several years ago, 20 and 40 GB iPods were common, but now the largest most people have is only 8 or 16 GB
Several years ago, the largest iPod you could get was 40GB, and it cost $399. Nowadays, an 80GB iPod is $249.
If you buy one that's smaller, that's your choice. Presumably, people with large music collections would not buy a smaller device. You're somehow equating buying trends with the available choices on the market, and there is no correlation. In other words, the fact that 8GB or 16GB iPods are so common now doesn't mean that's all you can get.
Not to mention you're ignoring all the 4GB and 6GB iPods that used to be around. Remember, the iPod mini was the most popular iPod on the market in the timeframe you're talking about. So iPods have still only increased in average capacity, as has every other player out there.
Yes, Vorbis scored slightly higher. But given the convenience and ubiquity of mp3, I'll take mp3. I also took part in that test and honestly, I really couldn't tell the difference in almost any of the files I listened to (using a set of professional studio headphones). There's nothing there in those test results that a slightly higher quality setting wouldn't take care of, and as I said, hard drive space is cheap.
mp3 got a bad rep because of encoders like Blade and iTunes (which intentionally uses an old, crappy encoder to encourage use of AAC). But LAME has really closed the gap.
This model was the one at the top of the charts. "Was" being the key word, because it was selling for $90 at the time the article was written, which was November 19. That lasted approximately one week.
It's now back up to $186. The black model is $229. I suspect the brown model is still discounted a bit because it doesn't sell at full price. (And by "doesn't sell" I mean "people don't buy it".)
btw the top-selling Zune right now at Amazon *is* the black model, at #24 on Amazon's chart. The top-selling iPod is at #3.
This was a highly optimistic and now outdated article.
It's the same here. They're in stock practically everywhere. (I work in NYC and live just outside it and have been to probably 5 stores that sell video games in the past week.)
This is either a nice bit of PR that Nintendo's managed to put out there without a lot of questioning by analysts or the media ("look how much demand there is!"), or it's entirely a regional shortage, or it's both. If it's intentionally regional, Nintendo can "legitimately" point to shortages while driving those in unaffected areas out to stores hoping they can get "lucky" scoring such a hot item.
I wonder what areas of the country are sold out. I would almost bet that they've deliberately rerouted shipments from areas with less demand to areas with more, then concocted this story to drive up demand even further in those high-demand areas.
But I know that where I'm sitting right now, I and about 8 million other people could walk out of my office and in five minutes return with a Nintendo Wii, bought for $249, no strings attached.
I guess I gotta commend Nintendo for knowing how to play the hype machine. But look at it this way: if Nintendo's selling 350,000 Wiis *per week*, people are finding them and buying them. There is no nationwide shortage when you're selling systems at the rate of 1.4 million a month.
Considering does not mean they're actuallg going to do it.
No, but then who really expected EMI to drop DRM either?
EMI is a wounded animal prone to doing all sorts of things that other people in the industry would consider crazy, but that the rest of the world has been saying record labels need to do to stay viable. They're losing money, their market share is sinking, and they need to do whatever they can to both tighten their belts and get some good PR.
I'd give this about a 50/50 chance of actually happening.
I'm on my third 360 but besides it breaking all the time I would not call it a POS. It's actually quite great.
If you bought any other product that required two replacements for defective hardware, I guarantee you would not be saying that. Try this: replace the "360" in the first sentence above with any one of the following: "Camry", "47 inch plasma television", "lawnmower", "food processor". See? It sounds ridiculous.
Why do people have this double-standard about the Xbox 360? If it's broken on you twice, it is a piece of junk. Apply the same standard of quality to it as you do to anything else.
btw, I was amused to see the 360 at my local Gamestop displaying the RROD on my trip there this past weekend.
Because if they had a blockbuster product they wouldn't be gaining slowly. A large company will gain market share simply based on it size and the amount of marketing money they can throw at it. Microsoft has a lot of money to throw. I'll consider Zune a success when there is significant demand for it and the division makes a healthy profit.
You're setting the bar pretty low. MS themselves are just as guilty of lowering expectations.
The fact is people have been saying the iPod was going to get knocked off its perch any day now for probably the last 5 years. Every year, analysts say the demand *must* have been satisfied by now, while at the same time arguing that there's a larger market out there that hasn't been tapped yet and that competitors could swoop in and take. (Somehow they fail to see the contradiction there.)
And every year, the iPod maintains its ~70% overall market share, while sales continue to climb.
Meanwhile, MS - the largest tech company in the world, with 95% market share in operating systems - can't manage to crack 5% of the market in media players. They say, however, that this is a "success" - they never expected anything more! Bullshit. MS throws $2 billion at a device for 5% market share? I've got a bridge to sell you if you believe that.
The Zune is and continues to be an utter failure. The fact that it's "slowly gaining" market share means nothing, because a) you're talking about the difference between about 2% and 5% of the overall market, hardly earth-shattering news for a product redesign, and b) it's coming at the expense of Apple's other competitors, not at the expense of Apple. In other words, the number of iPod haters is the same as it ever was, they're just consolidating.
With its current strategy, MS has essentially zero chance of ever making a dent in Apple's dominance. I agree with the original article in that they seem to be about 2 years behind Apple and not catching up. When Apple had an 80GB iPod, MS had a 30GB Zune that was bigger and fatter. Now that Apple has a 120GB iPod, the iPhone and the iPod Touch with touch screens, MS has... an 80GB Zune. Yay. And I still don't think Zunes can be used out of the box as portable hard drives, which is the main reason a lot of people buy the "big" iPods. (Few people have music collections that hit 120GB in size.)
The only competitor that really has a chance at catching Apple worldwide is Sony. Sony's built their market share in Japan up to around 40% with some interesting Walkman models and some good old-fashioned celebrity-based marketing. They've also got a series of popular phone models with the Walkman branding. We'll see if they ever try to make a real push in the US again - their last few attempts didn't go too well, but then that was before they found the right formula in Japan either. Now that they've got their home market going their way, they may try to transfer some of what they've learned there to the US.
But forget about the Zune unless MS completely changes course and either does something significantly different than the iPod or gives up trying to play catchup and leapfrogs Apple on specs and design (don't hold your breath there).
I understand your anger, but the issue here is whether the low-carb propaganda is really bullshit or not. It is a matter that should be investigated, otherwise those dismissing it as bullshit would effectively act as anti-low-carb zealots, instead of following the scientific method.
Ok, here's your scientific study:
Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
Excess calories make you fat. That's a law of physics; I have no idea why some people dispute it. It's like arguing with the law of gravity. The only question is whether calories coming from different sources are absorbed more slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same unless you're exercising to stay in shape. A calorie is a unit of energy and if that energy is not used, it must be stored. Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it.
And I really don't think there are any scientists out there saying otherwise; I don't know of any scientist saying "eating fat makes you fat" or even "eating carbs makes you fat". The only time that's ever said is in the context of certain types of high-fat or high-carb foods generally being higher in calories, which is true. Although again, Asians eat plenty of fatty meats along with their carbs and they're still thinner than we are. The reason is they just eat less. Which means fewer calories.
Not rocket science. And we've got all the knowledge we need.
I've used Firefox on my current laptop, running Vista and Linux; on a very old computer running 98SE and Linux; on a Dell running XP that's a couple of years old. On none of these machines have I had any memory problems with Firefox, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think of myself as a power user. I often have 30-40 tabs open in one or two windows, and I leave Firefox running for days at a time when I'm too lazy to just close everything.
Not everyone experiences the problems you describe
You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.
I work in web production and everyone at my office knows that you have to close and re-open Firefox every so often - because we're such heavy users, that means several times per day. It's something we complain about on an almost continuous basis.
We generally never turn off our computers (mine had been up 58 days when one of our IT guys asked me to reboot last week), and I had Word documents open at that time that I'm pretty sure I last opened in August. So it is pretty annoying to have to restart your browser several times a day. And btw, other browsers do not behave this way - not even IE. (IE's memory usage goes up if you open a bunch of tabs, but it drops again when you close them. FF just keeps taking and taking and taking.)
I initially thought it might be a problem with the Mac version of FF (I run a Mac at work) but it happens on my PC laptop at home as well, and it's even worse for my wife, whose computer has less RAM than mine.
It's definitely a problem with the browser, and I hope that 3.0 fixes it.
I don't use tinyurl or other such services in any of my web sites or blogs, but I do have plenty of other links that end up being broken after a period of time regardless, and I myself have taken down pages that others link to, thereby breaking their links. It happens.
I don't think using tinyurl on a blog is the proper way to use that service (it's really intended for things like discussion forums or blog comments, where long url's would break the page), but then there are plenty of other things that a lot of people do wrong on web sites these days that I think are a lot more egregious to the overall "health" of the web. Like, say, creating massively long url's in the first place. Remember when every page on the web used to have a nice descriptive, static, short url? That's the way the web was originally designed, and there used to even be the equivalent of "best practices" documents floating around talking about what your url's should look like. Now that everything is database driven and dynamic, we get urls that won't even fit on one line of an email (and are therefore broken when they arrive in an inbox), and that say nothing whatsoever about what the page they're linking to is.
This is a much bigger problem than worrying about some links eventually being broken - links get broken anyway. But the url's themselves have fundamentally changed how we use the web, and that's what forced us all into using tinyurl in the first place.
Ah, but he's not apologizing for the lawsuits -- he's apologizing for not releasing DRM-riddled restrictively-licensed music fast enough, which he thinks is what forced consumers to share music illegally.
Exactly. The bottom line is this article isn't saying anything like what's being implied in the summary; in fact, just the opposite.
His "war" with consumers, from his perspective, is that the music industry wasn't offering consumers what they wanted, so they went out and took it. But if you read the rest of his comments, the problem is he still isn't understanding just what it is that people want. He thinks that DRM-free music is just being used as a means to an end rather than being an end in itself. He thinks that if the record labels just give everybody music pre-made in the formats that they want, even if it comes saddled with DRM and even if consumers need to buy the same music over and over, that they will buy it as long as it's easy and convenient enough for them to get it.
He's totally missing the point, which is that if I have a CD, or a DRM-free digital download, I buy the music once and can then put it anywhere I want to. I can listen to it, my wife can listen to it, I can make a ringtone out of it, I can put it on my iPod or make a mix CD. His idea is still to sell you multiple copies of the same tracks in all these different places, and he thinks where his company went wrong was in not doing that early enough. That's just as wrongheaded as Warner ever has been.
And he says absolutely nothing about the lawsuits, which he will no doubt continue supporting.
Seriously, the difference between "races" is hardly so vast that the algorithms will have to be rewritten from scratch. In fact, they probably won't have to be rewritten at all. Are there really any facial feature that are unique to geographic regions?
First of all, are you really so PC that you need to put "races" in quotes, as if you doubt the fact that different races even exist?
Second, while it may not be politically correct to say, it's pretty obvious that there are visual differences between races. Most of these differences we can all agree on - Caucasians generally have lighter skin than those of African descent, Asians have a different eye shape (and really a different eyelid structure), as well as thinner eyebrows. Other differences are more subtle, but they still exist - I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom that Asians also "look younger" at any given age than whites. I put that in quotes because nobody can ever seem to pinpoint why, but different types of skin do have different properties and it could partially be a relative lack of wrinkles until reaching a more advanced age. Asian skin is different than Caucasian or other races' skin. Different races have evolved in different climates.
Most people here seem to think they're still teenagers. But as of this magazine cover, one was 33 and the other was 32.
This is not uncommon - in fact I'd say it's more common than not. My wife is also from Japan - she's 35, and most people here think she's at least 10 years younger. (Of course, in Japan, people think she's 35.)
So any age recognition software is definitely going to have to take that into account. The Japanese know it too; it's not just us, they think we look old as hell at any given age. (That's probably closer to the truth - we look old, they look normal. Some of it is probably based on our unhealthy diets.)
I don't see how this machine could work reliably in the first place, but it would definitely need to be re-tuned for any use in the west, if it's even going to have a chance.
The reality is probably that nobody got "the shaft", but also that it wasn't the employees' faults either.
I think there is a tendency among a lot of people to take this kind of thing personally. There's nothing personal about it. EA doesn't see this as laying off a certain number of employees; they see it as jettisoning an unprofitable part of the company. Nor should they see it any other way; we don't live in a socialist economic system, the whole point is to be profitable. It's not up to EA's board of directors or CEO to get to know every single employee and pledge to take care of their families forever, regardless of anything.
Employees, likewise, know there's always a risk of a layoff when they're hired. That's part of the bargain. In return, an employee is allowed to quit whenever he wants, with a reasonable expectation of finding another job in fairly short order. That's a freedom that people in many countries don't have.
I think this unnamed former employee is taking all of this a little too personally. Yeah, it sucks to get laid off - I've been through it too. But there was nothing personal in the firings and there is honestly probably nothing personal in the "cold" comments he's reading on the net either. All anybody on the outside knows is the games that this division put out, and that they're a part of a giant conglomerate that everybody hates as a matter of course. Those are what we have to judge this studio by. So how can he blame anyone for being harsh? People are just making a judgment based on the information they have. It's got nothing to do with him personally.
He feels bad now, but he'll get another job and forget all about this eventually. My being laid off sucked, and the job I got laid off from was probably the best I ever had, but it ended up advancing my career. I'm sure that I wouldn't be making the money I'm making now if I was still stuck at that job, and I likely wouldn't have a house or a wife. You never know how things are going to play out, and what's going to end up being the catalyst you need to take the next step in your life.
What "necessity" is there to require two button presses? This sounds like pre-iPhone thinking. Not that I'm a huge fan of the iPhone, but one thing it has done is forced people to rethink both what's practical and what's "necessary" in a phone.
I had a Siemens candy-bar style phone about 5 years ago that only required one button press to unlock. I mention that it was a candy bar because that means its buttons were unprotected, and I walked around with it in my pocket. Never once did I unlock it by mistake. All it takes is a combination of the right resistance on the buttons and requiring a certain length of a button press (1-2 seconds) in order to successfully unlock it.
People have a tendency to get tunnel vision, and to get locked in to a certain way of thinking (no pun intended) just because "that's the way it's done". This is probably why, after 5 earlier iterations, Windows Mobile still requires going into a menu to hit "delete" on a text message. The one thing I will give Steve Jobs credit for is looking at things like this and saying "why does it have to be done this way?" If there's no good answer, he throws everything out and starts over.
That kind of questioning needs to be done at every level of every single product design. You can't just continuously carry things over from iteration to iteration without any justification as to why.
Do you understand what an Islamic fundamentalist is? Do you understand that they hate most music, they ban it if they can. They hate women having freedom to choose and do things for themselves. They ban this if they can. Have you heard of honour killings?
Don't be fooled by this 'it's all our fault' mentality folks. There are religious maniacs out there that hate our culture, hate 'our freedoms'. And they want to impose their islamic law upon the world. They would kill us if they could.
And again, they only want to kill us because we are killing them.
You need to actually use your head for once and think about the argument you're making here. Your argument is extremely self-centered - it assumes everything a fundamentalist muslim believes is because of us. Well, guess what, there have been fundamentalist muslims in the world since before this country existed. The United States is not the center of the universe.
Why would they hate our music if they didn't have to hear it? What does being against freedom for women have to do with hating the west? (I'm not saying it's right for them to feel that way, but it's their belief - it's got nothing to do with us.) Ditto for "honor killings" - hey, we've got thousands of those every year here in the United States too, they should love us for that. We're practically showing them the way.
The reason they hate us is because we're constantly shoving ourselves down their throats. We don't believe the same things they do but we are forcing both our governmental system and our culture onto them - literally forcing these things onto them through military action if necessary. How would you feel if another country did that to us? Would you love that country?
Your attitude is as pervasive as it is wrong, and it stems from the fact that so few Americans have ever even been off this continent. We think the way we do things is the way everybody does things, and if they don't, they're just backwards and need to be educated. Well, that's not the way the world is. Every country has its own systems, its own culture and its own beliefs, most of which are far older and well-established than ours, and those beliefs may be diametrically opposed to yours without having anything to do with you. In other words, just because a person's beliefs are the opposite of yours does not mean they're reacting against you. Again, this country is far younger than the muslim religion, and there have always been people who interpret its laws strictly. But now, we have given them an enemy. We've handed them a rallying point on a silver platter. It didn't have to be that way; we could have left them alone.
I also find it amazing that nobody who parrots the same line you do ever stops to see the fallacy in the logic. If they hate our freedoms so much, why is our stated goal to eradicate terrorism by forcing those same freedoms on them? (Again, through military action if necessary.) The entire argument makes no sense from any standpoint.
Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less.
Just give me the full ending for the game already. If something impressed me enough, (which would usually be the music), I'll go and look for the composer myself, which is always a simple google/imdb search away.
I guess you're missing the obvious fault in this logic.
If the composer is not officially credited, he's not going to appear in either IMDB or Google.
It's not about displaying names. It's about assigning credit.
This is one reason why the PS2 has sold more machines than any other console. The PS2 consistently breaks down a few years after (usually the laser on the DVD drive).
Bullshit. People who say this are missing the obvious hole in their argument: attach rates.
If everybody out there were constantly re-buying broken PS2's, the attach rate would plateau and then actually drop. Think about it - a person with 10 games has an attach rate of 10. Then their console breaks, so they buy another one; now their attach rate is 5. (10 games divided by 2 consoles.) But that has never happened. The PS2's attach rate has only ever gone up, consistently, and at least to a year or two ago, the rise in attach rates was actually accelerating. (It's natural for attach rates to start to stabilize at the end of a system's lifespan, as people stop buying games for it.)
I've never been convinced that any model of PS2 has ever had a higher defect rate than the industry average, or were any easier to break. It was a popular system, so naturally you were going to have some people with breakdowns. It's not like the 360, which even MS has admitted has multiple design flaws (their own words) and seems to have close to a 100% defect rate, judging by both the anecdotal reports and by MS's expectations of what it's going to cost them to repair defective units. But here you have multiple people saying their launch PS2's work just fine - chalk me up as another, and Sony has never had to cop to any problems with these systems. There's never been any threat of any class action either.
I've seen about as many reports of the Wii overheating as I did of PS2 breakdowns in the early days.
Seriously, now we're going to have to deal with a bunch of obese people pointing to this study as evidence of why they don't feel a need to lose weight.
Something's obviously missing in this study, because there is a positive correlation between average lifespan and obesity rates, both when comparing countries around the world and when comparing historical rates within this country. The simple fact is that all else being equal, the fatter a population is, the shorter its average lifespan. The United States, for example, ranks 42nd in world life expectancy - Japan, with much lower rates obesity and average weight, ranks #2. (Behind Andorra.)
Not to even mention other studies (like this one, for example) that show that being even moderately overweight can increase your risk of heart disease by more than 30% - and that's our nation's #1 killer. That's to say nothing of diabetes.
I'll take my chances on being thin, thanks. One study that appears to contradict all scientific knowledge we've accumulated to this point isn't going to change my mind.
Can I ask? What the fuck is going on at EA? Do they even have a clue what they want?
It seems pretty clear what they want from the press release, which spells it out in no uncertain terms. They want profitability. Nothing wrong with that; they're a business, and this is a capitalist economy. You don't like it, either go somewhere else or vote your conscious for political candidates who believe in changing it, but don't blame EA for acting the way they're supposed to act within the system in which they exist.
This studio grew by 300% with no corresponding growth in profits. What is a business supposed to do? They're not running a charity for these employees.
Yes, I'm sure the hours were long and hard - I've been through it, working for a game publisher myself for 3 1/2 years. But I still understand EA's perspective. When you hire a bunch of people, you expect those people to increase your overall productivity, not just collect a paycheck, which is what it amounts to when revenue stays flat even as you bulk up the company.
The grunts - the devs, testers and other peons who slave in countless death marches - will get fired, while the execs will get millions in severance packages.
It's most likely that neither the "grunts" *nor* the execs are to blame here. Usually in a situation like this, it's middle management that's to blame - the project managers, the producers, the creative directors, etc. These are the guys responsible for the nitty-gritty decisions. These are the guys that the execs have delegated to.
Yes, it's sad that the grunts will get laid off. But that's life, and they should expect nothing less if their company isn't doing well. If they're talented, they'll quickly get hired somewhere else. If they're not talented, then maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
With the amount of software released in a month and the presence of perennial best sellers like Super Smash Brothers in the sales figures, I can't imagine the usefulness of a pared down list.
Wrong question. The real question is the utility in releasing these lists to the public at all.
The industry gets a list that includes sales data on every currently produced game. They pay good money for that. That's not going anywhere.
But what does anybody gain by releasing those numbers to the public? All it does is feed the trolls (some of which work under the title of "editor" for major gaming sites). Game makers hate it because unless you're #1, it just makes you look bad. The NPD feels like they're giving away part of the report they charge for, so they don't like it either. It's debatable whether or not it serves the public, because all we do is argue about what the numbers mean, as if we know anything. It's certainly not information we *need*, in any case.
So I can't say I have much of a problem with the list being pared down, and I certainly understand the reasoning for it.
Just one more example - a couple years ago, I had two spontaneous pneumothoraces (collapsed lung) in the span of six months. That calls for surgery to repair it. Even 10 years ago, I would have been looking at a thoracotomy - basically the same as open heart surgery, but for the lungs. They make a large incision, push your ribs out of the way (ie. break them) and then work on your lungs out in the open.
Instead, with modern advancements I was able to have the VATS procedure. This involves three tiny incisions and the insertion of a small camera to help the surgeon work. It's still a painful recovery, but there's a lot less interior trauma.
So it's BS to say there have been no advancements made over the last 20-30 years. Look at our life expectancy over that time - it's only gone up. That's not because we're net healthier (true, we smoke less, but then we're also much more obese), it's because we're eradicating or controlling more and more diseases, we're performing fewer and safer surgeries, and we're using more effective medications (yes, even for so far incurable diseases like HIV).
In fact, one of the things most people don't realize is that almost all of our life expectancy gains over the last 100 years have been due to disease control, not better overall health. In 1900, lots of people made it to 70 or 80 years old before death, but lots of people died when they were 20 from things like polio, smallpox and TB. Infant mortality was also much higher than it is now. In other words, we're living longer lives because of the health care industry, not because we're all eating better food.
That's to say nothing of modern pain management. Say what you want about oxycontin, I don't know how I would have gotten through the first six months after my surgery without it. A lot of modern medicine is focused on quality-of-life issues, which are important issues. 20 years ago, a doctor would have said to just live with it; the pain is good, means your nerves are coming back. The current thinking is it's not enough to just save a person's life, it's also about giving them a life worth living. After my pain meds ran out the first two weeks after my lung surgery, I was in absolute hell until I made it back to the doctor and got my prescription for oxycontin. People who have never gone through major surgery have no idea what real pain is like. Oxycontin made life bearable until I healed well enough to get off it (and seriously, it was about a year).
The pharmaceutical industry has its share of problems. But it's just way off base to say there have been no advancements over the past however many decades.
Maybe its because ED cures are frivolous when up against oh I don't know HIV or malaria?
No doubt HIV and malaria are important diseases to cure.
But you're trivializing ED, which can literally mean the difference between a couple having a child or not. Being able to procreate is a pretty basic requirement of the human species, you know - it is not "frivolous".
(Not that I have any problem with ED, but I've got a little empathy for people that do.)
The only thing I take from it is that they were interested in fixing bad writing. There's a reason why it sounds like the guy's a cannibal in the original dialogue. If that wasn't the intent, then it should have been fixed. I wouldn't necessarily attach any nefarious "family values" motive to it - if I read that as part of an approval process, I'd say "did you mean for that guy to be a cannibal?" If the answer from the writer was "no", I'd tell him to fix it. Simple as that, really.
I'd call this more part of Nintendo's quality control process - of which they are widely known to be very strict - than any sort of "censorship".
Actually, the value proposition is incredibly high if you're a music lover with eclectic taste. I use the service to listen to probably at least 40 new albums a month, and all it costs is about half the price of a single cd...per month. If I had to buy those albums I'd be spending at least $400 instead of $6. So yeah, the value's definitely there.
I can get just as much good info on whether or not an album's worth hearing by listening to the 30 second snippets on Amazon. If it's worth hearing, then it's worth buying. With your method, even the music you like will be gone once the service is gone, and you'll have to buy it anyway. So you'll be out both the purchase price *and* the "rental" price. Whereas with the buyer's method (ie. my method), I'm out only the purchase price. (Alternatively, you could not buy any of your previously-rented music, in which case you've just been totally fleeced and end up with nothing.)
So I still don't see how the value is there even when it comes to sampling new music. "Sampling" new music doesn't require listening to every track in full multiple times. That's just called listening to an album. And if an album is good enough to listen to repeatedly, then you're eventually going to have to buy it anyway because your subscription will not last forever.
We should be throwing all of these bums out, not legitimizing their corporate ties. A vote for Colbert is a vote in favor of corporate sponsorship of our government. What sort of example does that set?
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several years ago, 20 and 40 GB iPods were common, but now the largest most people have is only 8 or 16 GB
Several years ago, the largest iPod you could get was 40GB, and it cost $399. Nowadays, an 80GB iPod is $249.
If you buy one that's smaller, that's your choice. Presumably, people with large music collections would not buy a smaller device. You're somehow equating buying trends with the available choices on the market, and there is no correlation. In other words, the fact that 8GB or 16GB iPods are so common now doesn't mean that's all you can get.
Not to mention you're ignoring all the 4GB and 6GB iPods that used to be around. Remember, the iPod mini was the most popular iPod on the market in the timeframe you're talking about. So iPods have still only increased in average capacity, as has every other player out there.
btw, whenever somebody tells me that any codec (usually AAC or WMA) is significantly better than mp3, I always trot out this set of double-blind test results: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html
Yes, Vorbis scored slightly higher. But given the convenience and ubiquity of mp3, I'll take mp3. I also took part in that test and honestly, I really couldn't tell the difference in almost any of the files I listened to (using a set of professional studio headphones). There's nothing there in those test results that a slightly higher quality setting wouldn't take care of, and as I said, hard drive space is cheap.
mp3 got a bad rep because of encoders like Blade and iTunes (which intentionally uses an old, crappy encoder to encourage use of AAC). But LAME has really closed the gap.
It just shows that Microsoft can afford to lose money to gain market share.
Apparently not.
This model was the one at the top of the charts. "Was" being the key word, because it was selling for $90 at the time the article was written, which was November 19. That lasted approximately one week.
It's now back up to $186. The black model is $229. I suspect the brown model is still discounted a bit because it doesn't sell at full price. (And by "doesn't sell" I mean "people don't buy it".)
btw the top-selling Zune right now at Amazon *is* the black model, at #24 on Amazon's chart. The top-selling iPod is at #3.
This was a highly optimistic and now outdated article.
It's the same here. They're in stock practically everywhere. (I work in NYC and live just outside it and have been to probably 5 stores that sell video games in the past week.)
This is either a nice bit of PR that Nintendo's managed to put out there without a lot of questioning by analysts or the media ("look how much demand there is!"), or it's entirely a regional shortage, or it's both. If it's intentionally regional, Nintendo can "legitimately" point to shortages while driving those in unaffected areas out to stores hoping they can get "lucky" scoring such a hot item.
I wonder what areas of the country are sold out. I would almost bet that they've deliberately rerouted shipments from areas with less demand to areas with more, then concocted this story to drive up demand even further in those high-demand areas.
But I know that where I'm sitting right now, I and about 8 million other people could walk out of my office and in five minutes return with a Nintendo Wii, bought for $249, no strings attached.
I guess I gotta commend Nintendo for knowing how to play the hype machine. But look at it this way: if Nintendo's selling 350,000 Wiis *per week*, people are finding them and buying them. There is no nationwide shortage when you're selling systems at the rate of 1.4 million a month.
Considering does not mean they're actuallg going to do it.
No, but then who really expected EMI to drop DRM either?
EMI is a wounded animal prone to doing all sorts of things that other people in the industry would consider crazy, but that the rest of the world has been saying record labels need to do to stay viable. They're losing money, their market share is sinking, and they need to do whatever they can to both tighten their belts and get some good PR.
I'd give this about a 50/50 chance of actually happening.
I'm on my third 360 but besides it breaking all the time I would not call it a POS. It's actually quite great.
If you bought any other product that required two replacements for defective hardware, I guarantee you would not be saying that. Try this: replace the "360" in the first sentence above with any one of the following: "Camry", "47 inch plasma television", "lawnmower", "food processor". See? It sounds ridiculous.
Why do people have this double-standard about the Xbox 360? If it's broken on you twice, it is a piece of junk. Apply the same standard of quality to it as you do to anything else.
btw, I was amused to see the 360 at my local Gamestop displaying the RROD on my trip there this past weekend.
Because if they had a blockbuster product they wouldn't be gaining slowly. A large company will gain market share simply based on it size and the amount of marketing money they can throw at it. Microsoft has a lot of money to throw. I'll consider Zune a success when there is significant demand for it and the division makes a healthy profit.
You're setting the bar pretty low. MS themselves are just as guilty of lowering expectations.
The fact is people have been saying the iPod was going to get knocked off its perch any day now for probably the last 5 years. Every year, analysts say the demand *must* have been satisfied by now, while at the same time arguing that there's a larger market out there that hasn't been tapped yet and that competitors could swoop in and take. (Somehow they fail to see the contradiction there.)
And every year, the iPod maintains its ~70% overall market share, while sales continue to climb.
Meanwhile, MS - the largest tech company in the world, with 95% market share in operating systems - can't manage to crack 5% of the market in media players. They say, however, that this is a "success" - they never expected anything more! Bullshit. MS throws $2 billion at a device for 5% market share? I've got a bridge to sell you if you believe that.
The Zune is and continues to be an utter failure. The fact that it's "slowly gaining" market share means nothing, because a) you're talking about the difference between about 2% and 5% of the overall market, hardly earth-shattering news for a product redesign, and b) it's coming at the expense of Apple's other competitors, not at the expense of Apple. In other words, the number of iPod haters is the same as it ever was, they're just consolidating.
With its current strategy, MS has essentially zero chance of ever making a dent in Apple's dominance. I agree with the original article in that they seem to be about 2 years behind Apple and not catching up. When Apple had an 80GB iPod, MS had a 30GB Zune that was bigger and fatter. Now that Apple has a 120GB iPod, the iPhone and the iPod Touch with touch screens, MS has... an 80GB Zune. Yay. And I still don't think Zunes can be used out of the box as portable hard drives, which is the main reason a lot of people buy the "big" iPods. (Few people have music collections that hit 120GB in size.)
The only competitor that really has a chance at catching Apple worldwide is Sony. Sony's built their market share in Japan up to around 40% with some interesting Walkman models and some good old-fashioned celebrity-based marketing. They've also got a series of popular phone models with the Walkman branding. We'll see if they ever try to make a real push in the US again - their last few attempts didn't go too well, but then that was before they found the right formula in Japan either. Now that they've got their home market going their way, they may try to transfer some of what they've learned there to the US.
But forget about the Zune unless MS completely changes course and either does something significantly different than the iPod or gives up trying to play catchup and leapfrogs Apple on specs and design (don't hold your breath there).
I understand your anger, but the issue here is whether the low-carb propaganda is really bullshit or not. It is a matter that should be investigated, otherwise those dismissing it as bullshit would effectively act as anti-low-carb zealots, instead of following the scientific method.
Ok, here's your scientific study:
Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
Excess calories make you fat. That's a law of physics; I have no idea why some people dispute it. It's like arguing with the law of gravity. The only question is whether calories coming from different sources are absorbed more slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same unless you're exercising to stay in shape. A calorie is a unit of energy and if that energy is not used, it must be stored. Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it.
And I really don't think there are any scientists out there saying otherwise; I don't know of any scientist saying "eating fat makes you fat" or even "eating carbs makes you fat". The only time that's ever said is in the context of certain types of high-fat or high-carb foods generally being higher in calories, which is true. Although again, Asians eat plenty of fatty meats along with their carbs and they're still thinner than we are. The reason is they just eat less. Which means fewer calories.
Not rocket science. And we've got all the knowledge we need.
I've used Firefox on my current laptop, running Vista and Linux; on a very old computer running 98SE and Linux; on a Dell running XP that's a couple of years old. On none of these machines have I had any memory problems with Firefox, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think of myself as a power user. I often have 30-40 tabs open in one or two windows, and I leave Firefox running for days at a time when I'm too lazy to just close everything.
Not everyone experiences the problems you describe
You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.
I work in web production and everyone at my office knows that you have to close and re-open Firefox every so often - because we're such heavy users, that means several times per day. It's something we complain about on an almost continuous basis.
We generally never turn off our computers (mine had been up 58 days when one of our IT guys asked me to reboot last week), and I had Word documents open at that time that I'm pretty sure I last opened in August. So it is pretty annoying to have to restart your browser several times a day. And btw, other browsers do not behave this way - not even IE. (IE's memory usage goes up if you open a bunch of tabs, but it drops again when you close them. FF just keeps taking and taking and taking.)
I initially thought it might be a problem with the Mac version of FF (I run a Mac at work) but it happens on my PC laptop at home as well, and it's even worse for my wife, whose computer has less RAM than mine.
It's definitely a problem with the browser, and I hope that 3.0 fixes it.
Are any links on the web truly permanent?
This should be modded insightful.
I don't use tinyurl or other such services in any of my web sites or blogs, but I do have plenty of other links that end up being broken after a period of time regardless, and I myself have taken down pages that others link to, thereby breaking their links. It happens.
I don't think using tinyurl on a blog is the proper way to use that service (it's really intended for things like discussion forums or blog comments, where long url's would break the page), but then there are plenty of other things that a lot of people do wrong on web sites these days that I think are a lot more egregious to the overall "health" of the web. Like, say, creating massively long url's in the first place. Remember when every page on the web used to have a nice descriptive, static, short url? That's the way the web was originally designed, and there used to even be the equivalent of "best practices" documents floating around talking about what your url's should look like. Now that everything is database driven and dynamic, we get urls that won't even fit on one line of an email (and are therefore broken when they arrive in an inbox), and that say nothing whatsoever about what the page they're linking to is.
This is a much bigger problem than worrying about some links eventually being broken - links get broken anyway. But the url's themselves have fundamentally changed how we use the web, and that's what forced us all into using tinyurl in the first place.
Ah, but he's not apologizing for the lawsuits -- he's apologizing for not releasing DRM-riddled restrictively-licensed music fast enough, which he thinks is what forced consumers to share music illegally.
Exactly. The bottom line is this article isn't saying anything like what's being implied in the summary; in fact, just the opposite.
His "war" with consumers, from his perspective, is that the music industry wasn't offering consumers what they wanted, so they went out and took it. But if you read the rest of his comments, the problem is he still isn't understanding just what it is that people want. He thinks that DRM-free music is just being used as a means to an end rather than being an end in itself. He thinks that if the record labels just give everybody music pre-made in the formats that they want, even if it comes saddled with DRM and even if consumers need to buy the same music over and over, that they will buy it as long as it's easy and convenient enough for them to get it.
He's totally missing the point, which is that if I have a CD, or a DRM-free digital download, I buy the music once and can then put it anywhere I want to. I can listen to it, my wife can listen to it, I can make a ringtone out of it, I can put it on my iPod or make a mix CD. His idea is still to sell you multiple copies of the same tracks in all these different places, and he thinks where his company went wrong was in not doing that early enough. That's just as wrongheaded as Warner ever has been.
And he says absolutely nothing about the lawsuits, which he will no doubt continue supporting.
Seriously, the difference between "races" is hardly so vast that the algorithms will have to be rewritten from scratch. In fact, they probably won't have to be rewritten at all. Are there really any facial feature that are unique to geographic regions?
First of all, are you really so PC that you need to put "races" in quotes, as if you doubt the fact that different races even exist?
Second, while it may not be politically correct to say, it's pretty obvious that there are visual differences between races. Most of these differences we can all agree on - Caucasians generally have lighter skin than those of African descent, Asians have a different eye shape (and really a different eyelid structure), as well as thinner eyebrows. Other differences are more subtle, but they still exist - I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom that Asians also "look younger" at any given age than whites. I put that in quotes because nobody can ever seem to pinpoint why, but different types of skin do have different properties and it could partially be a relative lack of wrinkles until reaching a more advanced age. Asian skin is different than Caucasian or other races' skin. Different races have evolved in different climates.
One example - how old is this girl?
Another shot of the same girl.
What would you guess? 15? 16 at most?
She's 23. And she's even half-Caucasian.
How about these girls?
Most people here seem to think they're still teenagers. But as of this magazine cover, one was 33 and the other was 32.
This is not uncommon - in fact I'd say it's more common than not. My wife is also from Japan - she's 35, and most people here think she's at least 10 years younger. (Of course, in Japan, people think she's 35.)
So any age recognition software is definitely going to have to take that into account. The Japanese know it too; it's not just us, they think we look old as hell at any given age. (That's probably closer to the truth - we look old, they look normal. Some of it is probably based on our unhealthy diets.)
I don't see how this machine could work reliably in the first place, but it would definitely need to be re-tuned for any use in the west, if it's even going to have a chance.
The reality is probably that nobody got "the shaft", but also that it wasn't the employees' faults either.
I think there is a tendency among a lot of people to take this kind of thing personally. There's nothing personal about it. EA doesn't see this as laying off a certain number of employees; they see it as jettisoning an unprofitable part of the company. Nor should they see it any other way; we don't live in a socialist economic system, the whole point is to be profitable. It's not up to EA's board of directors or CEO to get to know every single employee and pledge to take care of their families forever, regardless of anything.
Employees, likewise, know there's always a risk of a layoff when they're hired. That's part of the bargain. In return, an employee is allowed to quit whenever he wants, with a reasonable expectation of finding another job in fairly short order. That's a freedom that people in many countries don't have.
I think this unnamed former employee is taking all of this a little too personally. Yeah, it sucks to get laid off - I've been through it too. But there was nothing personal in the firings and there is honestly probably nothing personal in the "cold" comments he's reading on the net either. All anybody on the outside knows is the games that this division put out, and that they're a part of a giant conglomerate that everybody hates as a matter of course. Those are what we have to judge this studio by. So how can he blame anyone for being harsh? People are just making a judgment based on the information they have. It's got nothing to do with him personally.
He feels bad now, but he'll get another job and forget all about this eventually. My being laid off sucked, and the job I got laid off from was probably the best I ever had, but it ended up advancing my career. I'm sure that I wouldn't be making the money I'm making now if I was still stuck at that job, and I likely wouldn't have a house or a wife. You never know how things are going to play out, and what's going to end up being the catalyst you need to take the next step in your life.
What "necessity" is there to require two button presses? This sounds like pre-iPhone thinking. Not that I'm a huge fan of the iPhone, but one thing it has done is forced people to rethink both what's practical and what's "necessary" in a phone.
I had a Siemens candy-bar style phone about 5 years ago that only required one button press to unlock. I mention that it was a candy bar because that means its buttons were unprotected, and I walked around with it in my pocket. Never once did I unlock it by mistake. All it takes is a combination of the right resistance on the buttons and requiring a certain length of a button press (1-2 seconds) in order to successfully unlock it.
People have a tendency to get tunnel vision, and to get locked in to a certain way of thinking (no pun intended) just because "that's the way it's done". This is probably why, after 5 earlier iterations, Windows Mobile still requires going into a menu to hit "delete" on a text message. The one thing I will give Steve Jobs credit for is looking at things like this and saying "why does it have to be done this way?" If there's no good answer, he throws everything out and starts over.
That kind of questioning needs to be done at every level of every single product design. You can't just continuously carry things over from iteration to iteration without any justification as to why.
Do you understand what an Islamic fundamentalist is? Do you understand that they hate most music, they ban it if they can. They hate women having freedom to choose and do things for themselves. They ban this if they can. Have you heard of honour killings?
Don't be fooled by this 'it's all our fault' mentality folks. There are religious maniacs out there that hate our culture, hate 'our freedoms'. And they want to impose their islamic law upon the world. They would kill us if they could.
And again, they only want to kill us because we are killing them.
You need to actually use your head for once and think about the argument you're making here. Your argument is extremely self-centered - it assumes everything a fundamentalist muslim believes is because of us. Well, guess what, there have been fundamentalist muslims in the world since before this country existed. The United States is not the center of the universe.
Why would they hate our music if they didn't have to hear it? What does being against freedom for women have to do with hating the west? (I'm not saying it's right for them to feel that way, but it's their belief - it's got nothing to do with us.) Ditto for "honor killings" - hey, we've got thousands of those every year here in the United States too, they should love us for that. We're practically showing them the way.
The reason they hate us is because we're constantly shoving ourselves down their throats. We don't believe the same things they do but we are forcing both our governmental system and our culture onto them - literally forcing these things onto them through military action if necessary. How would you feel if another country did that to us? Would you love that country?
Your attitude is as pervasive as it is wrong, and it stems from the fact that so few Americans have ever even been off this continent. We think the way we do things is the way everybody does things, and if they don't, they're just backwards and need to be educated. Well, that's not the way the world is. Every country has its own systems, its own culture and its own beliefs, most of which are far older and well-established than ours, and those beliefs may be diametrically opposed to yours without having anything to do with you. In other words, just because a person's beliefs are the opposite of yours does not mean they're reacting against you. Again, this country is far younger than the muslim religion, and there have always been people who interpret its laws strictly. But now, we have given them an enemy. We've handed them a rallying point on a silver platter. It didn't have to be that way; we could have left them alone.
I also find it amazing that nobody who parrots the same line you do ever stops to see the fallacy in the logic. If they hate our freedoms so much, why is our stated goal to eradicate terrorism by forcing those same freedoms on them? (Again, through military action if necessary.) The entire argument makes no sense from any standpoint.
Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less.
Ummmm... You sure you want to recommend that?
Just give me the full ending for the game already. If something impressed me enough, (which would usually be the music), I'll go and look for the composer myself, which is always a simple google/imdb search away.
I guess you're missing the obvious fault in this logic.
If the composer is not officially credited, he's not going to appear in either IMDB or Google.
It's not about displaying names. It's about assigning credit.
This is one reason why the PS2 has sold more machines than any other console. The PS2 consistently breaks down a few years after (usually the laser on the DVD drive).
Bullshit. People who say this are missing the obvious hole in their argument: attach rates.
If everybody out there were constantly re-buying broken PS2's, the attach rate would plateau and then actually drop. Think about it - a person with 10 games has an attach rate of 10. Then their console breaks, so they buy another one; now their attach rate is 5. (10 games divided by 2 consoles.) But that has never happened. The PS2's attach rate has only ever gone up, consistently, and at least to a year or two ago, the rise in attach rates was actually accelerating. (It's natural for attach rates to start to stabilize at the end of a system's lifespan, as people stop buying games for it.)
I've never been convinced that any model of PS2 has ever had a higher defect rate than the industry average, or were any easier to break. It was a popular system, so naturally you were going to have some people with breakdowns. It's not like the 360, which even MS has admitted has multiple design flaws (their own words) and seems to have close to a 100% defect rate, judging by both the anecdotal reports and by MS's expectations of what it's going to cost them to repair defective units. But here you have multiple people saying their launch PS2's work just fine - chalk me up as another, and Sony has never had to cop to any problems with these systems. There's never been any threat of any class action either.
I've seen about as many reports of the Wii overheating as I did of PS2 breakdowns in the early days.
Seriously, now we're going to have to deal with a bunch of obese people pointing to this study as evidence of why they don't feel a need to lose weight.
Something's obviously missing in this study, because there is a positive correlation between average lifespan and obesity rates, both when comparing countries around the world and when comparing historical rates within this country. The simple fact is that all else being equal, the fatter a population is, the shorter its average lifespan. The United States, for example, ranks 42nd in world life expectancy - Japan, with much lower rates obesity and average weight, ranks #2. (Behind Andorra.)
Not to even mention other studies (like this one, for example) that show that being even moderately overweight can increase your risk of heart disease by more than 30% - and that's our nation's #1 killer. That's to say nothing of diabetes.
I'll take my chances on being thin, thanks. One study that appears to contradict all scientific knowledge we've accumulated to this point isn't going to change my mind.
Can I ask? What the fuck is going on at EA? Do they even have a clue what they want?
It seems pretty clear what they want from the press release, which spells it out in no uncertain terms. They want profitability. Nothing wrong with that; they're a business, and this is a capitalist economy. You don't like it, either go somewhere else or vote your conscious for political candidates who believe in changing it, but don't blame EA for acting the way they're supposed to act within the system in which they exist.
This studio grew by 300% with no corresponding growth in profits. What is a business supposed to do? They're not running a charity for these employees.
Yes, I'm sure the hours were long and hard - I've been through it, working for a game publisher myself for 3 1/2 years. But I still understand EA's perspective. When you hire a bunch of people, you expect those people to increase your overall productivity, not just collect a paycheck, which is what it amounts to when revenue stays flat even as you bulk up the company.
The grunts - the devs, testers and other peons who slave in countless death marches - will get fired, while the execs will get millions in severance packages.
It's most likely that neither the "grunts" *nor* the execs are to blame here. Usually in a situation like this, it's middle management that's to blame - the project managers, the producers, the creative directors, etc. These are the guys responsible for the nitty-gritty decisions. These are the guys that the execs have delegated to.
Yes, it's sad that the grunts will get laid off. But that's life, and they should expect nothing less if their company isn't doing well. If they're talented, they'll quickly get hired somewhere else. If they're not talented, then maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
With the amount of software released in a month and the presence of perennial best sellers like Super Smash Brothers in the sales figures, I can't imagine the usefulness of a pared down list.
Wrong question. The real question is the utility in releasing these lists to the public at all.
The industry gets a list that includes sales data on every currently produced game. They pay good money for that. That's not going anywhere.
But what does anybody gain by releasing those numbers to the public? All it does is feed the trolls (some of which work under the title of "editor" for major gaming sites). Game makers hate it because unless you're #1, it just makes you look bad. The NPD feels like they're giving away part of the report they charge for, so they don't like it either. It's debatable whether or not it serves the public, because all we do is argue about what the numbers mean, as if we know anything. It's certainly not information we *need*, in any case.
So I can't say I have much of a problem with the list being pared down, and I certainly understand the reasoning for it.
Just one more example - a couple years ago, I had two spontaneous pneumothoraces (collapsed lung) in the span of six months. That calls for surgery to repair it. Even 10 years ago, I would have been looking at a thoracotomy - basically the same as open heart surgery, but for the lungs. They make a large incision, push your ribs out of the way (ie. break them) and then work on your lungs out in the open.
Instead, with modern advancements I was able to have the VATS procedure. This involves three tiny incisions and the insertion of a small camera to help the surgeon work. It's still a painful recovery, but there's a lot less interior trauma.
So it's BS to say there have been no advancements made over the last 20-30 years. Look at our life expectancy over that time - it's only gone up. That's not because we're net healthier (true, we smoke less, but then we're also much more obese), it's because we're eradicating or controlling more and more diseases, we're performing fewer and safer surgeries, and we're using more effective medications (yes, even for so far incurable diseases like HIV).
In fact, one of the things most people don't realize is that almost all of our life expectancy gains over the last 100 years have been due to disease control, not better overall health. In 1900, lots of people made it to 70 or 80 years old before death, but lots of people died when they were 20 from things like polio, smallpox and TB. Infant mortality was also much higher than it is now. In other words, we're living longer lives because of the health care industry, not because we're all eating better food.
That's to say nothing of modern pain management. Say what you want about oxycontin, I don't know how I would have gotten through the first six months after my surgery without it. A lot of modern medicine is focused on quality-of-life issues, which are important issues. 20 years ago, a doctor would have said to just live with it; the pain is good, means your nerves are coming back. The current thinking is it's not enough to just save a person's life, it's also about giving them a life worth living. After my pain meds ran out the first two weeks after my lung surgery, I was in absolute hell until I made it back to the doctor and got my prescription for oxycontin. People who have never gone through major surgery have no idea what real pain is like. Oxycontin made life bearable until I healed well enough to get off it (and seriously, it was about a year).
The pharmaceutical industry has its share of problems. But it's just way off base to say there have been no advancements over the past however many decades.
Maybe its because ED cures are frivolous when up against oh I don't know HIV or malaria?
No doubt HIV and malaria are important diseases to cure.
But you're trivializing ED, which can literally mean the difference between a couple having a child or not. Being able to procreate is a pretty basic requirement of the human species, you know - it is not "frivolous".
(Not that I have any problem with ED, but I've got a little empathy for people that do.)
The only thing I take from it is that they were interested in fixing bad writing. There's a reason why it sounds like the guy's a cannibal in the original dialogue. If that wasn't the intent, then it should have been fixed. I wouldn't necessarily attach any nefarious "family values" motive to it - if I read that as part of an approval process, I'd say "did you mean for that guy to be a cannibal?" If the answer from the writer was "no", I'd tell him to fix it. Simple as that, really.
I'd call this more part of Nintendo's quality control process - of which they are widely known to be very strict - than any sort of "censorship".
Actually, the value proposition is incredibly high if you're a music lover with eclectic taste. I use the service to listen to probably at least 40 new albums a month, and all it costs is about half the price of a single cd...per month. If I had to buy those albums I'd be spending at least $400 instead of $6. So yeah, the value's definitely there.
I can get just as much good info on whether or not an album's worth hearing by listening to the 30 second snippets on Amazon. If it's worth hearing, then it's worth buying. With your method, even the music you like will be gone once the service is gone, and you'll have to buy it anyway. So you'll be out both the purchase price *and* the "rental" price. Whereas with the buyer's method (ie. my method), I'm out only the purchase price. (Alternatively, you could not buy any of your previously-rented music, in which case you've just been totally fleeced and end up with nothing.)
So I still don't see how the value is there even when it comes to sampling new music. "Sampling" new music doesn't require listening to every track in full multiple times. That's just called listening to an album. And if an album is good enough to listen to repeatedly, then you're eventually going to have to buy it anyway because your subscription will not last forever.
So in your world, two wrongs make a right?
We should be throwing all of these bums out, not legitimizing their corporate ties. A vote for Colbert is a vote in favor of corporate sponsorship of our government. What sort of example does that set?