Mars isn't any fixed number of light-minutes from Earth, since their orbits aren't in lockstep. When they're farthest apart, they're, what, about five times as far apart as when they're closest?
You must be thinking of Earth's distance from the Sun...
If this kind of site encurages more returns than antisipated, might this prevent there from being a repeat of this promotion in the future?
Why would it? Pepsi (with Apple's cooperation) is the one running the contest, not any of the music labels. The music labels (both the "Big Five" and the indies) care which songs consumers choose to download, but there's no reason for Pepsi to do so (well, unless you make the stretch of saying they hope to groom more corporate teen pop a la Britney for use in their future ads), and there's certainly no reason for Apple to care. From their perspective, it's all the same - the sponsor (Pepsi) will pay the same 99 cents for an indie song that it does for an RIAA-associated one. Apple will the same cut from payment for an indie song as for a major label one, and will pass on the rest to the label.
Assuming Apple and Pepsi want more of the winning codes to be redeemed (certainly Apple probably does; Pepsi may not, since it has to pay for them), then the more of these things get cashed in at all, the more successful the promotion will be deemed to have been. To them, it doesn't matter what particular music is downloaded, because it's all the same to them. It only matters to the labels and artists. Someone might choose to download a tune from an artist on a Sony label, or from one on the indie Matador label, and either way, Pepsi will pay the 99 cents, and Apple will take its cut of that and pass on the rest to the label. The only ones who'll care what song it is are the label, possibly the artist (if not getting screwed by the label), and of course the consumer.
I don't consider that little battery changing problem to be very user friendly at all.
Perhaps, but if that's your basis for countering the original post's assertion that "it seems the iPod is still a superior product overall", then it doesn't really contribute to the argument for the DJ / against the iPod, since the Dell DJ doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, either.
In fairness, his wife is still a lawyer (they met in law school), and she's staying with the job a while, so while it still is a dramatic drop in their overall income, it's not what it would be if he were alone.
The work was just really getting to him in a seriously bad way - not every person will experience exactly the same thing in the practice, of course, and not every one will respond to given things about the practice the same way, but it was bad for him. Law, it turns out, can be an extremely stressful occupation; those of us who aren't lawyers tend to think of lawyers as overpaid scumbags, but there are reasons for all the stuff we read about, and it gets to (some) lawyers, too. It's not just that they have very long hours spent doing largely extremely tedious work; the nature of the work itself is apparently deeply troubling for many. They sometimes have to deal with really nasty people, and have to deal with it when their personal feelings about justice or Right or whatever are at odds with the way the law works. Lawyers typically have high rates of alcoholism, divorce, suicide, etc.; it goes on. It was getting to be really bad for my brother for a while; his wife has had some tough times dealing with her own job, but my brother's was apparently worse.
They've talked it over extensively (of course, since it affects their finances and everything), and decided he'd go ahead and leave his firm. Frankly, I'm glad for him.
I can totally believe it, actually. My brother went through years of law school and finished in '99, passed his bar, and became a lawyer. It didn't take him very long to realize it was something he definitely didn't want to do the rest of his life, and he just quit last month so he could become a teacher (yes, really). He'll take about a 75% or 80% pay cut, but he's still happy; he just really doesn't want to do law any more, and would rather do something like teaching high school bio.
I've already posted this same info elsewhere under this story, but I'll post the same thing in a few more places to ensure people see it who need to:
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
(Presumably, now that they've evidently identified the specific issue, they have a supply of corrected logic boards that'll actually work, so hopefully they won't be swapping out more failed boards with ones that are just waiting to fail.)
I've already posted this same info elsewhere under this story, but I'll post the same thing in a few more places to ensure people see it who need to:
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
I've already posted this same info elsewhere under this story, but I'll post the same thing in a few more places to ensure people see it who need to:
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
I already posted this same info elsewhere under this story, but I'll post the same thing in a few more places to ensure people see it who need to:
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
As it turns out, they just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
I got it (the bit about avoiding "any real critical thought" made it patently obvious, after all; I don't claim to pick up on everything, but I'm not completely dim;) ), but I thought it a good springboard for what I wanted to say anyway.
Indeed. Frankly, I'd feel more guilty about using Windows than about using any alternative.
That said, this guy has a valid rant. I'm as big an Apple / Mac defender as anyone on this board, as my post history should show, but if I'd had as rotten luck with an iBook as this guy has had, I'd be upset about it as well. The iBook mobo problems certainly warrant serious attention from Apple. I don't know if they just had a run of boards with bad parts or what, but whatever it is, Apple ought to do something to correct it, both to be fair to its customers and to stave off bad PR.
Oh, certainly. That's why I put "hidden outrage" in quotes (i.e., it's really not all that outrageous). As I pointed out, they did this not by actually raising the price of any individual offerings, but instead by simply increasing the capacity of the players at each price point. Most people, I'm sure, won't feel compelled to buy all the accessories if their iPods don't come with them already.
I don't really have any complaint, except that their pricing for the individual accessories (notably the dock and the case) seems exorbitant. Still, one can easily see a market for the availability of the add-ons separately, for those people who get the low-end iPod and want just one of the extras.
No, it doesn't have OGG now; how do you know it won't get it, though?
I'm not saying it will, mind you; I just don't think those of us outside Apple have any real reason to know. Unlike WMA, whose spread Apple might actively be trying to fight for strategic reasons, there's no real reason for them to object to OGG. The only reason for them not to support it is that there's not much reason to support it. As I see it, they could very easily go either way on official OGG support in iTunes and the iPod, and there's no reason for any of us to say they will or won't do so.
Also, 4 months really isn't that long, report back in a year.
No, it's not. However, many people peole have had their iPods (and run with them) a lot longer than that, some as much as two years, and are still enjoying their iPods. What problem are they missing?
Indeed, but at least the iPod mini comes with the USB 2 cable, which some Windows users will need; for the "regular" iPods, it's $19 extra. That means for someone with a PC with USB 2 but not FireWire, the price difference between the mini and the 15 GB is effectively $69, not $50, and the 15 GB is on the other side of the psychologically important $300 barrier.
I do agree it'd be great if they all came with all the accessories, though. It's not just the mini; the 15 GB doesn't come with the dock, remote or case.
Here's the really interesting "hidden outrage": A few months ago, when the iPod line was 10 / 15 / 30 and the 15 was the $399 midrange instead of the $299 low end, the 15 did have all those extras (since Apple includes them with the midrange and high end, while making them optional for the low end). Apple sells each of those items for $39 (overpriced, but there you go). That means that a few months ago one could have bought a 15 GB that included all the extras for $399; now it would cost you $416, or $17 more, to get the same stuff (!), since you buy the extras separately - yet remarkably, they achieved this not by actually raising the price of anything, but by simply improving everything - they just replaced the midrange 15 with a 20, and then the low end 10 with a 15, while keeping all the other specs (prices and included extras) the same. Pretty damn clever of them, if you ask me...
It's already been pointed out the iPod mini is priced competitively with the other players that cost and hold less than the regular iPods, so I won't harp on that here; I'll just add that for a lot of users, the price difference between the mini and the 15 GB iPod is effectively more than $50 - that's if you intend to use it with a PC with USB 2 rather than FireWire. All the current iPods now support USB 2 on Windows, but the "regular" iPods don't include the cable needed to use it; that's $19 extra. The iPod mini comes out of the box with that cable though (as well as FireWire, of course), so the extra purchase isn't required. Therefore, if someone wants an iPod to use with a PC that has USB 2 but not FireWire (and there are probably a fair number of such users out there), the 15 GB would ultimately cost $318, not $299. A lot of users are not going to pay the $69 difference between $249 and $318, even if it does mean getting more than 3 times the capacity.
The added cost of the cable doesn't actually add that much, but it does push the price past a significant psychological barrier. There are some people for whom $300 (or more) is simply too much for an MP3 player, no matter how much better the deal (in terms of price/storage ratio) than a $250 player.
Yeah, but to be fair Lucas' involvement with that was minimal (it doesn't even have his name on it, not even for a "Based upon characters created by..." credit). Lucas did work on it, but he wasn't the driving force behind it, and when he finally saw the end result he completely disowned it. Given that, one could reasonably expect that any Star Wars material he really worked on and was proud enough of to put his name on would be better - and it was, at least for a few years...
Oh, I do love the music (I have the Radioland Murders soundtrack, and I don't even hate the film (I actually saw it twice theatrically, and had to drive an hour to see it the first time). It's actually interesting in its social underpinnings - the movie has a subtext about the cultural transition from a world when radio was a much bigger force than it is now to one where television dominates, and if you know something of the history (Lucas actually had the idea as far back as around the American Graffiti / Star Wars [i.e., Episode IV] period in the '70s; the movie was a project he'd had percolating on a back burner for ~25 years), you can see some of the social ideas that were at play in the original idea he'd had as a young filmmaker (whose studies had involved both filmmaking and anthropology, after all). It's as fast-paced as any of the Star Wars episodes or Indy adventures, and has a lot to recommend it; unfortunately, it's just not particularly funny, which is a pretty serious shortcoming for a comedy.
Incidentally (just as a possible trivia point), it's apparently part of the same universe as American Graffiti - reputedly, Penny and Roger Henderson, the characters played by Mary Stuart Masterson and Brian Benben, are the parents of Curt and Laurie Henderson, the characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Cindy Williams in American Graffiti, making Radioland Murders yet another Lucasfilm prequel of sorts (along with Star Wars Episodes I, II and III, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and all of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).
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Mars isn't any fixed number of light-minutes from Earth, since their orbits aren't in lockstep. When they're farthest apart, they're, what, about five times as far apart as when they're closest?
You must be thinking of Earth's distance from the Sun...
Why would it? Pepsi (with Apple's cooperation) is the one running the contest, not any of the music labels. The music labels (both the "Big Five" and the indies) care which songs consumers choose to download, but there's no reason for Pepsi to do so (well, unless you make the stretch of saying they hope to groom more corporate teen pop a la Britney for use in their future ads), and there's certainly no reason for Apple to care. From their perspective, it's all the same - the sponsor (Pepsi) will pay the same 99 cents for an indie song that it does for an RIAA-associated one. Apple will the same cut from payment for an indie song as for a major label one, and will pass on the rest to the label.
Assuming Apple and Pepsi want more of the winning codes to be redeemed (certainly Apple probably does; Pepsi may not, since it has to pay for them), then the more of these things get cashed in at all, the more successful the promotion will be deemed to have been. To them, it doesn't matter what particular music is downloaded, because it's all the same to them. It only matters to the labels and artists. Someone might choose to download a tune from an artist on a Sony label, or from one on the indie Matador label, and either way, Pepsi will pay the 99 cents, and Apple will take its cut of that and pass on the rest to the label. The only ones who'll care what song it is are the label, possibly the artist (if not getting screwed by the label), and of course the consumer.
Perhaps, but if that's your basis for countering the original post's assertion that "it seems the iPod is still a superior product overall", then it doesn't really contribute to the argument for the DJ / against the iPod, since the Dell DJ doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, either.
Ok, but did that (or any of the other stupider things you could pull out) happen last year?
I have a feeling that'll show up somewhere on next year's list.
The work was just really getting to him in a seriously bad way - not every person will experience exactly the same thing in the practice, of course, and not every one will respond to given things about the practice the same way, but it was bad for him. Law, it turns out, can be an extremely stressful occupation; those of us who aren't lawyers tend to think of lawyers as overpaid scumbags, but there are reasons for all the stuff we read about, and it gets to (some) lawyers, too. It's not just that they have very long hours spent doing largely extremely tedious work; the nature of the work itself is apparently deeply troubling for many. They sometimes have to deal with really nasty people, and have to deal with it when their personal feelings about justice or Right or whatever are at odds with the way the law works. Lawyers typically have high rates of alcoholism, divorce, suicide, etc.; it goes on. It was getting to be really bad for my brother for a while; his wife has had some tough times dealing with her own job, but my brother's was apparently worse.
They've talked it over extensively (of course, since it affects their finances and everything), and decided he'd go ahead and leave his firm. Frankly, I'm glad for him.
I can totally believe it, actually. My brother went through years of law school and finished in '99, passed his bar, and became a lawyer. It didn't take him very long to realize it was something he definitely didn't want to do the rest of his life, and he just quit last month so he could become a teacher (yes, really). He'll take about a 75% or 80% pay cut, but he's still happy; he just really doesn't want to do law any more, and would rather do something like teaching high school bio.
Actually, it didn't. There have been rumblings about a class action lawsuit, but there hasn't actually been one filed.
Frankly, this program probably provides a more satisfactory resolution for customers than a class action suit would have anyway...
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
(Presumably, now that they've evidently identified the specific issue, they have a supply of corrected logic boards that'll actually work, so hopefully they won't be swapping out more failed boards with ones that are just waiting to fail.)
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
Apple just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
As it turns out, they just today announced a new service program for the affected iBooks that covers them for three years from the date of sale, and also reimburses customers for any repairs for this problem that customers had to pay for before today.
(shrug)
That said, this guy has a valid rant. I'm as big an Apple / Mac defender as anyone on this board, as my post history should show, but if I'd had as rotten luck with an iBook as this guy has had, I'd be upset about it as well. The iBook mobo problems certainly warrant serious attention from Apple. I don't know if they just had a run of boards with bad parts or what, but whatever it is, Apple ought to do something to correct it, both to be fair to its customers and to stave off bad PR.
I don't really have any complaint, except that their pricing for the individual accessories (notably the dock and the case) seems exorbitant. Still, one can easily see a market for the availability of the add-ons separately, for those people who get the low-end iPod and want just one of the extras.
Actually, for some of us, the music awards are among the most important.
I'm not saying it will, mind you; I just don't think those of us outside Apple have any real reason to know. Unlike WMA, whose spread Apple might actively be trying to fight for strategic reasons, there's no real reason for them to object to OGG. The only reason for them not to support it is that there's not much reason to support it. As I see it, they could very easily go either way on official OGG support in iTunes and the iPod, and there's no reason for any of us to say they will or won't do so.
No, it's not. However, many people peole have had their iPods (and run with them) a lot longer than that, some as much as two years, and are still enjoying their iPods. What problem are they missing?
I do agree it'd be great if they all came with all the accessories, though. It's not just the mini; the 15 GB doesn't come with the dock, remote or case.
Here's the really interesting "hidden outrage": A few months ago, when the iPod line was 10 / 15 / 30 and the 15 was the $399 midrange instead of the $299 low end, the 15 did have all those extras (since Apple includes them with the midrange and high end, while making them optional for the low end). Apple sells each of those items for $39 (overpriced, but there you go). That means that a few months ago one could have bought a 15 GB that included all the extras for $399; now it would cost you $416, or $17 more, to get the same stuff (!), since you buy the extras separately - yet remarkably, they achieved this not by actually raising the price of anything, but by simply improving everything - they just replaced the midrange 15 with a 20, and then the low end 10 with a 15, while keeping all the other specs (prices and included extras) the same. Pretty damn clever of them, if you ask me...
The added cost of the cable doesn't actually add that much, but it does push the price past a significant psychological barrier. There are some people for whom $300 (or more) is simply too much for an MP3 player, no matter how much better the deal (in terms of price/storage ratio) than a $250 player.
Yeah, but to be fair Lucas' involvement with that was minimal (it doesn't even have his name on it, not even for a "Based upon characters created by..." credit). Lucas did work on it, but he wasn't the driving force behind it, and when he finally saw the end result he completely disowned it. Given that, one could reasonably expect that any Star Wars material he really worked on and was proud enough of to put his name on would be better - and it was, at least for a few years...
Incidentally (just as a possible trivia point), it's apparently part of the same universe as American Graffiti - reputedly, Penny and Roger Henderson, the characters played by Mary Stuart Masterson and Brian Benben, are the parents of Curt and Laurie Henderson, the characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Cindy Williams in American Graffiti, making Radioland Murders yet another Lucasfilm prequel of sorts (along with Star Wars Episodes I, II and III, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and all of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).
That said, the last movie he directed before the prequels was indeed the original Star Wars, done 22 years earlier...
Gahh, stupid brackets... sorry; I forgot what site I was on for a moment... ;)