Wasn't that the answer given, when the US president demanded to know how the Russians got Sputnik up before the Americans managed a similar feat? "Because their Germans are better than our Germans".
They might be a bit deluded when they think of themselves as a master race (well, only some of them do) but if they were to qualify it as a "master engineering race" then I think there'd be a lot less of us that would argue with it. From rockets to cars, they are excellent engineers.
If you are interested in "our" Germans from the parent's statement, do a google on "operation paperclip". It's very interesting... the US program to extract as many German scientists out of post-Nazi Germany as possible.
-- james PS I mean to stir no racial tension by the use of "master race", merely referring to the use of a very well known phrase
I completely agree with your identification of the issues, with the exception that you've left off price. You've applied your own standing to those issues, which is fair enough, but not everyone agrees with you.
I don't mean to be the smelly hairy audiophile (anyway, I'm not) but the 192Kb MP3s that you refer to suck as soon as you're not listening to them on those shitty iPod headphones.
Like many other college students, I've invested a bit in a decent hi-fi (as much as I could afford) that has decent components in it. My mother can pick the difference between MP3s at less than 192kbps and a CD. I have a few demo SACDs and DVD-As (not going to buy many because I can't put them into iTunes) and the difference between these and CDs is unbelievable.
I am willing to pay more for good quality and no DRM. The RIAA is only interested in offering a wide range of poorly-formatted songs (i.e. put on AAC/MP3/WMA, etc) or a very narrow range of well formatted songs (i.e. put on DVD-A or SACD) but all of them, every last one, has DRM. So I'm buying CDs, but less of them, because I'm becoming disillusioned with the whole situation...
So, as someone who is one of their customers and who has spent a lot of money on their products, I'm sick of this situation. I want their product, but I don't want to be assumed to be a criminal. Yes, I'll probably let my sister copy my songs but that's never going to stop. It's always been the case, and always will be, no matter what stupid DRM you put on the product. I'll strip, fucking sue me.
I might sample a few songs online but I go and buy the CD. The quality is better, and it saves the hastle of going through and finding the songs. It's great for discovery but no good for getting a lot of what you want.
Surely these overpaid fuckers at the RIAA can find a business model in there somewhere. They have a product I want, I want to give them money, but I don't want to be told how it is acceptable for me to use their product.
And this is a real shame, because technology is moving forward but the mediums are moving backwards.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Some people want portability, and that's fine, but what I want is a high quality update of the CD; with it's quality, maybe with more channels, and with the ability to scale it down *myself* if I want to take it with me on an iPod or such. Give me high quality, no DRM, and I'll work out what I want to do with, thanks very much. Oh, and I will pay for it, if it's DRM free, because that means it's portable to me (as well as being high quality). I have a rack of about 500 CDs sitting here beside me as a testament to that.
And this isn't about digital files. Digital files could be great, if they were decent quality. I'd buy lossless versions of the digital masters by the truckload if I could... but not versions that are worse than the CDs I can already buy (128kbps typical online music store vs CDs 1411kbps).
Anyway, I think the main reason that the MP3 is popular is not because it's just portable, but because of that portability it's easy to pirate. Listening to music on portable music devices is fine, but when you stick a 128kB MP3 on a decent hi-fi, or in a car, it sounds like crap. Until they provide us with something more compelling than free (but crap quality), they're going to have a big piracy problem (as opposed to a small one).
But the record companies are going to learn one way or another. If what they put out costs the same, but in every other regard is a backwards step, there are going to be a lot of people throw up their hands in disgust and look for something better. Or at least different.
I (we) don't just want portability, we want fidelity. MP3 and co do not provide that. They'll only get so far in the market without taking that into account.
I don't have an Apple. (Sadly, I already run too many systems Sparc,Linux,windoze)
I've heard a fair few excuses in my time but that one is pretty bad.
The fact that you've got so many sounds to me like you're looking for one that is a good one. Give the Apple a shot, you may find that afterwards you're not running nearly as many systems as you are now...:)
Yeah, that's the message we want to convey to the MPAA. Everyone knows the Internet2 is all about pirating DVDs.
Someone give Jack Valenti a call! His exit interview was linked off here just a few days ago, and he said: If everything stayed just as it is right now, we could probably survive it, because even with broadband it takes at least an hour to bring down a movie. But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they're running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.
I wanna know what his face does when he finds out we can now do it in under 5 seconds:D It sure couldn't get any uglier than it already is.
Anyway, don't let him quit before someone tells him!
That should be a good start. You'll find that the Mac community is more than willing to go out of its way to help you, especially if you're a new convert. Just tell people you've switched from Windows, you'll get all the help you'll ever need.
Apple have support forums too, they're worth a look, especially to track bugs - people normally go whinge over there.
Finally, as someone mentioned, VersionTracker and MacUpdate are the places to search for software. Even if you don't know the name of the software, type in what kind of thing you're looking for (eg MP3) and you're bound to find something of use.
Some people like to say that the USA is the home of pure capitalism. However, that's an oversimplification of how our system really functions. I'd rather call it capitalism with gutters on either side of the bowling lane so that when something starts to go off course in a bad way, the law kicks in and makes sure that the bad shot both fails to score, and also cannot go further off course so that it impacts the scores on other lanes.
So that's how the RIAA and MPAA can bring all those lawsuits to bear on US citizens?
The only reason there are gutters is for the businesses to dump the little guys when they're done with them. The politicians are standing shoulder to shoulder with the big corps over this, too - that's why US drug prices remain at the highest levels in the western world, and why laws like the DMCA and the INDUCE Act will continue to make their way onto the books.
So long as politicians keep get big $$$ from big business, there's going to be a severe tilt towards serving business interests as opposed to human interests. I'm surprised there haven't been overtures to ban political donations from corporations - I think it would fix a lot of problems.
Is the market really free if the state of California tries to regulate it?
True free markets exist in textbooks. Not in reality.
Of all the states, I'm least surprised by Cal taking a (?another) shot at the Redmond giant. A number of Californian businesses (some of them quite big... most of them in Silicon Valley) have suffered at MS's hands.
Actually, the guy admitted it was a hoax - it's really a 20" LaCie in a PowerBook box. That's why the foam doesn't fit the back!
A hoax makes sense. About 6 months ago, MacBidoulle self-retired from the rumour business - it said it was taking too much pressure from the mothership.
They've stayed pretty true to their word - up until now...
This is like the third time in 24 hours I've read this analogy and it's really lame.
If you don't pay mafia protection fees, then "bad things happen to you".
Despite the standover tactics (and I agree they're mafia-esque), they offer a product. The grandparent post values being able to gain access to the content at $5 a month, who the hell are you to say he shouldn't get access to it?
If you don't pay the RIAA for its monthly fee or buy it's content, then the only things that could happen to you (such as not listening to Britney Spears) are good.
What happens if grandparent poster likes Britney Spears? Who are you to say it's good for him not to get access to it?
And if he feels the moral obligation to pay for access, and feels $5/all you can eat content is fair, then let him pay.
If you're referring to the court cases brought against people who were file-sharing and infringing on copyrights, then I don't think a monthly college file sharing fee protects you if you continue to file-share copyrighted works that aren't part of the deal.
It will depend on what's made available. I don't think $5 a month is unreasonable, and from what the article says it seems a lot of students agree with that point of view.
Stop with the knee jerk quip karma bait comments.
ha! That's rich coming from the guy who posted about how the RIAA is the root of all evil when someone said they might be interested in the service mentioned!
Both I and the anonymous grandchild post are not wrong! The difference being we probably don't speak bastardised English - I didn't realise US English did this:)
It doesn't work like that for the rest of the English-speaking world. Though I accept that this is a US server.
-- james
PS: See here: Committee is a collective noun, just like jury, flock, herd, class, choir, team, family, and other words that refer to a single unit consisting of more than one person or thing. In American English (British English differs on this issue, as it does on many others), collective nouns can be either singular or plural, depending on how the group is being spoken of in the sentence.
John Kerry would no real war-fighting president. He's the kind of Democrat bin Laden wants in the oval office. You can bet he sure doesn't want Bush re-elected, and that alone is adequate reason to vote for Bush.
You people just don't get it, do you?
There is no "war" going on, not in the real sense of the word (well, with the big exception of Iraq). You have a "war" on terror, and you've already lost the fight. It's like a "war" on drugs, or a "war" on filesharing, or a "war" on any of these other esoteric concepts people like to shove down your throat.
Bin Laden's purpose is only to fight wars. He fought the Soviets, they disintegrated, now he's looking for a new target. He was pretty much ignored until 9/11, and funnily enough, he's being ignored again now.
The "war" that you have going is just a political farce designed to make a "war" President. If W didn't have terror, what would he have?
Tax cuts for the rich? Think that's going to get you re-elected?
The most ironic thing about this "war" is that by fighting it on Bin Laden's terms, as the US has done, you're merely lending support to his cause. He's got a lot more support now than he did in those days after 9/11. Which means more terrorists. Which means that the world is a less safe place. Which means, that compared to the week after the Twin Towers, we're all in a worse position now.
Rather than worry about this they should have a big tourist event around it. Figure out what the safe distance is to view this, fence off two big concentric rings around that, and then sell tickets to watch the show. They could even have different bands playing at different quadrants of the circle before the big blow-off. They could get AC/DC in one quadrant and Judas Priest in another. It would be awesome, and they could make money doing a live PPV event.
Funny you should mention that, because it's exactly what they did in Canberra when the Government decided to implode the old Canberra Hospital. They touted it as a big tourist event... you know, come out and see us blow shit up.
Something went wrong. I think some twit decided to put some barrels of diesel in there for a bigger spectacle. Maybe someone else got the calculations wrong, but debris rained down on the crowd, some of it very big. Unbelievably, only one person was killed - which is a tragedy, but it had the potential to be a lot more.
I give it 10 minutes before the first phone Luditte who comes complaining that nobody makes good plain phones anymore gets modded up.
Actually, I was going to award phone luddite to the guy who submitted the story. He says it's billed as the first phone service to air tv on your phone.
I was watching TV on a friend's Nokia 6600 about 8 months ago, and no, I don't live in Japan (I'm in Australia).
... is the biggest single obstacle the music industry has from ramming really nasty DRM down all our throats. The very nature of Apple's terms has stopped WMP dead in its tracks, and it's going to make the labels think twice with future formats like DVD-A and SACD.
I sincerely hope that they get the fact that people will pay for convenience, quality and portability. I think that as soon as they get that, the file sharing apps are going to seriously head south. They've got convenience with the iTunes music store, portability is ok (average at best), but they need a lot of work on quality (I'd like to see a lossless version of the digital master recording made available).
Get all three of those, and I'd pay up to double what they're presently charging.
yeah yeah, if you want to bring down a system there's no point targeting the new online equivalent of the CD store. You think HMV has any say in how artists get remunerated? That's right, and neither does Apple (though I'd love to see them set up a direct agreement with a few big artists - no record company at all).
Anyway, you have your grievances, fair enough. Mine is quality. I want lossless, not some shitty lossy encoded MP3/AAC/OGG, etc.
It's the first time in music production history where the quality of what's on offer (as in, technical sound quality) has gone backwards. I'd pay up to double if I could get lossless files.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars, terrabytes, and lots of G5s, all posted on /.
the porn sites are going to have a bad day today
-- james
They might be a bit deluded when they think of themselves as a master race (well, only some of them do) but if they were to qualify it as a "master engineering race" then I think there'd be a lot less of us that would argue with it. From rockets to cars, they are excellent engineers.
If you are interested in "our" Germans from the parent's statement, do a google on "operation paperclip". It's very interesting... the US program to extract as many German scientists out of post-Nazi Germany as possible.
-- james
PS I mean to stir no racial tension by the use of "master race", merely referring to the use of a very well known phrase
I wasn't meaning to be comical. It should be:
Sorry
-- james
I completely agree with your identification of the issues, with the exception that you've left off price. You've applied your own standing to those issues, which is fair enough, but not everyone agrees with you.
I don't mean to be the smelly hairy audiophile (anyway, I'm not) but the 192Kb MP3s that you refer to suck as soon as you're not listening to them on those shitty iPod headphones.
Like many other college students, I've invested a bit in a decent hi-fi (as much as I could afford) that has decent components in it. My mother can pick the difference between MP3s at less than 192kbps and a CD. I have a few demo SACDs and DVD-As (not going to buy many because I can't put them into iTunes) and the difference between these and CDs is unbelievable.
I am willing to pay more for good quality and no DRM. The RIAA is only interested in offering a wide range of poorly-formatted songs (i.e. put on AAC/MP3/WMA, etc) or a very narrow range of well formatted songs (i.e. put on DVD-A or SACD) but all of them, every last one, has DRM. So I'm buying CDs, but less of them, because I'm becoming disillusioned with the whole situation...
So, as someone who is one of their customers and who has spent a lot of money on their products, I'm sick of this situation. I want their product, but I don't want to be assumed to be a criminal. Yes, I'll probably let my sister copy my songs but that's never going to stop. It's always been the case, and always will be, no matter what stupid DRM you put on the product. I'll strip, fucking sue me.
I might sample a few songs online but I go and buy the CD. The quality is better, and it saves the hastle of going through and finding the songs. It's great for discovery but no good for getting a lot of what you want.
Surely these overpaid fuckers at the RIAA can find a business model in there somewhere. They have a product I want, I want to give them money, but I don't want to be told how it is acceptable for me to use their product.
-- james
And this is a real shame, because technology is moving forward but the mediums are moving backwards.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Some people want portability, and that's fine, but what I want is a high quality update of the CD; with it's quality, maybe with more channels, and with the ability to scale it down *myself* if I want to take it with me on an iPod or such. Give me high quality, no DRM, and I'll work out what I want to do with, thanks very much. Oh, and I will pay for it, if it's DRM free, because that means it's portable to me (as well as being high quality). I have a rack of about 500 CDs sitting here beside me as a testament to that.
And this isn't about digital files. Digital files could be great, if they were decent quality. I'd buy lossless versions of the digital masters by the truckload if I could... but not versions that are worse than the CDs I can already buy (128kbps typical online music store vs CDs 1411kbps).
Anyway, I think the main reason that the MP3 is popular is not because it's just portable, but because of that portability it's easy to pirate. Listening to music on portable music devices is fine, but when you stick a 128kB MP3 on a decent hi-fi, or in a car, it sounds like crap. Until they provide us with something more compelling than free (but crap quality), they're going to have a big piracy problem (as opposed to a small one).
But the record companies are going to learn one way or another. If what they put out costs the same, but in every other regard is a backwards step, there are going to be a lot of people throw up their hands in disgust and look for something better. Or at least different.
I (we) don't just want portability, we want fidelity. MP3 and co do not provide that. They'll only get so far in the market without taking that into account.
-- james
I've heard a fair few excuses in my time but that one is pretty bad.
The fact that you've got so many sounds to me like you're looking for one that is a good one. Give the Apple a shot, you may find that afterwards you're not running nearly as many systems as you are now...
-- james
Someone give Jack Valenti a call! His exit interview was linked off here just a few days ago, and he said:
If everything stayed just as it is right now, we could probably survive it, because even with broadband it takes at least an hour to bring down a movie. But I visited the labs at Caltech, and they're running an experiment called FAST where they can bring down a DVD-quality movie in 5 seconds. The director told me it could be operative in the market in 18 months. Well, my face blanched.
I wanna know what his face does when he finds out we can now do it in under 5 seconds
Anyway, don't let him quit before someone tells him!
-- james
perl in a nightclub?
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
-- james
The web is definitely your friend when it comes to switching. The parent links will help.
:)
MacNN Forums
xlr8yourmac.com's forums
MacFixIt Forums
MacWorld Forums
That should be a good start. You'll find that the Mac community is more than willing to go out of its way to help you, especially if you're a new convert. Just tell people you've switched from Windows, you'll get all the help you'll ever need.
Apple have support forums too, they're worth a look, especially to track bugs - people normally go whinge over there.
Finally, as someone mentioned, VersionTracker and MacUpdate are the places to search for software. Even if you don't know the name of the software, type in what kind of thing you're looking for (eg MP3) and you're bound to find something of use.
Good luck, and most of all, have fun
-- james
God.
So that's how the RIAA and MPAA can bring all those lawsuits to bear on US citizens?
The only reason there are gutters is for the businesses to dump the little guys when they're done with them. The politicians are standing shoulder to shoulder with the big corps over this, too - that's why US drug prices remain at the highest levels in the western world, and why laws like the DMCA and the INDUCE Act will continue to make their way onto the books.
So long as politicians keep get big $$$ from big business, there's going to be a severe tilt towards serving business interests as opposed to human interests. I'm surprised there haven't been overtures to ban political donations from corporations - I think it would fix a lot of problems.
-- james
True free markets exist in textbooks. Not in reality.
Of all the states, I'm least surprised by Cal taking a (?another) shot at the Redmond giant. A number of Californian businesses (some of them quite big... most of them in Silicon Valley) have suffered at MS's hands.
-- james
A hoax makes sense. About 6 months ago, MacBidoulle self-retired from the rumour business - it said it was taking too much pressure from the mothership.
They've stayed pretty true to their word - up until now...
-- james
There's pr0n on it.slashdot.org?
-- james
Maybe because you need to post to /. to find out?
-- james
Despite the standover tactics (and I agree they're mafia-esque), they offer a product. The grandparent post values being able to gain access to the content at $5 a month, who the hell are you to say he shouldn't get access to it?
What happens if grandparent poster likes Britney Spears? Who are you to say it's good for him not to get access to it?
And if he feels the moral obligation to pay for access, and feels $5/all you can eat content is fair, then let him pay.
It will depend on what's made available. I don't think $5 a month is unreasonable, and from what the article says it seems a lot of students agree with that point of view.
ha! That's rich coming from the guy who posted about how the RIAA is the root of all evil when someone said they might be interested in the service mentioned!
-- james
Both I and the anonymous grandchild post are not wrong! The difference being we probably don't speak bastardised English - I didn't realise US English did this :)
It doesn't work like that for the rest of the English-speaking world. Though I accept that this is a US server.
-- james
PS: See here:
Committee is a collective noun, just like jury, flock, herd, class, choir, team, family, and other words that refer to a single unit consisting of more than one person or thing. In American English (British English differs on this issue, as it does on many others), collective nouns can be either singular or plural, depending on how the group is being spoken of in the sentence.
On the subject of dyslexia:
The staff at Grimwell.com has temporarily relocated to Egypt, and provides a live report.
HAVE!
The staff at grimwell.com HAVE temporarily relocated to Egypt, and provides a live report.
Staff is plural! So it's have, not has!
I know it's
-- james
You people just don't get it, do you?
There is no "war" going on, not in the real sense of the word (well, with the big exception of Iraq). You have a "war" on terror, and you've already lost the fight. It's like a "war" on drugs, or a "war" on filesharing, or a "war" on any of these other esoteric concepts people like to shove down your throat.
Bin Laden's purpose is only to fight wars. He fought the Soviets, they disintegrated, now he's looking for a new target. He was pretty much ignored until 9/11, and funnily enough, he's being ignored again now.
The "war" that you have going is just a political farce designed to make a "war" President. If W didn't have terror, what would he have?
Tax cuts for the rich? Think that's going to get you re-elected?
The most ironic thing about this "war" is that by fighting it on Bin Laden's terms, as the US has done, you're merely lending support to his cause. He's got a lot more support now than he did in those days after 9/11. Which means more terrorists. Which means that the world is a less safe place. Which means, that compared to the week after the Twin Towers, we're all in a worse position now.
-- james
Funny you should mention that, because it's exactly what they did in Canberra when the Government decided to implode the old Canberra Hospital. They touted it as a big tourist event... you know, come out and see us blow shit up.
Something went wrong. I think some twit decided to put some barrels of diesel in there for a bigger spectacle. Maybe someone else got the calculations wrong, but debris rained down on the crowd, some of it very big. Unbelievably, only one person was killed - which is a tragedy, but it had the potential to be a lot more.
-- james
Actually, I was going to award phone luddite to the guy who submitted the story. He says it's billed as the first phone service to air tv on your phone.
I was watching TV on a friend's Nokia 6600 about 8 months ago, and no, I don't live in Japan (I'm in Australia).
-- james
How do you think you come up with a patent for a colour changing "chameleon" computer case?
-- james
... is the biggest single obstacle the music industry has from ramming really nasty DRM down all our throats. The very nature of Apple's terms has stopped WMP dead in its tracks, and it's going to make the labels think twice with future formats like DVD-A and SACD.
I sincerely hope that they get the fact that people will pay for convenience, quality and portability. I think that as soon as they get that, the file sharing apps are going to seriously head south. They've got convenience with the iTunes music store, portability is ok (average at best), but they need a lot of work on quality (I'd like to see a lossless version of the digital master recording made available).
Get all three of those, and I'd pay up to double what they're presently charging.
-- james
Well, I can't speak for the developers, but this thing does HDTV right?
Well, the first thing that springs to my mind is that 30" behemoth Apple announced a couple of weeks ago...
-- james
yeah yeah, if you want to bring down a system there's no point targeting the new online equivalent of the CD store. You think HMV has any say in how artists get remunerated? That's right, and neither does Apple (though I'd love to see them set up a direct agreement with a few big artists - no record company at all).
Anyway, you have your grievances, fair enough. Mine is quality. I want lossless, not some shitty lossy encoded MP3/AAC/OGG, etc.
It's the first time in music production history where the quality of what's on offer (as in, technical sound quality) has gone backwards. I'd pay up to double if I could get lossless files.
-- james