The only thing I buy from the iTunes Music Store are "iTunes Plus" tracks; they've got a higher bitrate, and no DRM at all.
If something I want isn't available DRM-free, I'll go buy a CD or something instead and rip it myself. Easy.
I've spent a lot more money at eMusic and Magnatune (my personal favourite; I download WAV files of the whole CD and encode them however I want) than at iTMS.
(Note: I'm not associated with any of these services, other than as a customer.)
They're doing it wrong then; aren't they still selling 360s without hard drives? Downloading movies onto Flash memory cards doesn't seem like a great business model.
Yeah, I know you can buy (overpriced) 360 hard drives to plug in, but still. If you want the box to be some sort of "home media hub" they should all have hard drives.
Can you plug USB mass storage devices into the 360 and have them "just work" as storage? I haven't tried plugging a USB hard drive into my Wii yet; you can plug Flash cards in though for expanded storage (currently you can't run games/"Channels" from it, but they may add that capability... I want to be able to buy Guitar Hero 3 tracks and store them there).
IMHO it's much more important to start punching the people who buy things from spam email. Remember, folks, if it wasn't profitable, they wouldn't do it.
Shouldn't the MPAA and RIAA (and BSA, etc.) flip right out over this? Clearly these are illegal digital copies that the customs agents could be viewing/listening to/using/whatever without valid licenses.
Just another reason for me not to travel to the US. If I need a passport, have to pass through pointless and invasive searchings, etc. I'm going to travel somewhere interesting.
Isn't the US tourism industry at all concerned by this crap?
For fun, hit up flickr and search for the keyword "private" or similar. It seems that some people think adding a "private" keyword will somehow restrict access to their naughty pictures.
Will you buy MP3s, unrestricted, for a reasonable price?
Naturally; I've been doing it for years from the likes of Magnatune and eMusic.
There's one big problem though... Amazon.com won't let me, and Amazon.ca doesn't have any. 100% idiotic, especially since I can buy CDs from Amazon.com no problem and rip them myself.
I prefer buying CDs (album art, and a physical backup for when my hard drive kills itself), but some things are out of print and/or insanely hard to find. And the major labels don't generally release anything worth buying... the last, oh, dozen CDs I've bought have been from people who sell their own discs over the Internet (Dr. Steel, Richard Cheese, Daikaiju, etc.).
I've also bought MP3s online from artists I don't normally listen to (like Radiohead's latest) simply because they're doing it right and I want to support that. I didn't like the Radiohead album (I've never listened to them), but I don't begrudge them the 5-6 pounds I paid for it.
Sucks to reply to myself, but I just checked. Rogers is "up to" 8Mbit/800kbit now, while Bell is 7Mbit/? now. I'll have to contact my ISP to see if Bell's allowed any of the third parties selling DSL to take advantage of this extra 2MBit of bandwidth.
Canada's really falling behind on high-speed broadband all of a sudden. Rogers (the cable monopoly) is still only offering 6Mbit service (under 1Mbit up), and Bell (the phone monopoly) is only up to 5Mbit (under 1Mbit up).
We've bricked two 360s at work in less than 12 months; they get played five or less hours per week. The thing isn't stored in a hot location with no air flow, either.
*shrug* I like my console hardware foolproof, and I don't think they've got the quality up there yet.
This was the year that finally made me give up on PC gaming. I'm so very sick of buggy releases (no, you shouldn't have a patch available before the game is released, EVER), buggy drivers (ATI's been going down-hill since AMD took over, unfortunately), putting up with Windows Update, etc. I'm going to finish the games I've already got there, but I'm not buying any more, period.
My DS, Wii, and PS2 will provide plenty of entertainment, thanks.
I'm going to stay away from the 360 (crap hardware quality and game patches... it really does bring the PC gaming experience to consoles) and PS3 (game patches and high price tag).
This is actually the #2 reason why I won't buy a 360 (#1 is hardware quality, obviously). I'm not dropping $400 or whatever on hardware and then another $50+/year to be able to access all of the advertised features. Sure it's $5/month or whatever, but that's on top of my DSL line and whatnot. I feel like a 360 would be "useless" (or maybe just "less fun") without the Live membership, and I hate feeling like I'm being forced to pay for a service.
#3 reason is probably that I already have way too many games (PS1, PS2, GameCube, Wii, PC, DS) that I need to finish. Stupid lack of free time.
I witnessed the horrors of a point-of-sale system "written" in Excel just last weekend. When the user clicked on products, it would scroll the spreadsheet around to the next step in the purchase process.
I just knew there was an Access back-end, too, I could sense its evil lurking there. And probably no regular backups.
Bell's not faring too well at doing that with DSL service; I switched (due to crappy reliability) from Rogers cable to DSL with TekSavvy.com and it's a bit over $20/month cheaper than Bell Sympatico High-Speed for exactly the same service.
Given how the Zunes seem to have feature sets trailing the iPod feature sets by a year or more, the Zune phone would be GSM-only (and probably require some sort of additional Live! subscription) and released some time next year.
BSD and X11 aren't exactly "tightly closed black boxes". I've heard of at least one massive nerd tweaking his Mac to boot straight into an X11 desktop instead of the Mac desktop.
OS X remains the only usable (out of the box, by your grandma) UNIX system out there, and the only one (IMHO) with a decent UI.
I've had it with gaming on the PC. That was the last thing keeping me from replacing my XP box (which I built myself; the second machine I've built from scratch) with a Mac of some sort... I use my iBook for literally everything else when I'm not at work, even though it's ridiculously slow.
PC gaming has completed its downward spiral into ridiculous DRM and copy protection, endless patching, and swapping drivers in and out for specific games. Absolutely ridiculous.
I've got piles of PS2, Wii/GameCube, and DS games to amuse me, and I'll keep my XP box until I'm done playing the games I already own, but I'm not buying another PC game, period. I've had it with all the bullshit.
Not to mention the standard North American practise of providing terrible up-stream speeds on cable and DSL lines. It'd take ages to upload 5GB (or whatever GMail's current limit is) of data.
I'm too impatient to back up 5GB of data over my 100Mbit LAN, I'm not doing it at "up to" 800kbits/sec.
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The only thing I buy from the iTunes Music Store are "iTunes Plus" tracks; they've got a higher bitrate, and no DRM at all.
If something I want isn't available DRM-free, I'll go buy a CD or something instead and rip it myself. Easy.
I've spent a lot more money at eMusic and Magnatune (my personal favourite; I download WAV files of the whole CD and encode them however I want) than at iTMS.
(Note: I'm not associated with any of these services, other than as a customer.)
They're doing it wrong then; aren't they still selling 360s without hard drives? Downloading movies onto Flash memory cards doesn't seem like a great business model.
Yeah, I know you can buy (overpriced) 360 hard drives to plug in, but still. If you want the box to be some sort of "home media hub" they should all have hard drives.
Can you plug USB mass storage devices into the 360 and have them "just work" as storage? I haven't tried plugging a USB hard drive into my Wii yet; you can plug Flash cards in though for expanded storage (currently you can't run games/"Channels" from it, but they may add that capability... I want to be able to buy Guitar Hero 3 tracks and store them there).
IMHO it's much more important to start punching the people who buy things from spam email. Remember, folks, if it wasn't profitable, they wouldn't do it.
If they're RIAA "musicians" it wouldn't affect their future albums.
Shouldn't the MPAA and RIAA (and BSA, etc.) flip right out over this? Clearly these are illegal digital copies that the customs agents could be viewing/listening to/using/whatever without valid licenses.
Just another reason for me not to travel to the US. If I need a passport, have to pass through pointless and invasive searchings, etc. I'm going to travel somewhere interesting.
Isn't the US tourism industry at all concerned by this crap?
My kid (he's seven) is only online when we let him, using my iBook. In the living room.
He's not going to have a computer in his room until he's old enough to move out. We will see what he's doing.
Parenting involves actually paying attention to your children, not dumping them as soon as possible.
This is the nice thing about new Windows releases; it makes the previous version seem insanely fast.
For fun, hit up flickr and search for the keyword "private" or similar. It seems that some people think adding a "private" keyword will somehow restrict access to their naughty pictures.
Naturally; I've been doing it for years from the likes of Magnatune and eMusic.
There's one big problem though... Amazon.com won't let me, and Amazon.ca doesn't have any. 100% idiotic, especially since I can buy CDs from Amazon.com no problem and rip them myself.
I prefer buying CDs (album art, and a physical backup for when my hard drive kills itself), but some things are out of print and/or insanely hard to find. And the major labels don't generally release anything worth buying... the last, oh, dozen CDs I've bought have been from people who sell their own discs over the Internet (Dr. Steel, Richard Cheese, Daikaiju, etc.).
I've also bought MP3s online from artists I don't normally listen to (like Radiohead's latest) simply because they're doing it right and I want to support that. I didn't like the Radiohead album (I've never listened to them), but I don't begrudge them the 5-6 pounds I paid for it.
Sucks to reply to myself, but I just checked. Rogers is "up to" 8Mbit/800kbit now, while Bell is 7Mbit/? now. I'll have to contact my ISP to see if Bell's allowed any of the third parties selling DSL to take advantage of this extra 2MBit of bandwidth.
Canada's really falling behind on high-speed broadband all of a sudden. Rogers (the cable monopoly) is still only offering 6Mbit service (under 1Mbit up), and Bell (the phone monopoly) is only up to 5Mbit (under 1Mbit up).
Sucktastic.
Buy Canadian diamonds. Not only are the mines not owned by DeBoers, but we've got labour laws!
So, which existing closed-source game are they going to duplicate in painstaking detail?
Games should start with a design document, not a list of technologies they plan to use.
Stop being stupid.
Thanks.
We've bricked two 360s at work in less than 12 months; they get played five or less hours per week. The thing isn't stored in a hot location with no air flow, either.
*shrug* I like my console hardware foolproof, and I don't think they've got the quality up there yet.
This was the year that finally made me give up on PC gaming. I'm so very sick of buggy releases (no, you shouldn't have a patch available before the game is released, EVER), buggy drivers (ATI's been going down-hill since AMD took over, unfortunately), putting up with Windows Update, etc. I'm going to finish the games I've already got there, but I'm not buying any more, period.
My DS, Wii, and PS2 will provide plenty of entertainment, thanks.
I'm going to stay away from the 360 (crap hardware quality and game patches... it really does bring the PC gaming experience to consoles) and PS3 (game patches and high price tag).
Firefox 3 passes it, coming soon...
I'd be running it now on XP, but I "need" a bunch of add-ons that haven't been updated yet.
Safari 3.0.4 for XP almost gets it right (the "eyes" are screwed up).
This is actually the #2 reason why I won't buy a 360 (#1 is hardware quality, obviously). I'm not dropping $400 or whatever on hardware and then another $50+/year to be able to access all of the advertised features. Sure it's $5/month or whatever, but that's on top of my DSL line and whatnot. I feel like a 360 would be "useless" (or maybe just "less fun") without the Live membership, and I hate feeling like I'm being forced to pay for a service.
#3 reason is probably that I already have way too many games (PS1, PS2, GameCube, Wii, PC, DS) that I need to finish. Stupid lack of free time.
I witnessed the horrors of a point-of-sale system "written" in Excel just last weekend. When the user clicked on products, it would scroll the spreadsheet around to the next step in the purchase process.
I just knew there was an Access back-end, too, I could sense its evil lurking there. And probably no regular backups.
Bell's not faring too well at doing that with DSL service; I switched (due to crappy reliability) from Rogers cable to DSL with TekSavvy.com and it's a bit over $20/month cheaper than Bell Sympatico High-Speed for exactly the same service.
Given how the Zunes seem to have feature sets trailing the iPod feature sets by a year or more, the Zune phone would be GSM-only (and probably require some sort of additional Live! subscription) and released some time next year.
LOL, flamebait.
BSD and X11 aren't exactly "tightly closed black boxes". I've heard of at least one massive nerd tweaking his Mac to boot straight into an X11 desktop instead of the Mac desktop.
OS X remains the only usable (out of the box, by your grandma) UNIX system out there, and the only one (IMHO) with a decent UI.
I've had it with gaming on the PC. That was the last thing keeping me from replacing my XP box (which I built myself; the second machine I've built from scratch) with a Mac of some sort... I use my iBook for literally everything else when I'm not at work, even though it's ridiculously slow.
PC gaming has completed its downward spiral into ridiculous DRM and copy protection, endless patching, and swapping drivers in and out for specific games. Absolutely ridiculous.
I've got piles of PS2, Wii/GameCube, and DS games to amuse me, and I'll keep my XP box until I'm done playing the games I already own, but I'm not buying another PC game, period. I've had it with all the bullshit.
I totally missed your point (or joke?)... Mac Mini starts at $600 US.
Of course, they're still using that craptastic Intel integrated video (even the MacBooks have better integrated video now), but still...
Not to mention the standard North American practise of providing terrible up-stream speeds on cable and DSL lines. It'd take ages to upload 5GB (or whatever GMail's current limit is) of data.
I'm too impatient to back up 5GB of data over my 100Mbit LAN, I'm not doing it at "up to" 800kbits/sec.