The person who said that, Albhy Galuten, is the Vice President of New Media for Universal Records. This should be someone who's particularly familiar with computer's, as "new media" tends to be a euphamism for computers as far as I've seen.
If the music industry was seriously willing to bring the prices of their albums down I think people would be more willing to buy them (and more of them). The biggest advantage I see in downloaded music is the sheer variety that one can get. Many people simply can't afford to spend that much money on music, and the ability to have a wide selection available all the time is hugely appealing.
Just to further point out the absurdity of the statement: someone estimated that you could get about 720 GB of storage for $1,000 (or less of higher quality) and that 720GB equates to about 15,000 albums (which is an overshot, at least at 192kbit). Let's just say each CD you buy costs only $9.99 - that's still about $140,000 to buy all the music that your $1,000 of storage is holding. If you're more realistic and say $17 a shot, that's over a quarter-million dollars.
Most analysts are predicting that current price increases are reaching a plateau.... now is not necessarily the time to buy (unless you buy like today), as price increases are already happening througout the industry, as can be seen in this article.
The flat panels price increase is due almost entirely to a shortage of one of the key ingredients used in manufacture, which is supposedly only temporary.
In Ashland, Oregon the city is running a broadband access network (with cable modems) and faster fiber optic connections for those who want to pay up.
We certainly didn't mind, as it spurred Charter (cable company) to speed up their service deployment so we actually have competition for cable service - what an interesting concept.
On the other hand, the City of Ashland also owns the water and electric utilities... and has put the "telecommunications" (the internet & tv business) as a part of the electric utility... check out the Ashland Fiber Network, and the City of Ashland.
Yah, plus it would seem a bit contradictory for the complaintants to argue in court that they're not entitled to keep the product that was sent to them...
There's an article on msnbc (I only found it through Google), about this too... We learn that they're suing to, among other things, keep the products that were sent to them at AOL's expense.
I'd really like to be able to look through the rejected bin (especially if it were to be ranked, like over on the other sid^Hte), and this doesn't seem like a huge addition to the code base - it appears that slash already saves all of the postings, including rejected ones, and maintaining this could only cost a little more traffic (once it's working)...
I think when they're talking about features that cost more to maintain than you can sell them for, they're talking about features that have real on-going costs...like sending Geraldo Riviera to the middle east...
I always thought that the whole point of a laser was that it was generating a perfect coherent waveform, so is this new laser generating light at a large number of wavelengths in the infrared, or is it an infinite number of wavelengths in the range specified?
Also, it seems like it would take a lot more development to extend this wideband laser work for something more consumer-oriented, like room lighting, as the light would need to be relatively omni-directional, which it doesn't seem like lasers are very good at producing now.
So how do I get onto this thing? It seems like it would be hard to get started on it since it's constantly moving - and even harder to get off of it.
It would also get pretty boring to ski around in a circle for hours on end... no new scenery. If they put up a big contiguous screen along the edges, and maybe some of the sky too, to prevent you from getting quite so dizzy and provide some additional entertainment. Then again you could also just go VR skiing and never have to go outside or worry about all these physical limitations.
The article had a quote from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit that said they thought supporting open standards, like "MP3 or JPG," would solve a lot of problems over time...
Sounds pretty contradictory to me - it's not as if mp3 and jpg haven't been supported for quite some time now, and if open standards will solve so many problems, then why develop a proprietary media format with digital rights management et. all?
Looks like Yahoo! had some creative math with their storage space estimates for possible charge levels... According to the screen shottwo links off the site, you can get 25 10 page PowerPoint documents in 10MB, but simply doubling the space to 20MB will let you store about three times the number of 10 page PowerPoint documents, 75...;)
With their general counsel, Dan Johnston, as Be's new president and nothing much left of a real company, it sounds like Be is now in the legal business. It might not be a bad way for them to go out, as long as they (or their law firm) has the resources to get into a long legal battle with ms.
But hey, it couldn't have been too bad of a move for the company, they're stock shot up 20% today (to 0.12/share... but still;).
A little more interesting is that TI is working with Nokia to counter Microsoft's entry into the cell phone market. They're working on a standard that will be available to their competitors. Article here. Microsoft is working with TI and Intel too (that article is named Microsoft brings wireless to Windows, I think it should be more like Microsoft tries to toss Windows on Wireless... Who do you want to hang up on today?)
Too bad nobody seems to be taking any open source based options for cell phones...
Slashdot Mirror
It's only ~9% off the individual prices. You would think that you would get a better price for buying so much at the same time...
The Complete Collection $2499.99
Total Individual Price: $2754.84 (unless I can't do math, or missed an episode...)Star Trek - The Motion Pictures DVD Collection $121.98
Star Trek The Original Series - The Complete Seasons $265.99
Star Trek The Next Generation - The Complete Seasons $583.98
Star Trek Voyager - The Complete Seasons $809.95
Star Trek Deep Space Nine - The Complete Seasons $636.95
Star Trek Enterprise - The Complete Seasons $335.99
If the music industry was seriously willing to bring the prices of their albums down I think people would be more willing to buy them (and more of them). The biggest advantage I see in downloaded music is the sheer variety that one can get. Many people simply can't afford to spend that much money on music, and the ability to have a wide selection available all the time is hugely appealing.
Just to further point out the absurdity of the statement: someone estimated that you could get about 720 GB of storage for $1,000 (or less of higher quality) and that 720GB equates to about 15,000 albums (which is an overshot, at least at 192kbit). Let's just say each CD you buy costs only $9.99 - that's still about $140,000 to buy all the music that your $1,000 of storage is holding. If you're more realistic and say $17 a shot, that's over a quarter-million dollars.
Most analysts are predicting that current price increases are reaching a plateau.... now is not necessarily the time to buy (unless you buy like today), as price increases are already happening througout the industry, as can be seen in this article.
The flat panels price increase is due almost entirely to a shortage of one of the key ingredients used in manufacture, which is supposedly only temporary.
In Ashland, Oregon the city is running a broadband access network (with cable modems) and faster fiber optic connections for those who want to pay up.
We certainly didn't mind, as it spurred Charter (cable company) to speed up their service deployment so we actually have competition for cable service - what an interesting concept.
On the other hand, the City of Ashland also owns the water and electric utilities... and has put the "telecommunications" (the internet & tv business) as a part of the electric utility... check out the Ashland Fiber Network, and the City of Ashland.
Yah, plus it would seem a bit contradictory for the complaintants to argue in court that they're not entitled to keep the product that was sent to them...
There's an article on msnbc (I only found it through Google), about this too...
We learn that they're suing to, among other things, keep the products that were sent to them at AOL's expense.
I'd really like to be able to look through the rejected bin (especially if it were to be ranked, like over on the other sid^Hte), and this doesn't seem like a huge addition to the code base - it appears that slash already saves all of the postings, including rejected ones, and maintaining this could only cost a little more traffic (once it's working)...
I think when they're talking about features that cost more to maintain than you can sell them for, they're talking about features that have real on-going costs...like sending Geraldo Riviera to the middle east...
I always thought that the whole point of a laser was that it was generating a perfect coherent waveform, so is this new laser generating light at a large number of wavelengths in the infrared, or is it an infinite number of wavelengths in the range specified?
Also, it seems like it would take a lot more development to extend this wideband laser work for something more consumer-oriented, like room lighting, as the light would need to be relatively omni-directional, which it doesn't seem like lasers are very good at producing now.
So how do I get onto this thing? It seems like it would be hard to get started on it since it's constantly moving - and even harder to get off of it.
It would also get pretty boring to ski around in a circle for hours on end... no new scenery. If they put up a big contiguous screen along the edges, and maybe some of the sky too, to prevent you from getting quite so dizzy and provide some additional entertainment.
Then again you could also just go VR skiing and never have to go outside or worry about all these physical limitations.
Sounds pretty contradictory to me - it's not as if mp3 and jpg haven't been supported for quite some time now, and if open standards will solve so many problems, then why develop a proprietary media format with digital rights management et. all?
Only if I could get storage to work like that...
But hey, it couldn't have been too bad of a move for the company, they're stock shot up 20% today (to 0.12/share... but still ;).
Too bad nobody seems to be taking any open source based options for cell phones...
It doesn't disply banners in Outlook XP either