warning on those kiosks: their card readers suck and may break your card. don't use your "originals" - take it home and burn a cdrom and take that to the shop to print.
one at the nearby kinkos totally destroyed my SD card of everything i shot from a particular vacation.
As in, would you say anything if your work was installing unlicensed software on boxes? I know by "pirated" they usually refer to the big things, like Windows itself or MS Office.
But really, the place where things are problematic is "nag-ware" items that don't actually remove their features if you don't pay in time, like WinZip and TextPad. Lots of companies simply keep quiet at those things being on every box on site, unpaid.
Now, I get around that by using free (if old and unmaintained) software like ZipCentral and Crimson Editor, but not everybody feels that way.
Tell Lightning and Sunbird to support upload-via-FTP and I'll use it almost exclusively. Right now, as long as their only web access is "Webdav", it sucks and it locks out using it to only those who have total control over a web server.
I use reminder fox right now because it supports FTP upload. I then view the calendar online with phpCalendar parsing the iCal file.
This whole Dell preinstalled Linux thing strikes me as a sham to get something out of Microsoft, like lower Windows license prices.
Which is exactly what it was 7 years ago when Dell put out pre-installed Linux boxes in an effort to get the prices of Windows 2000 lowered.
After a year, they achieved what they wanted, and quit. By the time of XP, they couldn't get away with it 'cause people actually wanted XP (Zarquon only knows why).
There is nothing telling me this isn't the same type of stunt - publicity to get MS to offer lower OEM prices to their biggest retailer, followed by a total shutdown of the operation in a year under the claims of "it's just not big enough to be financially viable".
Dell was flirting with linux-supported releases almost 10 years ago. I know, 'cause in 1999 or 2000 I had my company buy one for me. I went through the website to pick it and everything. RedHat was the main distro then. Even came with Applixware for Office 'cause OpenOffice hadn't become the standard yet.
So really, this isn't news, 'cause they had it and they dropped it and now they're acting like they've never had it before and it's completely full of crap.
If it works. In my case, at least on my lower jaw, the roots were so strong they pushed the incoming adult teeth behind them and the baby teeth needed to be extracted. Their roots were completely undamaged.
On the other hand, the idea of being able to reconstruct adult teeth is very useful over our current artificial forms of patch-work. The trick with enamle, of course, is to get it replaced before the rest of the tooth starts decaying. One probably couldn't put it back on a filling.
for every night person that wants a little more sun at the end of the day is a morning person who would rather keep standard standard and have more sun when they're up.
Outpost Gallifrey is reporting that several original Dr. Who costumes were sold in the same auction, and Tom Baker's coat and scarf took in over 24000 GBP. Other Doctors' costumes took between 1000 and 8000 GBP each.
One target of this are the radio services that aren't *primarily* internet, but have an internet outlet. AOL, XMRadio, Sirius, many HD-Radio stations, more...
This will KILL them because this would impact their online "free preview" services they use (much less their services they give to subscribers) - if you can't afford to advertise and give samples, you can't afford to get new customers, and you'll go out of business.
Thing is, under current agreements, they aren't paying the RIAA because as over-the-air broadcasters first, they pay only ASCAP/BMI/etc songwriter royalties, not performance royalties to the labels. Watch for most of those services to drop if this should go through, 'cause XM-Radio and friends really can't afford it.
Granted, this is a cartel in action and the feds CAN do something about it if people complain enough.
Because Fraunhofer itself were the ones telling everybody they needed to license from them directly. I'd like to think I remember those particular wars fairly well. When did Thompson get involved, because that name was never mentioned back when Fraunhofer were first pulling their threats and Ogg was being formulated in response?
The problem came when everybody licensed the encoding patent on the assumption that they couldn't stop decoding codes (though Fraunhofer disputed it, they didn't they'd win a legal battle). The patent was on the encryption *algorithm*, not the format itself.
This ruling effectively changes everything everybody "knew" about mp3 licensing, both in terms of who companies were actually supposed to license from and what they were supposed to license for.
This is huge. I don't think even Apple has the cash to back-license all of this and still move forward with their video plans. This ruling will be the death of probably about half of the e-media hardware companies out there, leaving things to JUST Apple and Microsoft because nobody except those two have the cash on hand to pay such a penalty rate, having all thought they were properly licensed already since the 90s.
Then there's the issue of the *tons* of free software implementations out there with mp3 decoding (and encoding) built in. What are they going to do about all of that?
Depends on "before/after". Does the director decide not to get the "tear" out of Jennifer *because* he can add it later?
Or was it a case of the Director was happy with the shot in the dailies, but in editing decided it needed something else?
The latter is where the flexibility comes in along with a price-tag trade off. Is it cheaper to get Jennifer in, amidst an insane schedule that may have her on the other side of the world filming another movie, to do the one closeup? Or just turn the 48 frame (2 seconds on screen) to a computer department to fill it in.
It used to be that adding a computer effect for a scene that had no CGI was very expensive. The whole scene would have had to have been computer-scanned. Today, with digital color correction being the norm, everything's in the computer anyways so getting the 48 frames to add the feature into costs nothing.
and more importantly, what will become of "duplicate" channel offerings. Both have a standard symphonic classical station, a vocals/opera station, and a "pops" station, and that's just within the classical genre, the smallest. Which of those 6 identities will survive?
For the larger genres like "rock" or "urban", what will survive?
Wall Street may like the certitude this brings financially, but the customer base on BOTH networks will have to deal with a LOT of uncertainty as to which of their favorite shows and djs may disappear in the coming months...
google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it.
This is now a marketting leverage that Google I think should use until such time as someone calls them a monopoly on it and pulls anti-trust action on them.
From a customer standpoint, we use their site under their terms of service.
So too should an indexed site. Want to be indexed by Google so the world can find you? Agree to their terms of letting them cache your material. Some negotiations might be made for the size of the cache and the duration of it should your site be pulling stuff from the "free" zone, but generally, if you want to be found, you have to agree to be stored.
See the other comment: it was specifically Google Cache being used as part of the Google News service. The caching system is the same, it's merely the difference in how it is presented (and its priority in coming up when one searches) that decides if a reference is presented in News or the Main google search.
Google caches *everything*, both to use it in parsing text to create the advertisement links and to have a cache available should the original be down, like, say, the/. effect, or more often because many news websites that are AP/Reuters feeds tend to not keep those articles around after a certain amount of time.
As such, Google normally makes no distinction between an feed article and an original from the news site in question.
The newspaper sites lose two ways - first is that people reading the headlines and summary text available @ google don't bother to read the site directly (so the site doesn't get the "eyeballs" for advertising) and two, the material is cached after the original site has converted it to a pay for access model. The latter is a tough call - when its free and then not, how can you really say you have control over it anymore?
Certainly legally, you do, per international copyright agreements, but realistically?
Similar questions abound when the government tries to reclassify something that has already been deemed safe for public distribution, like the various instruction pamphlets on making bombs for tree removal that they thought about taking back after McVeigh used exactly those techniques to hit Oklahoma City.
The decision was correct from a strictly legal standpoint. The law itself does not currently recognize the reality of electronic distribution through the web, of course, but its not up to the courts to change the laws, only to judge by them or judge them unconstitutional.
At any rate, it was such a small thing, and google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it. the lack of details about what it means to the layperson is what led to yesterday's early stock price drop, a drop that shouldn't have happened because it has nothing to do with google's real long term prospects.
Well, what defines a "Canadian" record label? Is "Time Warner Canada" a "Canadian" label, when 85% of what it redistributes is from Time Warner's European or American departments?
And what of the iPod that has no Canadian music on it at all, everything legally acquired by purchases through America or iTMS? Why should they pay Canadian artists and labels (well, labels - there's still no proof that the labels actually pay the artists out of this fund) when they have neither purchased Canadian music nor illegally acuired it?
It's still a racket, legally sanctioned theft. its just a slightly smaller racket than first implied.
Seriously, there is no evidence at all that the labels (almost all American, btw) will actually give a dime to the artists on top of their existing contracts.
The "standard recording contract" pays the artist an upfront advance that is recouped from the royalties (usually a meager 12-14%, some of which may go to the engineer or the producer). IF and ONLY IF that advance is recouped in full (and record labels have tons of accounting tricks to assert that even a million-seller didn't "recoup") will the artist actually start seeing real royalty payments come in. (BTW, through all of this and beyond, the label owns the music, not the artist.)
There is nothing in the artist contract that actually has allowances for when extra "fees" collected on behalf of the artists of the label actually is applied to the payment of the advance. There is nothing in the accounting systems of a record label that will actually distribute such collected fees back to the artists of the label, either as cash or as applied to the advance.
The label keeps the money, most of which is either pure profit (it didn't cost them anything except paying the lobbyist) or at least is applied to the "general fund" which is used to pay the advance for the next standard artist's standard contract, and the legalized slavery continues unabated.
Unless the law goes against the labels as well, requiring that they show proof that they have changed their contracting and accounting systems to actually give an acceptable cut of this income to the artists, then all that has happened is that the legislation has totally bought into the lies and deceits of the music industry, and is sanctioning theft of both the artists AND the consumers.
(directed at either the researchers or the article writer)
Try a *combination* of bad events and watch the devastation all add up. How about a series of volcanic eruptions and other possible solar events were causing a global warming crisis over a few hundred thousand years. Some creatures in the equatorial regions that couldn't adapt to the heat died off, as did those that ate them. You have large ecosystems in a very unstable state by trying to adjust.
The larger pliosaurs might have also died out in this increasing heat, but the sharks survived by being able to migrate to more reasonable water temps more quickly.
Then, just as they might have reached a point of adjustment, a new stasis point, and some non-bird dinosaurs might have survived...THAT's when the first of the *two* possible impacts happened, followed within a few hundred thousand years by the second.
There is evidence for all of these possibilities, so why should we continue to be a slave to the likely inaccurate idea that only one thing did it?
That we now have to figure out which dinosaurs were killed off at which stage of these sequences certainly is a much harder problem, but it'll be the scientifically accurate one over this constant desire to gratify one's ego by having "THE" answer and throwing out the last 100 years of research into this.
In fact, the tin foil hatter in me would probably suggest that big radio conglomerates like ClearChannel are actively lobbying behind the scenes to make sure that Sirius and XM can never join forces - in the hopes that they successfully kill them both, to allow re-entry into the market by those that missed the boat the first time.
Actually, my understanding is that ClearChannel is a heavy investor in HD-Radio, since most HD stations are co-owned by normal broadcast stations, but with national networking so some stations are the same no matter what HD-radio market you're in.
They want Satellite to die so that HD radio wins.
This is where the FCC misses the boat, just as they did with the DirectTV/Dish merger a few years ago. They think that the satellite monopoly will cause a price rise in satellite services, when in actuality there's already too much competition here on the ground to the point that satellite stuff will never be profitable.
...back when there was talk about DirectTV and Dish merging.
Trouble is, its short-term thinking that doesn't necessarily look at the long-term survival of either company.
Competition is good to keep existing monopolies from getting out of hand and abusing the customer base, but if, thanks to competition and high operating costs, *nobody* makes a profit, then the market itself will die. At worst. Otherwise, its whoever can keep the VC capital flowing until the other one dies, then the monopoly happens inevitably anyways.
I've got a couple of Nomad IIc's which I use for myself (the ipod's my wife's;) ), and yeah, the tool sucks. In 1.1 it's dreadfully slow, in 2.0 (IIc supports it), the whole interface freezes while the transfers are going on - bad threading code in there. For myself, I now use an mp3-cdrom compatible sony walkman, with an mp3-cdrom player in my car as well that can share the discs. The only hassle there is that *some* of my artists when compiled together end up with 715 meg, meaning i have to cut a song or two out. grrr.
iTMS is good for those who will buy the stuff they carry. my particular genres are such that either they don't have it (most progressive rock and good local celtic stuff), or the sound quality is too critical to buy compressed files (classical), or i prefer to by direct from the artist and cut out the middleman (back to the celtic).
I was thinking of finally giving in and going to iTunes to collect some missing 80s pop-rock songs that I'd like playing for a party, only Tower went away and I just got a ton of 80s best-of cds there and rock-cheap prices!
Creative had an ok product, licensed with M$ to be able to play DRM-protected WMP files...only M$ didn't succeed as well as they wanted to get online downloads to use WMP.
What Apple had was not just one great product, but 3, which when combined won the day.
They had an mp3 player that was aesthetically impressive, had new inventions for user simplicity (like the volume/menu wheel, which though faulty at first, got better), and easily licensed for 3rd party accessories so you didn't feel like the only way to use it was through the normal headphones.
They had iTunes the desktop software, with its slick look (though why they insisted on the mac look on a windows box i'll never know, but it seemed to work), a look so impressive that it made the users want to use that as their playback software even without the iPod. Windows Media Player kept changing its look, and kept bumping into wars of codecs and DRM license issues that users simply didn't want to deal with. When prompted to auto-upgrade WMP to a new version, users panic because history with Microsoft software shows that such upgrades often break backwards compatibility or at the very least completely lose all of their existing settings. If upgrading WMP suddenly means you can't watch movies you already have or listen to music you already have, then you won't do it, and upgrades did that with WMP and Real Player a LOT.
Creative's tool was ok for loading stuff onto the box, but it wasn't "right" for actually playing the tunes as the desktop player, so the integration factor wasn't there the way it was with iTunes/iPod.
Finally, they successfully got iTunes the store to work (sounds like Spaceballs: the t-Shirt). One stop shopping, fully integrated into the player. Buy the song, put it into a desktop playlist, sync to the iPod, BAM, new music for 99 cents and i never had to change software anywhere.
Such integration is difficult, but Apple did it where Microsoft never could with their partner relationships as they licensed them at the time.
Hence the Zume. They now know the only way to play on Apple's field is to do that same integration - player, desktop software as load tool and preferred player, and music store all in one.
But they'll never get it...or at least not until the "version 3" that it takes Microsoft to have a success for any product launch.
Slashdot Mirror
...it's now just a little over 10 years since all had to start yelling "Han Shot First!"
warning on those kiosks: their card readers suck and may break your card. don't use your "originals" - take it home and burn a cdrom and take that to the shop to print.
one at the nearby kinkos totally destroyed my SD card of everything i shot from a particular vacation.
As in, would you say anything if your work was installing unlicensed software on boxes? I know by "pirated" they usually refer to the big things, like Windows itself or MS Office.
But really, the place where things are problematic is "nag-ware" items that don't actually remove their features if you don't pay in time, like WinZip and TextPad. Lots of companies simply keep quiet at those things being on every box on site, unpaid.
Now, I get around that by using free (if old and unmaintained) software like ZipCentral and Crimson Editor, but not everybody feels that way.
Tell Lightning and Sunbird to support upload-via-FTP and I'll use it almost exclusively. Right now, as long as their only web access is "Webdav", it sucks and it locks out using it to only those who have total control over a web server.
I use reminder fox right now because it supports FTP upload. I then view the calendar online with phpCalendar parsing the iCal file.
Yeah, but will they ever release the Windows Media Player for Linux they promised a great many years ago?
But I *like* writing linked lists...
This whole Dell preinstalled Linux thing strikes me as a sham to get something out of Microsoft, like lower Windows license prices.
Which is exactly what it was 7 years ago when Dell put out pre-installed Linux boxes in an effort to get the prices of Windows 2000 lowered.
After a year, they achieved what they wanted, and quit. By the time of XP, they couldn't get away with it 'cause people actually wanted XP (Zarquon only knows why).
There is nothing telling me this isn't the same type of stunt - publicity to get MS to offer lower OEM prices to their biggest retailer, followed by a total shutdown of the operation in a year under the claims of "it's just not big enough to be financially viable".
Dell was flirting with linux-supported releases almost 10 years ago. I know, 'cause in 1999 or 2000 I had my company buy one for me. I went through the website to pick it and everything. RedHat was the main distro then. Even came with Applixware for Office 'cause OpenOffice hadn't become the standard yet.
So really, this isn't news, 'cause they had it and they dropped it and now they're acting like they've never had it before and it's completely full of crap.
If it works. In my case, at least on my lower jaw, the roots were so strong they pushed the incoming adult teeth behind them and the baby teeth needed to be extracted. Their roots were completely undamaged.
On the other hand, the idea of being able to reconstruct adult teeth is very useful over our current artificial forms of patch-work. The trick with enamle, of course, is to get it replaced before the rest of the tooth starts decaying. One probably couldn't put it back on a filling.
for every night person that wants a little more sun at the end of the day is a morning person who would rather keep standard standard and have more sun when they're up.
sometimes they're married.
Outpost Gallifrey is reporting that several original Dr. Who costumes were sold in the same auction, and Tom Baker's coat and scarf took in over 24000 GBP. Other Doctors' costumes took between 1000 and 8000 GBP each.
One target of this are the radio services that aren't *primarily* internet, but have an internet outlet. AOL, XMRadio, Sirius, many HD-Radio stations, more...
This will KILL them because this would impact their online "free preview" services they use (much less their services they give to subscribers) - if you can't afford to advertise and give samples, you can't afford to get new customers, and you'll go out of business.
Thing is, under current agreements, they aren't paying the RIAA because as over-the-air broadcasters first, they pay only ASCAP/BMI/etc songwriter royalties, not performance royalties to the labels. Watch for most of those services to drop if this should go through, 'cause XM-Radio and friends really can't afford it.
Granted, this is a cartel in action and the feds CAN do something about it if people complain enough.
Because Fraunhofer itself were the ones telling everybody they needed to license from them directly. I'd like to think I remember those particular wars fairly well. When did Thompson get involved, because that name was never mentioned back when Fraunhofer were first pulling their threats and Ogg was being formulated in response?
The problem came when everybody licensed the encoding patent on the assumption that they couldn't stop decoding codes (though Fraunhofer disputed it, they didn't they'd win a legal battle). The patent was on the encryption *algorithm*, not the format itself.
This ruling effectively changes everything everybody "knew" about mp3 licensing, both in terms of who companies were actually supposed to license from and what they were supposed to license for.
This is huge. I don't think even Apple has the cash to back-license all of this and still move forward with their video plans. This ruling will be the death of probably about half of the e-media hardware companies out there, leaving things to JUST Apple and Microsoft because nobody except those two have the cash on hand to pay such a penalty rate, having all thought they were properly licensed already since the 90s.
Then there's the issue of the *tons* of free software implementations out there with mp3 decoding (and encoding) built in. What are they going to do about all of that?
Depends on "before/after". Does the director decide not to get the "tear" out of Jennifer *because* he can add it later?
Or was it a case of the Director was happy with the shot in the dailies, but in editing decided it needed something else?
The latter is where the flexibility comes in along with a price-tag trade off. Is it cheaper to get Jennifer in, amidst an insane schedule that may have her on the other side of the world filming another movie, to do the one closeup? Or just turn the 48 frame (2 seconds on screen) to a computer department to fill it in.
It used to be that adding a computer effect for a scene that had no CGI was very expensive. The whole scene would have had to have been computer-scanned. Today, with digital color correction being the norm, everything's in the computer anyways so getting the 48 frames to add the feature into costs nothing.
and more importantly, what will become of "duplicate" channel offerings. Both have a standard symphonic classical station, a vocals/opera station, and a "pops" station, and that's just within the classical genre, the smallest. Which of those 6 identities will survive?
For the larger genres like "rock" or "urban", what will survive?
Wall Street may like the certitude this brings financially, but the customer base on BOTH networks will have to deal with a LOT of uncertainty as to which of their favorite shows and djs may disappear in the coming months...
google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it.
This is now a marketting leverage that Google I think should use until such time as someone calls them a monopoly on it and pulls anti-trust action on them.
From a customer standpoint, we use their site under their terms of service.
So too should an indexed site. Want to be indexed by Google so the world can find you? Agree to their terms of letting them cache your material. Some negotiations might be made for the size of the cache and the duration of it should your site be pulling stuff from the "free" zone, but generally, if you want to be found, you have to agree to be stored.
See the other comment: it was specifically Google Cache being used as part of the Google News service. The caching system is the same, it's merely the difference in how it is presented (and its priority in coming up when one searches) that decides if a reference is presented in News or the Main google search.
/. effect, or more often because many news websites that are AP /Reuters feeds tend to not keep those articles around after a certain amount of time.
Google caches *everything*, both to use it in parsing text to create the advertisement links and to have a cache available should the original be down, like, say, the
As such, Google normally makes no distinction between an feed article and an original from the news site in question.
The newspaper sites lose two ways - first is that people reading the headlines and summary text available @ google don't bother to read the site directly (so the site doesn't get the "eyeballs" for advertising) and two, the material is cached after the original site has converted it to a pay for access model. The latter is a tough call - when its free and then not, how can you really say you have control over it anymore?
Certainly legally, you do, per international copyright agreements, but realistically?
Similar questions abound when the government tries to reclassify something that has already been deemed safe for public distribution, like the various instruction pamphlets on making bombs for tree removal that they thought about taking back after McVeigh used exactly those techniques to hit Oklahoma City.
The decision was correct from a strictly legal standpoint. The law itself does not currently recognize the reality of electronic distribution through the web, of course, but its not up to the courts to change the laws, only to judge by them or judge them unconstitutional.
At any rate, it was such a small thing, and google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it. the lack of details about what it means to the layperson is what led to yesterday's early stock price drop, a drop that shouldn't have happened because it has nothing to do with google's real long term prospects.
Well, what defines a "Canadian" record label? Is "Time Warner Canada" a "Canadian" label, when 85% of what it redistributes is from Time Warner's European or American departments?
And what of the iPod that has no Canadian music on it at all, everything legally acquired by purchases through America or iTMS? Why should they pay Canadian artists and labels (well, labels - there's still no proof that the labels actually pay the artists out of this fund) when they have neither purchased Canadian music nor illegally acuired it?
It's still a racket, legally sanctioned theft. its just a slightly smaller racket than first implied.
...and I might be willing to pay the fine.
Seriously, there is no evidence at all that the labels (almost all American, btw) will actually give a dime to the artists on top of their existing contracts.
The "standard recording contract" pays the artist an upfront advance that is recouped from the royalties (usually a meager 12-14%, some of which may go to the engineer or the producer). IF and ONLY IF that advance is recouped in full (and record labels have tons of accounting tricks to assert that even a million-seller didn't "recoup") will the artist actually start seeing real royalty payments come in. (BTW, through all of this and beyond, the label owns the music, not the artist.)
There is nothing in the artist contract that actually has allowances for when extra "fees" collected on behalf of the artists of the label actually is applied to the payment of the advance. There is nothing in the accounting systems of a record label that will actually distribute such collected fees back to the artists of the label, either as cash or as applied to the advance.
The label keeps the money, most of which is either pure profit (it didn't cost them anything except paying the lobbyist) or at least is applied to the "general fund" which is used to pay the advance for the next standard artist's standard contract, and the legalized slavery continues unabated.
Unless the law goes against the labels as well, requiring that they show proof that they have changed their contracting and accounting systems to actually give an acceptable cut of this income to the artists, then all that has happened is that the legislation has totally bought into the lies and deceits of the music industry, and is sanctioning theft of both the artists AND the consumers.
Well, one answer is that deaf people have trained themselves to be able to walk through the streets without getting hit.
The "newvo-deaf" ipodders haven't; they're supposedly not used to the idea of not hearing the outside world.
(directed at either the researchers or the article writer)
Try a *combination* of bad events and watch the devastation all add up. How about a series of volcanic eruptions and other possible solar events were causing a global warming crisis over a few hundred thousand years. Some creatures in the equatorial regions that couldn't adapt to the heat died off, as did those that ate them. You have large ecosystems in a very unstable state by trying to adjust.
The larger pliosaurs might have also died out in this increasing heat, but the sharks survived by being able to migrate to more reasonable water temps more quickly.
Then, just as they might have reached a point of adjustment, a new stasis point, and some non-bird dinosaurs might have survived...THAT's when the first of the *two* possible impacts happened, followed within a few hundred thousand years by the second.
There is evidence for all of these possibilities, so why should we continue to be a slave to the likely inaccurate idea that only one thing did it?
That we now have to figure out which dinosaurs were killed off at which stage of these sequences certainly is a much harder problem, but it'll be the scientifically accurate one over this constant desire to gratify one's ego by having "THE" answer and throwing out the last 100 years of research into this.
In fact, the tin foil hatter in me would probably suggest that big radio conglomerates like ClearChannel are actively lobbying behind the scenes to make sure that Sirius and XM can never join forces - in the hopes that they successfully kill them both, to allow re-entry into the market by those that missed the boat the first time.
Actually, my understanding is that ClearChannel is a heavy investor in HD-Radio, since most HD stations are co-owned by normal broadcast stations, but with national networking so some stations are the same no matter what HD-radio market you're in.
They want Satellite to die so that HD radio wins.
This is where the FCC misses the boat, just as they did with the DirectTV/Dish merger a few years ago. They think that the satellite monopoly will cause a price rise in satellite services, when in actuality there's already too much competition here on the ground to the point that satellite stuff will never be profitable.
...back when there was talk about DirectTV and Dish merging.
Trouble is, its short-term thinking that doesn't necessarily look at the long-term survival of either company.
Competition is good to keep existing monopolies from getting out of hand and abusing the customer base, but if, thanks to competition and high operating costs, *nobody* makes a profit, then the market itself will die. At worst. Otherwise, its whoever can keep the VC capital flowing until the other one dies, then the monopoly happens inevitably anyways.
I've got a couple of Nomad IIc's which I use for myself (the ipod's my wife's ;) ), and yeah, the tool sucks. In 1.1 it's dreadfully slow, in 2.0 (IIc supports it), the whole interface freezes while the transfers are going on - bad threading code in there. For myself, I now use an mp3-cdrom compatible sony walkman, with an mp3-cdrom player in my car as well that can share the discs. The only hassle there is that *some* of my artists when compiled together end up with 715 meg, meaning i have to cut a song or two out. grrr.
iTMS is good for those who will buy the stuff they carry. my particular genres are such that either they don't have it (most progressive rock and good local celtic stuff), or the sound quality is too critical to buy compressed files (classical), or i prefer to by direct from the artist and cut out the middleman (back to the celtic).
I was thinking of finally giving in and going to iTunes to collect some missing 80s pop-rock songs that I'd like playing for a party, only Tower went away and I just got a ton of 80s best-of cds there and rock-cheap prices!
Which was Jobs's point all along.
Creative had an ok product, licensed with M$ to be able to play DRM-protected WMP files...only M$ didn't succeed as well as they wanted to get online downloads to use WMP.
What Apple had was not just one great product, but 3, which when combined won the day.
They had an mp3 player that was aesthetically impressive, had new inventions for user simplicity (like the volume/menu wheel, which though faulty at first, got better), and easily licensed for 3rd party accessories so you didn't feel like the only way to use it was through the normal headphones.
They had iTunes the desktop software, with its slick look (though why they insisted on the mac look on a windows box i'll never know, but it seemed to work), a look so impressive that it made the users want to use that as their playback software even without the iPod. Windows Media Player kept changing its look, and kept bumping into wars of codecs and DRM license issues that users simply didn't want to deal with. When prompted to auto-upgrade WMP to a new version, users panic because history with Microsoft software shows that such upgrades often break backwards compatibility or at the very least completely lose all of their existing settings. If upgrading WMP suddenly means you can't watch movies you already have or listen to music you already have, then you won't do it, and upgrades did that with WMP and Real Player a LOT.
Creative's tool was ok for loading stuff onto the box, but it wasn't "right" for actually playing the tunes as the desktop player, so the integration factor wasn't there the way it was with iTunes/iPod.
Finally, they successfully got iTunes the store to work (sounds like Spaceballs: the t-Shirt). One stop shopping, fully integrated into the player. Buy the song, put it into a desktop playlist, sync to the iPod, BAM, new music for 99 cents and i never had to change software anywhere.
Such integration is difficult, but Apple did it where Microsoft never could with their partner relationships as they licensed them at the time.
Hence the Zume. They now know the only way to play on Apple's field is to do that same integration - player, desktop software as load tool and preferred player, and music store all in one.
But they'll never get it...or at least not until the "version 3" that it takes Microsoft to have a success for any product launch.