I don't know why I bother doing this every time some Mac user makes this rediculous claim... but here we go.
Exhibit A (from apple.com 4/19/04)
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 128-bit SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
Price: $1,799.00
Exhibit B (From Dell.com 4/19/04)
Intel ® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.8GHz w/533MHz FSB
256MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 333MHz
80GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
Price: $768
The Dell includes a monitor, the Mac doesn't. They are identicle in terms of specs, or as close as they can get, but the PC is over $1,000 cheaper. Also keep in mind that if I'd priced the PC as a DIY with the lowest prices from Pricewatch.com, it would have been $100 cheaper.
There are plenty of somewhat good arguments for buying a Mac, but price is not, and has never been, one of them. Why can't Mac users admit they're paying a huge premium for the Mac brand name?
The going theory on Soulseek (where allegedly no one has been sued yet) is that the RIAA legally can't share illegal files, so it's okay to share with other people who share.
I personally got hooked on the Napster days of downloading a hundred totally random songs overnight, picking out what you like, then buying a few CDs. It's sad that the RIAA would prosecute me for this were I still doing it... but there is a lot of good music out there that the artists don't mind sharing.
Eh, having worked for a law firm, costs are considerable. They have to hire local counsel for various reasons (for example, bar membership), so there goes the "attorneys on retainer" theory.
I can't imagine why an attorney would take this kind of a case on contingency, so the RIAA is paying them whether they recover or not. Each suit has to be drafted, then courts charge $50-$250 for every suit filed, then I imagine the local counsel has to appear and ask the judge for permission to subpoena the ISP for the Defendent's name, then there's the cost of getting the defendent served, then the time the attorney or a paralegal spends hacking out a settlement. All of that really adds up, then there's the money the RIAA has to invest in picking out people to sue and hiring local lawyers, then tracking the payments (I doubt many people can pay a $3,000 settlement out of their pocket, they have to pay in installments).
They might break even if everyone settled, but again, having worked in a law firm, I know there are a lot of people who just can't pay or be tracked down.
Even assuming they settle every lawsuit they file (which is nearly impossible) they are losing a lot of money suing people, especially considering the ammount of legwork in getting a legal name out of a Kazaa user name. It's just a scare tactic, and given peoples lack of knowledge of statistics, the legal system and the internet, the tactic is working. To quote my Mom: "I heard they're arresting people who use Winamp". Yep, that's the people the RIAA is desperately trying to keep paying $20 for CDs.
But as the recent article about the guy who loved buying from spammers proved, Spammers have an effective business model because they only need a tiny percentage of their victims to bite before the spammers make a profit. You can convince 99% of people to boycott spam, but spammers still win because of that 1% who don't care.
I know this is impossible for any number of reasons, but wouldn't the solution be to make it illegal to buy from spammers? I imagine the huge bulk of their sales are to people in the US/Canada/Europe, where such a law could be enforced (were it not unconstitutional and whatnot).
What I wonder about with all of these online music stores is that none really offer bitrates above 192k, and most are in 128k. Remember when everyone claimed any form of audio compression was vastly inferior to CD Audio? At least you could get MP3/Ogg files in 192k or better rates, which really are as good as CD Audio to all but a few ears.
Should iTunes-style audio became the main way people get music, are we going to see a real drop in the literal sound quality of the music we're all listening to? I just wonder why, when MP3s were around in high bitrates, people loved to talk about how they weren't as good as CDs, but now that iTunes are being downloaded en masse in lower bitrates, curiously no one is even mentioning sound quality. Is the Apple brand name truly that powerful?
At the risk of sounding misogynistic, I used to play an RPG called Asheron's Call on a full-scale Player Vs. Player server called Darktide. No safe zones, everyone killed newbies and lowbies mercilessly, for the fun of it. Because a single death could ruin your afternoon, and because it took hundreds of hours to level up to the point where you could join a guild or defend yourself, it was an extremely harsh place to try to be.
The demographics? 1,000+ people were online throughout the day, I'd estimate 20,000 mid or high level players between November 1999 and November 2001. During that time, there were only five openly female players (and two of them were just playing characters their boyfriends leveled up).
Now that's obviously an extreme, the more hostile the environment the greater the likelihood that it will be all loser teenage males, but it's those sorts of situations that make us oldschool gamers find it hard to believe that all games are 50/50 by gender. Some are like that, but some are still 95/5.
Now if only my other favorite NPR show, This American Life, would follow Car Talk's lead...
From TAL's site...
We recognize there are issues with RealAudio - but there are other quirks with Windows RealMedia Player and other formats, too. And the "free" technologies some of you have kindly suggested have their own costs - mainly, they still require staff time (particularly time to convert our many, many shows) and server/bandwidth space, which are in very short supply here. We promise that we've investigated many options, and have chosen what we think is the best, and really, the only viable solution. Recognizing that we can't make everyone happy, we do the best we can, as we keep our promise to offer TAL shows free online.
I believe you on point 1, but do you have any actual data supporting point 2? I was just wondering.
I don't really know how modern Windows versions stack up in terms of stability. Win98 and earlier releases were horrible, and some people seem determined to pretend it's still like that five years after the fact, but it's been my experience (with a lot of installations) that Windows XP/2k really don't crash much, except for hardware/power problems, and weirdness with third party programs.
Defending Windows on Slashdot is probably asking for bad karma...
Okay I just follow this whole story from Slashdot headlines and writeups so I'm no expert, but every day SCO seems more and more like the villain in a James Bond movie.
What Microsoft has going for it is money. Google has lots of good ideas, but running that many searches is very expensive in bandwidth and hardware. Google might just have a hard time ever making a profit. Microsoft has a hard time not making a profit. Google can't just slap 'new version!' on a flagship product, and have people line up at the malls all over America to spend $400 on it.
So I'm thinking the superior product could lose out to the more profitable one. Wouldn't be the first time it happened.
The way I see this working is something like...
* Every (male) floor of every college doomroom has at least one nerd out of the 50 guys on it.
* College students probably consume way more Pepsi per capata than the general population
* Said nerds unite and make it known they want every Pepsi bottle cap their neighbors would ordinarilly toss. They are mocked but eventually get a lot of bottle caps.
Not quite 100 million... but maybe a few.
Blank DVDR =~ $2
200gb Hard Drive = $200
200 DVDs can hold much more data than 200gb. DVDs can also be played instantly in a lot more places (including places where there isn't even a computer) while a USB hard drive can be a pain to connect sometimes.
What about students who pay an tuition or fee that goes towards athletics but have never even watched their football team on TV let alone been to a game? Let's face it, not every fee directly benefits every student.
Where I work, we (the IT department) realize the problems associated with overloading everyone with passwords, but our clients require us to do it. When you lose a multimillion dollar account if you don't make even the lowliest secretary have three different long, random passwords, there's not much you can do about it but just be understanding when employees forget their passwords.
I imagine it's a long process of finger pointing all over the corporate world, though. The bottom line is that this just might be an inherent flaw of conventional passwords, and we either have to accept that, or develop a better system.
But I remember on the all-PvP world in Asheron's call (no safe zone's, no safe anything, very very harsh if you're used to EQ or whatever), there were probably 10,000+ people who progressed beyond level 25 in the first 2 years. A grant total of 5 were female, and just about everyone at least knew the names of those 5.
Why should MS be required to provide objective information about its competitors? It's not like Slashdot or any Linux-oriented news sites, let alone the web pages run by companies and groups that make Linux software and distributions are even close to providing fair and accurate information about Microsoft products.
It's all of $5 for this book... or you can buy it used for $2 or so if you look around. It's so moronic to suggest that, for someone in America/Europe, $5 is too steep a price to pay for literally dozens of hours of somewhat thoughtful entertainment.
At any rate, pirated books are indeed called bookz and they're more accessable than you'd think. Fortunatly, there's a big difference between a txt file you can only read on a comptuer and a comfy paperback version you can read anywhere. I'll still buy a book any day, even knowing how I could get it online for free.
It's just Karma for their years of refusal to follow their own polls and give Fark an award or even a nomination, even though it always had way more votes than any of the other silly 'community' sites they list which you've never heard of.
Um, I think you're missing the point. This client could download highly illegal files, and make it look like I'm knowingly downloading them. Say I run it, and it downloads anything from kiddy porn to some Al Qaida webpage from an FBI sting server. I would quite possibly be arrested and charged, and while I wouldn't be convicted, it's quite an ordeal, and there's an ugly social stigma to even being charged with Kiddy Porn or conspiring with a terrorist. So that's a serious question that's posted by running Grub.
This reminds me of an ad I saw on Yahoo a while ago that I think really illustrates exactly what you're saying. It was an in-house ad for Yahoo Bill Pay (I think) and the showed some goofy guy in front of a computer, and of course he was sporting the 'wow how cool' face. The caption was "There's something free on the internet that you aren't using yet?"
I thought that smacked of condescension, as if they had a problem with me using their site because it was free.
Slashdot Mirror
Exhibit A (from apple.com 4/19/04)
1.6GHz PowerPC G5
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 128-bit SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
Price: $1,799.00
Exhibit B (From Dell.com 4/19/04)
Intel ® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.8GHz w/533MHz FSB
256MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 333MHz
80GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet
56K PCI Data Fax Modem
Price: $768
The Dell includes a monitor, the Mac doesn't. They are identicle in terms of specs, or as close as they can get, but the PC is over $1,000 cheaper. Also keep in mind that if I'd priced the PC as a DIY with the lowest prices from Pricewatch.com, it would have been $100 cheaper.
There are plenty of somewhat good arguments for buying a Mac, but price is not, and has never been, one of them. Why can't Mac users admit they're paying a huge premium for the Mac brand name?
I personally got hooked on the Napster days of downloading a hundred totally random songs overnight, picking out what you like, then buying a few CDs. It's sad that the RIAA would prosecute me for this were I still doing it... but there is a lot of good music out there that the artists don't mind sharing.
They might break even if everyone settled, but again, having worked in a law firm, I know there are a lot of people who just can't pay or be tracked down.
Even assuming they settle every lawsuit they file (which is nearly impossible) they are losing a lot of money suing people, especially considering the ammount of legwork in getting a legal name out of a Kazaa user name. It's just a scare tactic, and given peoples lack of knowledge of statistics, the legal system and the internet, the tactic is working. To quote my Mom: "I heard they're arresting people who use Winamp". Yep, that's the people the RIAA is desperately trying to keep paying $20 for CDs.
I know this is impossible for any number of reasons, but wouldn't the solution be to make it illegal to buy from spammers? I imagine the huge bulk of their sales are to people in the US/Canada/Europe, where such a law could be enforced (were it not unconstitutional and whatnot).
Should iTunes-style audio became the main way people get music, are we going to see a real drop in the literal sound quality of the music we're all listening to? I just wonder why, when MP3s were around in high bitrates, people loved to talk about how they weren't as good as CDs, but now that iTunes are being downloaded en masse in lower bitrates, curiously no one is even mentioning sound quality. Is the Apple brand name truly that powerful?
The demographics? 1,000+ people were online throughout the day, I'd estimate 20,000 mid or high level players between November 1999 and November 2001. During that time, there were only five openly female players (and two of them were just playing characters their boyfriends leveled up).
Now that's obviously an extreme, the more hostile the environment the greater the likelihood that it will be all loser teenage males, but it's those sorts of situations that make us oldschool gamers find it hard to believe that all games are 50/50 by gender. Some are like that, but some are still 95/5.
From TAL's site...
We recognize there are issues with RealAudio - but there are other quirks with Windows RealMedia Player and other formats, too. And the "free" technologies some of you have kindly suggested have their own costs - mainly, they still require staff time (particularly time to convert our many, many shows) and server/bandwidth space, which are in very short supply here. We promise that we've investigated many options, and have chosen what we think is the best, and really, the only viable solution. Recognizing that we can't make everyone happy, we do the best we can, as we keep our promise to offer TAL shows free online.
I don't really know how modern Windows versions stack up in terms of stability. Win98 and earlier releases were horrible, and some people seem determined to pretend it's still like that five years after the fact, but it's been my experience (with a lot of installations) that Windows XP/2k really don't crash much, except for hardware/power problems, and weirdness with third party programs.
Defending Windows on Slashdot is probably asking for bad karma...
Early returns indicate top rentals are "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Deep Throat". What, you thought people'd pay money to pretend to be in Star Trek 3?
Torvalds. Linus Torvalds.
What Microsoft has going for it is money. Google has lots of good ideas, but running that many searches is very expensive in bandwidth and hardware. Google might just have a hard time ever making a profit. Microsoft has a hard time not making a profit. Google can't just slap 'new version!' on a flagship product, and have people line up at the malls all over America to spend $400 on it.
So I'm thinking the superior product could lose out to the more profitable one. Wouldn't be the first time it happened.
The way I see this working is something like...
* Every (male) floor of every college doomroom has at least one nerd out of the 50 guys on it.
* College students probably consume way more Pepsi per capata than the general population
* Said nerds unite and make it known they want every Pepsi bottle cap their neighbors would ordinarilly toss. They are mocked but eventually get a lot of bottle caps.
Not quite 100 million... but maybe a few.
Blank DVDR =~ $2 200gb Hard Drive = $200 200 DVDs can hold much more data than 200gb. DVDs can also be played instantly in a lot more places (including places where there isn't even a computer) while a USB hard drive can be a pain to connect sometimes.
What about students who pay an tuition or fee that goes towards athletics but have never even watched their football team on TV let alone been to a game? Let's face it, not every fee directly benefits every student.
I don't think you're sorry at all.
Kibo is submitting to Slashdot? Party like it's 1989!
I imagine it's a long process of finger pointing all over the corporate world, though. The bottom line is that this just might be an inherent flaw of conventional passwords, and we either have to accept that, or develop a better system.
But I remember on the all-PvP world in Asheron's call (no safe zone's, no safe anything, very very harsh if you're used to EQ or whatever), there were probably 10,000+ people who progressed beyond level 25 in the first 2 years. A grant total of 5 were female, and just about everyone at least knew the names of those 5.
Why should MS be required to provide objective information about its competitors? It's not like Slashdot or any Linux-oriented news sites, let alone the web pages run by companies and groups that make Linux software and distributions are even close to providing fair and accurate information about Microsoft products.
It's all of $5 for this book... or you can buy it used for $2 or so if you look around. It's so moronic to suggest that, for someone in America/Europe, $5 is too steep a price to pay for literally dozens of hours of somewhat thoughtful entertainment. At any rate, pirated books are indeed called bookz and they're more accessable than you'd think. Fortunatly, there's a big difference between a txt file you can only read on a comptuer and a comfy paperback version you can read anywhere. I'll still buy a book any day, even knowing how I could get it online for free.
It's just Karma for their years of refusal to follow their own polls and give Fark an award or even a nomination, even though it always had way more votes than any of the other silly 'community' sites they list which you've never heard of.
Um, I think you're missing the point. This client could download highly illegal files, and make it look like I'm knowingly downloading them. Say I run it, and it downloads anything from kiddy porn to some Al Qaida webpage from an FBI sting server. I would quite possibly be arrested and charged, and while I wouldn't be convicted, it's quite an ordeal, and there's an ugly social stigma to even being charged with Kiddy Porn or conspiring with a terrorist. So that's a serious question that's posted by running Grub.
I thought that smacked of condescension, as if they had a problem with me using their site because it was free.
Perhaps they could charge by the lol or 'omg u 2' used on their services? Make money and maybe even improve the interweb a little at the same time.