Apple already has caved. On the Japanese iTMS, the price depends on the particular song. So what the labels are saying is "if you can do it there, you can do it here."
I noticed, after installing iTunes 5, that the name of the playlist for music purchased off of iTMS had changed (in the Japanese version of iTunes) from "Purchased Music" (kounyuu shita ongaku) to "Purchased Items/Things" (kounyuu shita mono).
(It's actually difficult for me to confirm, cos my playlist was named "Musique achetée" before the upgrade, left over from a flirtation with French, but I've checked to see that it said "ongaku" from other sources.)
Has this changed in the English version as well? Maybe music videos and other contents are on the way soon?
It seems like the major announcements Nintendo has made in the last few days have taken major cues from Apple. Nintendo has just opened a store in New York, released a new GBA the press release says will "[position] the image-conscious player as someone on the cutting edge of cool." Now, they've also set up game downloads for their back catalog, like iTMS.
Expect Nintendo to try and portray themselves as above the Sony vs. Microsoft battle. It looks like Nintendo think they are right now like Apple right before OS X and the iPod made them a major player again. Hopefully this will translate into them bringing major and useful innovations to the market.
Would you like to append a "*wink*" or anything else to your comment, just to make it clearer?
I am not sure if this means I would be wasting my time waiting until WWDC, or if I'll just be helping apple clear soon to be outdated stock...sigh.. I am putting too much weight on the words of an anonymous maybe-somebody on slashdot..
I can't stand this suspense... Do you work for apple? Are you Steve Jobs? Or just a really well informed outsider??
No amount of scouring has provided answers. You have been the subject of a user journal, shown up in articles all over, and have a following of users...
Tell us!
And if you don't want to share anything about yourself, fine..
But maybe you can tell me if I should wait until WWDC to buy a powerbook..
After seeing the Mac Mini, two things popped into my head. First: that thing is really cool. I want one.
and second: Tiger is not going to need top of the line hardware.
After the iMac G5s came out, I was really worried about whether my iBook G4 would be able to handle Tiger well enough, but the specs of the Mac Mini seem to show that Tiger will probably be fine on most G4s (unless Apple is out to alienate the huge market they've created today.) I was worried about how much longer Apple's "faster on the same hardware" OS development would continue, but it seems that Tiger will at least not run much slower on even slightly dated hardware. Good news from Apple today in a lot of ways.
ProDOS is the Apple II port of SOS (essentially - a disk can actually have an SOS.SYSTEM and a PRODOS.SYSTEM, along with A2 AND A3 versions of programs). GS/OS is the 65816 port of ProDOS, with a GUI added.
Not that I know anything about Apple OSs, but I think ProDOS 16 was the 65816 port. GS/OS was built specifically for the IIgs.
I was there a few weeks ago, visiting a friend who does research there, while travelling in Switzerland. It's definitely an interesting place (although it lacks the futuristic "aura" that I somehow expected). Near the main gate is a massive wooden sphere called the Innovation Globe. It's still in construction, but it looks like it will be a great and interesting facility (with public exhibits and theaters), and its organic look is a stark contrast to the mostly drab buildings inside.
It was a sunday when I went, and not that crowded, and my friend took me through a short tour of the place. They have an educational area set up with a museum, and science exhibits for children, which was very cool. All sorts of modern artifacts from nuclear experiments are lying around courtyards. He showed me the server room, where (i think, my friend wasn't sure either) they had some of the first web servers, and where they are now doing the grid computing stuff.
Another cool bit of CERN, especially for physics geeks, is all the streets are named after famous nuclear scientists. I passed by ones named for Einstein, Rutherford, and others. We didn't get to Feynman that day.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
CERN was a nice place to spend an afternoon, and I wish them another 50 great years.
..and the pictures don't do the new iMac justice. But having said that, I was a little bit disappointed. I missed the keynote but I was at the expo venue when the banners and computers were uncovered. Everyone clapped and some people cheered, but the response seemed a bit muted. At one point, the girl doing the iMac presentation had to almost ask for applause. She seemed a little surprised by the response. The presentation alluded to an "in any room of your home" idea, which suggests to me that they might not have wanted something that stuck out too much, but rather blended in to its surroundings.
It's a sleek and contained design, but it reminds me of one of the new cinema displays in plastic with serious underbite. The photos don't show it very well, but the top layer of the bevel surrounding the screen is clear plastic, which looks quite nice, but I don't think it completely saves the design. I was personally expecting something much more exciting, but looking at it straight on, you can almost fool yourself into thinking you are looking at an eMac missing its speakers.
With this design to complete their lineup, its easy to see that they wanted the iMac to be to the Powermac, as the iBook is to the Powerbook. There are similar form factors between the consumer and pro lines (if you had one of the new aluminum displays for your powermac), and the same materials for each side of the divide.
He probably had to do this kind of stuff to appease the church. Scientists in this era lived in fear of the mighty clergy. Just look at what happened to Galileo!
He actually did a lot of his work in theology against the accepted order of the church in England. Newton was heavily into Arianism, which denies the holy trinity, and would surely have been branded a heretic if he had revealed his beliefs. He believed that the church in his time, and throughout most of its history had been corrupted after the Council of Nicea. He kept his most extreme beliefs very secret, somehow managing to weasel out of the declarations of faith that were required of all who attended Cambridge. Newton actually encouraged one of his colleagues who held the same beliefs as he did to go public with them, and this poor guy was booted out of Cambridge and ridiculed for the rest of his life.
..but something they would never probably even consider is to give the millions of people that already own stacks of Playstation games the capability to play them on the PSP for basically free.
I'm not sure about the details of the drive that they're using, but it would be very cool, and lucrative in terms of getting a massive installed base of PSPs, if they let people burn the PS1 games they already own on to mini-CDs or mini-DVDs or whatever and just stick those into the PSP. If the drives were capable of doing it, all they'd need to do is set up some funky logic in the PSP to bypass the PS1 copy protect and region encoding. And since this thing is supposed to have the power of the PS2, it should be able to emulate the PS1. It's not as though they make tons of money selling PS1 games anymore, but im sure there are a whole ton of people with stagnant libraries of those old games. Even without a huge library of PSP games on release, this one cheap feature would cause a rush of people to run out and buy one of these things, and it would cost Sony almost nothing to implement, provided that the optical drives can run standard DVDs... which come to think of it, I don't think they do. (UMD was it?)
You're probably going to get firewire cards for cheaper than gigabit ones, and I have seen demo setups with firewire wall plates so you can network your home (though I don't know if they're commercially available yet). But this would seem to be an alternative worth looking into.
I read on a minor Japanese news site (here) a little while ago about a site that was running a Japanese translated ripoff of the US Yahoo. The site was just running the Yahoo site through a machine translator (excite's i think), and changing the references to Yahoo to Shimanto.
The news site interviewed the guy running the fake and asked him why he was doing it. Shimanto.com wasn't making him any money. Rather he was paying a fair bit for the hosting fees. Plus it could get him in a bunch of trouble.
He was just doing it for fun...
Apparently, the guy has a history of doing the same thing, as well as domain name squatting, things like that.
I second the iBook. I had a sony before, but I got one in the fall. There were a few problems with it at first (messed up screen and crap logic board) but since i've gotten back, it's been working flawlessly. I get great battery life and wireless performance, and it's fast enough to do everything I need it to.
If you're a student you can get a decent edu discount. If you like to program, you can sign up for the student developer program for a fee and get an even larger discount. (Not 100% sure about this.)
Having said that, if you can spare the cash, get a powerbook. It seems more polished and well-built, and has some features (like superdrive) that you can't get on the ibook. But for the price, the ibook is really hard to beat.
...the fact that they put it in a phone. You can already get electronic cash cards to use at some AM/PM convenience stores in Japan, and JR is going to expand their Suica rail pass system to be used for purchases in station stores (that uses the same Felica technology). Even two years ago, you could use a phone to buy pop at some vending machines by showing it a two dimensional bar code.
The problem here is that ICANN has no real authority either. People only listen to them because it's more convenient to listen to them and agree on a standard than it is to go with some other system. IANA still controls IP addresses, and they only did that at the whim of the RIRs, so your argument is invalid.
IANA is under the control of ICANN, so it does have some authority. It sounds like things may have changed, so this might not be the case now. Even if they have no real authority though, it is the symbolism of it that is making the whole thing a big issue.
Abiding by decisions made by ICANN (Or IETF or IEEE for that matter) is completely voluntary. But then again, so is being connected to the Internet in the first place. The Internet has always worked on the system of "We'll all get together and agree on a standard. If you don't like the standard, convince others that your idea is better. If you don't agree, we don't have to route your packets." And it should remain that way. Does that mean people in the nations that worked on making the Internet what it is today get more say than nations being hooked up currently do? Of course! But then again, with nigh on forty years of experience in making this thing work, they should!
I think that's the way it should be for technical standards, but the Internet is not just about technical standards anymore. People and governments are looking for social standards, and legal guarantees and protections. With these things, the "show us a better way or use ours" approach doesn't work. This probably goes beyond the scope of what's being discussed in Geneva, but I think it's important to keep this in mind.
Nope. As you undoubtedly noticed, I did not say that ICANN had the authority to regulate the Internet.
I did notice. But there are only two choices right now.
You're attempting to insert race into the argument, which I reject, as I do your attempts to insert economic theory.
If you wish to see an organization created with legitimate authority to regulate a global activity such as the Internet, then the only way to do that is to create a global democratically elected organization to which existing states cede a portion of their sovereignty. An undemocratic organization like the UN can never create legitimacy where none exists simply by appointing people of different skin colors and different ideologies to some committee.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but economics and race are relevant to this. There are a lot people in many countries who know that the rich in (overwhelmingly caucasian) developed countries have a disproportionate share of money and power, and they want to make sure they have more say in what is going to happen next. This is about money, this is about ideology, and this is about race, but more than anything, it is about the symbolism. This would be a less of an issue if ICANN were truly independent and autonomous. I imagine just the idea of the whole Internet somehow being governed from California is unpalatable for some people.
I agree that the UN is undemocratic, but I think it is the best that is available right now, and the question over who governs the internet will need to be resolved before any good replacement for the UN appears. I agree with everything you say about the right way to do this, but I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime.
To get back to your original comment, there are countries that may find a legitimate need for some amount of regulation on data flow (Canada has been doing it on traditional media for decades), and the fine line between justified regulation and the countries you mention is the one that whoever governs the internet will have to tread. Although I'm sure that ICANN is competent enough to do it, the US government and the way they approach international and domestic affairs doesn't fill me with hope for the future. So in my opinion, the ITU/UN wins this one by default.
The UN lacks the authority to regulate the Internet. It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet. They claim to do this in the interest of preventing pollution of their culture by outsiders, but, in reaity, they are merely seeking to all possible means of internal dissent. (For examples, Iran and China.)
Are you saying that ICANN, that was created by the US government and still answers to it, composed mostly of white men from developed countries with capitalist agendas should have the authority? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer people who are a little more representative of the world.
If you are going to visit Japan, there is a special travel pass you can get, which is only for tourists. It allows you to travel on any train in Japan over one, two, three or four weeks. It is well worth it.
Just as a service to anyone who decides to go to Japan after reading this. It does NOT let you get on every train, only JR ones. Which is great, because they run all the major cross-country routes, but a lot of the urban railways are private or municipal and won't accept it. And IIRC they are not sold in Japan so make sure to pick it up before you leave.
You know that dull pain you are feeling in the back of your head right now? That is denial. That ringing in your ears is your mind screaming at you to wake up and see Revolutions for what it is.
I am the king of denial. If I walk into a movie wanting to like it, I will find a way to like it I first thought Phantom Menace was ok, Attack of the Clones was entertaining, and Reloaded was a brilliant set up for a conclusion. But Revolutions was bad beyond bad. The first half dragged, but so did Reloaded so I expected something better to come up. But NO! All I got for my waiting was a lot of screaming pilots in big robot things, and a ripoff of dragonball z. I half expected Neo's hair to turn gold and Smith to sprout a tail. I really wanted to like Revolutions, and I used to believe that there was no limit to the power of self-deception. Revolutions shattered that comfortable illusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple already has caved. On the Japanese iTMS, the price depends on the particular song. So what the labels are saying is "if you can do it there, you can do it here."
(It's actually difficult for me to confirm, cos my playlist was named "Musique achetée" before the upgrade, left over from a flirtation with French, but I've checked to see that it said "ongaku" from other sources.)
Has this changed in the English version as well? Maybe music videos and other contents are on the way soon?
Expect Nintendo to try and portray themselves as above the Sony vs. Microsoft battle. It looks like Nintendo think they are right now like Apple right before OS X and the iPod made them a major player again. Hopefully this will translate into them bringing major and useful innovations to the market.
Would you like to append a "*wink*" or anything else to your comment, just to make it clearer?
..sigh.. I am putting too much weight on the words of an anonymous maybe-somebody on slashdot..
I am not sure if this means I would be wasting my time waiting until WWDC, or if I'll just be helping apple clear soon to be outdated stock.
I can't stand this suspense... Do you work for apple? Are you Steve Jobs? Or just a really well informed outsider??
No amount of scouring has provided answers. You have been the subject of a user journal, shown up in articles all over, and have a following of users...
Tell us!
And if you don't want to share anything about yourself, fine..
But maybe you can tell me if I should wait until WWDC to buy a powerbook..
They wouldn't either.
On the landwalker page they list the method of locomotion as "two-legged shuffling." And you can see wheels on the soles of the feet in the diagram.
The headline should be Homemade Mecha Rollerskates in Japan.
Bah.. Everyone knows that scientific progress goes 'boink'.
and second: Tiger is not going to need top of the line hardware.
After the iMac G5s came out, I was really worried about whether my iBook G4 would be able to handle Tiger well enough, but the specs of the Mac Mini seem to show that Tiger will probably be fine on most G4s (unless Apple is out to alienate the huge market they've created today.) I was worried about how much longer Apple's "faster on the same hardware" OS development would continue, but it seems that Tiger will at least not run much slower on even slightly dated hardware. Good news from Apple today in a lot of ways.
Not that I know anything about Apple OSs, but I think ProDOS 16 was the 65816 port. GS/OS was built specifically for the IIgs.
It was a sunday when I went, and not that crowded, and my friend took me through a short tour of the place. They have an educational area set up with a museum, and science exhibits for children, which was very cool. All sorts of modern artifacts from nuclear experiments are lying around courtyards. He showed me the server room, where (i think, my friend wasn't sure either) they had some of the first web servers, and where they are now doing the grid computing stuff.
Another cool bit of CERN, especially for physics geeks, is all the streets are named after famous nuclear scientists. I passed by ones named for Einstein, Rutherford, and others. We didn't get to Feynman that day.
Oh, and the food in the lunch room is not half-bad and cheap for Switzerland.
CERN was a nice place to spend an afternoon, and I wish them another 50 great years.
It's a sleek and contained design, but it reminds me of one of the new cinema displays in plastic with serious underbite. The photos don't show it very well, but the top layer of the bevel surrounding the screen is clear plastic, which looks quite nice, but I don't think it completely saves the design. I was personally expecting something much more exciting, but looking at it straight on, you can almost fool yourself into thinking you are looking at an eMac missing its speakers.
With this design to complete their lineup, its easy to see that they wanted the iMac to be to the Powermac, as the iBook is to the Powerbook. There are similar form factors between the consumer and pro lines (if you had one of the new aluminum displays for your powermac), and the same materials for each side of the divide.
He actually did a lot of his work in theology against the accepted order of the church in England. Newton was heavily into Arianism, which denies the holy trinity, and would surely have been branded a heretic if he had revealed his beliefs. He believed that the church in his time, and throughout most of its history had been corrupted after the Council of Nicea. He kept his most extreme beliefs very secret, somehow managing to weasel out of the declarations of faith that were required of all who attended Cambridge. Newton actually encouraged one of his colleagues who held the same beliefs as he did to go public with them, and this poor guy was booted out of Cambridge and ridiculed for the rest of his life.
I'm not sure about the details of the drive that they're using, but it would be very cool, and lucrative in terms of getting a massive installed base of PSPs, if they let people burn the PS1 games they already own on to mini-CDs or mini-DVDs or whatever and just stick those into the PSP. If the drives were capable of doing it, all they'd need to do is set up some funky logic in the PSP to bypass the PS1 copy protect and region encoding. And since this thing is supposed to have the power of the PS2, it should be able to emulate the PS1. It's not as though they make tons of money selling PS1 games anymore, but im sure there are a whole ton of people with stagnant libraries of those old games. Even without a huge library of PSP games on release, this one cheap feature would cause a rush of people to run out and buy one of these things, and it would cost Sony almost nothing to implement, provided that the optical drives can run standard DVDs... which come to think of it, I don't think they do. (UMD was it?)
You're probably going to get firewire cards for cheaper than gigabit ones, and I have seen demo setups with firewire wall plates so you can network your home (though I don't know if they're commercially available yet). But this would seem to be an alternative worth looking into.
The writeup has 10 C!s. Very nice.
From post:
Even if you don't read the article, at least read the post.
The news site interviewed the guy running the fake and asked him why he was doing it. Shimanto.com wasn't making him any money. Rather he was paying a fair bit for the hosting fees. Plus it could get him in a bunch of trouble.
He was just doing it for fun...
Apparently, the guy has a history of doing the same thing, as well as domain name squatting, things like that.
Right now the Yahoo fake is gone, but it's now ripping off IBM's news site.
If you're a student you can get a decent edu discount. If you like to program, you can sign up for the student developer program for a fee and get an even larger discount. (Not 100% sure about this.)
Having said that, if you can spare the cash, get a powerbook. It seems more polished and well-built, and has some features (like superdrive) that you can't get on the ibook. But for the price, the ibook is really hard to beat.
...the fact that they put it in a phone. You can already get electronic cash cards to use at some AM/PM convenience stores in Japan, and JR is going to expand their Suica rail pass system to be used for purchases in station stores (that uses the same Felica technology). Even two years ago, you could use a phone to buy pop at some vending machines by showing it a two dimensional bar code.
IANA is under the control of ICANN, so it does have some authority. It sounds like things may have changed, so this might not be the case now. Even if they have no real authority though, it is the symbolism of it that is making the whole thing a big issue.
I think that's the way it should be for technical standards, but the Internet is not just about technical standards anymore. People and governments are looking for social standards, and legal guarantees and protections. With these things, the "show us a better way or use ours" approach doesn't work. This probably goes beyond the scope of what's being discussed in Geneva, but I think it's important to keep this in mind.
I did notice. But there are only two choices right now.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but economics and race are relevant to this. There are a lot people in many countries who know that the rich in (overwhelmingly caucasian) developed countries have a disproportionate share of money and power, and they want to make sure they have more say in what is going to happen next. This is about money, this is about ideology, and this is about race, but more than anything, it is about the symbolism. This would be a less of an issue if ICANN were truly independent and autonomous. I imagine just the idea of the whole Internet somehow being governed from California is unpalatable for some people.
I agree that the UN is undemocratic, but I think it is the best that is available right now, and the question over who governs the internet will need to be resolved before any good replacement for the UN appears. I agree with everything you say about the right way to do this, but I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime.
To get back to your original comment, there are countries that may find a legitimate need for some amount of regulation on data flow (Canada has been doing it on traditional media for decades), and the fine line between justified regulation and the countries you mention is the one that whoever governs the internet will have to tread. Although I'm sure that ICANN is competent enough to do it, the US government and the way they approach international and domestic affairs doesn't fill me with hope for the future. So in my opinion, the ITU/UN wins this one by default.
Are you saying that ICANN, that was created by the US government and still answers to it, composed mostly of white men from developed countries with capitalist agendas should have the authority? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer people who are a little more representative of the world.
It does, but that's not all. DoCoMo also stands for DO COmmunications on the MObile network.
Just as a service to anyone who decides to go to Japan after reading this. It does NOT let you get on every train, only JR ones. Which is great, because they run all the major cross-country routes, but a lot of the urban railways are private or municipal and won't accept it. And IIRC they are not sold in Japan so make sure to pick it up before you leave.
I am the king of denial. If I walk into a movie wanting to like it, I will find a way to like it I first thought Phantom Menace was ok, Attack of the Clones was entertaining, and Reloaded was a brilliant set up for a conclusion. But Revolutions was bad beyond bad. The first half dragged, but so did Reloaded so I expected something better to come up. But NO! All I got for my waiting was a lot of screaming pilots in big robot things, and a ripoff of dragonball z. I half expected Neo's hair to turn gold and Smith to sprout a tail. I really wanted to like Revolutions, and I used to believe that there was no limit to the power of self-deception. Revolutions shattered that comfortable illusion.