My friend Rolf does this for a living. What he takes depends on how long he's going to be gone and what he's going to be doing, but generally speaking he also doesn't take any of that crap, either. But after a few years in Asia, he found himself in a hotel in Bangkok eavesdropping on someone else's James Brown. Now Rolf very often takes his iPod. He has found it a great way to share culture with other people and avoid serious homesickness.
Actually, I was leaving to start a competing business, and they were going to fire me no matter what I did or said. And the company -- nor the profession -- would take me back. I was in a position where there was no bridge for me to burn. Or, better, they were burning my bridge, so I nuked it. (It was a real take-this-job-and-shove-it watershed moment.) No big deal.
But only a fucking idiot would accept an early resignation. You don't have to say what I said the way I said it to not accept an early resignation. You can just say, "No." Or, "No, I've still got good work in me." "No thank you." If they want to fire you, that's their business. Business. And part of the way a business works in society is that firing people leaves a paper trail but resignations do not. In Kansas, if you go to the unemployment office and say, "I don't have a job, whoa is me" they'll ask, "so you got fired?" and if you say "yes" they say "here are your benefits" and if you say no they say "fucking idiot. get a job."
But, by firing you a week early, they've fired you. In Kansas, the state in which I've been fired a couple of times, I can tell you that you should at least file a claim with the unemployment office so that their unemployment insurance rates will go up.
And as for the two weeks notice... it depends on the company you work for as to wether that was a good thing. As an employer, I certainly appreciate the notice and always have amicable relations with employees who are leaving. As an employee, I've never felt compelled to commit sabotage after giving my notice.
When I left my first real job, after six and a half years there I gave them four months notice. I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was going to do, but I knew I was leaving. So I told them. About two months short of that, I decided to start my own business in direct competition, so after sitting on that idea for a month, I told them. I was told that they were going to accept my resignation early. I told them, "Bullshit. You're firing me. If you think that I haven't had ample opportunity to mine whatever resources I'd want to steal, than you're an idiot. I've hated you for at least the last four years, and those conditions haven't changed. I'm leaving in one month unless you are firing me right now." And so I got fired. But it was stupid on their part, because even though they knew I was going they hadn't prepared for it and they nearly crippled themselves for a couple of weeks. Though, I suppose, there's no way to really prepare for a highly-trained employee to leave, and even if you have two weeks to hire someone the transition is never smooth.
As the first person to reply to what was clearly a bad pun for the sake of fun, let me point out that it is not racism. Racism would be something like, "Welsh people have no sense of humor -- probably because they are so pale." But, since they picked up the torch with that delightful new Doctor Who series, they must have some sort of sense of humor (if not melanin).
Artificially confusing "Wales" with "whales" is really, in fact, making fun of the English language. Homonyms are fun. And so are palindromes. ("The palindrome of 'Bolton' would be 'Notlob.' It don't work!")
I think plenty of us here in North America (regardless of how much edumatatiom we lack) would probably think that just because we're a large continent (actually, rather medium) doesn't mean we should be the subject of snide quips, either. This, however, is perfectly on par with the level of comments normally associated with Slashdot (which, if I was educated properly, is capitalized).
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to find my Stetson and my Smith and Wesson, step out into the hot Kansas sun, and rustle me up some cattle (left 'em right down there between the Boeing and Airbus factories).
No, no... it's not the whales. It's the people they eat. It's very hard to get reception inside a whale, and therefore very difficult to get help when a whale eats you. In old days, they had to light a fire and hope that a passing ship could see the smoke -- now we'll be able to send pictures of the ribcage and everything. Come on, man, RTFA.
In this same vein, I came across a torrent for a great book just a few days ago (perhaps on Boing Boing): 1960's "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" -- which is a phenomenal read. It's just what it sounds like: a children's chemistry text book. But it tells you how to do all the basic science that freaks out the government. It's an interesting slice of the era, too. It's all "yea, pesticides" and the nuclear future. It is, apparently, the book that inspired that kid in California to try to build his own breeder nuclear reactor.
It would seem that what the author really wants is for Apple to comment on silly people doing things with Apple computers, which is the job of a marketing person. The marketing person just goes and asks someone authoritative sounding to comment, wraps that in pretty and feeds it to the public. No big deal. And that's certainly not a reason to make a security czar.
The "art of photography" actually has a long history of manipulation. Photos of ghosts -- multiple exposures in which one of them had a person in white or bright clothes (or a sheet) -- were the first active deceptions. In some ways, it's far easier for a novice to pull this sort of trick than a digital overlap. With a ghost image, it's right there in the negative, after all.
But the "art" takes a whack from every significant step forward in technology. As operating systems got easier to use, noobs got more and more involved in computers. Auto-focus lenses have created a generation of people who can't focus a goddamn camera. Anti-lock breaks, power steering and stabilizing suspensions, it was recently revealed, have created a class of drivers who cannot drive safely.
And as someone who has been using Photoshop since 1.0 in professional settings, I really think that the really good photographers have been given a wonderful tool to do some really great things. And some average people can do some pretty good things. And total idiots are still total idiots.
I manipulate almost every photo I take in some way. Color correction, contrast, sharpness, spot corrections. Manual or digital.
But digitally I've repaired antique family photos so well that you couldn't tell it wasn't the original, except that the huge areas of missing paper and water spots were all gone. (In one, I accidentally erased the laundry hanging on the line in the background because it was being windblown and just looked like white smudges on an otherwise perfectly sharp picture. I only figured it out when I saw a clothes pin on the line toward the end where it wasn't moving much. Ooops.) My manipulation there was not to make these photos something that they were not, but rather reveal something that they were a long time ago.
But the real problem you face is that manipulation has always been with photography and will always be with photography. What you really want in your photo contests is a category for honest people and one for mischievous cheaters. Good luck with that.
Let the market decide the price? Well, Napster will let you have access to 1,000,000 for $10 per month. Now, it's not really far to say that $10/1,000,000 is the price, because you can't listen to that many songs in a month. An average month has roughly 44,000 minutes in it. Figure an average person will sleep through a third of that (eight of 24 hours), and (let's through the industry a bone and say that I'm a shallow teenager with no attention span) a poop -- sorry, pop -- song is 2.5 minutes long, that's about 5,849 songs that I can listen to for $10. That means each song is worth $0.0017 -- a tenth of one cent.
The free market rocks!
Wait... wait a second. He didn't say anything about being cheaper than 99 cents, did he? Crap.
You're oversimplifying my simple economics. If you look back, I say that it comes down to "what price will the market bear" because the supply is not an issue.
I was talking about how they justify the different pricing. And simply pointed out that supply and demand isn't their reason.
They also are not suggesting some sort of popularity model -- songs that sell X number of times per day cost $1.50, Y sales are $1, Z sales are $0.50 -- I could see that. That would be entirely popularity-based pricing, perhaps something like the stock exchange (roughly; don't think about it too much). That pricing might not be a bad idea, actually.
But it would freak out the record companies, because they don't want popular things to be more expensive. They want the things that they market heavily to be more expensive. That's the model that they are familiar with and one that they know works.
Apple, however, has completely changed everything about their economic model. Nothing makes sense to the recording industry anymore. There aren't any DJs to buy off with payolla, there aren't any record store chains to give under-the-table kickbacks to -- everything is above the board, and they don't even control the distribution channels.
The record companies want to guarantee hits. They want to control prices so that you are either buying (a) something that they've put a lot of money into at a high price or (b) something that has been sold at a high price for years and is nothing but pure profit. Hits or classics. Expensive or cheap.
But they don't want you buying independent music -- certainly not independent music that costs exactly the same as the stuff they've pumped millions into to convince you to buy.
Which begs to question why they are pumping all this money into promoting these artists if they can't guarantee a certain amount of profit.
But they're finding that when they put their heavily marketed tracks up on iTunes then they lose control. You've got classic music records from 1996 by Telrac Records right between "The Who Sings My Generation" and U2's "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb"; D.L. Menard's "Cajun Saturday Night" on Rounder Records in with Justin Timberlake and Travis. If Apple is selling that placement (and it wouldn't be too hard to convince me with the Timberlake appearance), it's certainly diluted.
There are five major labels -- Universal, EMI, BMG, Warner and Sony -- who own nearly everything.
The current new releases are Trick Pony (Curb->MCI->Universal); Craig David (Warner->Atlantic); The Flaming Lips (Warner Bros.); and Crazy Hits by Crazy Frog on Mach 1 Records Gmbh, which is owned by Ministry of Sound, which is definitely not one of the big five.
It's also at the bottom of today's top 10 album list. Coincidence? No.
Apple doesn't care because Apple just sells whatever people want for $1. But the record companies must be livid. Yes, they have 1-9, but they're used to having 1-100. And you can be damn sure they want more money for their efforts. (Though in the end, it will just do more for Crazy Frog.)
The real economics at work here is "Seller sets the price, buyer decides if it's too much." And we have two sellers who 1) disagree about how buyers will react and 2) have completely different motivations toward selling.
Apple thinks buyers will baulk on all sales if some are weirdly more expensive and want to keep everyone using iTunes to sell the most music to the most people. The record companies want more money for their product and don't care if they sell it through stores or iTunes or beam it directly into your head as you sleep (which they may already be doing) as long as they get the most money out of it.
So there you are.
Notice also that these models also never once involve the artists directly, even though one would hope that they did all the real work.
Actually, a fluctuating price (according to economists, of which I am not one) is an issue of supply and demand. The issue this raises is one sided: there is more demand so it should cost more, record companies say. Well, yes, the supply has stayed constant, but it's virtually infinite. Their production costs for digital media are the same if they sell one or one hundred million. Except for the bandwidth, which is Apple's concern anyway, right?
So while it's easy to see the record companies' points, they fall down under any scrutiny. It comes down to "what price will the market bear?"
And if they want more for the more popular songs, they will quickly find those songs less popular.
Which will be fine for the record companies, because they'd rather you buy out of their catalog so that they can tell new artists, "Sorry, kid, you don't sell," and screw them out of royalties, fame and etc. They may then go on to blame P2P for the failure of new artists.
You'll find Muddy Waters really cheap, though, because the record companies always owned all of his rights.
I run a small newspaper and get press releases and stories filed from people doing absolutely any file formate and styles that you can imagine. Quickly striping the text down is hugely important to me.
I've become a huge fan of Textutil, a command-line tool built by Apple that was included in Mac OS X 10.4. It can process Doc, RTF, text and anything that Apple's OS can read. And it can spit files back out in any format you want.
I wrote an AppleScript for BBEdit (you could just as easily do a Perl script) to strip out everything but the most generic tags -- italics and bolds -- so that I can use those files to my own ends. It rocks.
My favorite current theory is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Please note how it also explains global warming with the decline of the world's pirate population.
From the founder's open letter to the Kansas Board of Education, which is considering re-writing the state's science standards to have none: "I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence."
Well, regardless of whether it should have been able to block the website, in doing so it has drawn far more people to it than would have ever seen it before. Raise your hand if you would've cared about a union website five minutes ago. Stupid, stupid telco.
You forget, I'm my own boss. I'm already completely unemployable for that reason alone.
But surfing at work isn't necessarily a bad thing. I encourage my staff -- all part timers/freelancers/volunteers -- to come in and use the office computers for whatever they want whenever they want. The end result is that they have a warm fuzzy about being in the office, and I can occasionally slip in little pieces of work for them "if they've got a moment."
Granted, it's not a traditional work environment where I'm paying people to sit there by the hour.
My supervisor at my old job said, "You work on a different RPM than everyone else." And that was true. I could get done in an hour what others would spend four hours on, and usually I would do it with better quality. When I did too much work, it didn't get me any rewards from the top but certainly built up resentment with my coworkers and made office politics difficult. In the end, it was better for the moral of my coworkers if I spent a lot of time online -- usually engaged in semi-work related reading, such as how to script something to end repetitive tasks, even though I wasn't IT and any such work I did would have to go through a lot of channels to be used.
Actually, I've been reading work-related and personal email for two hours this morning. I'm still in my underwear at home and won't go into work for another two hours. Of course, I'm my own boss and there's little line for me.
But when I had a corporate job, it was mostly hurry up and wait. It was second shift, and I checked my email from home every day, often hours and hours before and after I was in the office. But when I was in the office, I'd sometimes have five hours of down time a day. Surfed a lot, and I didn't mind one bit keeping on top of things from home. Often I'd come to work with a good sense of the major events of the day and spent less time catching up and more time... surfing.;)
For me, it's not about a shortage of meat, but rather the environmental impact of mass producing meat. I live in Kansas. I often ask, "Yes, meat's fine and all, but could you make it without dumping tons of poop in the water?"
I've been a vegetarian for six years not because I care about the animals and not because I think it's more healthy not to eat it and not because I don't like meat. I've done it because it's incredibly hard on the environment, and I just choose not to participate in that.
It would be interesting to know the full environmental impact of scaling this up. Questions of taste and quality can certainly be answered. One can only assume that this is better on the environment. But it may not be. It just depends on what goes in and what comes out -- besides pseudo meat.
Just like any other day...
on
USB Fundue Set
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· Score: 1
Gotta love the dupes for the April Fools jokes. Like there aren't enough today anyway. Oh, look above as I type this... a Fundue ad from ThinkGeek...
How can he suggest that a bitmap image is too complicated but that having the aliens compile an AI we send them is easy cheesy? Why would we send them what would have to be a supermassive program full of mostly encrypted data and assume that they would figure out how to run it but not figure out how to crack the encryption. It's like saying, "Instead of sending them a photo of a submarine, let's send them the blueprints and the parts (but with some parts of the blueprints blacked out and those parts in a sealed black box)." It just doesn't make sense.
Actually, 15% off to get to $685 means that the starting point was about $805. ($805 * 15% = $120.75. $805-$120.75 = $684.25)
And there's still the DVD writer issue. And that XP Home is not even close to as good as OS X.
So, is the machine that's more expensive with weaker parts a better value? No, I don't think it is.
X11 Will Always Look like Other Platforms: Many people deploying OpenOffice.org count the identical look and feel on all supported platforms as a major benefit. It helps them reduce training and, in many cases, implement a single multi-platform solution using OpenOffice.org as middleware (such as extendedPDF). Any native work that changes the interface would remove this as a critical selling point for OpenOffice.org for these users.
Ask Microsoft how well Word would be accepted if it didn't follow the basic UI outlines of the Mac OS. There used to be a time when Word (and all Microsoft products) made up their own key combos, their own look and feel and were generally willy nilly -- a lot like many X11 offerings now. Word was the same on Windows (albeit 3.11) and Mac (6 or 7) but it didn't play well with the other programs.
As a tech support, do you think you'd get more questions from people about why copy and paste doesn't use the same buttons on the Mac/PC/Linux versions or do you think users are more likely to not understand this one program that doesn't act anything like the other Mac programs? How many users are going to hop from machine to machine versus program to program? And then consider that it is just a word processor. Screw it. I wouldn't want those support calls.
This has been the downfall of many otherwise fine pieces of software on the Mac OS. It's users expect consistancy.
Slashdot Mirror
My friend Rolf does this for a living. What he takes depends on how long he's going to be gone and what he's going to be doing, but generally speaking he also doesn't take any of that crap, either. But after a few years in Asia, he found himself in a hotel in Bangkok eavesdropping on someone else's James Brown. Now Rolf very often takes his iPod. He has found it a great way to share culture with other people and avoid serious homesickness.
Actually, I was leaving to start a competing business, and they were going to fire me no matter what I did or said. And the company -- nor the profession -- would take me back. I was in a position where there was no bridge for me to burn. Or, better, they were burning my bridge, so I nuked it. (It was a real take-this-job-and-shove-it watershed moment.) No big deal. But only a fucking idiot would accept an early resignation. You don't have to say what I said the way I said it to not accept an early resignation. You can just say, "No." Or, "No, I've still got good work in me." "No thank you." If they want to fire you, that's their business. Business. And part of the way a business works in society is that firing people leaves a paper trail but resignations do not. In Kansas, if you go to the unemployment office and say, "I don't have a job, whoa is me" they'll ask, "so you got fired?" and if you say "yes" they say "here are your benefits" and if you say no they say "fucking idiot. get a job."
IANAL either, but this guy is (in Texas): http://www.brownemploymentlaw.com/non_competition. shtml
But, by firing you a week early, they've fired you. In Kansas, the state in which I've been fired a couple of times, I can tell you that you should at least file a claim with the unemployment office so that their unemployment insurance rates will go up.
And as for the two weeks notice ... it depends on the company you work for as to wether that was a good thing. As an employer, I certainly appreciate the notice and always have amicable relations with employees who are leaving. As an employee, I've never felt compelled to commit sabotage after giving my notice.
When I left my first real job, after six and a half years there I gave them four months notice. I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was going to do, but I knew I was leaving. So I told them. About two months short of that, I decided to start my own business in direct competition, so after sitting on that idea for a month, I told them. I was told that they were going to accept my resignation early. I told them, "Bullshit. You're firing me. If you think that I haven't had ample opportunity to mine whatever resources I'd want to steal, than you're an idiot. I've hated you for at least the last four years, and those conditions haven't changed. I'm leaving in one month unless you are firing me right now." And so I got fired. But it was stupid on their part, because even though they knew I was going they hadn't prepared for it and they nearly crippled themselves for a couple of weeks. Though, I suppose, there's no way to really prepare for a highly-trained employee to leave, and even if you have two weeks to hire someone the transition is never smooth.
As the first person to reply to what was clearly a bad pun for the sake of fun, let me point out that it is not racism. Racism would be something like, "Welsh people have no sense of humor -- probably because they are so pale." But, since they picked up the torch with that delightful new Doctor Who series, they must have some sort of sense of humor (if not melanin). Artificially confusing "Wales" with "whales" is really, in fact, making fun of the English language. Homonyms are fun. And so are palindromes. ("The palindrome of 'Bolton' would be 'Notlob.' It don't work!") I think plenty of us here in North America (regardless of how much edumatatiom we lack) would probably think that just because we're a large continent (actually, rather medium) doesn't mean we should be the subject of snide quips, either. This, however, is perfectly on par with the level of comments normally associated with Slashdot (which, if I was educated properly, is capitalized). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to find my Stetson and my Smith and Wesson, step out into the hot Kansas sun, and rustle me up some cattle (left 'em right down there between the Boeing and Airbus factories).
No, no ... it's not the whales. It's the people they eat. It's very hard to get reception inside a whale, and therefore very difficult to get help when a whale eats you. In old days, they had to light a fire and hope that a passing ship could see the smoke -- now we'll be able to send pictures of the ribcage and everything. Come on, man, RTFA.
And let me just correct myself: that kid was just outside of Detroit. I'm sure he'll be set in L.A. for the movie version, though. ;)
In this same vein, I came across a torrent for a great book just a few days ago (perhaps on Boing Boing): 1960's "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" -- which is a phenomenal read. It's just what it sounds like: a children's chemistry text book. But it tells you how to do all the basic science that freaks out the government. It's an interesting slice of the era, too. It's all "yea, pesticides" and the nuclear future. It is, apparently, the book that inspired that kid in California to try to build his own breeder nuclear reactor.
It would seem that what the author really wants is for Apple to comment on silly people doing things with Apple computers, which is the job of a marketing person. The marketing person just goes and asks someone authoritative sounding to comment, wraps that in pretty and feeds it to the public. No big deal. And that's certainly not a reason to make a security czar.
The "art of photography" actually has a long history of manipulation. Photos of ghosts -- multiple exposures in which one of them had a person in white or bright clothes (or a sheet) -- were the first active deceptions. In some ways, it's far easier for a novice to pull this sort of trick than a digital overlap. With a ghost image, it's right there in the negative, after all.
But the "art" takes a whack from every significant step forward in technology. As operating systems got easier to use, noobs got more and more involved in computers. Auto-focus lenses have created a generation of people who can't focus a goddamn camera. Anti-lock breaks, power steering and stabilizing suspensions, it was recently revealed, have created a class of drivers who cannot drive safely.
And as someone who has been using Photoshop since 1.0 in professional settings, I really think that the really good photographers have been given a wonderful tool to do some really great things. And some average people can do some pretty good things. And total idiots are still total idiots.
I manipulate almost every photo I take in some way. Color correction, contrast, sharpness, spot corrections. Manual or digital.
But digitally I've repaired antique family photos so well that you couldn't tell it wasn't the original, except that the huge areas of missing paper and water spots were all gone. (In one, I accidentally erased the laundry hanging on the line in the background because it was being windblown and just looked like white smudges on an otherwise perfectly sharp picture. I only figured it out when I saw a clothes pin on the line toward the end where it wasn't moving much. Ooops.) My manipulation there was not to make these photos something that they were not, but rather reveal something that they were a long time ago.
But the real problem you face is that manipulation has always been with photography and will always be with photography. What you really want in your photo contests is a category for honest people and one for mischievous cheaters. Good luck with that.
I don't know. Does the book repeat bits on every other page?
Let the market decide the price? Well, Napster will let you have access to 1,000,000 for $10 per month. Now, it's not really far to say that $10/1,000,000 is the price, because you can't listen to that many songs in a month. An average month has roughly 44,000 minutes in it. Figure an average person will sleep through a third of that (eight of 24 hours), and (let's through the industry a bone and say that I'm a shallow teenager with no attention span) a poop -- sorry, pop -- song is 2.5 minutes long, that's about 5,849 songs that I can listen to for $10. That means each song is worth $0.0017 -- a tenth of one cent.
The free market rocks!
Wait... wait a second. He didn't say anything about being cheaper than 99 cents, did he? Crap.
You're oversimplifying my simple economics. If you look back, I say that it comes down to "what price will the market bear" because the supply is not an issue.
I was talking about how they justify the different pricing. And simply pointed out that supply and demand isn't their reason.
They also are not suggesting some sort of popularity model -- songs that sell X number of times per day cost $1.50, Y sales are $1, Z sales are $0.50 -- I could see that. That would be entirely popularity-based pricing, perhaps something like the stock exchange (roughly; don't think about it too much). That pricing might not be a bad idea, actually.
But it would freak out the record companies, because they don't want popular things to be more expensive. They want the things that they market heavily to be more expensive. That's the model that they are familiar with and one that they know works.
Apple, however, has completely changed everything about their economic model. Nothing makes sense to the recording industry anymore. There aren't any DJs to buy off with payolla, there aren't any record store chains to give under-the-table kickbacks to -- everything is above the board, and they don't even control the distribution channels.
The record companies want to guarantee hits. They want to control prices so that you are either buying (a) something that they've put a lot of money into at a high price or (b) something that has been sold at a high price for years and is nothing but pure profit. Hits or classics. Expensive or cheap.
But they don't want you buying independent music -- certainly not independent music that costs exactly the same as the stuff they've pumped millions into to convince you to buy.
Which begs to question why they are pumping all this money into promoting these artists if they can't guarantee a certain amount of profit.
But they're finding that when they put their heavily marketed tracks up on iTunes then they lose control. You've got classic music records from 1996 by Telrac Records right between "The Who Sings My Generation" and U2's "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb"; D.L. Menard's "Cajun Saturday Night" on Rounder Records in with Justin Timberlake and Travis. If Apple is selling that placement (and it wouldn't be too hard to convince me with the Timberlake appearance), it's certainly diluted.
There are five major labels -- Universal, EMI, BMG, Warner and Sony -- who own nearly everything.
The current new releases are Trick Pony (Curb->MCI->Universal); Craig David (Warner->Atlantic); The Flaming Lips (Warner Bros.); and Crazy Hits by Crazy Frog on Mach 1 Records Gmbh, which is owned by Ministry of Sound, which is definitely not one of the big five.
It's also at the bottom of today's top 10 album list. Coincidence? No.
Apple doesn't care because Apple just sells whatever people want for $1. But the record companies must be livid. Yes, they have 1-9, but they're used to having 1-100. And you can be damn sure they want more money for their efforts. (Though in the end, it will just do more for Crazy Frog.)
The real economics at work here is "Seller sets the price, buyer decides if it's too much." And we have two sellers who 1) disagree about how buyers will react and 2) have completely different motivations toward selling.
Apple thinks buyers will baulk on all sales if some are weirdly more expensive and want to keep everyone using iTunes to sell the most music to the most people. The record companies want more money for their product and don't care if they sell it through stores or iTunes or beam it directly into your head as you sleep (which they may already be doing) as long as they get the most money out of it.
So there you are.
Notice also that these models also never once involve the artists directly, even though one would hope that they did all the real work.
Actually, a fluctuating price (according to economists, of which I am not one) is an issue of supply and demand. The issue this raises is one sided: there is more demand so it should cost more, record companies say. Well, yes, the supply has stayed constant, but it's virtually infinite. Their production costs for digital media are the same if they sell one or one hundred million. Except for the bandwidth, which is Apple's concern anyway, right?
So while it's easy to see the record companies' points, they fall down under any scrutiny. It comes down to "what price will the market bear?"
And if they want more for the more popular songs, they will quickly find those songs less popular.
Which will be fine for the record companies, because they'd rather you buy out of their catalog so that they can tell new artists, "Sorry, kid, you don't sell," and screw them out of royalties, fame and etc. They may then go on to blame P2P for the failure of new artists.
You'll find Muddy Waters really cheap, though, because the record companies always owned all of his rights.
I run a small newspaper and get press releases and stories filed from people doing absolutely any file formate and styles that you can imagine. Quickly striping the text down is hugely important to me.
I've become a huge fan of Textutil, a command-line tool built by Apple that was included in Mac OS X 10.4. It can process Doc, RTF, text and anything that Apple's OS can read. And it can spit files back out in any format you want.
I wrote an AppleScript for BBEdit (you could just as easily do a Perl script) to strip out everything but the most generic tags -- italics and bolds -- so that I can use those files to my own ends. It rocks.
In Kansas, we intelligently design all the time.
My favorite current theory is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Please note how it also explains global warming with the decline of the world's pirate population.
From the founder's open letter to the Kansas Board of Education, which is considering re-writing the state's science standards to have none: "I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence."
Well, regardless of whether it should have been able to block the website, in doing so it has drawn far more people to it than would have ever seen it before. Raise your hand if you would've cared about a union website five minutes ago. Stupid, stupid telco.
You forget, I'm my own boss. I'm already completely unemployable for that reason alone.
But surfing at work isn't necessarily a bad thing. I encourage my staff -- all part timers/freelancers/volunteers -- to come in and use the office computers for whatever they want whenever they want. The end result is that they have a warm fuzzy about being in the office, and I can occasionally slip in little pieces of work for them "if they've got a moment."
Granted, it's not a traditional work environment where I'm paying people to sit there by the hour.
My supervisor at my old job said, "You work on a different RPM than everyone else." And that was true. I could get done in an hour what others would spend four hours on, and usually I would do it with better quality. When I did too much work, it didn't get me any rewards from the top but certainly built up resentment with my coworkers and made office politics difficult. In the end, it was better for the moral of my coworkers if I spent a lot of time online -- usually engaged in semi-work related reading, such as how to script something to end repetitive tasks, even though I wasn't IT and any such work I did would have to go through a lot of channels to be used.
Actually, I've been reading work-related and personal email for two hours this morning. I'm still in my underwear at home and won't go into work for another two hours. Of course, I'm my own boss and there's little line for me. But when I had a corporate job, it was mostly hurry up and wait. It was second shift, and I checked my email from home every day, often hours and hours before and after I was in the office. But when I was in the office, I'd sometimes have five hours of down time a day. Surfed a lot, and I didn't mind one bit keeping on top of things from home. Often I'd come to work with a good sense of the major events of the day and spent less time catching up and more time... surfing. ;)
For me, it's not about a shortage of meat, but rather the environmental impact of mass producing meat. I live in Kansas. I often ask, "Yes, meat's fine and all, but could you make it without dumping tons of poop in the water?"
I've been a vegetarian for six years not because I care about the animals and not because I think it's more healthy not to eat it and not because I don't like meat. I've done it because it's incredibly hard on the environment, and I just choose not to participate in that.
It would be interesting to know the full environmental impact of scaling this up. Questions of taste and quality can certainly be answered. One can only assume that this is better on the environment. But it may not be. It just depends on what goes in and what comes out -- besides pseudo meat.
Gotta love the dupes for the April Fools jokes. Like there aren't enough today anyway. Oh, look above as I type this ... a Fundue ad from ThinkGeek...
How can he suggest that a bitmap image is too complicated but that having the aliens compile an AI we send them is easy cheesy? Why would we send them what would have to be a supermassive program full of mostly encrypted data and assume that they would figure out how to run it but not figure out how to crack the encryption. It's like saying, "Instead of sending them a photo of a submarine, let's send them the blueprints and the parts (but with some parts of the blueprints blacked out and those parts in a sealed black box)." It just doesn't make sense.
In Soviet Russia, ID produces YOU!
Actually, 15% off to get to $685 means that the starting point was about $805. ($805 * 15% = $120.75. $805-$120.75 = $684.25) And there's still the DVD writer issue. And that XP Home is not even close to as good as OS X. So, is the machine that's more expensive with weaker parts a better value? No, I don't think it is.
Ask Microsoft how well Word would be accepted if it didn't follow the basic UI outlines of the Mac OS. There used to be a time when Word (and all Microsoft products) made up their own key combos, their own look and feel and were generally willy nilly -- a lot like many X11 offerings now. Word was the same on Windows (albeit 3.11) and Mac (6 or 7) but it didn't play well with the other programs.
As a tech support, do you think you'd get more questions from people about why copy and paste doesn't use the same buttons on the Mac/PC/Linux versions or do you think users are more likely to not understand this one program that doesn't act anything like the other Mac programs? How many users are going to hop from machine to machine versus program to program? And then consider that it is just a word processor. Screw it. I wouldn't want those support calls.
This has been the downfall of many otherwise fine pieces of software on the Mac OS. It's users expect consistancy.
At least Spider-Man won't have anything to worry about.