I know exactly what you meant by grey imports, but, if you were paying attention, the end result of CD Wow's hassles earlier this year was that it committed itself to buying its inventory from within the EU and/or compensate the record industry in the EU for CDs that it purchased elsewhere. So, in essence, CD Wow has ceased to be a grey importer.
Does the average Briton pay too much for CDs? Yes, I'd say so. Does that mean you have to do the same? No, not at all.
And, getting back on topic, I agree that UK downloads are too expensive - VAT aside, there's no reason why downloading a track in the UK should cost any more than downloading a track anywhere else - but I do think that the idea of a 25p track is pie in the sky.
Even after you strip away a retailer's profits, distribution, media and packaging costs, a CD still costs more than 25p per track to produce. If a CD sold in the stores nets a record label, say, 40p per track (from which they pay the artists, etc, and allow for some profit), then how would selling tracks online for 25p each make any financial sense? Or are your 25p tracks only the "old" stuff that you dismissed so nonchalantly in a previous post?
My Chip and PIN nightmare scenario is a junkie armed with a knife threatening it out of me, or worse, my girlfriend. Granted, the chances of ever being mugged are very slim, but Chip and PIN seems to me to be a violent mugger's dream come true: take someone's wallet, extract their PIN from them and, voila, you've turned a nice profit simply by marching along to the nearest cashpoint.
As I've said, being mugged isn't something that I worry about in the general scheme of things, but it does seem to me that a PIN is far more impersonal, and thus far easier to misuse, than a signature, hence it opens up a whole new can of worms.
Frankly, there's an argument that Chip and PIN will cause more problems than it solves, but I suppose that's really should be another debate for another day.
Man, you don't even have the balls to post using a pseudonym so why the hell do you think that I would feel the need to justify my taste in music or defend my purchases to you of all people?
I buy what I like the sound of: is that so hard to comprehend?
Don't you have something better to do on a Friday night than prove how immature you are? I guess not.
Re:Combat it or deny responsibility you mean...
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 1
I agree with you 100 percent about Chip and PIN.
I'll be using my signature rather than a PIN for as long as possible. When the time eventually comes that I've got no choice but to use a PIN then I'm going to be making damn sure that the hand that isn't entering the digits is shielding the keypad whilst I'm using it.
As to the security concerns that Chip and PIN creates, well, I guess we're all screwed by those.
Personally, I'd prefer a system that has photo and signature-based security. You sign for transactions as you do know but your card has a visible photo ID on it, and a similar ID comes up on the entry terminal when it's processing a transaction. As you say, getting hold of someone's PIN isn't impossible but mimicking their physical appearance is a little bit harder.
Incidentally, there are one or two UK banks that have offered credit cards with photo IDs on them for some time now, and the incident of fraud associated with those cards is far lower than cards without photos on them. Credit cards with photo IDs on them are big in continental Europe too, or so I'm led to believe.
Old? Well, in the case of some of my Virgin bargains, not unless your definition of "old" is anything that's been out for more than a few months. And, in the case of my purchases from CD Wow and Play.com, I'm talking about latest releases too.
Crap? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, my friend. One man's crap is another man's caviar. I don't care what judgement you make about my musical taste from a few names because I'm buying them for my enjoyment, not your's or anyone else's. You buy what you like and I'll buy what I like, OK?
Petrol to your fire? I hardly think so. But, hey, believe what your want.
The person to whom I was replying to originally was clearly enjoying the use of the word "record" in the story summary.
As for why the BPI is still called the BPI, well, it's historical momentum, I guess. Twentieth Century Fox is still called Twentieth Century Fox too, right?
Combat it or deny responsibility you mean...
on
Gone Phishing?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I read recently that phishing scams have reached such a ridiculous level that UK banks are seriously considering making the victims 100 percent responsible for them.
Whereas at the moment a phishing victim can reasonably expect their bank to to give back any money that's lost from their account(s) as a result of being scammed, in future the same victim could well be told that they're responsible so they're liable.
Personally, whilst I would prefer that banks do the right thing, I find it hard to argue with a policy that says that they won't refund money where people have been stupid enough to be conned into giving away their banking details by obvious scams.
I don't want Alzheimer's disease victims to suddenly find their accounts empty but when the average man on the street is practically giving away his financial details when he should be keeping them secure, well, what do you expect banks to do? Give away money which they then end up recouping by charging everyone more for their services?
Sometimes, the only way you can educate people into doing the right thing is to not protect them when they do the wrong thing. In that respect, we're talking about the same sort of lesson people who don't have any backup procedures learn the first time they irretrievably lose all their data.
No offense intended, but you sound like the sort of person that, if the tracks were 25p each, would complain that they're still too expensive and that you'd pay for them if only they were 10p each instead.
I buy plenty of music, mostly from CD Wow, Play.com, or Virgin Megastores, when they're having one of their 5 CDs/DVDs for £30 sales. I never pay more than £9 for any CD I want, and I get most of the music that I want for less than that.
The other week I bought a bunch of stuff from Virgin, including the Black Eyed Peas Elephunk and the Ramones Anthology for £6 each. Other artists whose albums I've bought recently at that price include (in no particular order) the Sex Pistols, Jamie Cullum, Blur, Travis and Air.
There are 57 tracks on my new Ramones double CD (32 on disc one, 25 on disc two). 57 tracks for £6. Now, I don't know about you, but that seems like a steal to me.
Are CDs too expensive? Well, they're cheaper now than at any other time. When you factor in things like inflation, the CDs I'm buying now can't be costing me more than half what the CDs I was buying 15 years ago were.
Same thing for DVD movies. I have over 100 DVDs - many of them 2-disc collectors' editions, director's cuts, etc - and not one of them cost me more than £10. In fact, I'd say 70 percent of them cost me £6 or less.
Bottom line: CDs and DVDs on physical media can be had at damn good prices. Sure, legal downloads aren't as competitively priced as they could be, but you forget that, not only is legal downloading in its infancy, it's designed to provide a legitimate alternative to P2P downloading rather than compete with traditional music retailing from a price point of view.
If you're expecting legal downloads - and legal downloads without any DRM at that - at a quarter of the price of discounted CDs then, sorry, but you're living in a dreamworld.
If you look at the article, you'll notice a link to a related audio story in the top right corner, that talks about how the UK is bucking music industry trends. In other words, how the UK industry's growth is the exception rather than the norm.
Tiger, the next version of the MacOS, is being polished right now. At Mac Expo London last week, Apple was giving demos of the new OS and had machines where you could get a hands-on taste of some of the new features, like video conferencing, Safari RSS, etc.
Impressive doesn't do it justice: if it lives up to its billing then it'll be nothing short of the best desktop OS ever. And this coming from a dedicated Windows and Linux user.
If I remember correctly, the original version of this joystick was damn durable. It was one of the few things in life that was inexpensive yet built to last. If this new stick is half as good it'll last years.
Accenture is not the ex-Arthur Andersen crowd, it's the ex-ex-Arthur Andersen crowd: Accenture is what Andersen Consulting changed its name to (at the start of 2000, if I remember correctly) to differentiate itself from Arthur Andersen after it broke away from it.
Good thing too for those working at Accenture, given what lay ahead with Arthur Andersen's dealings with Enron. If the company had still been called Andersen Consulting when the shit hit that fan then it probably would have been dragged down too.
I can't speak from years of experience but, from the brief exposure that I had to them, Accenture's people seemed competent enough to me.
No, I can't, because, as I said already, I can't remember the manufacturer. I do know it wasn't an Apple notebook (because the store didn't sell any Apple hardware or software) and I do know it wasn't a big name that's normally associated with PCs (because I remember being surprised that they made them at all).
I freely acknowledge that I don't recall the name and thus I can't prove a thing. But ask yourself this: why would I lie about it? To knock Apple? It was only yesterday that somebody else on Slashdot was calling me an Apple fan boy (be sure to read a couple of posts along the thread each way), so, please, don't for a minute think I have some sort of Apple-bashing agenda.
The only reason I pointed out that Apple wasn't the first to put a notebook's keyboard towards the rear of the unit is precisely that: that Apple wasn't the very first to do it. If I have an agenda here then it's sharing that simple truth; no more, no less. However, if you or anyone else wants to carry on believing that not a single, solitary notebook before the Powerbook had that feature, well, I can't stop you, can I?
I think I know full well what year I took out of university. And I think I know full well what I did and didn't see whilst working that year for a computer retailer.
So, thanks for suggesting I've got some sort of senility and can't get my dates right. I really do appreciate it.
I'll say it one more time because you don't seem to be able to comprehend what I'm saying: there was at least one notebook out there before Apple's Powerbook launch that had the keyboard towards the rear of the unit, and I saw and sold the models myself.
That doesn't make the Powerbook any better or any worse than it was. It just means that it wasn't the very first notebook to have that particular design feature.
I was selling these notebooks in the summer of 1991. Like I said, they were end-of-line stock then (ie, models that had been discontinued) so they obviously had been around for some time.
Either way, the fact that I was selling them at least three to six months ahead of the Powerbook's debut shows that Apple wasn't the first to market with notebooks that placed the keyboard towards the rear. Granted, Apple was probably the first to heavily promote this as a design feature and sell it to its users as such, but that doesn't mean they were first to market.
I can't remember the exact make, but I remember selling end-of-line PC notebooks that had keyboards placed at the hinge end in 1991. If they were end-of-line then, then they were probably around in 1990, perhaps 1989. That's years ahead of the Powerbook's first appearance.
In fact, the keyboard at the back was pretty much its unique selling point. Some people hated it, and some people loved it. I remember an author who bought two of the units because it would he thought it was perfect for him.
Granted, 99 percent of PC notebooks before the Powerbook had the keyboard as close to the front of the unit as possible but not all of them.
You still have to shop the guys who you bought your unlicensed copy of the OS from. And that includes signing a sworn statement to the fact.
So, in essence, Microsoft gives you a legitimate copy of the software (or at least a license for the software that you already have installed) and you give Microsoft a mid-sized piracy outfit on a silver platter.
Total cost to Microsoft for eliminating a pirate that might be costing them tens, if not hundreds, of thousands: next to nothing. The pirate outfit will probably end up forking over the lost income one way or another (in court or out of court, whichever Microsoft decides) and even it it doesn't (because it declares bankrupcy or something similar) it'll never be selling another pirated copy of Windows XP again, which means more legitimate Windows XP sales for Microsoft in the long run.
You have to admit, it's one helluva smart play by Microsoft. It gets to make more money and it gets to look like the good guy too.
Oh, and why not totally free? Well, apart from the legal stuff that you have to sign, there's a good chance that any outfit that's pirating Windows XP on a large scale barely has its head above water. The cost of getting caught by Microsoft, or even the cost of going legitimate from there onwards, is likely to drag such a company down like a stone. If that happens, your PC's warranty won't be worth the paper that it's written on.
IM is like a phone conversation. You talk with someone, and you "know" exactly who that someone is.
IRC is more like a bar. You're talking to a bunch of people, and people come and go freely. Of course people can record what you're saying in a bar, just as they can record a log of what's said in an IRC channel, but would you go to a bar with the expectation of your every word being recorded?
And, if you were in a bar and there was a high probability that your every word was being monitored, wouldn't you choose your words more carefully? For example, wouldn't you think twice about talking about your new supply of weed, that movie or that album you downloaded last night or that time you ripped off a bunch of stuff from work?
Of course, you're right that you shouldn't have a complete expectation of privacy in just about everything you do online but there's a difference between having no expectation of privacy and your every conversation actually being monitored.
There's a name for the country where everything is recorded and nothing goes unseen. It's called Oceania.
Slashdot Mirror
I know exactly what you meant by grey imports, but, if you were paying attention, the end result of CD Wow's hassles earlier this year was that it committed itself to buying its inventory from within the EU and/or compensate the record industry in the EU for CDs that it purchased elsewhere. So, in essence, CD Wow has ceased to be a grey importer.
Does the average Briton pay too much for CDs? Yes, I'd say so. Does that mean you have to do the same? No, not at all.
And, getting back on topic, I agree that UK downloads are too expensive - VAT aside, there's no reason why downloading a track in the UK should cost any more than downloading a track anywhere else - but I do think that the idea of a 25p track is pie in the sky.
Even after you strip away a retailer's profits, distribution, media and packaging costs, a CD still costs more than 25p per track to produce. If a CD sold in the stores nets a record label, say, 40p per track (from which they pay the artists, etc, and allow for some profit), then how would selling tracks online for 25p each make any financial sense? Or are your 25p tracks only the "old" stuff that you dismissed so nonchalantly in a previous post?
My Chip and PIN nightmare scenario is a junkie armed with a knife threatening it out of me, or worse, my girlfriend. Granted, the chances of ever being mugged are very slim, but Chip and PIN seems to me to be a violent mugger's dream come true: take someone's wallet, extract their PIN from them and, voila, you've turned a nice profit simply by marching along to the nearest cashpoint.
As I've said, being mugged isn't something that I worry about in the general scheme of things, but it does seem to me that a PIN is far more impersonal, and thus far easier to misuse, than a signature, hence it opens up a whole new can of worms.
Frankly, there's an argument that Chip and PIN will cause more problems than it solves, but I suppose that's really should be another debate for another day.
It is possible to be committed to more than one thing at a time. It might be a novel concept to you, but it's not to most people.
Man, you don't even have the balls to post using a pseudonym so why the hell do you think that I would feel the need to justify my taste in music or defend my purchases to you of all people?
I buy what I like the sound of: is that so hard to comprehend?
Don't you have something better to do on a Friday night than prove how immature you are? I guess not.
I agree with you 100 percent about Chip and PIN.
I'll be using my signature rather than a PIN for as long as possible. When the time eventually comes that I've got no choice but to use a PIN then I'm going to be making damn sure that the hand that isn't entering the digits is shielding the keypad whilst I'm using it.
As to the security concerns that Chip and PIN creates, well, I guess we're all screwed by those.
Personally, I'd prefer a system that has photo and signature-based security. You sign for transactions as you do know but your card has a visible photo ID on it, and a similar ID comes up on the entry terminal when it's processing a transaction. As you say, getting hold of someone's PIN isn't impossible but mimicking their physical appearance is a little bit harder.
Incidentally, there are one or two UK banks that have offered credit cards with photo IDs on them for some time now, and the incident of fraud associated with those cards is far lower than cards without photos on them. Credit cards with photo IDs on them are big in continental Europe too, or so I'm led to believe.
Old? Well, in the case of some of my Virgin bargains, not unless your definition of "old" is anything that's been out for more than a few months. And, in the case of my purchases from CD Wow and Play.com, I'm talking about latest releases too.
Crap? Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, my friend. One man's crap is another man's caviar. I don't care what judgement you make about my musical taste from a few names because I'm buying them for my enjoyment, not your's or anyone else's. You buy what you like and I'll buy what I like, OK?
Petrol to your fire? I hardly think so. But, hey, believe what your want.
The person to whom I was replying to originally was clearly enjoying the use of the word "record" in the story summary.
As for why the BPI is still called the BPI, well, it's historical momentum, I guess. Twentieth Century Fox is still called Twentieth Century Fox too, right?
I read recently that phishing scams have reached such a ridiculous level that UK banks are seriously considering making the victims 100 percent responsible for them.
Whereas at the moment a phishing victim can reasonably expect their bank to to give back any money that's lost from their account(s) as a result of being scammed, in future the same victim could well be told that they're responsible so they're liable.
Personally, whilst I would prefer that banks do the right thing, I find it hard to argue with a policy that says that they won't refund money where people have been stupid enough to be conned into giving away their banking details by obvious scams.
I don't want Alzheimer's disease victims to suddenly find their accounts empty but when the average man on the street is practically giving away his financial details when he should be keeping them secure, well, what do you expect banks to do? Give away money which they then end up recouping by charging everyone more for their services?
Sometimes, the only way you can educate people into doing the right thing is to not protect them when they do the wrong thing. In that respect, we're talking about the same sort of lesson people who don't have any backup procedures learn the first time they irretrievably lose all their data.
Tough love is sometimes the best love.
I use Windows and Linux, I'm comfortable using both, and I have no plans to ditch one or the other, or adopt MacOS.
Ergo, I'm a dedicated Windows and Linux user, and no oxymoron in sight.
No offense intended, but you sound like the sort of person that, if the tracks were 25p each, would complain that they're still too expensive and that you'd pay for them if only they were 10p each instead.
I buy plenty of music, mostly from CD Wow, Play.com, or Virgin Megastores, when they're having one of their 5 CDs/DVDs for £30 sales. I never pay more than £9 for any CD I want, and I get most of the music that I want for less than that.
The other week I bought a bunch of stuff from Virgin, including the Black Eyed Peas Elephunk and the Ramones Anthology for £6 each. Other artists whose albums I've bought recently at that price include (in no particular order) the Sex Pistols, Jamie Cullum, Blur, Travis and Air.
There are 57 tracks on my new Ramones double CD (32 on disc one, 25 on disc two). 57 tracks for £6. Now, I don't know about you, but that seems like a steal to me.
Are CDs too expensive? Well, they're cheaper now than at any other time. When you factor in things like inflation, the CDs I'm buying now can't be costing me more than half what the CDs I was buying 15 years ago were.
Same thing for DVD movies. I have over 100 DVDs - many of them 2-disc collectors' editions, director's cuts, etc - and not one of them cost me more than £10. In fact, I'd say 70 percent of them cost me £6 or less.
Bottom line: CDs and DVDs on physical media can be had at damn good prices. Sure, legal downloads aren't as competitively priced as they could be, but you forget that, not only is legal downloading in its infancy, it's designed to provide a legitimate alternative to P2P downloading rather than compete with traditional music retailing from a price point of view.
If you're expecting legal downloads - and legal downloads without any DRM at that - at a quarter of the price of discounted CDs then, sorry, but you're living in a dreamworld.
If you look at the article, you'll notice a link to a related audio story in the top right corner, that talks about how the UK is bucking music industry trends. In other words, how the UK industry's growth is the exception rather than the norm.
I think that it's fair to say that record refers to recording, not only to vinyl or any other specific medium.
Tiger, the next version of the MacOS, is being polished right now. At Mac Expo London last week, Apple was giving demos of the new OS and had machines where you could get a hands-on taste of some of the new features, like video conferencing, Safari RSS, etc.
Impressive doesn't do it justice: if it lives up to its billing then it'll be nothing short of the best desktop OS ever. And this coming from a dedicated Windows and Linux user.
If I remember correctly, the original version of this joystick was damn durable. It was one of the few things in life that was inexpensive yet built to last. If this new stick is half as good it'll last years.
Accenture is not the ex-Arthur Andersen crowd, it's the ex-ex-Arthur Andersen crowd: Accenture is what Andersen Consulting changed its name to (at the start of 2000, if I remember correctly) to differentiate itself from Arthur Andersen after it broke away from it.
Good thing too for those working at Accenture, given what lay ahead with Arthur Andersen's dealings with Enron. If the company had still been called Andersen Consulting when the shit hit that fan then it probably would have been dragged down too.
I can't speak from years of experience but, from the brief exposure that I had to them, Accenture's people seemed competent enough to me.
No, I can't, because, as I said already, I can't remember the manufacturer. I do know it wasn't an Apple notebook (because the store didn't sell any Apple hardware or software) and I do know it wasn't a big name that's normally associated with PCs (because I remember being surprised that they made them at all).
I freely acknowledge that I don't recall the name and thus I can't prove a thing. But ask yourself this: why would I lie about it? To knock Apple? It was only yesterday that somebody else on Slashdot was calling me an Apple fan boy (be sure to read a couple of posts along the thread each way), so, please, don't for a minute think I have some sort of Apple-bashing agenda.
The only reason I pointed out that Apple wasn't the first to put a notebook's keyboard towards the rear of the unit is precisely that: that Apple wasn't the very first to do it. If I have an agenda here then it's sharing that simple truth; no more, no less. However, if you or anyone else wants to carry on believing that not a single, solitary notebook before the Powerbook had that feature, well, I can't stop you, can I?
Isn't it time for you to disappear for a year again?
I think I know full well what year I took out of university. And I think I know full well what I did and didn't see whilst working that year for a computer retailer.
So, thanks for suggesting I've got some sort of senility and can't get my dates right. I really do appreciate it.
I'll say it one more time because you don't seem to be able to comprehend what I'm saying: there was at least one notebook out there before Apple's Powerbook launch that had the keyboard towards the rear of the unit, and I saw and sold the models myself.
That doesn't make the Powerbook any better or any worse than it was. It just means that it wasn't the very first notebook to have that particular design feature.
It's like the international equivalent of a kerfuffle. Now shut up and have a nice bit of cake.
I was selling these notebooks in the summer of 1991. Like I said, they were end-of-line stock then (ie, models that had been discontinued) so they obviously had been around for some time.
Either way, the fact that I was selling them at least three to six months ahead of the Powerbook's debut shows that Apple wasn't the first to market with notebooks that placed the keyboard towards the rear. Granted, Apple was probably the first to heavily promote this as a design feature and sell it to its users as such, but that doesn't mean they were first to market.
I can't remember the exact make, but I remember selling end-of-line PC notebooks that had keyboards placed at the hinge end in 1991. If they were end-of-line then, then they were probably around in 1990, perhaps 1989. That's years ahead of the Powerbook's first appearance.
In fact, the keyboard at the back was pretty much its unique selling point. Some people hated it, and some people loved it. I remember an author who bought two of the units because it would he thought it was perfect for him.
Granted, 99 percent of PC notebooks before the Powerbook had the keyboard as close to the front of the unit as possible but not all of them.
You still have to shop the guys who you bought your unlicensed copy of the OS from. And that includes signing a sworn statement to the fact.
So, in essence, Microsoft gives you a legitimate copy of the software (or at least a license for the software that you already have installed) and you give Microsoft a mid-sized piracy outfit on a silver platter.
Total cost to Microsoft for eliminating a pirate that might be costing them tens, if not hundreds, of thousands: next to nothing. The pirate outfit will probably end up forking over the lost income one way or another (in court or out of court, whichever Microsoft decides) and even it it doesn't (because it declares bankrupcy or something similar) it'll never be selling another pirated copy of Windows XP again, which means more legitimate Windows XP sales for Microsoft in the long run.
You have to admit, it's one helluva smart play by Microsoft. It gets to make more money and it gets to look like the good guy too.
Oh, and why not totally free? Well, apart from the legal stuff that you have to sign, there's a good chance that any outfit that's pirating Windows XP on a large scale barely has its head above water. The cost of getting caught by Microsoft, or even the cost of going legitimate from there onwards, is likely to drag such a company down like a stone. If that happens, your PC's warranty won't be worth the paper that it's written on.
Unless, of course, you were an IVF conception, in which case hand is entirely appropriate.
IM is like a phone conversation. You talk with someone, and you "know" exactly who that someone is.
IRC is more like a bar. You're talking to a bunch of people, and people come and go freely. Of course people can record what you're saying in a bar, just as they can record a log of what's said in an IRC channel, but would you go to a bar with the expectation of your every word being recorded?
And, if you were in a bar and there was a high probability that your every word was being monitored, wouldn't you choose your words more carefully? For example, wouldn't you think twice about talking about your new supply of weed, that movie or that album you downloaded last night or that time you ripped off a bunch of stuff from work?
Of course, you're right that you shouldn't have a complete expectation of privacy in just about everything you do online but there's a difference between having no expectation of privacy and your every conversation actually being monitored.
There's a name for the country where everything is recorded and nothing goes unseen. It's called Oceania.
So sorry. I'll use my thesaurus next time to find some appropriate synonyms instead, OK?