Re:Diminishing sales equals diminishing use?
on
The Dying PC Market
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, Japan has widely disseminated very high-bandwidth broadband to the masses. You might expect that this would lead to advanced computer applications beyond "browsing the web, send email, and run a few apps like Word Processing and Spreadsheets." But I guess it hasn't - makes one question why Japan bothered investing on the infrastructure.
It makes sense - why pay for music, when it's so easy to download the pirated stuff for free? iTunes has the people who aren't computer savvy, eMusic has people who like non-RIAA music that can't easily be found, Napster didn't really have a niche.
That said, the actual service (and Yahoo! Music, a competitor) is/was really awesome, for who enjoy listening to a huge selection of music - and have an always-on Internet connection - and have their stereos hooked up to a computer. I guess it was a niche, it was just too small of one.
The Fucking Article does not mention a single case of anti-terrorism laws impacting chemistry sets. It's hard to see a relation - the decline started 50 years ago. The Porter Chemical Company and A.C. Gilbert, the two companies that originated the Chemistry set in the early 20th century, went out of business in the 60s, and that's also when these sets started using less dangerous chemicals. It has more to do with growing Consumer Protection Laws and just changes in American tastes - the chemistry set was a 50s icon, like the hula-hoop, or countless other knick-knacks which have waned in popularity over the years.
Anyway I agree that dangerous toys shouldn't be allowed on the market, and I think most people would if the issue was put up in less contentious terms. For instance I'm sure 99% of Slashdot is opposed to toys made with lead-based paint. The author is waxing nostalgically about children having easy access to dangerous chemicals - like Seinfeld said, "I miss the days when they made toys that could kill a kid."
Seeing these "Government controls people by taking away the knowledge" posts - my god, take off your fucking tin-foil hat.
Rome pre-Christianity was not unified by a single religion, it was a melange of different religions. And Rome was more of a "spoils of war" based society when it was a Republic, not when it was led by an all-powerful emperor - at least after AD 100 or so. If you say it's all-powerful - all the constant assassinations showed that emperors had a check on their power from angry mobs and the military, whereas despotic Chinese leaders could rule with relative impunity for long stretches of the Chinese Empire.
The idea that the fall of the Roman Empire started with Constantine is completely ludicrous and obviously is more influenced by your anti-Christian beliefs than an honest view of history. He expanded the empire, consistently beat back Germanic tribes, and led to the empire's split into halves, with the Eastern half lasting a thousand years longer.
Writing = civilization? While there's an obvious correlation, not quite. All the Germanic tribes by the fall of Rome had adopted scripts of their own. Anyway the judgment obviously had a lot more to do with 19th century ethos than anything else.
Christianity was employed against the enemy - Rome pursued a policy of converting Germanic tribes to a Rome-centered Christianity, to make them more dependent towards Rome. So in that sense, Christianity probably prolonged the empire.
It seems you read history books for the sole purpose of re-enforcing your own prejudices, and don't actually absorb any of it. Why do you even bother reading?
Labels are really no longer necessary for a large number of bands to get their music out, with digital distribution, significantly lower production costs etc. And a lot of bands are dropping their labels as fast as they can.
Ha Ha Ha...no. It's a nice idea but not at all true. Popular music continues to be dominated by RIAA bands, and the only major band I can think of to buck the trend is Radiohead with its current release. Anyway that's not a fair example, as the band built up its currently following entirely under an RIAA label.
Keep in mind contracts usually run out after a set number of albums - the big artists are re-signing up with new record labels, not opting to go independent.
You talk about this as if it's a movement being led by bands, realizing they don't need labels. In reality, labels are instrumental in the promotion and production that is behind basically every well-known band today.
Apple admits that iTunes isn't that profitable, and that mostly its intent is to drive sales of iPods and Macs. To me it seems very reasonable that NBC wouldn't want to be a part of this loss-leader strategy, without some portion of the profit Apple derives from it.
And producing a "Seinfeld" is cheap? What planet are you on? Have you seen Youtube sketch comedy, and how much it sucks? Without the keen writing and star actors and smooth production, the product is shit. Whereas 30 Rock, the Office, et. al, are consistently much better than anything that can be found on Youtube.
New Zealand has a population of only 4 million people, with no significant technology industry. I'm guessing this effects a few dozen people at most, and all they have to do is install an update, or set their clock. Why should Debian bother with breaking protocol to save a few dozen users 10 seconds of work?
So we can draw an inference here: Americans value a profession in direct correlation to the amount of "people work" (interaction with other people) involved in the profession, and in inverse correlation to the amount of "inhuman work" involved.
In TV shows and movies, that's often true, it makes for more entertaining storylines. To be fair, living in China and being a huge Bollywood fan, I can tell you that Chinese and Indian entertainments also don't concentrate on people using math.
I'd say math and science is actually much more prevalent in US culture - science-fiction is a popular genre. In the meantime sci-fi novels and movies barely exist in China, and in India (with a huge film industry), the first science fiction movie didn't come out until 2003, and was mostly a re-creation of ET with lots of dancing.
...there sure aren't as many "americans" here as there used to be. Of course, I mean white anglo-saxon protestant males.
You think Americans are males?
Anyway, it's only the political leaders that are predominantly anglo-saxon males. Living in the SF Bay Area I didn't know any anglo-saxon protestant males. Only an incredible rube would confuse anglo-saxon protestant with american.
A lot more first and second generation americans.
I seriously doubt this to be true. Immigration has been fairly consistent throughout the history of the US.
Did you skip the part about the guy recreating 50's Germ Warfare experiments? This isn't an irrational paranoid panic response. I'd hope any government organization anywhere in the world would thoroughly investigate all recreations of Germ Warfare experiments. What would you suggest, the government just letting things slide?
Wow, a non-controlling stake, good nitpick on a minor point for a +4 informative (rated above the parent, obviously because it goes along with Slashdot's groupthink). But the exact same point could be made with a large number of examples, and I'll be a little more careful with my choice: Arcade Fire, the North American Label is Merge Records.
Their first album "Funeral" won all kinds of awards, they headlined Coachella, they played Saturday Night Live, they routinely play stadiums, and "Neon Bible" came out at #2 on the US charts.
How does this go along with "RIAA controls everything and doesn't allow any non-RIAA band to succeed"? How does anybody claim there's no professional indie musicians? Or that there's no big indie concerts? Or that there's insurmountable barriers to purchasing non-RIAA music?
These points are demonstratively untrue and show a complete unfamiliarity with non-RIAA music. There's plenty of indie musicians who make a career out of it, plenty who become famous, and even the largest venues will book indie acts - take the 8,500 seat The Greek Theater in Berkeley, which tonight is playing the Shins, a well-known band on the non-affiliated indie label Sub-pop.
The largest sellers of music are Amazon, Walmart, and iTunes. iTunes and Amazon will take indie music, and sell it on an equal footing with everything else. And while I'm not familiar with Walmart, I doubt they're in the pocket of the record labels.
The RIAA doesn't have a monopoly on production. Any fool with a computer can do a professional-quality job. These people just can't consistently do it as well as the top names in production, it's quite naturally led to an economics of scarcity.
Really what posts like yours show just how effective the RIAA is, and why it continues to exist even though every artist knows it's a Faustian deal, and every artist knows their alternatives. People like you may gripe about the RIAA, but really you're not interested in the large majority of music being created today that isn't RIAA, you just want the well-advertised, well-produced product that RIAA labels pump out. Nothing wrong with that, but blaming the RIAA for your not being willing to check out the many easily-available alternatives is ass-backwards.
In the US, you can easily buy an unlocked phone (Amazon or EBay are good places to look), and any carrier will sell their services without a subscription plan, although they won't advertise it - it's mandated by law. It's also mandated by law that you can hold phone numbers when switching between carriers.
When I'm in the US, I use an unlocked cell phone bought in a foreign country, and a local GSM card, it's easy. The only thing to watch out for is that the US uses 850&1900 Mhz GSM, most countries use 900&1800. So make sure the phone is at least tri-band, or better yet quad-band.
Really there's nothing difficult about getting an unlocked phone in the US, it just isn't well advertised. And really it's not a bad deal to get the phone bundled with a long-term contract, if you're going to have to have a cell phone anyway.
Its because of analogies like yours, that people think that ANY file sharing is illegal.
The site is entirely priacy oriented. Even the top 16 search results for the term Linux are pirated filed, mostly scanned Linux books and Linux warez. The site is a bad egg that is up to no good in the hood!
I have never heard anybody say all file sharing is illegal, so I don't think there's some clear and present danger that should cause Slashdot readers to self-censor their words.
The XBox has been out for 6 years now, and they're starting to offer downloads of anime episodes, to the 5% of American households than have an XBox. At that rate it will name them approximately 95 more years to take over the living room.
People have been talking about "Living room domination" since the beginning, but if that was at the forefront of MS's plans, they would have adopted XBMC as their own, they would have made the XBox 360 cheaper, they'd have targeted a broader audience that really isn't into games, really they would have done a lot of things differently. I don't they're using the XBox to build on the failure of Web TV.
I love this classic argument. Anyone who's never made a successful movie can never say Uwe Boll movies are crap. Anyone who's never been Miss Missouri can never say that chick gave an air-headed response. Anyone who's never written a #1 best-selling book can never say the Wheel of Time series is tedious.
According to the Wikipedia article, the extent that he predicted was Geostationary orbits (although he wasn't the first to describe the idea, nor was he an influence on the actual development of the satellite), and the extent of his pop culture contributions was assisting Kubrick with 2001, and then later novelizing the movie.
As a kid I liked the 2001 novel, I read some of his other works. Mostly they just described ridiculous nerd utopias without any real characters or character development, and constantly dove into his rants about his random list of pet peeves. The quite frequent racism was grating. Basically the guy is a crazy old coot who nobody would remember except that he was associated with Kubrick's out-dated blockbuster.
I'm guessing the ability for High Schools to freely perform Shakespeare adds a whole lot less than $4.5 trillion dollars to the US economy. By comparison, the GDP of France is $1.8 trillion dollars.
This study suggests that about 35% of the $13.1 trillion US economy comes from Fair Use. Despite the immense economic import of High School Drama Productions, I'm a bit suspicious.
I went to college in English and computers, I have a job which involves writing and computers.
And I absolutely disagree with the precepts your question. As an English teacher, you should be doing your best to teaching the English language, and an appreciation of the English canon. It's almost like you're sabotaging your own field, and hope to stress other subjects! The sciences already receive far more government spending and grants than the arts; anyway it's not your place to correct perceived imbalances.
Plenty of nerds here will advise you to read Heinlen or some shit. But the prose of science fiction (or really, of any genre fiction) is for shit and the metaphors shallow, and really don't add anything to being a well-rounded, broadly-educated youth. They're the literary equivalent of watching "the Matrix" and "Independence Day" in a marathon session, with no real depth or artistic value. Furthermore, the sort of people who would get anything out of science-fiction are the sort of people who would read it anyway.
I think people have too little appreciation for culture, here in China my friends (many in the Computer field) can rattle off 8th century poetry, and have a much deeper appreciation of history and culture. How many Americans can quote even a single poem? Honestly I think it's terrible that an English teacher has so little regard for their own subject. If you were the teacher of my child I would demand them being transferred out, and I strongly believe you're in the wrong field.
A noble sentiment, I guess, but artificial sweeteners are better for your health than sugar. Sugar makes you a fat fuck, rots your teeth, and fucks up your metabolism. These ill effects are widely known, but somehow glossed over. Meanwhile, saccharine has been extensively tested, but never associated to any ill effect.
Lance Bass didn't actually go into space, but as a rich person who wanted to spend his own money to make it into space, that sort of thing is exactly what the space program needs. Private enterprise realizing financial opportunities in space flight would be about the best possible thing that could happen to NASA, whether it's exotic vacations, or increased satellites, or zero-G research, or mining some exotic kind of space narcotic, or whatever the fuck people might want from outer space and be willing to spend money for. NASA right now exists somewhere between being a long term investment and as a propaganda arm of the US government, its future is always going to be in doubt while that's true.
What a silly question, Zonk. No way is Eve doing this to stay competitive! Why would they care about that? They just think economists are fun at parties!
You can still set up Asian input with a OEM installation of Windows, I did it with my old American HP laptop. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010347361 033.aspx is the first thing that came up on Google, maybe it even helps! The way I had it set up worked fine, except that you couldn't use Asian fonts for file names. Or maybe you could, I didn't really worry about it, everything worked fine. I wrote PRC Chinese and also occasionally Japanese.
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On the other hand, Japan has widely disseminated very high-bandwidth broadband to the masses. You might expect that this would lead to advanced computer applications beyond "browsing the web, send email, and run a few apps like Word Processing and Spreadsheets." But I guess it hasn't - makes one question why Japan bothered investing on the infrastructure.
That said, the actual service (and Yahoo! Music, a competitor) is/was really awesome, for who enjoy listening to a huge selection of music - and have an always-on Internet connection - and have their stereos hooked up to a computer. I guess it was a niche, it was just too small of one.
Anyway I agree that dangerous toys shouldn't be allowed on the market, and I think most people would if the issue was put up in less contentious terms. For instance I'm sure 99% of Slashdot is opposed to toys made with lead-based paint. The author is waxing nostalgically about children having easy access to dangerous chemicals - like Seinfeld said, "I miss the days when they made toys that could kill a kid."
Seeing these "Government controls people by taking away the knowledge" posts - my god, take off your fucking tin-foil hat.
The idea that the fall of the Roman Empire started with Constantine is completely ludicrous and obviously is more influenced by your anti-Christian beliefs than an honest view of history. He expanded the empire, consistently beat back Germanic tribes, and led to the empire's split into halves, with the Eastern half lasting a thousand years longer.
Writing = civilization? While there's an obvious correlation, not quite. All the Germanic tribes by the fall of Rome had adopted scripts of their own. Anyway the judgment obviously had a lot more to do with 19th century ethos than anything else.
Christianity was employed against the enemy - Rome pursued a policy of converting Germanic tribes to a Rome-centered Christianity, to make them more dependent towards Rome. So in that sense, Christianity probably prolonged the empire.
It seems you read history books for the sole purpose of re-enforcing your own prejudices, and don't actually absorb any of it. Why do you even bother reading?
Ha Ha Ha...no. It's a nice idea but not at all true. Popular music continues to be dominated by RIAA bands, and the only major band I can think of to buck the trend is Radiohead with its current release. Anyway that's not a fair example, as the band built up its currently following entirely under an RIAA label.
Keep in mind contracts usually run out after a set number of albums - the big artists are re-signing up with new record labels, not opting to go independent.
You talk about this as if it's a movement being led by bands, realizing they don't need labels. In reality, labels are instrumental in the promotion and production that is behind basically every well-known band today.
Apple admits that iTunes isn't that profitable, and that mostly its intent is to drive sales of iPods and Macs. To me it seems very reasonable that NBC wouldn't want to be a part of this loss-leader strategy, without some portion of the profit Apple derives from it.
And producing a "Seinfeld" is cheap? What planet are you on? Have you seen Youtube sketch comedy, and how much it sucks? Without the keen writing and star actors and smooth production, the product is shit. Whereas 30 Rock, the Office, et. al, are consistently much better than anything that can be found on Youtube.
New Zealand has a population of only 4 million people, with no significant technology industry. I'm guessing this effects a few dozen people at most, and all they have to do is install an update, or set their clock. Why should Debian bother with breaking protocol to save a few dozen users 10 seconds of work?
In TV shows and movies, that's often true, it makes for more entertaining storylines. To be fair, living in China and being a huge Bollywood fan, I can tell you that Chinese and Indian entertainments also don't concentrate on people using math.
I'd say math and science is actually much more prevalent in US culture - science-fiction is a popular genre. In the meantime sci-fi novels and movies barely exist in China, and in India (with a huge film industry), the first science fiction movie didn't come out until 2003, and was mostly a re-creation of ET with lots of dancing.
You think Americans are males?
Anyway, it's only the political leaders that are predominantly anglo-saxon males. Living in the SF Bay Area I didn't know any anglo-saxon protestant males. Only an incredible rube would confuse anglo-saxon protestant with american.
A lot more first and second generation americans.
I seriously doubt this to be true. Immigration has been fairly consistent throughout the history of the US.
It's not panic, it's just common sense.
Seriously, have you ever read an old book, or heard an old song? I have, and they're hella boring.
There's this excellent site called Google, you might want to look into it!
Their first album "Funeral" won all kinds of awards, they headlined Coachella, they played Saturday Night Live, they routinely play stadiums, and "Neon Bible" came out at #2 on the US charts.
How does this go along with "RIAA controls everything and doesn't allow any non-RIAA band to succeed"? How does anybody claim there's no professional indie musicians? Or that there's no big indie concerts? Or that there's insurmountable barriers to purchasing non-RIAA music?
The largest sellers of music are Amazon, Walmart, and iTunes. iTunes and Amazon will take indie music, and sell it on an equal footing with everything else. And while I'm not familiar with Walmart, I doubt they're in the pocket of the record labels.
The RIAA doesn't have a monopoly on production. Any fool with a computer can do a professional-quality job. These people just can't consistently do it as well as the top names in production, it's quite naturally led to an economics of scarcity.
Really what posts like yours show just how effective the RIAA is, and why it continues to exist even though every artist knows it's a Faustian deal, and every artist knows their alternatives. People like you may gripe about the RIAA, but really you're not interested in the large majority of music being created today that isn't RIAA, you just want the well-advertised, well-produced product that RIAA labels pump out. Nothing wrong with that, but blaming the RIAA for your not being willing to check out the many easily-available alternatives is ass-backwards.
When I'm in the US, I use an unlocked cell phone bought in a foreign country, and a local GSM card, it's easy. The only thing to watch out for is that the US uses 850&1900 Mhz GSM, most countries use 900&1800. So make sure the phone is at least tri-band, or better yet quad-band.
Really there's nothing difficult about getting an unlocked phone in the US, it just isn't well advertised. And really it's not a bad deal to get the phone bundled with a long-term contract, if you're going to have to have a cell phone anyway.
The site is entirely priacy oriented. Even the top 16 search results for the term Linux are pirated filed, mostly scanned Linux books and Linux warez. The site is a bad egg that is up to no good in the hood!
I have never heard anybody say all file sharing is illegal, so I don't think there's some clear and present danger that should cause Slashdot readers to self-censor their words.
People have been talking about "Living room domination" since the beginning, but if that was at the forefront of MS's plans, they would have adopted XBMC as their own, they would have made the XBox 360 cheaper, they'd have targeted a broader audience that really isn't into games, really they would have done a lot of things differently. I don't they're using the XBox to build on the failure of Web TV.
I love this classic argument. Anyone who's never made a successful movie can never say Uwe Boll movies are crap. Anyone who's never been Miss Missouri can never say that chick gave an air-headed response. Anyone who's never written a #1 best-selling book can never say the Wheel of Time series is tedious.
Rather, countless Slashdot articles have taught me that video games are actually a form of art. And perhaps the finest form of art, at that!
And who wants to see a sports league of what amounts to a Fine Art?
As a kid I liked the 2001 novel, I read some of his other works. Mostly they just described ridiculous nerd utopias without any real characters or character development, and constantly dove into his rants about his random list of pet peeves. The quite frequent racism was grating. Basically the guy is a crazy old coot who nobody would remember except that he was associated with Kubrick's out-dated blockbuster.
This study suggests that about 35% of the $13.1 trillion US economy comes from Fair Use. Despite the immense economic import of High School Drama Productions, I'm a bit suspicious.
And I absolutely disagree with the precepts your question. As an English teacher, you should be doing your best to teaching the English language, and an appreciation of the English canon. It's almost like you're sabotaging your own field, and hope to stress other subjects! The sciences already receive far more government spending and grants than the arts; anyway it's not your place to correct perceived imbalances.
Plenty of nerds here will advise you to read Heinlen or some shit. But the prose of science fiction (or really, of any genre fiction) is for shit and the metaphors shallow, and really don't add anything to being a well-rounded, broadly-educated youth. They're the literary equivalent of watching "the Matrix" and "Independence Day" in a marathon session, with no real depth or artistic value. Furthermore, the sort of people who would get anything out of science-fiction are the sort of people who would read it anyway.
I think people have too little appreciation for culture, here in China my friends (many in the Computer field) can rattle off 8th century poetry, and have a much deeper appreciation of history and culture. How many Americans can quote even a single poem? Honestly I think it's terrible that an English teacher has so little regard for their own subject. If you were the teacher of my child I would demand them being transferred out, and I strongly believe you're in the wrong field.
A noble sentiment, I guess, but artificial sweeteners are better for your health than sugar. Sugar makes you a fat fuck, rots your teeth, and fucks up your metabolism. These ill effects are widely known, but somehow glossed over. Meanwhile, saccharine has been extensively tested, but never associated to any ill effect.
Lance Bass didn't actually go into space, but as a rich person who wanted to spend his own money to make it into space, that sort of thing is exactly what the space program needs. Private enterprise realizing financial opportunities in space flight would be about the best possible thing that could happen to NASA, whether it's exotic vacations, or increased satellites, or zero-G research, or mining some exotic kind of space narcotic, or whatever the fuck people might want from outer space and be willing to spend money for. NASA right now exists somewhere between being a long term investment and as a propaganda arm of the US government, its future is always going to be in doubt while that's true.
What a silly question, Zonk. No way is Eve doing this to stay competitive! Why would they care about that? They just think economists are fun at parties!
You can still set up Asian input with a OEM installation of Windows, I did it with my old American HP laptop. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010347361 033.aspx is the first thing that came up on Google, maybe it even helps! The way I had it set up worked fine, except that you couldn't use Asian fonts for file names. Or maybe you could, I didn't really worry about it, everything worked fine. I wrote PRC Chinese and also occasionally Japanese.