I've noticed that my militancy - as measured by how much and exactly what I download - has gotten worse the more the *AA stupity has gone on. In the beginning, it was stuff I'd already bought. Now it's a little wider.
Interesting - my experience has been exactly the same.
I want to support the artists. I think most people do. I still buy CD's most of the time. But I will not buy anything encumbered with DRM (at least not DRM that I can't easily get around).
The more pissed off I have gotten with the RIAA, though, the more I've almost wanted to actively stick it to them. I've downloaded from Allofmp3.com, and I've downloaded through bittorrent. Not a lot, and I still try to justify it by saying it's stuff that I wouldn't otherwise buy at all. (For stuff I really care about, I still buy the CD.) But that's more of a rationalization than just downloading music I already own on another format, which is also how I started out. The RIAA has made me care a lot less about being on the right side of the law, because their idea of what the right side of the law is is both factually incorrect in many cases and also completely unreasonable. It's like telling somebody that not only can they not jaywalk (which is and should be illegal), but that they also can't cross the street from a corner with a "walk" signal. You're only allowed to cross the street in the presence of a uniformed RIAA representative, and if no such representative is around, tough. That is not an edict I'd follow, anymore than I'd follow their edicts about DRM'd music (especially their consideration of ripping CD's for my own personal use as "piracy"). Worse, the fact that they're trying to redefine the law on their own terms and enforce it themselves just makes me want to do exactly the opposite of what they're telling me to do. So now I'm going to jaywalk too, even when I wouldn't have before. I mean, if they're gonna make a criminal out of me anyway, I may as well go all the way.
They need to seriously start repairing their relationship with their customers. Ditching DRM is a good first step, and a necessary one. But it's going to take more than that to win me back as a full-time customer and to wean me off physical CD's. They need to completely re-evaluate everything from the top-down, starting with the artists they sign and promote, then the deals they sign with those artists (the artists need to be the ones taking the lead in promoting their music - I shouldn't even know what label somebody's on), then the way they distribute that music and the value they include with it. They need to be way more customer-friendly, which includes not insulting my intelligence with a bunch of American Idol wannabes all the time, not forcing DRM down my throat and not complaining that CD's are "too cheap". They need to realize that we're the ones keeping them in business with the products we buy, so if they want to make more money, they're going to need to provide us with more value for that money. Part of that means not crippling their songs with DRM.
Porn or not, I find it quite worrying that Sony is able to dictate who is allowed to print films onto Blu-ray. If indeed that is the situation.
It's not. Sony has unequivocally denied a prohibition of porn, yet it still gets parroted as fact all over the place (including on slashdot). Here: http://gear.ign.com/articles/756/756148p1.html
Be sure you read the update near the bottom for the quote from Sony.
AVN didn't find a "workaround" for Blu-Ray - that's just spin, as is pretty much everything else the porn industry says. Why would we not believe their sales numbers but we do believe they've somehow "reverse-engineered" Blu-Ray?
I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.
It's not as cool as what Netflix is already doing, which is letting you stream movies basically for "free" if you're already a subscriber. You get an hour's worth of streaming for every dollar you spend with them per month. And you can watch the same movie over and over if you want to. The quality is also better than Unbox (if you've got a good net connection - it automatically selects your quality level.)
You also really only get charged for the time you use... if you select a 2 hour movie and watch 5 minutes before deciding it sucks, you only get charged for 5 minutes, not the whole movie. Big difference from Unbox. And you can start watching immediately, you don't need to wait for a download.
You can argue about TiVo being hooked up to a person's TV vs. streaming over a computer, but TiVo doesn't exactly have a huge market share; I'd wager at least as many people have their PC's hooked up to a TV as have TiVo. And with people watching more video on their computers anyway, I'm not sure the distinction is really going to matter in a few years. A monitor will be a monitor.
All I can say is, be glad you don't live in Japan. CDs here generally sell for around ¥3000-3500 ($25-29 at the current exchange rate of ¥120:$1). Singles are generally ¥1000-1600 ($9-14). What's worse is that the prices are printed on the back label, so pretty much every store has the same price- you don't get those "Virgin Special Price $9.99" stickers anywhere.
On the other hand, we also don't generally get DVD's packaged as a bonus on a regular basis. Japan does. Japanese inserts are also usually much thicker than ours, with tons of photos - heck, several of my "regular" (non-SE) CD's from Japan came with a whole separate photo book (as does the random CD I'm linking to above). Even the CD cases themselves are thicker and better made. In short, you get what you pay for.
The RIAA's problem is they've been downgrading the value of their product for years, which of course is going to drive both demand and prices down along with it. Imagine if every big new release here came with the first couple singles (including b-sides), a live DVD, and a photo book - and that was the regular edition! That's akin to the situation in Japan much of the time. So it's no surprise that CD's there cost $25 or so and that people will pay it - they'd pay it here too if there was actually that much value in the product being offered.
This is interesting because its done in Australia and no one cares. I've seen a print out of a street with a pile of info on each house including in most cases a photo.
A lot of people would probably be surprised to know that many US municipalities already have such databases as well.
I can see photos of my own house as well as any of my neighbors there (or anybody anywhere else in the county), along with all sorts of details about their houses, including the last sale price.
Granted, the photo of my house dates to 2000 and is completely out of date at this point (unfortunately, because it looks a lot worse now!) - as I imagine will be the photos that this Canadian company's taking in fairly short order. No way they're going to do this on an ongoing basis.
I also don't really believe this is being done "nationwide" - that's 100 million households spread over a huge land area. They may as well be taking the census at the same time - this is a massive undertaking, and it's the first I've heard of it. It seems like a fairly small company as well.
As opposed to every other company/person/government agency/school/church/whatever than always blames themselves and spins things to make themselves look as bad as possible.
It's a western convention for companies to refuse to accept blame. In much of Asia (including the Far East and Asia proper), it's exactly the opposite; companies that don't accept blame - even if a problem is not their fault - end up facing major consumer backlash. Contrition is considered a business virtue and customers demand accountability. Companies apologize and look for an internal scapegoat at the first hint of a problem.
I'm not saying that's better or worse. But to assume the way we do business is the way everybody does business is wrong.
Now, that doesn't mean Sony's out apologizing for DRM in Japan either. But that's just because the public hasn't really woken up there yet. We're actually a bit ahead of Asia in challenging DRM (they're ahead of us in the technology itself; not that that's a good thing).
Has the press in America even been negative? The one news piece I saw of it highlighted the ridiculousness of the government's response to the advertisements. So $2M for good press in circles that quite likely would have gone unawares of the show is a pretty good deal I imagine in anyone major company's book.
First of all, Google the story using Google News. You'll turn up about 80% of all the news reports done anywhere on this. Browse through them - many of them are quite negative.
Second, I wish I'd had the chance to comment earlier because I know my thoughts are just gonna get lost here, but I seem to be the only one here who actually works in marketing and knows that there *is* such a thing as "bad press". As the VP of marketing at my company said in a meeting yesterday (where we joked about this), "I'd rather have that $2 million for more advertising". I mean this was hardly a best-case scenario, and yes, people did get fired over this.
Look at it this way. This agency has now cost Turner $2 million that they didn't budget, for a tiny little late-night cartoon that's worth nowhere near that much. That's $2 million that could have been spent promoting bigger shows, and that's probably coming directly out of Adult Swim's overall marketing budget.
Not only that, but it's going to cost the agency future business. No company wants to think that their message is out of their hands once they hire an ad agency, and no company wants to think that their ad campaign could potentially go 1,000% over-budget. My company was considering a deal with this agency and that's now off the table. This is, in the end, going to cost everybody concerned a large amount of money.
That's not even a comment on the city's response, which I do think was an overreaction. But it was also a dumb marketing campaign and the agency should have known better in this day and age - another point that a lot of companies based in large cities are going to take away from this.
The whole point of advertising is to get your message out there in the way you want it, spending as much money as you budget. It's not about watching a couple of dumbasses talking about 1970's hair styles in a press conference or over-spending $2 million on a show that probably had a $200,000 ad budget (why else would you even do a cheap guerilla marketing campaign?). This story became a lot less about the show and a lot more about the ad agency, and that's exactly the opposite of what any company wants from their marketing.
The first link has a chart showing all alcohol-related traffic fatalities over the last 20 or so years, the second is a graph showing only teen drunk-driving fatalities.
To summarize, teen drunk driving deaths are at record lows, 67 percent lower than in 1982.
Now, granted, that's probably for a variety of reasons, even including those dumb PSA's you see on NBC during commercial breaks. But to suggest raising the drinking age has had no effect would be ridiculous. You'd have to argue that teen drunk driving deaths have dropped despite the raising of the drinking age rather than in part because of it. And that would be pretty idiotic. It's obvious that the law played a part, and probably a large part.
This law is more than likely saving several thousand kids per year, at the cost of what? Nobody under the age of 21 has any more "freedom" to drink alcohol than they have "freedom" to smoke crack or drive without a license. There are plenty of laws that restrict all sorts of things; just because you want to do those things doesn't make them inalienable rights, and there is no guarantee in any of our founding documents that says anything different.
I'm not saying all of these types of laws are good - certainly, many of them are not because they are far too sweeping (affecting all adults) and achieve no tangible benefits. (The all-out ban on certain less dangerous recreational drugs, for example.) But a 3 year increase to the drinking age has helped dramatically reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths while just forcing you to wait a little bit longer to drink legally. That's pretty much the definition of a good law.
I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.
Tell that to anyone who's been running an OS9-based G4, who then upgrades to the latest version of OSX.
You're comparing OSX to itself. It's like saying Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows XP SP1. That's not what we're talking about; we're talking about major OS upgrades. The Mac OS existed before OSX, and it wasn't very long ago in the grand scheme of things. The last version of OS9 was released in December of 2001. I don't know about you, but I've got two separate PC's that were originally built long before 2002, and my wife's laptop dates to about that period also.
Upgrading from OS9 to any version of OSX can be *painful* unless you have upgraded your computer. OSX is notoriously memory-hungry (as is Vista), and it requires a graphics card with decent 3D capabilities to really shine (also like Vista).
I think the point made was valid - Apple themselves seem to be assuming that all of their customers bought OSX-based Macs, which means they either tossed out their old Macs or they're n00bs. Otherwise, they couldn't *possibly* expect anyone to update from OS9 to OSX without at least a RAM upgrade, probably a video card upgrade and probably a hard drive upgrade. So it's a little disingenuous of them to suggest that this is unique to the PC world.
You try running OSX with 256MB of RAM, which was a high-end machine back in 2001.
It's always a good idea to give at least a month of notice, in writing. The worst case is that you leave on good terms with the company, the best case is that they immediately escort you to the door, and have to pay you for as long as your notice was for.
They don't "have to" do anything in most (perhaps all) states. I don't know the breakdown, but the vast majority of states are "at-will" states unless there's a contract involved, meaning either party can terminate employment at any time for any reason.
There is neither a need to give notice nor is there a requirement for employers to pay you for that time if you do. They're only required to pay you for the time you actually work. If your friend got a "3 month paid vacation" by giving 3 months notice, it just means his company's HR department forgot to terminate his employment and the payroll department never caught the mistake. That's pretty unlikely at most companies.
Giving notice is purely a courtesy. It legally can not affect recommendations or references, and there is absolutely nothing any company can do to force you to stay at work in an at-will state. You're not in jail, you have no obligation to your company if you want to quit. Your company in turn has no obligation to you.
Look at it this way. Your company does not have to give you two weeks notice to fire you, nor would they. Why would you need to give two weeks notice to quit? Neither side is obligated when employment is terminated, and it doesn't matter who is doing the terminating.
That is, of course, provided you're not under contract or a non-compete, which are both different situations.
Xbox is not losing money anymore. They make money on it!
Incorrect. MS's entertainment division (which includes both the Xbox and Zune, but not much more than that) lost $277 million in the most recently announced quarter, which was through December 2006. It lost $275 million in the same quarter last year, so this is not even an improvement, much less a turn from losing money to making money.
No doubt the Zune dragged on those numbers a bit, but it's not nearly as costly of a product as the 360. The 360 should be subsidizing the Zune at this point, and it clearly isn't. The entire entertainment division is still being subsidized by Office and Windows. MS has lost billions on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and will probably never make that investment back.
Actually, I'm one of those people who does this, even before this article. I pretty much always use google, I have it on my 'address bar' as a quick link (Oddly, I rarely use my embedded web-browser search box). Often times, I'm looking for a Yahoo! service, which by habit, I use Google.
My wife does this too. I can't really understand it, but she's got Google as her homepage and even if she *knows* the address of a site, she will type the name into Google and then click the link that comes up rather than just typing it into her address bar and hitting control-enter. I have even seen her mistakenly search for Google on Google, just out of force of habit.
There are probably a lot of people who operate this way, using Google as a combination semi-automatic portal/search, whereas we mostly think of it as just search. They're typing things in not because they need to search for them, but because they just rely on Google to serve them up links that they can click.
In a way, I guess this is more like real, hardcore old-school web browsing - the first browsers didn't even have an address bar, everything was done through hyperlinks. (That's the whole point of the web.)
Lack of content IS the primary argument. I watch *ONE* channel of what is currently available that you listed or that I know of. That is NOT worth it.
Let me get this straight. I just want to be clear, because your argument as it appears is a very strange one.
Out of CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, UPN, WB, PBS, Discovery, Universal HD, ESPN, and TNT, there is *one* channel that you watch? Those are only the major networks offered on the free HD tier with my cable service. (There are other, more niche networks also on the free tier.) I can only guess that you're not a major TV watcher in general, because that list includes all of the major broadcast networks as well as the top-tier free cable nets even in standard definition.
And that's not even counting HBO, Showtime or Starz, because you say you don't care about premiums.
To say there's a lack of HD content at this point is ludicrous. Even the local news is in HD, at least where I am. All prime time non-reality programming on all the major nets is in HD. All major sports are in HD. Hell, people seem to love Battlestar Galactica here - it's in HD too.
The "no content" argument is one people have been making since day one that HDTV was switched on. At some point, though, it's an argument that ceases to carry any weight, and that point has long since past. You may as well argue that there aren't any good films on DVD yet or that the PlayStation 2 doesn't have any good games. Welcome to like, five years ago.
Sorry, that you can't accept that not everyone is interested in sports, premium stations, or every nature channel.
Forgive my asking, but what exactly do you watch? Late-night infomercials? The Food Network? (Hey, guess what.) Spike TV?
I'm not arguing against your choice to keep your current non-HD setup. That's your decision to make. But if you're going to publicly try to perpetuate this myth that there is "no content" in HD, people are gonna have to stand up and tell you how wrong you are, so your backward thinking doesn't infect anybody else. Probably 80% of all the TV that actually gets watched in this country (by total ratings) is now broadcast in HD, and there are only a few more major dominoes left to fall.
Now, this has been my perception. Mileage may vary... yadda yadda yadda.
Mileage may vary on this sort of treatment by professors (and mine sure does - I was actually the only person to get an "A" in my first college history class because I was the only one who disagreed with my professor's theory). But I don't think anybody's mileage varies on wikipedia - one of the only few facts you can count on it for with 100% certainty is that many articles contain errors. Nobody who uses it on a regular basis would say otherwise.
I don't generally use wikipedia for real research (I'm well out of college and don't work in an academic field, so I don't often need to), so the topics I look up are usually more pop-culture oriented. But my last two searches came up with some pretty egregious errors and/or malicious edits. One of them was the article for WNEW-FM, which recently changed its call letters to WWFS. In two separate places, the article said WWFS "had reluctantly changed" their call letters back to WNEW on April 1, 2007. (This was not just a coincidental typo; there is no such plan by the station. Maybe it's an April Fool's joke.) My previous search was for Ami Onuki, the corresponding article stating that she was divorced - a 2005 internet rumor that has long-since been discredited.
I made edits to both pages removing the offending non-facts. For all I know, whoever made the original edits have put them back since. This is a fundamental problem with wikipedia; it's not that anyone can edit, it's that human nature is often for people to be steadfast in their convictions, even if they're wrong. So while this notion that a large group of people editing articles will eventually result in the best accuracy is a fine ideal, the reality is that a small group of stubborn idiots hellbent on overwriting corrections to "their" pages can ruin it for everybody. That's true of anything in life that's open to the public, it's not just wikipedia. But it does mean that wikipedia can never be considered authoritative. Unfortunately, often the worst people in any community have the last word - and especially on the lesser-trafficked articles.
A perfect example of the best and worst of wikipedia - how it can eventually work but can never be considered authoritative - is the entry for American Airlines flight 191. When I first visited this page, there was a whole mess of misinformation about supernatural nonsense both before and after the crash, and another section listing all sorts of tangential conspiracy theories and connections with 9/11 and even Comair flight 5191 (simply because they both had "191" in the flight number). It read like an article on the Weekly World News. I removed much of this stuff and changed the wording on some of what was left. I noted why I made the changes, saying those sections as written really had no place in an authoritative, factual article on this flight. Almost immediately (the same day), my edits were mostly reversed. An edit war then started, which I stayed out of. Up until the last time I checked, which was just now, those sections had stayed mostly intact.
Finally, though, at least for the moment, it seems that most of the bad info has again been removed and some of my wording is now on the page in what remains. The supernatural section has been renamed "Almost victims and alleged premonitions", although one paragraph remains problematic and is labeled "citation needed" - I consider this paragraph urban legend. It should not be there, at least not as worded. The "history and media" section has had its 9/11 and Comair 5191 references removed.
But after all that, *some* bad info is still there and anyone who visited this page in the meantime would have unknowingly been caught in the middle of an edit war between those who just wanted to present the facts of this crash and those who wanted to present a sensationalized Fox News-style tangle of conspiracy theories and superstitions.
I figure I could get say, $100,000 consulting fee out of it, right? And it'd be well worth it to any company planning to introduce a really retarded DRM scheme.
The problem is, companies don't pay people to tell them things they don't want to hear. That's the unfortunate reality of the situation. They'd probably *gladly* pay you (or someone else) $100,000 to tell them a DRM scheme *works*... then they've got somebody to blame when it's cracked.
But tell them all DRM schemes are fatally flawed from the start, and that they shouldn't bother, and they'll probably sue you for breach of contract.
And if you do this as an employee, forget it. You'll be labeled a negative influence, and not a team player. It'll be the beginning of the end of your life at that company. Corporations don't want to hear that something can't be done, especially not from their employees. They're paying you to make happen what they want to happen. That's the whole point of your employment.
You can argue all day about how much better off we'd all be if dissent were tolerated and even encouraged in corporate America, but the truth is in most companies (and especially big media companies), it isn't.
So it's not a question that there aren't people who would love to tell these corporations how flawed DRM is as a concept; the corporations involved just don't have any interest in listening.
Stupid comment of the day, courtesy of the article: In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. "We're for interoperability," he said, "and there's nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability."
Well, their entire attitude seems to be that if DRM is broken, it's because the hardware makers screwed it up. And it's up to the hardware makers to fix it. (That jibes with the other comment about letting the hardware makers "off the hook" by ditching DRM.)
They still don't seem to get that it's the concept that's flawed, not the execution, and the concept is theirs. You can't take a flawed concept and implement it well and have everything turn out right. I mean it's New Coke all over again. Sure, New Coke beat "Old Coke" in taste tests - it was executed well. But people didn't want a New Coke, they wanted the Coke that they were familiar with. No matter how well that concept was executed, it was doomed from the start. And luckily for consumers, Coke realized it fairly quickly once the product hit the market, and they rectified it not by trying to tweak the execution (which would have been throwing good money after bad), but by basically undoing the entire concept. That's all you can do with failed ideas, because the idea is the foundation for every other part of the plan.
The music industry is taking longer to come around to the idea that DRM is their New Coke. Customers don't want it, and the more they hear about it, the less they like it. The music industry thought that people would become comfortable with it over time, but the opposite is happening - as people become more tech savvy, they're learning more about DRM, and they're finding out how restrictive it is. Two years ago, the term "DRM" didn't mean anything to anybody - now you see it written up in places like the New York Times, and it's turned into a four-letter word on the interwebs. Things are only going to get worse for the music industry from here on out.
There will be a change at some point, but no doubt a lot of the industry will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it.
Scroll to the bottom - the difference in quality is negligible at the same bit rate. It always has been (well, ever since LAME popped up). And given the tradeoff in convenience and industry support, I'd take mp3 any day of the week.
This is the line that people have been saying for 20 years now. The fact of the matter is that solar power hasn't yet reached a point where cells are efficient enough to pay back the initial monetary cost in a reasonable time frame.
Not really the point.
Are you a homeowner? If yes, then you know that you're likely to get back close to 100% of many major home improvements when you sell your house. Even if you don't sell, you still retain that equity - it's a saleable asset. Whether it's a new kitchen, new floors, new windows or whatever. That money doesn't just disappear. Of course, home improvements do depreciate over the years along with the home itself... but generally not as fast as the inflation in home prices.
Not all home improvements are created equal and it would probably take a pretty specialized sort of buyer to think $500,000 worth of hydrogen tanks and solar cells was worth it. But I think such buyers do probably exist.
On smaller scales, though, the equation works out even better. Say you put in a $20,000 solar system in your roof. It may only save you 30% on your electric bill each month (though that's not a small chunk for a lot of people). But now when you sell, you can legitimately advertise your home as having an electric bill that's 30% less than all comparable homes in the neighborhood, and that's environmentally friendly. (You also get a tax deduction.) Assuming you plan to sell in about 5 years, you would almost definitely come out ahead.
This is the way a lot of the changes we've seen in home design get standardized. People put in improvements specifically to up their selling price, and the costs and benefits then get passed down through several generations of owners. Those new owners then demand the same features - and more - from their next house. So I'd expect to see solar systems becoming more and more common over time, not just to lower electric bills but to raise selling prices. Eventually, you will be at a severe disadvantage trying to sell a house *without* such a system. I think it will be a standard feature fairly quickly - within the next 20-30 years.
(I don't yet have such a system in my house, but my next house probably will - whether I buy one that already has one installed, or I install it myself.)
I have to wonder why this is the news story when we have current rumours saying Square are selling off Siken Densetsu, Chrono and the Kingdom hearts franchises.
Could it be because your post is probably the first anyone other than you has heard this "rumor"? And since when are rumors posted as news?
I'll let you in on a little secret. At any given time, there are probably 100 rumors flying around the periphery of the game industry about publishers, developers, and consoles. 99% of them are ridiculously false. Mostly, they're started by fanboys (on one side or the other) looking to garner attention. Often, they begin with posts just like yours. In fact, your post is a classic example of rumor-mongering - no source quoted, and the impression given that "we" all know about these rumors already, with the implication being that this collective knowledge itself counts as "news".
There is ZERO chance of Square-Enix ever "selling off" these franchises. When has that ever happened? Publishers don't just "sell" major franchises, especially not money-making ones.
So put it to rest and get it out of your head. It's not happening, and it's not news. And I don't know who started this rumor, but for all I know it was you.
Most places I go actually have wifi already, so 3G is then irrelevant.
Bullshit. This is a *phone*, not a laptop. You're not going to be sitting at Starbucks 24 hours a day accessing data services on your phone. If you need data in a phone, then you need to use data wherever you happen to be, and that includes the office (where unsecured wifi networks are generally taboo), out on the street, in your car, or wherever. You've got wi-fi in a moving car on the interstate? Explain to me how that works. (btw I'm not suggesting you'd be browsing the net while driving, but while a passenger, sure.)
Wi-fi is no substitute for 3G in a phone.
And, in the absence of any sort of i-Mode like network of WAP sites in the United States, I'd go so far as to say that data support in general is basically useless here without 3G support. There's just nothing you can actually do with it. You need to be able to browse real web sites, and for that you need 3G. A phone without 3G is just a phone; any data features it might have will never get used because it will just be too slow and frustrating of an experience.
btw, the linked article goes to great lengths to confuse the 3G issue by throwing out all sorts of unrelated acronyms to make it seem as if Apple's smart by staying away from it. It also tries to somehow argue that EDGE and HSPDA are mutually exclusive; you can either have one or the other in a phone. The fact is Cingular has both 3G and 3.5G networks up and running and several phones that use them just fine (I should know, I own one), along with EDGE and even GPRS as a last-ditch fallback. I see no reason why Apple couldn't have done the same. (Don't give me cost; I paid zilch for my phone.)
I don't think the iPhone is going to flop because of its closed-ness. It's neat that I can install all manner of junk on my Windows Mobile device, but the main reason to do so is to replace the standard software because it is poorly designed. If Apple can deliver a phone / iPod / PDA device that "just works" and has a good user interface, I could live without the ability to add or replace software on it, And I suspect that there are many consumers like me, who do not want a hackable mini-computer.
True, and I count myself among them. But the problem is those people have many, many good phones available to them already, and often for free. My phone cost me nothing (in fact, after rebate, they paid *me* to buy it), it has 3G, it has expandable memory, it has installable apps if I want them, it has an mp3 player with external controls (on an external touch-screen, mind you), it has a QVGA screen, a 2 megapixel camera, and it has a proper clamshell design with buttons. Remember, I got this phone for *free*.
The iPhone is actually less capable than my phone in many ways - no expandable memory, no installable apps, no 3G. Even not caring about installable apps, I'm still getting less functionality for $600 *more* with the iPhone. What the hell am I paying for?
I think the problem is this: there are people willing to pay a premium for top-of-the-line devices, and there are people willing to pay nothing and get the best phone they can for free. But there are *not* people willing to pay a premium for phones that are at best mid-range in functionality. If I was paying $600 for a "phone", you're damn right I'd expect to be able to install my own apps on it. I'd expect to be getting a device with *at least* all the PDA functions other smartphones already have, and *more*.
If Apple wants to sell such a crippled phone, then it is way, way overpriced at $500-$600. The baseline expected price for a phone with basic features like it has, with a two year contract, is zero. I can see charging a bit of a premium for wi-fi and for the large screen, but those wouldn't add up to more than $200 or so. That's what I think the iPhone in its current iteration is worth. And that's being generous - I've got half a mind to subtract $100 for its lack of 3G support.
The NY Times article also makes a comparison to the original Mac, which despite the current pedigree was not particularly successful. I think the comparison is apt. The original Mac was not very expandable, not very compatible with anything else and it also was priced much higher than the competition. It was different and novel but only the Apple faithful (yes, fanboys existed in the 1980's too) bought it initially. It wasn't until they added expandability, brought in color screens and went through several OS iterations before creative types started flocking to it and more mainstream users even noticed it.
But it does go to show - as the iPod does too - that despite Jobs' pronouncements at any given time suggesting he always knows best, and that the products they're currently offering are the best they could possibly make, he has no problem listening to customer feedback and going back to the drawing board to make necessary additions and improvements. So I think eventually, we'll see an iPhone that's both useful and reasonably priced; probably several of them in a more varied lineup that includes different form factors and feature sets. (Just like the iPod.) And eventually, Apple really may challenge the top phone manufacturers for market share.
This ain't it, though. If we've learned anything over the years, it should be to avoid the first generation of any Apple product.
As you can see, it's a lot closer than this article would lead you to believe. The Wii sold in huge numbers its first 2 weeks, and it's now dropped off. The PS3 has held steady. They're almost neck and neck at this point.
Maybe, but offering criticism could just as easily turn into an incident that makes your company look bad.
Worse than that. There are liability issues that mean your company could be sued depending on what you tell them. Even something like "your attire was not proper business attire" could be grounds for a lawsuit in this day and age, if the candidate takes that to mean their religious tribal necklace was the problem. It's best for the company for you not to say anything. Which means it's best for you (and your continued employment) not to say anything.
Most large corporations have specific guidelines forbidding any sort of feedback for unsuccessful job candidates just for this reason. I know mine does (I work for one of the largest and oldest media companies in the country). "Sorry, we went in a different direction" is about as specific as I can get.
It's generally a good idea to think about the friendly but vague, non-committal way your average human resources drone talks; they don't talk that way because they like to, they do it because they are legally bound to. Your best bet is first to try to just refer any questions from candidates directly to them (because they're trained in how to handle them) or, when faced with a particularly persistent candidate, to try to emulate them yourself. Never say anything specific about the candidate themselves or their interview performance.
Almost all of these have better raw specs than the iPhone, with higher res screens and cameras, expandable memory, user-installable apps, 3D graphics and more. You'll also notice that the Japanese have almost universally shunned any form factor other than the clamshell... just as we have. That's going to be a big problem for the iPhone in terms of attracting mainstream users (in the United States). The iPhone's problem is that it's attempting to redefine a market that's already been defined through market forces; it's not like we've never had candy bar style phones here before, and it's not like we haven't had touch screens. They just don't sell as well as clamshells, and phones with buttons.
Back to NTT, though... what's the one thing all of these have that the iPhone doesn't? 3G support (which is old hat in Japan at this point). Another big minus for the iPhone. It's not like Cingular doesn't have 3G phones here either - I've got one myself. So this is another big negative - how are you expected to actually make use of all of the iPhone's internet features on a 2G network?
On the one hand, it doesn't serve much purpose to compare the iPhone to Japanese phones, which are almost universally more advanced than ours (funny thing is NTT does sell the Moto Razr, but it's like at the bottom of their lineup of already bottom-rung 2G non-FOMA phones, and I didn't see a single one last time I was there). On the other, I do think it's worth pointing out that the iPhone is really not as advanced as some people seem to think it is. And I also think it's interesting (and telling) that even a place like Japan, which has embraced Apple's design ethos and which places so much importance on industrial design, continues down the clamshell/button road even in their ultra-high end stuff. There are reasons for this. Apple should have taken a lesson.
Did you see the keynote. It's not just a phone + iPod, it's a smartphone (with all of the features you expect when you hear "smartphone") + iPod with an interface that doesn't suck.
a) it's not a smartphone.
b) its interface does suck. Worse than all the others, even. At least if you plan to use it as a phone, or even as a web tablet.
What the iPhone is is a touch-screen iPod with a radio tacked onto it so you can make calls. Jobs almost seemed like he had to convince himself that making calls was actually the primary goal of this thing yesterday (when he called it the "killer app"). It obviously is not. It was designed as a video iPod first, and the interface (or lack thereof) reflects that. But people who make a lot of calls and who write a lot of emails need goddamn tactile buttons. Not to mention a screen that's not going to scratch or crack (unless you keep it in an un-phone-like case) or get loaded up with fingerprints and gunk. You thought the iPod nano 1.0 bitching was bad, just wait until people try carrying this thing around unprotected in their pocket.
About it being "secret", we saw mockups of a touch-screen iPod that looked exactly like the iPhone a while back. All that's different is the addition of a GSM radio. And we've always suspected Apple was developing a phone. This has never been a big secret, either in concept or in execution.
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I've noticed that my militancy - as measured by how much and exactly what I download - has gotten worse the more the *AA stupity has gone on. In the beginning, it was stuff I'd already bought. Now it's a little wider.
Interesting - my experience has been exactly the same.
I want to support the artists. I think most people do. I still buy CD's most of the time. But I will not buy anything encumbered with DRM (at least not DRM that I can't easily get around).
The more pissed off I have gotten with the RIAA, though, the more I've almost wanted to actively stick it to them. I've downloaded from Allofmp3.com, and I've downloaded through bittorrent. Not a lot, and I still try to justify it by saying it's stuff that I wouldn't otherwise buy at all. (For stuff I really care about, I still buy the CD.) But that's more of a rationalization than just downloading music I already own on another format, which is also how I started out. The RIAA has made me care a lot less about being on the right side of the law, because their idea of what the right side of the law is is both factually incorrect in many cases and also completely unreasonable. It's like telling somebody that not only can they not jaywalk (which is and should be illegal), but that they also can't cross the street from a corner with a "walk" signal. You're only allowed to cross the street in the presence of a uniformed RIAA representative, and if no such representative is around, tough. That is not an edict I'd follow, anymore than I'd follow their edicts about DRM'd music (especially their consideration of ripping CD's for my own personal use as "piracy"). Worse, the fact that they're trying to redefine the law on their own terms and enforce it themselves just makes me want to do exactly the opposite of what they're telling me to do. So now I'm going to jaywalk too, even when I wouldn't have before. I mean, if they're gonna make a criminal out of me anyway, I may as well go all the way.
They need to seriously start repairing their relationship with their customers. Ditching DRM is a good first step, and a necessary one. But it's going to take more than that to win me back as a full-time customer and to wean me off physical CD's. They need to completely re-evaluate everything from the top-down, starting with the artists they sign and promote, then the deals they sign with those artists (the artists need to be the ones taking the lead in promoting their music - I shouldn't even know what label somebody's on), then the way they distribute that music and the value they include with it. They need to be way more customer-friendly, which includes not insulting my intelligence with a bunch of American Idol wannabes all the time, not forcing DRM down my throat and not complaining that CD's are "too cheap". They need to realize that we're the ones keeping them in business with the products we buy, so if they want to make more money, they're going to need to provide us with more value for that money. Part of that means not crippling their songs with DRM.
Porn or not, I find it quite worrying that Sony is able to dictate who is allowed to print films onto Blu-ray. If indeed that is the situation.
It's not. Sony has unequivocally denied a prohibition of porn, yet it still gets parroted as fact all over the place (including on slashdot). Here: http://gear.ign.com/articles/756/756148p1.html
Be sure you read the update near the bottom for the quote from Sony.
AVN didn't find a "workaround" for Blu-Ray - that's just spin, as is pretty much everything else the porn industry says. Why would we not believe their sales numbers but we do believe they've somehow "reverse-engineered" Blu-Ray?
I can't be the only one who thinks this is a cool idea. If you look at the FAQ, you can even erase it from the Tivo and download it again when you want to watch it. Sounds like an offsite movie storage arrangement simply for the cost of Unbox movies.
It's not as cool as what Netflix is already doing, which is letting you stream movies basically for "free" if you're already a subscriber. You get an hour's worth of streaming for every dollar you spend with them per month. And you can watch the same movie over and over if you want to. The quality is also better than Unbox (if you've got a good net connection - it automatically selects your quality level.)
You also really only get charged for the time you use... if you select a 2 hour movie and watch 5 minutes before deciding it sucks, you only get charged for 5 minutes, not the whole movie. Big difference from Unbox. And you can start watching immediately, you don't need to wait for a download.
You can argue about TiVo being hooked up to a person's TV vs. streaming over a computer, but TiVo doesn't exactly have a huge market share; I'd wager at least as many people have their PC's hooked up to a TV as have TiVo. And with people watching more video on their computers anyway, I'm not sure the distinction is really going to matter in a few years. A monitor will be a monitor.
All I can say is, be glad you don't live in Japan. CDs here generally sell for around ¥3000-3500 ($25-29 at the current exchange rate of ¥120:$1). Singles are generally ¥1000-1600 ($9-14). What's worse is that the prices are printed on the back label, so pretty much every store has the same price- you don't get those "Virgin Special Price $9.99" stickers anywhere.
On the other hand, we also don't generally get DVD's packaged as a bonus on a regular basis. Japan does. Japanese inserts are also usually much thicker than ours, with tons of photos - heck, several of my "regular" (non-SE) CD's from Japan came with a whole separate photo book (as does the random CD I'm linking to above). Even the CD cases themselves are thicker and better made. In short, you get what you pay for.
The RIAA's problem is they've been downgrading the value of their product for years, which of course is going to drive both demand and prices down along with it. Imagine if every big new release here came with the first couple singles (including b-sides), a live DVD, and a photo book - and that was the regular edition! That's akin to the situation in Japan much of the time. So it's no surprise that CD's there cost $25 or so and that people will pay it - they'd pay it here too if there was actually that much value in the product being offered.
This is interesting because its done in Australia and no one cares.
I've seen a print out of a street with a pile of info on each house including in most cases a photo.
A lot of people would probably be surprised to know that many US municipalities already have such databases as well.
Here's my county's: http://www.mynassauproperty.com/
I can see photos of my own house as well as any of my neighbors there (or anybody anywhere else in the county), along with all sorts of details about their houses, including the last sale price.
Granted, the photo of my house dates to 2000 and is completely out of date at this point (unfortunately, because it looks a lot worse now!) - as I imagine will be the photos that this Canadian company's taking in fairly short order. No way they're going to do this on an ongoing basis.
I also don't really believe this is being done "nationwide" - that's 100 million households spread over a huge land area. They may as well be taking the census at the same time - this is a massive undertaking, and it's the first I've heard of it. It seems like a fairly small company as well.
As opposed to every other company/person/government agency/school/church/whatever than always blames themselves and spins things to make themselves look as bad as possible.
It's a western convention for companies to refuse to accept blame. In much of Asia (including the Far East and Asia proper), it's exactly the opposite; companies that don't accept blame - even if a problem is not their fault - end up facing major consumer backlash. Contrition is considered a business virtue and customers demand accountability. Companies apologize and look for an internal scapegoat at the first hint of a problem.
I'm not saying that's better or worse. But to assume the way we do business is the way everybody does business is wrong.
Now, that doesn't mean Sony's out apologizing for DRM in Japan either. But that's just because the public hasn't really woken up there yet. We're actually a bit ahead of Asia in challenging DRM (they're ahead of us in the technology itself; not that that's a good thing).
Has the press in America even been negative? The one news piece I saw of it highlighted the ridiculousness of the government's response to the advertisements. So $2M for good press in circles that quite likely would have gone unawares of the show is a pretty good deal I imagine in anyone major company's book.
First of all, Google the story using Google News. You'll turn up about 80% of all the news reports done anywhere on this. Browse through them - many of them are quite negative.
Second, I wish I'd had the chance to comment earlier because I know my thoughts are just gonna get lost here, but I seem to be the only one here who actually works in marketing and knows that there *is* such a thing as "bad press". As the VP of marketing at my company said in a meeting yesterday (where we joked about this), "I'd rather have that $2 million for more advertising". I mean this was hardly a best-case scenario, and yes, people did get fired over this.
Look at it this way. This agency has now cost Turner $2 million that they didn't budget, for a tiny little late-night cartoon that's worth nowhere near that much. That's $2 million that could have been spent promoting bigger shows, and that's probably coming directly out of Adult Swim's overall marketing budget.
Not only that, but it's going to cost the agency future business. No company wants to think that their message is out of their hands once they hire an ad agency, and no company wants to think that their ad campaign could potentially go 1,000% over-budget. My company was considering a deal with this agency and that's now off the table. This is, in the end, going to cost everybody concerned a large amount of money.
That's not even a comment on the city's response, which I do think was an overreaction. But it was also a dumb marketing campaign and the agency should have known better in this day and age - another point that a lot of companies based in large cities are going to take away from this.
The whole point of advertising is to get your message out there in the way you want it, spending as much money as you budget. It's not about watching a couple of dumbasses talking about 1970's hair styles in a press conference or over-spending $2 million on a show that probably had a $200,000 ad budget (why else would you even do a cheap guerilla marketing campaign?). This story became a lot less about the show and a lot more about the ad agency, and that's exactly the opposite of what any company wants from their marketing.
Getting the stuff isn't hard since so many people don't like the law and many of those adults don't mind breaking a bad law.
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I won't argue with you about how easy it is to get, but I would definitely take issue with your (and others') point that it's a "bad law".
See here: http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statist
and here: http://www.alcoholstats.com/mm/docs/3612.pdf
The first link has a chart showing all alcohol-related traffic fatalities over the last 20 or so years, the second is a graph showing only teen drunk-driving fatalities.
To summarize, teen drunk driving deaths are at record lows, 67 percent lower than in 1982.
Now, granted, that's probably for a variety of reasons, even including those dumb PSA's you see on NBC during commercial breaks. But to suggest raising the drinking age has had no effect would be ridiculous. You'd have to argue that teen drunk driving deaths have dropped despite the raising of the drinking age rather than in part because of it. And that would be pretty idiotic. It's obvious that the law played a part, and probably a large part.
This law is more than likely saving several thousand kids per year, at the cost of what? Nobody under the age of 21 has any more "freedom" to drink alcohol than they have "freedom" to smoke crack or drive without a license. There are plenty of laws that restrict all sorts of things; just because you want to do those things doesn't make them inalienable rights, and there is no guarantee in any of our founding documents that says anything different.
I'm not saying all of these types of laws are good - certainly, many of them are not because they are far too sweeping (affecting all adults) and achieve no tangible benefits. (The all-out ban on certain less dangerous recreational drugs, for example.) But a 3 year increase to the drinking age has helped dramatically reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths while just forcing you to wait a little bit longer to drink legally. That's pretty much the definition of a good law.
I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.
Tell that to anyone who's been running an OS9-based G4, who then upgrades to the latest version of OSX.
You're comparing OSX to itself. It's like saying Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows XP SP1. That's not what we're talking about; we're talking about major OS upgrades. The Mac OS existed before OSX, and it wasn't very long ago in the grand scheme of things. The last version of OS9 was released in December of 2001. I don't know about you, but I've got two separate PC's that were originally built long before 2002, and my wife's laptop dates to about that period also.
Upgrading from OS9 to any version of OSX can be *painful* unless you have upgraded your computer. OSX is notoriously memory-hungry (as is Vista), and it requires a graphics card with decent 3D capabilities to really shine (also like Vista).
I think the point made was valid - Apple themselves seem to be assuming that all of their customers bought OSX-based Macs, which means they either tossed out their old Macs or they're n00bs. Otherwise, they couldn't *possibly* expect anyone to update from OS9 to OSX without at least a RAM upgrade, probably a video card upgrade and probably a hard drive upgrade. So it's a little disingenuous of them to suggest that this is unique to the PC world.
You try running OSX with 256MB of RAM, which was a high-end machine back in 2001.
It's always a good idea to give at least a month of notice, in writing. The worst case is that you leave on good terms with the company, the best case is that they immediately escort you to the door, and have to pay you for as long as your notice was for.
They don't "have to" do anything in most (perhaps all) states. I don't know the breakdown, but the vast majority of states are "at-will" states unless there's a contract involved, meaning either party can terminate employment at any time for any reason.
There is neither a need to give notice nor is there a requirement for employers to pay you for that time if you do. They're only required to pay you for the time you actually work. If your friend got a "3 month paid vacation" by giving 3 months notice, it just means his company's HR department forgot to terminate his employment and the payroll department never caught the mistake. That's pretty unlikely at most companies.
Giving notice is purely a courtesy. It legally can not affect recommendations or references, and there is absolutely nothing any company can do to force you to stay at work in an at-will state. You're not in jail, you have no obligation to your company if you want to quit. Your company in turn has no obligation to you.
Look at it this way. Your company does not have to give you two weeks notice to fire you, nor would they. Why would you need to give two weeks notice to quit? Neither side is obligated when employment is terminated, and it doesn't matter who is doing the terminating.
That is, of course, provided you're not under contract or a non-compete, which are both different situations.
Xbox is not losing money anymore. They make money on it!
Incorrect. MS's entertainment division (which includes both the Xbox and Zune, but not much more than that) lost $277 million in the most recently announced quarter, which was through December 2006. It lost $275 million in the same quarter last year, so this is not even an improvement, much less a turn from losing money to making money.
No doubt the Zune dragged on those numbers a bit, but it's not nearly as costly of a product as the 360. The 360 should be subsidizing the Zune at this point, and it clearly isn't. The entire entertainment division is still being subsidized by Office and Windows. MS has lost billions on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and will probably never make that investment back.
Actually, I'm one of those people who does this, even before this article. I pretty much always use google, I have it on my 'address bar' as a quick link (Oddly, I rarely use my embedded web-browser search box). Often times, I'm looking for a Yahoo! service, which by habit, I use Google.
My wife does this too. I can't really understand it, but she's got Google as her homepage and even if she *knows* the address of a site, she will type the name into Google and then click the link that comes up rather than just typing it into her address bar and hitting control-enter. I have even seen her mistakenly search for Google on Google, just out of force of habit.
There are probably a lot of people who operate this way, using Google as a combination semi-automatic portal/search, whereas we mostly think of it as just search. They're typing things in not because they need to search for them, but because they just rely on Google to serve them up links that they can click.
In a way, I guess this is more like real, hardcore old-school web browsing - the first browsers didn't even have an address bar, everything was done through hyperlinks. (That's the whole point of the web.)
Lack of content IS the primary argument. I watch *ONE* channel of what is currently available that you listed or that I know of. That is NOT worth it.
Let me get this straight. I just want to be clear, because your argument as it appears is a very strange one.
Out of CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, UPN, WB, PBS, Discovery, Universal HD, ESPN, and TNT, there is *one* channel that you watch? Those are only the major networks offered on the free HD tier with my cable service. (There are other, more niche networks also on the free tier.) I can only guess that you're not a major TV watcher in general, because that list includes all of the major broadcast networks as well as the top-tier free cable nets even in standard definition.
And that's not even counting HBO, Showtime or Starz, because you say you don't care about premiums.
To say there's a lack of HD content at this point is ludicrous. Even the local news is in HD, at least where I am. All prime time non-reality programming on all the major nets is in HD. All major sports are in HD. Hell, people seem to love Battlestar Galactica here - it's in HD too.
The "no content" argument is one people have been making since day one that HDTV was switched on. At some point, though, it's an argument that ceases to carry any weight, and that point has long since past. You may as well argue that there aren't any good films on DVD yet or that the PlayStation 2 doesn't have any good games. Welcome to like, five years ago.
Sorry, that you can't accept that not everyone is interested in sports, premium stations, or every nature channel.
Forgive my asking, but what exactly do you watch? Late-night infomercials? The Food Network? (Hey, guess what.) Spike TV?
I'm not arguing against your choice to keep your current non-HD setup. That's your decision to make. But if you're going to publicly try to perpetuate this myth that there is "no content" in HD, people are gonna have to stand up and tell you how wrong you are, so your backward thinking doesn't infect anybody else. Probably 80% of all the TV that actually gets watched in this country (by total ratings) is now broadcast in HD, and there are only a few more major dominoes left to fall.
Now, this has been my perception. Mileage may vary... yadda yadda yadda.
Mileage may vary on this sort of treatment by professors (and mine sure does - I was actually the only person to get an "A" in my first college history class because I was the only one who disagreed with my professor's theory). But I don't think anybody's mileage varies on wikipedia - one of the only few facts you can count on it for with 100% certainty is that many articles contain errors. Nobody who uses it on a regular basis would say otherwise.
I don't generally use wikipedia for real research (I'm well out of college and don't work in an academic field, so I don't often need to), so the topics I look up are usually more pop-culture oriented. But my last two searches came up with some pretty egregious errors and/or malicious edits. One of them was the article for WNEW-FM, which recently changed its call letters to WWFS. In two separate places, the article said WWFS "had reluctantly changed" their call letters back to WNEW on April 1, 2007. (This was not just a coincidental typo; there is no such plan by the station. Maybe it's an April Fool's joke.) My previous search was for Ami Onuki, the corresponding article stating that she was divorced - a 2005 internet rumor that has long-since been discredited.
I made edits to both pages removing the offending non-facts. For all I know, whoever made the original edits have put them back since. This is a fundamental problem with wikipedia; it's not that anyone can edit, it's that human nature is often for people to be steadfast in their convictions, even if they're wrong. So while this notion that a large group of people editing articles will eventually result in the best accuracy is a fine ideal, the reality is that a small group of stubborn idiots hellbent on overwriting corrections to "their" pages can ruin it for everybody. That's true of anything in life that's open to the public, it's not just wikipedia. But it does mean that wikipedia can never be considered authoritative. Unfortunately, often the worst people in any community have the last word - and especially on the lesser-trafficked articles.
A perfect example of the best and worst of wikipedia - how it can eventually work but can never be considered authoritative - is the entry for American Airlines flight 191. When I first visited this page, there was a whole mess of misinformation about supernatural nonsense both before and after the crash, and another section listing all sorts of tangential conspiracy theories and connections with 9/11 and even Comair flight 5191 (simply because they both had "191" in the flight number). It read like an article on the Weekly World News. I removed much of this stuff and changed the wording on some of what was left. I noted why I made the changes, saying those sections as written really had no place in an authoritative, factual article on this flight. Almost immediately (the same day), my edits were mostly reversed. An edit war then started, which I stayed out of. Up until the last time I checked, which was just now, those sections had stayed mostly intact.
Finally, though, at least for the moment, it seems that most of the bad info has again been removed and some of my wording is now on the page in what remains. The supernatural section has been renamed "Almost victims and alleged premonitions", although one paragraph remains problematic and is labeled "citation needed" - I consider this paragraph urban legend. It should not be there, at least not as worded. The "history and media" section has had its 9/11 and Comair 5191 references removed.
But after all that, *some* bad info is still there and anyone who visited this page in the meantime would have unknowingly been caught in the middle of an edit war between those who just wanted to present the facts of this crash and those who wanted to present a sensationalized Fox News-style tangle of conspiracy theories and superstitions.
But this is why professors (good ones,
I figure I could get say, $100,000 consulting fee out of it, right? And it'd be well worth it to any company planning to introduce a really retarded DRM scheme.
The problem is, companies don't pay people to tell them things they don't want to hear. That's the unfortunate reality of the situation. They'd probably *gladly* pay you (or someone else) $100,000 to tell them a DRM scheme *works*... then they've got somebody to blame when it's cracked.
But tell them all DRM schemes are fatally flawed from the start, and that they shouldn't bother, and they'll probably sue you for breach of contract.
And if you do this as an employee, forget it. You'll be labeled a negative influence, and not a team player. It'll be the beginning of the end of your life at that company. Corporations don't want to hear that something can't be done, especially not from their employees. They're paying you to make happen what they want to happen. That's the whole point of your employment.
You can argue all day about how much better off we'd all be if dissent were tolerated and even encouraged in corporate America, but the truth is in most companies (and especially big media companies), it isn't.
So it's not a question that there aren't people who would love to tell these corporations how flawed DRM is as a concept; the corporations involved just don't have any interest in listening.
Stupid comment of the day, courtesy of the article: In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. "We're for interoperability," he said, "and there's nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability."
Well, their entire attitude seems to be that if DRM is broken, it's because the hardware makers screwed it up. And it's up to the hardware makers to fix it. (That jibes with the other comment about letting the hardware makers "off the hook" by ditching DRM.)
They still don't seem to get that it's the concept that's flawed, not the execution, and the concept is theirs. You can't take a flawed concept and implement it well and have everything turn out right. I mean it's New Coke all over again. Sure, New Coke beat "Old Coke" in taste tests - it was executed well. But people didn't want a New Coke, they wanted the Coke that they were familiar with. No matter how well that concept was executed, it was doomed from the start. And luckily for consumers, Coke realized it fairly quickly once the product hit the market, and they rectified it not by trying to tweak the execution (which would have been throwing good money after bad), but by basically undoing the entire concept. That's all you can do with failed ideas, because the idea is the foundation for every other part of the plan.
The music industry is taking longer to come around to the idea that DRM is their New Coke. Customers don't want it, and the more they hear about it, the less they like it. The music industry thought that people would become comfortable with it over time, but the opposite is happening - as people become more tech savvy, they're learning more about DRM, and they're finding out how restrictive it is. Two years ago, the term "DRM" didn't mean anything to anybody - now you see it written up in places like the New York Times, and it's turned into a four-letter word on the interwebs. Things are only going to get worse for the music industry from here on out.
There will be a change at some point, but no doubt a lot of the industry will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it.
AAC or OGG please, but not MP3 - you need twice the bitrate for comparable quality :(
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Can we please just put this myth to bed once and for all? I mean Christ, this test was posted right here on this site, years ago: http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.
Scroll to the bottom - the difference in quality is negligible at the same bit rate. It always has been (well, ever since LAME popped up). And given the tradeoff in convenience and industry support, I'd take mp3 any day of the week.
This is the line that people have been saying for 20 years now. The fact of the matter is that solar power hasn't yet reached a point where cells are efficient enough to pay back the initial monetary cost in a reasonable time frame.
Not really the point.
Are you a homeowner? If yes, then you know that you're likely to get back close to 100% of many major home improvements when you sell your house. Even if you don't sell, you still retain that equity - it's a saleable asset. Whether it's a new kitchen, new floors, new windows or whatever. That money doesn't just disappear. Of course, home improvements do depreciate over the years along with the home itself... but generally not as fast as the inflation in home prices.
Not all home improvements are created equal and it would probably take a pretty specialized sort of buyer to think $500,000 worth of hydrogen tanks and solar cells was worth it. But I think such buyers do probably exist.
On smaller scales, though, the equation works out even better. Say you put in a $20,000 solar system in your roof. It may only save you 30% on your electric bill each month (though that's not a small chunk for a lot of people). But now when you sell, you can legitimately advertise your home as having an electric bill that's 30% less than all comparable homes in the neighborhood, and that's environmentally friendly. (You also get a tax deduction.) Assuming you plan to sell in about 5 years, you would almost definitely come out ahead.
This is the way a lot of the changes we've seen in home design get standardized. People put in improvements specifically to up their selling price, and the costs and benefits then get passed down through several generations of owners. Those new owners then demand the same features - and more - from their next house. So I'd expect to see solar systems becoming more and more common over time, not just to lower electric bills but to raise selling prices. Eventually, you will be at a severe disadvantage trying to sell a house *without* such a system. I think it will be a standard feature fairly quickly - within the next 20-30 years.
(I don't yet have such a system in my house, but my next house probably will - whether I buy one that already has one installed, or I install it myself.)
I have to wonder why this is the news story when we have current rumours saying Square are selling off Siken Densetsu, Chrono and the Kingdom hearts franchises.
Could it be because your post is probably the first anyone other than you has heard this "rumor"? And since when are rumors posted as news?
I'll let you in on a little secret. At any given time, there are probably 100 rumors flying around the periphery of the game industry about publishers, developers, and consoles. 99% of them are ridiculously false. Mostly, they're started by fanboys (on one side or the other) looking to garner attention. Often, they begin with posts just like yours. In fact, your post is a classic example of rumor-mongering - no source quoted, and the impression given that "we" all know about these rumors already, with the implication being that this collective knowledge itself counts as "news".
There is ZERO chance of Square-Enix ever "selling off" these franchises. When has that ever happened? Publishers don't just "sell" major franchises, especially not money-making ones.
So put it to rest and get it out of your head. It's not happening, and it's not news. And I don't know who started this rumor, but for all I know it was you.
Most places I go actually have wifi already, so 3G is then irrelevant.
Bullshit. This is a *phone*, not a laptop. You're not going to be sitting at Starbucks 24 hours a day accessing data services on your phone. If you need data in a phone, then you need to use data wherever you happen to be, and that includes the office (where unsecured wifi networks are generally taboo), out on the street, in your car, or wherever. You've got wi-fi in a moving car on the interstate? Explain to me how that works. (btw I'm not suggesting you'd be browsing the net while driving, but while a passenger, sure.)
Wi-fi is no substitute for 3G in a phone.
And, in the absence of any sort of i-Mode like network of WAP sites in the United States, I'd go so far as to say that data support in general is basically useless here without 3G support. There's just nothing you can actually do with it. You need to be able to browse real web sites, and for that you need 3G. A phone without 3G is just a phone; any data features it might have will never get used because it will just be too slow and frustrating of an experience.
btw, the linked article goes to great lengths to confuse the 3G issue by throwing out all sorts of unrelated acronyms to make it seem as if Apple's smart by staying away from it. It also tries to somehow argue that EDGE and HSPDA are mutually exclusive; you can either have one or the other in a phone. The fact is Cingular has both 3G and 3.5G networks up and running and several phones that use them just fine (I should know, I own one), along with EDGE and even GPRS as a last-ditch fallback. I see no reason why Apple couldn't have done the same. (Don't give me cost; I paid zilch for my phone.)
I don't think the iPhone is going to flop because of its closed-ness. It's neat that I can install all manner of junk on my Windows Mobile device, but the main reason to do so is to replace the standard software because it is poorly designed. If Apple can deliver a phone / iPod / PDA device that "just works" and has a good user interface, I could live without the ability to add or replace software on it, And I suspect that there are many consumers like me, who do not want a hackable mini-computer.
True, and I count myself among them. But the problem is those people have many, many good phones available to them already, and often for free. My phone cost me nothing (in fact, after rebate, they paid *me* to buy it), it has 3G, it has expandable memory, it has installable apps if I want them, it has an mp3 player with external controls (on an external touch-screen, mind you), it has a QVGA screen, a 2 megapixel camera, and it has a proper clamshell design with buttons. Remember, I got this phone for *free*.
The iPhone is actually less capable than my phone in many ways - no expandable memory, no installable apps, no 3G. Even not caring about installable apps, I'm still getting less functionality for $600 *more* with the iPhone. What the hell am I paying for?
I think the problem is this: there are people willing to pay a premium for top-of-the-line devices, and there are people willing to pay nothing and get the best phone they can for free. But there are *not* people willing to pay a premium for phones that are at best mid-range in functionality. If I was paying $600 for a "phone", you're damn right I'd expect to be able to install my own apps on it. I'd expect to be getting a device with *at least* all the PDA functions other smartphones already have, and *more*.
If Apple wants to sell such a crippled phone, then it is way, way overpriced at $500-$600. The baseline expected price for a phone with basic features like it has, with a two year contract, is zero. I can see charging a bit of a premium for wi-fi and for the large screen, but those wouldn't add up to more than $200 or so. That's what I think the iPhone in its current iteration is worth. And that's being generous - I've got half a mind to subtract $100 for its lack of 3G support.
The NY Times article also makes a comparison to the original Mac, which despite the current pedigree was not particularly successful. I think the comparison is apt. The original Mac was not very expandable, not very compatible with anything else and it also was priced much higher than the competition. It was different and novel but only the Apple faithful (yes, fanboys existed in the 1980's too) bought it initially. It wasn't until they added expandability, brought in color screens and went through several OS iterations before creative types started flocking to it and more mainstream users even noticed it.
But it does go to show - as the iPod does too - that despite Jobs' pronouncements at any given time suggesting he always knows best, and that the products they're currently offering are the best they could possibly make, he has no problem listening to customer feedback and going back to the drawing board to make necessary additions and improvements. So I think eventually, we'll see an iPhone that's both useful and reasonably priced; probably several of them in a more varied lineup that includes different form factors and feature sets. (Just like the iPod.) And eventually, Apple really may challenge the top phone manufacturers for market share.
This ain't it, though. If we've learned anything over the years, it should be to avoid the first generation of any Apple product.
Despite what you may have read on a blog/message board, the plural of anecdote is data.
No, this is data. These are Japan's console sales from December 25-31, as taken from actual retail store scans:
DSL 176,219
Wii 96,332
PS3 71,727
PSP 68,675
PS2 38,169
Xbox360 16,909
GBM 2,082
GBASP 1,743
GC 847
DS 102
GBA 51
Xbox 4
As you can see, it's a lot closer than this article would lead you to believe. The Wii sold in huge numbers its first 2 weeks, and it's now dropped off. The PS3 has held steady. They're almost neck and neck at this point.
Those are actual sales, not "surveys".
Maybe, but offering criticism could just as easily turn into an incident that makes your company look bad.
Worse than that. There are liability issues that mean your company could be sued depending on what you tell them. Even something like "your attire was not proper business attire" could be grounds for a lawsuit in this day and age, if the candidate takes that to mean their religious tribal necklace was the problem. It's best for the company for you not to say anything. Which means it's best for you (and your continued employment) not to say anything.
Most large corporations have specific guidelines forbidding any sort of feedback for unsuccessful job candidates just for this reason. I know mine does (I work for one of the largest and oldest media companies in the country). "Sorry, we went in a different direction" is about as specific as I can get.
It's generally a good idea to think about the friendly but vague, non-committal way your average human resources drone talks; they don't talk that way because they like to, they do it because they are legally bound to. Your best bet is first to try to just refer any questions from candidates directly to them (because they're trained in how to handle them) or, when faced with a particularly persistent candidate, to try to emulate them yourself. Never say anything specific about the candidate themselves or their interview performance.
Here's an even better one, a "VGA+" display at 690x480. http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/product/foma/903i/n903i /topics_01.html .
Yes, these are of course Japanese phones, and Japanese phones are for some reason much more advanced than western phones.
While you're at it, why not show off NTT's full FOMA lineup? Here: http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/product/foma/
Almost all of these have better raw specs than the iPhone, with higher res screens and cameras, expandable memory, user-installable apps, 3D graphics and more. You'll also notice that the Japanese have almost universally shunned any form factor other than the clamshell... just as we have. That's going to be a big problem for the iPhone in terms of attracting mainstream users (in the United States). The iPhone's problem is that it's attempting to redefine a market that's already been defined through market forces; it's not like we've never had candy bar style phones here before, and it's not like we haven't had touch screens. They just don't sell as well as clamshells, and phones with buttons.
Back to NTT, though... what's the one thing all of these have that the iPhone doesn't? 3G support (which is old hat in Japan at this point). Another big minus for the iPhone. It's not like Cingular doesn't have 3G phones here either - I've got one myself. So this is another big negative - how are you expected to actually make use of all of the iPhone's internet features on a 2G network?
On the one hand, it doesn't serve much purpose to compare the iPhone to Japanese phones, which are almost universally more advanced than ours (funny thing is NTT does sell the Moto Razr, but it's like at the bottom of their lineup of already bottom-rung 2G non-FOMA phones, and I didn't see a single one last time I was there). On the other, I do think it's worth pointing out that the iPhone is really not as advanced as some people seem to think it is. And I also think it's interesting (and telling) that even a place like Japan, which has embraced Apple's design ethos and which places so much importance on industrial design, continues down the clamshell/button road even in their ultra-high end stuff. There are reasons for this. Apple should have taken a lesson.
Did you see the keynote. It's not just a phone + iPod, it's a smartphone (with all of the features you expect when you hear "smartphone") + iPod with an interface that doesn't suck.
a) it's not a smartphone.
b) its interface does suck. Worse than all the others, even. At least if you plan to use it as a phone, or even as a web tablet.
What the iPhone is is a touch-screen iPod with a radio tacked onto it so you can make calls. Jobs almost seemed like he had to convince himself that making calls was actually the primary goal of this thing yesterday (when he called it the "killer app"). It obviously is not. It was designed as a video iPod first, and the interface (or lack thereof) reflects that. But people who make a lot of calls and who write a lot of emails need goddamn tactile buttons. Not to mention a screen that's not going to scratch or crack (unless you keep it in an un-phone-like case) or get loaded up with fingerprints and gunk. You thought the iPod nano 1.0 bitching was bad, just wait until people try carrying this thing around unprotected in their pocket.
About it being "secret", we saw mockups of a touch-screen iPod that looked exactly like the iPhone a while back. All that's different is the addition of a GSM radio. And we've always suspected Apple was developing a phone. This has never been a big secret, either in concept or in execution.