it. The reason some tracks may cost more could also be because you're allowed to do more with them with respect to burning CDs and transferring to other computers/players. All those things alter the "value" you're gettng for the $$.
Be careful though. From what little I've been reading it sounds like you might actually be able to fool the sight into allowing you to purchase and download tracks, but you won't be able to "unlock" them without the correct plugin that only works in IE on Windows.
I may be wrong about that, but that's the way it sounds (and it seems plausible -FWIW).
Ignore my previous post, I didn't grok the "hardware marketing company" vs. "hardware company" difference you were making, though I don't agree with that distinction either.
One thing to note is that Apple has always designed their own motherboards, including the chip sets. They still do. That would seem to make them a hardware company even as you've defined it.
Also consider that the PPC architecture is designed by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance. Thus Apple has had some input in the CPU design as well (how much, I don't know).
Does that mean Dell isn't a hardware company either?
"The motherboard?"
Well, the chip set for the motherboard. See the second page of the article, under Miscellany, the second question "I also asked at one point about the Apple-designed chipset..."
I was really hoping we'd find out more about the chip set used in the 970 blades. Oh well.
As far as the database used in this case, I was responding based on the linked article. There they stated the "database" was two drops of blood on a card. If you have any references to the type of database you indicate, housing genetic information for thousands of individuals, I'd love to see it, because I've never heard of it.
With regard to RFLP, using different labs for the purpose of identifying a body may be sufficient, but my understanding is that it isn't for criminal prosecution. Even following identical protocols, there is variability in how well the restriction enzymes work and how the gels run, not to mention all the other variables. These factors decrease reliablity in the comparison.
Yes, using PCR and sequencing you may be able to find SNPs but the fact remains that this requires days worth of lab work. Compare that with how simple it is to take a set of fingerprints and scan them. Having the genetic equivalent of a fingerprint database isn't going to happen anytime soon!
This may be a stupid question, but why do you shred junk mail?
Since I'd generally have to take it out of the envelope to shred it, I've generally just tossed it.
Just curious.
I was going based on the article linked, sounds like they may have changed things somewhere along the line. You actually get a better DNA sample from skin samples than blood, so doing a cheek swab would be better (based on my limited understanding).
OTOH, when I had one of those "swabs" it was more like using a wire brush on the inside of my mouth. I think I would have preferred a finger stick.
"Are you making the argument that everything a person does, says, believes in, etc are stored in their DNA?"
Ah, but that's where the neural interconnect comes in to download all that is "you" into a computer to be uploaded to your next body.
Or just to download your conciousness to the internet.
What movie were we talking about again?
LOL!
Good luck with the hair from the barber shop!
Unless the barber is a mean SOB who pulls people's hair out, there will be no usable DNA. Keep in mind its the cells attached to the base of the hair when its pulled out that contain the DNA. The hair itself is just a bunch of protein.
I'm just amazed at how advanced some people seem to think DNA tech is compared to reality.
Other than sex (the Y chromosome is easy enough to find) even the simplest of genetic determinations takes days to perform. Also keep in mind that simple things like hair and eye color can be the result of several different genes.
And race? What specific trait are you even going to base this on? The majority of people (at least in the US) are a genetic mix of races though based on appearance we may place them in one race vs. another.
When it comes to who's best suited for a promotion or who is gay, we're getting into areas which may be essentially impossible to determine genetically. You get into that whole nature/nurture thing.
Bottom line is that its very expensive to do even the simplest genetic tests. They're simply not economical on a large scale and probably won't be in our lifetime.
Its pretty much illegal to require a SSN for just about everything but tax related business. You can even request your driver's license not be your SSN -in other words not even the state can require your SSN for anything other than tax purposes.
Just FYI, these so-called databases are simply two drops of dried blood on a card. There's nothing digitized (yet anyway).
Next point is that these blood tests do not rely on DNA sequences (not directly anyway) but essentially just looking at patterns created when slicing up the DNA with enzymes and looking for genetic markers.
Tell me again why OJ isn't in jail?
Oh yeah, the DNA evidence may have been planted.
Just wanted to point out that it ins't going to be as easy as you implied.
Now comes DNA if it becomes easy to process and there are large databases avalible
I think there is a vast misunderstaning of how difficult it is to process DNA evidince (especially compared to fingerprints) and what these so-called "databases" are.
Starting with the database. Its a collection of blood samples (two drops of blood on a card). Just to process one sample to where it could be compared with another takes several days in a lab. Also, in order for these tests to have the necessary level of validity, they have to be run at the same time and in the same lab. You can't have two different labs running the different samples or even the same lab do it at different times. Compared to this, processing fingerprints in trivial.
So, going back to the article. The police had other reasons to suspect Casiano-Gernandez, so they requested the samples from the military registry in order to have a lab run the comparisons. Its not like you can just fire off a database search from a computer and wait for the result.