Perhaps musicians should consider hooking up with companies like Magnatune [magnatune.com] and keep 50% of each purchase...
This sort of thing comes up often, and I will explain why it's simply not a viable option.
Apple does not determine the amount each artist receives from a sale at the iTunes store. Each artist's contract with their respective label determines that. If you are in a contract that will screw you out of money from iTunes sales, then you will almost certainly not have the rights to sell your music directly on any other service. If you are making $1.00 a CD in royalties, you can't just go out and sidestep your label and sell an album of yours on your own so you can pull in $9 per CD - unless you want to be sued.
People need to get over this fantasy that Apple is hoarding the cash from iTunes at the expense of artists everywhere. In fact, it's the same culprits it's been for decades.
"To be fair, there are costs for servers and maintenance, design and maintaince for the web site, and bandwidth to pay for. But I think that these would be significantly less than the above items."
The truly depressing aspect of it all is that Apple pays all of the distribution costs out of it's 10-12 cent-ish cut. Servers, bandwidth, payment processing, iTunes maintenance/design, etc. The record companies get the lion-share for simply saying "Yeah, you can use our artist's music" and providing the AAC rips and artwork. On top of this Apple provides them with a nice automated system that apparently makes it borderline effortless for them to convert their tracks and art assets and upload them.
If aqua is ever opensourced you can bet within 24 hours there would be 5 projects on sourceforge to port the gui to Linux and OpenDarwin. Then you would no longer need to have a mac to run macosx or a macosx like environment.
Your post is a perfect example of why open source is not making any real headway into the desktop arena.
It's not that open source is a flawed development methodology, but rather that there is a persistent, and unflinching lack of understanding in the OSS community of what makes Mac OS attractive to a large number of users. I'll give you a hint. It's not POSIX-ish compatibility, it's not Cocoa, it's not even the pretty Aqua widgets themselves.
People are drawn to, and continue to use Macs because of the way the userspace functions. The pretty icons catch their eye, the nifty effects wow them, but in the end, it is how all the pieces fit together as a whole, and how that larger piece works. Commonality of behavior and interaction between various applications makes the user comfortable and allows them to be more productive. The GUI is simply the glue that brings these pieces together. Mac OS applications are user-oriented, while there is still a pervasive developer-oriented ideal running through open source efforts. "If you want it to be different, just code it yourself" is still an underlying principle in many corners of OSS development that completely goes against the core Mac OS attitude, and ultimately relegates the open source community to spending the foreseeable future isolated in its current markets.
OSS efforts have been hammering away at various desktop concepts for years with little success outside the relatively small circle of open source die-hards. They put in new effects, they make spiffier icons, they do all of this, but fail to recognize that improvements to the presentation of information need to be geared to facilitating the user's interaction with it. That's not happening. The reason is ego, Not Invented Here syndrome, and a simple lack of cohesive vision that will never be remedied until there is a sea change in the way developers view their relationship with the user and one another.
Saying that all you need to do is port Aqua and people will abandon the Mac, betrays a complete lack of understanding as to why Mac users love OS X.
What happens when a vehicle with a drunk driver collides with your vehicle? SUV vs. car: people in car survive if they are properly restrained. SUV vs. bike, even with proper helmets: Don't even go there.
You can disagree with the site, but the sources are another matter entirely. It's something to think about next time you see a jacked-up SUV with a super reenforced "brush guard" steel bar running across the front grille blowing through another STOP sign.
While SUVs pose serious safety problems for their occupants, recent studies are showing that SUVs are greatly increasing the danger on our roads for drivers and passengers in other cars. Federal information shows that although light trucks account for one-third of all registered vehicles, traffic crashes between a light truck and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car.(9) In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV.(10) In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.(11),
10. Traffic Safety Facts 1996: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System. DOT HS 808 649, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; National Center for Statistics and Analysis, December, 1997. Chapter 3. page 64. table 37.
11. The Insurance Institute For Highway Safety - Feb.98 study and Nauss , Donald. April 5 1998. "Detroit Circles the Trucks; The big three defend sport-utilities and other hot sellers against an assault by regulators and environmentalists." Los Angeles Times. SectionD: Page 1.
"I understand that they're different markets, but all eyes are going to be on Nintendo that day. They could easily put it off a week and get 100% of the attention."
Right now we are in the beginning of the 2007 educational purchasing season. This is when school districts/universities/etc all over the U.S. are putting together their orders for the next school year. Getting the MacBook to market as soon as possible is extremely important to Apple's bottom line.
Nintendo's game console is going to get a lot of attention, but in the whole scheme of things, getting the MacBooks out this week rather than next week could mean millions of dollars in additional revenue.
It's unfortunate, but the iTunes Video Store has completely robbed me of whatever tolerance I had remaining for advertising. The picture quality isn't the best, I can't burn it to a non-data-only DVD, but for $2 I can get any episode of any show right now with no ads. I can watch it on my 20" LCD, or take it with me.
If The History Channel and HBO sign deals (and I know for a fact HBO is interested in working with Apple) I'll be tempted to give up cable TV altogether.
The response to this is natural and expected. The advertisers are trying to be more and more invasive with their product, and are moving it away from "Necessary Annoyance" to "Shove It Down Our Throats". They spend millions to research the most effective campaigns, but fail to see that having scripts written around their products, forcing their ads into our pockets or similar efforts will only alienate the public and increase the adoption of services that shut them out of our lives even more.
They are in a bad spot with few clear strategies for turning things around, but saturating every aspect of our lives with advertising and making it utterly impossible to escape it cannot be a sustainable solution. You will likely see a telemarketing/spam-esque backlash arise as a consequence.
I long ago made peace with the science of nuclear power as I found it a bit absurd to retain a strong dislike of it after considering the facts.
That being said, I don't exactly have an abundance of faith when it comes to the idea that The Powers That Be managing the plants and disposal sites take safety procedures to heart as much as they should. We've seen corruption before in the industry and the whole energy sector is infested with money-grabbing executives with little regard for anything other than the stock price and who they can br...lobby effectively to remove the burdens of oversight from their shoulders.
I'm not trying to spread FUD, but simply state that history does not leave me with a lot of confidence in the corporate decision makers or the regulatory bodies that oversee them.
It's a difficult place to be in. The alternatives are either crap, or are permanently 20 years away, but the kind of corruption in the energy sector and government makes me hesitant to be very enthusiastic.
I would love to switch over to an apple macbook pro, but frankly their laptops are too expensive, and for a student purchasing something so expensive to replace a laptop that still works fine isnt worth it.
MacBook Pros/Powerbooks have never really been heavily targeted towards students. In the past, most students have been better suited by the iBook range. The Powerbooks have offered few added features that your average student will find themselves clamoring for, while demanding a hefty price premium. The iBooks are inexpensive, more rugged than a Powerbook and offer a nice feature set.
Assuming for a moment that Apple doesn't screw up the Intel iBooks, you can probably expect to see iBooks become even more widespread on college campuses as the few remaining deal-breaking concerns about buying one are eliminated with Boot Camp.
I work at a large book retailer that has a well-established network of coffee bars outfitted with wireless hotspots.
This company loves for customers to hang out for hours (and truth be told, many hang out all day and night several days a week) because they invariably buy more stuff the longer they stick around. The longer they stay, the more relaxed they become. When it comes time to get a new book, many will simply get up and walk away from their unattended laptop for anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes (don't get me started on table camping). Many days I've stood there during slow periods in amazement at the amount of very expensive hardware just left in the open with no one to watch it.
It's inevitable that thieves will begin to exploit this as I've seen the same level of carelessness at similar retailers and sister stores in several states. There really isn't much I can do about it other than make friendly reminders when talking to customers - which risks offending the all-too-common customer with the over-inflated sense of self importance who finds any suggestion that they alter their behavior in any way (even if it will benefit them) as a severe insult.
I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).
"Casual" laptop theft is going to increasingly be a problem, but not one that I fear to any great extent as in most cases it can be defeated with the help of common sense which itself is a rare commodity these days.
I wonder, how long will it take for our government to realize that most of us take our rights pretty damn seriously, as they are the major reason why so many people like living here?
What gives you that impression? People in the U.S. love to talk about their rights and how important they are, but watch their reaction when someone brings up how lies from the Bush administration have killed thousands of American troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of civilians and wounded tens of thousands more on both sides. Mention something negative about Bush implementing a warrentless domestic spying program, the fact he has "disappeared" untold numbers of people via Executive Order with the lucky ones getting a trial in a kangaroo court where even those proved innocent remain in custody, with the rest not deemed fit for trial set to remain in indefinite detention for the rest of their lives...the list goes on but the response is the same.
"We are at war, the PRESIDENT is just PROTECTING Americans against harm. You don't want HARM to come to AMERICANS do you?"
The country elects a guy to represent us, but the overwhelming attitude is that we should not ever expect him to represent our notions or pre-existing legal concepts of what is right and wrong, and just let him loose with a free reign. We are expected to let him "defend our freedoms" by allowing him to stash them away somewhere out of sight where they will be taken out again once it is safe.
While the example of Bush was chosen for being the most obvious and visible, the sickening mentality that is this Administration's contemptuous view of the general public and the Constitution is more and more widespread, as the example set by our current president is picked up in all corners of government thanks to pressure and cronyism. If you disagree with their policies and Govern By Edict approach towards running the nation, you are out of a job.
The GOP and their conjoined twin the Democratic Party are too corrupt to be willing to challenge Bush or the general trend in government. They are along for the ride, and will lap up anything that comes their way.
They expect the rest of the country to do the same, and have changed the tone of the national debate to be one where the President is above criticism and really serves no one at all other than himself and his close-knit circle (and whomever pays to enter that realm). If people really cared, things would be different, there would be an up-swelling of opposition, but truth be told, people in the United States generally take their lifestyles pretty seriously, and that's about it. They want their inexpensive gas to last forever, their cars and TVs to get bigger, their highways to get another 8 lanes each way, and that's about it. 9/11 was a horrific reminder that there is a big, scary world out there that they don't want to take time out of their "busy" lives to understand. "Just make the bad men go away and give me the lifestyle I deserve." is the current prevailing attitude in the U.S. Anything else is just talk, or the beleifs of what is quickly becoming a fringe element in our society...people who actually care.
Re:When's the new Badfinger album coming out?
on
On Apple vs Apple
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· Score: 1
But they have a contract with Apple Computer, don't they? One that essentially boils down to "we allow you to use our trademarked "Apple" name, and in return, you promise to not enter the music business".
I may be misremembering things, but if that's what it's like, it seems pretty clear that Apple *has* violated the contract by starting iTunes.
In Britain's High Court, Grabiner rejected Apple Corps' claim that the tech company's iTunes Music Store violated the agreement.
He said the computer company had paid the Fab Four's firm $26.5 million as part of the settlement and in return had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time.
Grabiner said the "distribution of digital entertainment content" was permitted at Apple Computer under the agreement.
"Data transmission is within our field of use," he said. "That's what (the agreement) says and it is inescapable."
Apple Corps' lawyer Geoffrey Vos had argued that Apple Computer's music distribution business "was flatly contradictory to the provisions of the agreement."
Apple Computer seems to have a leg to stand on with this one.
When's the new Badfinger album coming out?
on
On Apple vs Apple
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Apple Corp is an utterly irrelevant entity that hasn't been a force in the music industry in three decades. I'm willing to bet that a good number of younger Beatles fans have no clue as to who they are. The "threat" Apple Computer poses to their trademark recognition is already nullified by its lack of mindshare. People still love the Beatles' music, but the Apple "label" is just a joke that has slipped out of the minds of many.
Microware's laughable suit against Apple over the "OS-9" / MacOS 9" "confusion" was on more firm ground than this.
A few of my friends have been known to sarcastically utter "LOL" when mocking AOL-speak and for some reason there has been a tendency to pronounce it "Laal" as opposed to "Lohl" (rhymes with "bowl").
No one can explain how this came to be, but once we realized we had suddenly started mispronouncing it, we decided to keep on keeping on with our crime against language simply due to the fact the "word" is so inherently stupid, we feel we are truly doing it justice.
Every fucking time I turn around another police outfit from Bumblefuck, U.S.A. has bought itself a shiny new toy with my "homeland security" tax dollars. (Add your least favorite story about the new SWAT team in a county with three homocides a year, an armored car for a town of 50K people, etc.)
Oddly enough, it seems to be most prevalent in the Red States that are so incredibly vocal about how much they truly, passionately hate taxes and government programs, but fight their way to the front of the trough to get any pork they can - even if the money could be better spent actually helping people who might just need it. The Homeland Security funds are distributed in ways that ensure sparsely populated states get less per-capita than repeat targets such as New York.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has come across a memo of their own...from Britain concerning a meeting between Bush and Blair in early 2003. It's probably far more interesting than anything these amateur translators will find. Needless to say, this was stamped with "Extremely Sensitive" and was never supposed to get out.
Some choice quotes to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here:
During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.
"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides....
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
...The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
I view this as an admission that Microsoft and more importantly, the Windows codebase has become far too unwieldy to compete.
The logical response to Linux would be to create a product that surpasses it in security, speed and features - in that order. You can argue all day about the ideology of open vs. closed source, but in the end, those three things matter the most. Unfortunately Microsoft has been unable to do so. Windows Vista contains 50 million lines of code, Windows XP was "only" 30 million. From the already-bloated codebase of XP comes an operating system that doesn't really contain any new features that makes it stand out from its predecessor and comes from a company that is known for producing horribly insecure software that follows a steep hardware curve with each release that seems to defy logic.
One is forced to wonder where the extra code and hardware demands are coming from, and I believe the best analogy based on the information at hand is that they've got an old, leaky roof that wasn't designed properly in the first place. They refuse to replace it, and instead hire more and more workers to run around with bits of roofing material and keep adding layer and layer of patches on top of old patches and half-baked repair schemes and the roof is sagging more and more and needs constant propping up and reenforcement.
The best idea would be to trash the roof and sit down and decide "What makes a good roof, and how do we implement the strongest, most lightweight roof that will be compatible with the structure we already have in place?" Rewrite Windows from the ground up, trash the kludges, hacks, fragile dependancies that seem to teeter on the edge of complete collapse on a routine basis. All legacy support should be relegated to virtual machines, and the nightmare of thousands upon thousands of dynamically linked libraries should be addressed once and for all. Create a lean, nimble, modular OS where each component is not so deeply rooted in the rest of the software that one change can send the whole house of cards tumbling down.
This would require a significant investment in time, money and human resources, but I really can't buy the argument that the current approach is functional or sustainable in any way shape or form. It's been over 4 years since the last version of Windows was released, and we're looking at waiting until the approach of the 6th anniversary for a piece of software that is more or less functionally identical to it's predecessor and 40% larger and even more of a drag on the underlying hardware. There is no excuse for taking the better part of a decade to develop something that already exists and there is no excuse for the bloat associated with doing that. That is a clear sign of bad management and bad design. Bad management has allowed the faulty design to continue to drag Microsoft down.
Windows, like the power grid or the economy, has become one of those important, yet vaguely understood complex systems that it's creators can only pretend to understand to any significant degree. I don't believe there is any real methodology to approaching a complete revision of the codebase as no one is really sure how those 50 million lines of code and thousands of libraries really interact with one another. It has become such a monolithic, impenetrable mass that there is no way to address the flaws that run deeply within the code because the entire system is so interdependent and poorly-understood that it has become a game of hacking your way around the bugs and hoping it doesn't break anything else.
The failure to address this is being projected on Microsoft's competitors through actions such as lawsuits and other means to stifle the development and adoption of rival products, as Redmond lacks the will to make the tough call necessary and probably inevitable at this point. They have an incredible talent pool that can pull off some really wonderful things, but they have them running around like madmen trying to keep Windows from imploding. They continue to pour talent into the black hole of Windows development, and they face increasingly diminishing returns because there probably isn't any way to make it work anymore. Sooner or later they will be forced to accept this.
Ummm... is $10 gonna cover Apple's costs?
Cause a $10 album off iTunes isn't going to be more than 100MB... whereas a $10 movie is going to be at least 3~4 times as big (assuming it's formatted for the video iPod).
One $2 TV episode already clocks in between 200-300MB+, so I think it may be possible.
Apple is widely rumored to be in negotiations with the studios to add feature films to the iTunes Store, but the major hangup seems to be that the studios are insisting on a $9.99 a month subscription to keep a constant flow of cash coming their way, with an extra $13 or so on top of the monthly fee to keep movies after the term of the subscription ends. Jobs is having none of this, insisting on a $9.99 per movie fee with no monthly charge. You pay $10 and it's yours forever, and you don't have to keep spending money every month to maintain access to your files. The iTunes Music Store has had an enormous amount of success with this compared to the subscription models offered by other services, and it is more compatible with the existing customer mentality that when you pay for a film, it becomes part of your collection forever.
The service proposed in the article is a perfect example of what we would get if the music industry got their way with iTunes music pricing. The labels are insisting they be allowed to charge more for newer, and more popular music (driving the prices of digital content closer to that of physical media) while offering "lower" prices for older content (Steve Jobs is resisting the increases). The Universal movie service will charge you $35 for new releases, and offer an "incredible" 50% discount on older films, which brings the price for the back catalog down to what you would pay for a physical DVD.
Economics dictates that they can charge whatever the market will bear, but I think the past few years has proven that the market simply will not bear what the conglomerates are demanding. They have this fantasy that if online stores offer the same products that they aren't selling enough of in brick-and-mortar stores at the same, or a higher price than the brick-and-mortar stores, that sales will increase.
The prevalence of file sharing had a lot to do with the convenience, but it was also much more a direct rebellion against the pricing schemes that the cartels had shoved down our throats for decades. iTunes killed two birds with one stone and took away the incredible premium they were demanding in retail stores, and adopted the convenience of the file sharing networks. Sales rebounded, and now they feel as if their original methodology was somehow correct and they can begin maximizing their profits by demanding more money for less product.
They are unable to accept the notion that they have been wrong all of these years, and are terrified that Apple is increasingly making them irrelevant in the marketplace. They are not producing any physical product, the overhead and media itself is being paid for out of Apple's tiny cut (they've only recently passed break-even on the store) and they are collecting a lionshare of the proceeds for doing nothing but allowing Apple to reproduce the content they did not make. It's a zero-risk, zero-investment game with high returns for them and them alone. With fewer bands (even established ones) getting any attention from the marketing departments at major labels, the day is coming when they will be cut out of the arrangement altogether and bands upload their music on their own (as they can do right now when they lack a big-label contract prohibiting such things). If you're not getting any airplay, the only thing you need is GarageBand, a tour promoter and an iTunes merchant account. The 90% take the labels claim on each sale, and the indentured servitude they put bands in for the ridiculous expenses they charge to each group just isn't getting anyone but a few main artists any kind of return.
The film studios are well-aware of the trap the music labels walked into, and want to ensure that any movie service has no room in it for the individual copyright holder and is arranged so if the movie studios are the only source for content, they get a monthly cut and there is no ability for individuals to upload their own films, as there is no way for them to tap into the monthly revenue stream going back to Hollywood.
Start JRPG, walk away for a month...you've won
on
GDC - Sony Keynote
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· Score: 5, Funny
A lot of discussion on the need for more space, given the amount of content going into new games. (graphics, performace, sounds, localizations).
In other words: "All of our Japanese developers are obsessed with making you sit through 60 hours of unskippable cut-scenes."
To me there is nothing worse than going into a game knowing that I can change absolutely nothing about the outcome and my options are I will either reach the predetermined static ending, or I won't.
Linear gameplay in titles that are intended to be immersive and have some depth (which means I'm not bitching about the lack of story branching in Tetris) is really a waste of the medium. When I spend my $50-$60, the last thing I want to do is be tricked into thinking that there is anything I can do to impact my environment if there is one, single conclusion to pursue. I suppose my respect for Peter Molyneux was truly diminished when I submitted a question to an interview with him prior to the release of Fable. I wanted him to elaborate on the freedom the player would have. He replied by saying that it was an RPG, and of course you would be expected to follow the story the way it was laid out in front of you and there was no getting around that.
While he had over-promised a great deal with his claims about Fable's ability to allow you to change the world you inhabited, his comment (when taken with his earlier discussion about your impact on the world) betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding about what a good structure for such a game was. Let you pretend there is this vibrant, ever-evolving world, yet clamp you to the rails when it comes to your destiny? The inherent contradiction seemed to pass right over his head, and not surprisingly right into the face of many gamers who were unfortunate enough to buy it and ended up disappointed.
Then there is Warren Spector's assessment of the failure of Deus Ex 2 which was that the gamer was given too much choice. Not that your actions meant absolutely nothing, and the entire idea that you were having any impact on anything was just a complete fabrication, but that you were given too much choice. In DX2 you could do any mission, betray anyone and every opposing faction would instantly forgive you every time. The different factions often turned out to be the same entity, and anything the player did would bring them to the same point at the very end of the game where you were given a menu of what ending you wanted. Ah, yes...too much choice. That must be it.
Creating a linear game will always be cheaper than something with true depth and possibility. The added coding, art asset creation and debugging (especially the debugging) makes taking the easy way out so tempting when you know that you are probably still going to sell plenty of copies of your title if you go with the safe approach.
Then there is also a segment of the gaming community that gets absolutely perturbed at the thought of open-ended games. They despise games lacking any rigid path and demand that the few truly non-linear titles out there surrender to the dominant trend. It's truly a peculiar phenomenon. There is an endless stream of JRPGs flooding the market that present you with no choices and cutscenes longer than The Lord Of The Rings trilogy that are truly going-through-the-motions affairs. Constant feedback and rewards for minimal thought. No question of what you should do only "How will you do this assigned task that you have no choice in doing?"
Republic The Revolution was redesigned midway through its production to be an on-the-rails game, as opposed to the freeform title that was originally envisioned. According to the developers, this was done to make the game "more accessible". When this fact came to light, the quiet groundswell of interest in Republic faded immediately and it was poorly received upon its eventual release.
There is no point in making a political sim where your hand is forced every step of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple does not determine the amount each artist receives from a sale at the iTunes store. Each artist's contract with their respective label determines that. If you are in a contract that will screw you out of money from iTunes sales, then you will almost certainly not have the rights to sell your music directly on any other service. If you are making $1.00 a CD in royalties, you can't just go out and sidestep your label and sell an album of yours on your own so you can pull in $9 per CD - unless you want to be sued.
People need to get over this fantasy that Apple is hoarding the cash from iTunes at the expense of artists everywhere. In fact, it's the same culprits it's been for decades.
It's not that open source is a flawed development methodology, but rather that there is a persistent, and unflinching lack of understanding in the OSS community of what makes Mac OS attractive to a large number of users. I'll give you a hint. It's not POSIX-ish compatibility, it's not Cocoa, it's not even the pretty Aqua widgets themselves.
People are drawn to, and continue to use Macs because of the way the userspace functions. The pretty icons catch their eye, the nifty effects wow them, but in the end, it is how all the pieces fit together as a whole, and how that larger piece works. Commonality of behavior and interaction between various applications makes the user comfortable and allows them to be more productive. The GUI is simply the glue that brings these pieces together. Mac OS applications are user-oriented, while there is still a pervasive developer-oriented ideal running through open source efforts. "If you want it to be different, just code it yourself" is still an underlying principle in many corners of OSS development that completely goes against the core Mac OS attitude, and ultimately relegates the open source community to spending the foreseeable future isolated in its current markets.
OSS efforts have been hammering away at various desktop concepts for years with little success outside the relatively small circle of open source die-hards. They put in new effects, they make spiffier icons, they do all of this, but fail to recognize that improvements to the presentation of information need to be geared to facilitating the user's interaction with it. That's not happening. The reason is ego, Not Invented Here syndrome, and a simple lack of cohesive vision that will never be remedied until there is a sea change in the way developers view their relationship with the user and one another.
Saying that all you need to do is port Aqua and people will abandon the Mac, betrays a complete lack of understanding as to why Mac users love OS X.
You can disagree with the site, but the sources are another matter entirely. It's something to think about next time you see a jacked-up SUV with a super reenforced "brush guard" steel bar running across the front grille blowing through another STOP sign.
link
10. Traffic Safety Facts 1996: A Compilation of Motor Vehicle Crash Data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System. DOT HS 808 649, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; National Center for Statistics and Analysis, December, 1997. Chapter 3. page 64. table 37.
11. The Insurance Institute For Highway Safety - Feb.98 study and Nauss , Donald. April 5 1998. "Detroit Circles the Trucks; The big three defend sport-utilities and other hot sellers against an assault by regulators and environmentalists." Los Angeles Times. SectionD: Page 1.
Nintendo's game console is going to get a lot of attention, but in the whole scheme of things, getting the MacBooks out this week rather than next week could mean millions of dollars in additional revenue.
It's unfortunate, but the iTunes Video Store has completely robbed me of whatever tolerance I had remaining for advertising. The picture quality isn't the best, I can't burn it to a non-data-only DVD, but for $2 I can get any episode of any show right now with no ads. I can watch it on my 20" LCD, or take it with me.
If The History Channel and HBO sign deals (and I know for a fact HBO is interested in working with Apple) I'll be tempted to give up cable TV altogether.
The response to this is natural and expected. The advertisers are trying to be more and more invasive with their product, and are moving it away from "Necessary Annoyance" to "Shove It Down Our Throats". They spend millions to research the most effective campaigns, but fail to see that having scripts written around their products, forcing their ads into our pockets or similar efforts will only alienate the public and increase the adoption of services that shut them out of our lives even more.
They are in a bad spot with few clear strategies for turning things around, but saturating every aspect of our lives with advertising and making it utterly impossible to escape it cannot be a sustainable solution. You will likely see a telemarketing/spam-esque backlash arise as a consequence.
I long ago made peace with the science of nuclear power as I found it a bit absurd to retain a strong dislike of it after considering the facts.
That being said, I don't exactly have an abundance of faith when it comes to the idea that The Powers That Be managing the plants and disposal sites take safety procedures to heart as much as they should. We've seen corruption before in the industry and the whole energy sector is infested with money-grabbing executives with little regard for anything other than the stock price and who they can br...lobby effectively to remove the burdens of oversight from their shoulders.
I'm not trying to spread FUD, but simply state that history does not leave me with a lot of confidence in the corporate decision makers or the regulatory bodies that oversee them.
It's a difficult place to be in. The alternatives are either crap, or are permanently 20 years away, but the kind of corruption in the energy sector and government makes me hesitant to be very enthusiastic.
MacBook Pros/Powerbooks have never really been heavily targeted towards students. In the past, most students have been better suited by the iBook range. The Powerbooks have offered few added features that your average student will find themselves clamoring for, while demanding a hefty price premium. The iBooks are inexpensive, more rugged than a Powerbook and offer a nice feature set.
Assuming for a moment that Apple doesn't screw up the Intel iBooks, you can probably expect to see iBooks become even more widespread on college campuses as the few remaining deal-breaking concerns about buying one are eliminated with Boot Camp.
I work at a large book retailer that has a well-established network of coffee bars outfitted with wireless hotspots.
This company loves for customers to hang out for hours (and truth be told, many hang out all day and night several days a week) because they invariably buy more stuff the longer they stick around. The longer they stay, the more relaxed they become. When it comes time to get a new book, many will simply get up and walk away from their unattended laptop for anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes (don't get me started on table camping). Many days I've stood there during slow periods in amazement at the amount of very expensive hardware just left in the open with no one to watch it.
It's inevitable that thieves will begin to exploit this as I've seen the same level of carelessness at similar retailers and sister stores in several states. There really isn't much I can do about it other than make friendly reminders when talking to customers - which risks offending the all-too-common customer with the over-inflated sense of self importance who finds any suggestion that they alter their behavior in any way (even if it will benefit them) as a severe insult.
I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).
"Casual" laptop theft is going to increasingly be a problem, but not one that I fear to any great extent as in most cases it can be defeated with the help of common sense which itself is a rare commodity these days.
"We are at war, the PRESIDENT is just PROTECTING Americans against harm. You don't want HARM to come to AMERICANS do you?"
The country elects a guy to represent us, but the overwhelming attitude is that we should not ever expect him to represent our notions or pre-existing legal concepts of what is right and wrong, and just let him loose with a free reign. We are expected to let him "defend our freedoms" by allowing him to stash them away somewhere out of sight where they will be taken out again once it is safe.
While the example of Bush was chosen for being the most obvious and visible, the sickening mentality that is this Administration's contemptuous view of the general public and the Constitution is more and more widespread, as the example set by our current president is picked up in all corners of government thanks to pressure and cronyism. If you disagree with their policies and Govern By Edict approach towards running the nation, you are out of a job.
The GOP and their conjoined twin the Democratic Party are too corrupt to be willing to challenge Bush or the general trend in government. They are along for the ride, and will lap up anything that comes their way.
They expect the rest of the country to do the same, and have changed the tone of the national debate to be one where the President is above criticism and really serves no one at all other than himself and his close-knit circle (and whomever pays to enter that realm). If people really cared, things would be different, there would be an up-swelling of opposition, but truth be told, people in the United States generally take their lifestyles pretty seriously, and that's about it. They want their inexpensive gas to last forever, their cars and TVs to get bigger, their highways to get another 8 lanes each way, and that's about it. 9/11 was a horrific reminder that there is a big, scary world out there that they don't want to take time out of their "busy" lives to understand. "Just make the bad men go away and give me the lifestyle I deserve." is the current prevailing attitude in the U.S. Anything else is just talk, or the beleifs of what is quickly becoming a fringe element in our society...people who actually care.
Apple Corp is an utterly irrelevant entity that hasn't been a force in the music industry in three decades. I'm willing to bet that a good number of younger Beatles fans have no clue as to who they are. The "threat" Apple Computer poses to their trademark recognition is already nullified by its lack of mindshare. People still love the Beatles' music, but the Apple "label" is just a joke that has slipped out of the minds of many.
Microware's laughable suit against Apple over the "OS-9" / MacOS 9" "confusion" was on more firm ground than this.
A few of my friends have been known to sarcastically utter "LOL" when mocking AOL-speak and for some reason there has been a tendency to pronounce it "Laal" as opposed to "Lohl" (rhymes with "bowl").
No one can explain how this came to be, but once we realized we had suddenly started mispronouncing it, we decided to keep on keeping on with our crime against language simply due to the fact the "word" is so inherently stupid, we feel we are truly doing it justice.
Some choice quotes to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here:
I view this as an admission that Microsoft and more importantly, the Windows codebase has become far too unwieldy to compete.
The logical response to Linux would be to create a product that surpasses it in security, speed and features - in that order. You can argue all day about the ideology of open vs. closed source, but in the end, those three things matter the most. Unfortunately Microsoft has been unable to do so. Windows Vista contains 50 million lines of code, Windows XP was "only" 30 million. From the already-bloated codebase of XP comes an operating system that doesn't really contain any new features that makes it stand out from its predecessor and comes from a company that is known for producing horribly insecure software that follows a steep hardware curve with each release that seems to defy logic.
One is forced to wonder where the extra code and hardware demands are coming from, and I believe the best analogy based on the information at hand is that they've got an old, leaky roof that wasn't designed properly in the first place. They refuse to replace it, and instead hire more and more workers to run around with bits of roofing material and keep adding layer and layer of patches on top of old patches and half-baked repair schemes and the roof is sagging more and more and needs constant propping up and reenforcement.
The best idea would be to trash the roof and sit down and decide "What makes a good roof, and how do we implement the strongest, most lightweight roof that will be compatible with the structure we already have in place?" Rewrite Windows from the ground up, trash the kludges, hacks, fragile dependancies that seem to teeter on the edge of complete collapse on a routine basis. All legacy support should be relegated to virtual machines, and the nightmare of thousands upon thousands of dynamically linked libraries should be addressed once and for all. Create a lean, nimble, modular OS where each component is not so deeply rooted in the rest of the software that one change can send the whole house of cards tumbling down.
This would require a significant investment in time, money and human resources, but I really can't buy the argument that the current approach is functional or sustainable in any way shape or form. It's been over 4 years since the last version of Windows was released, and we're looking at waiting until the approach of the 6th anniversary for a piece of software that is more or less functionally identical to it's predecessor and 40% larger and even more of a drag on the underlying hardware. There is no excuse for taking the better part of a decade to develop something that already exists and there is no excuse for the bloat associated with doing that. That is a clear sign of bad management and bad design. Bad management has allowed the faulty design to continue to drag Microsoft down.
Windows, like the power grid or the economy, has become one of those important, yet vaguely understood complex systems that it's creators can only pretend to understand to any significant degree. I don't believe there is any real methodology to approaching a complete revision of the codebase as no one is really sure how those 50 million lines of code and thousands of libraries really interact with one another. It has become such a monolithic, impenetrable mass that there is no way to address the flaws that run deeply within the code because the entire system is so interdependent and poorly-understood that it has become a game of hacking your way around the bugs and hoping it doesn't break anything else.
The failure to address this is being projected on Microsoft's competitors through actions such as lawsuits and other means to stifle the development and adoption of rival products, as Redmond lacks the will to make the tough call necessary and probably inevitable at this point. They have an incredible talent pool that can pull off some really wonderful things, but they have them running around like madmen trying to keep Windows from imploding. They continue to pour talent into the black hole of Windows development, and they face increasingly diminishing returns because there probably isn't any way to make it work anymore. Sooner or later they will be forced to accept this.
Apple is widely rumored to be in negotiations with the studios to add feature films to the iTunes Store, but the major hangup seems to be that the studios are insisting on a $9.99 a month subscription to keep a constant flow of cash coming their way, with an extra $13 or so on top of the monthly fee to keep movies after the term of the subscription ends. Jobs is having none of this, insisting on a $9.99 per movie fee with no monthly charge. You pay $10 and it's yours forever, and you don't have to keep spending money every month to maintain access to your files. The iTunes Music Store has had an enormous amount of success with this compared to the subscription models offered by other services, and it is more compatible with the existing customer mentality that when you pay for a film, it becomes part of your collection forever.
The service proposed in the article is a perfect example of what we would get if the music industry got their way with iTunes music pricing. The labels are insisting they be allowed to charge more for newer, and more popular music (driving the prices of digital content closer to that of physical media) while offering "lower" prices for older content (Steve Jobs is resisting the increases). The Universal movie service will charge you $35 for new releases, and offer an "incredible" 50% discount on older films, which brings the price for the back catalog down to what you would pay for a physical DVD.
Economics dictates that they can charge whatever the market will bear, but I think the past few years has proven that the market simply will not bear what the conglomerates are demanding. They have this fantasy that if online stores offer the same products that they aren't selling enough of in brick-and-mortar stores at the same, or a higher price than the brick-and-mortar stores, that sales will increase.
The prevalence of file sharing had a lot to do with the convenience, but it was also much more a direct rebellion against the pricing schemes that the cartels had shoved down our throats for decades. iTunes killed two birds with one stone and took away the incredible premium they were demanding in retail stores, and adopted the convenience of the file sharing networks. Sales rebounded, and now they feel as if their original methodology was somehow correct and they can begin maximizing their profits by demanding more money for less product.
They are unable to accept the notion that they have been wrong all of these years, and are terrified that Apple is increasingly making them irrelevant in the marketplace. They are not producing any physical product, the overhead and media itself is being paid for out of Apple's tiny cut (they've only recently passed break-even on the store) and they are collecting a lionshare of the proceeds for doing nothing but allowing Apple to reproduce the content they did not make. It's a zero-risk, zero-investment game with high returns for them and them alone. With fewer bands (even established ones) getting any attention from the marketing departments at major labels, the day is coming when they will be cut out of the arrangement altogether and bands upload their music on their own (as they can do right now when they lack a big-label contract prohibiting such things). If you're not getting any airplay, the only thing you need is GarageBand, a tour promoter and an iTunes merchant account. The 90% take the labels claim on each sale, and the indentured servitude they put bands in for the ridiculous expenses they charge to each group just isn't getting anyone but a few main artists any kind of return.
The film studios are well-aware of the trap the music labels walked into, and want to ensure that any movie service has no room in it for the individual copyright holder and is arranged so if the movie studios are the only source for content, they get a monthly cut and there is no ability for individuals to upload their own films, as there is no way for them to tap into the monthly revenue stream going back to Hollywood.
To me there is nothing worse than going into a game knowing that I can change absolutely nothing about the outcome and my options are I will either reach the predetermined static ending, or I won't.
Linear gameplay in titles that are intended to be immersive and have some depth (which means I'm not bitching about the lack of story branching in Tetris) is really a waste of the medium. When I spend my $50-$60, the last thing I want to do is be tricked into thinking that there is anything I can do to impact my environment if there is one, single conclusion to pursue. I suppose my respect for Peter Molyneux was truly diminished when I submitted a question to an interview with him prior to the release of Fable. I wanted him to elaborate on the freedom the player would have. He replied by saying that it was an RPG, and of course you would be expected to follow the story the way it was laid out in front of you and there was no getting around that.
While he had over-promised a great deal with his claims about Fable's ability to allow you to change the world you inhabited, his comment (when taken with his earlier discussion about your impact on the world) betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding about what a good structure for such a game was. Let you pretend there is this vibrant, ever-evolving world, yet clamp you to the rails when it comes to your destiny? The inherent contradiction seemed to pass right over his head, and not surprisingly right into the face of many gamers who were unfortunate enough to buy it and ended up disappointed.
Then there is Warren Spector's assessment of the failure of Deus Ex 2 which was that the gamer was given too much choice. Not that your actions meant absolutely nothing, and the entire idea that you were having any impact on anything was just a complete fabrication, but that you were given too much choice. In DX2 you could do any mission, betray anyone and every opposing faction would instantly forgive you every time. The different factions often turned out to be the same entity, and anything the player did would bring them to the same point at the very end of the game where you were given a menu of what ending you wanted. Ah, yes...too much choice. That must be it.
Creating a linear game will always be cheaper than something with true depth and possibility. The added coding, art asset creation and debugging (especially the debugging) makes taking the easy way out so tempting when you know that you are probably still going to sell plenty of copies of your title if you go with the safe approach.
Then there is also a segment of the gaming community that gets absolutely perturbed at the thought of open-ended games. They despise games lacking any rigid path and demand that the few truly non-linear titles out there surrender to the dominant trend. It's truly a peculiar phenomenon. There is an endless stream of JRPGs flooding the market that present you with no choices and cutscenes longer than The Lord Of The Rings trilogy that are truly going-through-the-motions affairs. Constant feedback and rewards for minimal thought. No question of what you should do only "How will you do this assigned task that you have no choice in doing?"
Republic The Revolution was redesigned midway through its production to be an on-the-rails game, as opposed to the freeform title that was originally envisioned. According to the developers, this was done to make the game "more accessible". When this fact came to light, the quiet groundswell of interest in Republic faded immediately and it was poorly received upon its eventual release.
There is no point in making a political sim where your hand is forced every step of the way.