From a purely economic point of view, you simply can't compete with "free"
Hey now. Just slow down a bit here. The RIAA has been saying this for nearly a decade now and all the music pirates who don't want to admit being pirates and the anti-DRM crowd has been shouting this down as a lie created by the RIAA. So which is it?
Consequently the experiment can only be a test if people accept the proposition and respond in fairness.
Again, hold on a minute. Fairness could have been part of the earlier long-standing music piracy "experiment". Instead of users pirating music they could have been a bit more honest, let's say fair, about it and decided to take up the good fight and boycott the industry instead of resorting to theft (that's what it is folks, regardless of what feel-good terminology you use for it). But instead we have a situation now of DRM, **AA lawsuits and people from Sam Goody looking for a new job. Playing the devil's advocate, had the consumer been "fair" in the first place we'd have a new model today that would be sponsored and embraced by the RIAA, that would likely see a drop in prices and that the consumer wouldn't need to skulk in the shadows like a common criminal to get their songs from a CD or a download to an iPod or on their cell phone. AFAIC, the user brought this onto themselves by not playing "fair" in the first place. Everything after that is simply backlash.
This wouldn't be the first situation where "pirates" recognize an honest attempt at finding a common middle ground and honor it by not cracking/releasing something.
But the situation is not real. It's still artificial. The bottom line is that even with a name-your-own-price music economy there are going to be tons of users who are going to chose zero. You admitted it yourself. This means that since the genie is out of the bottle there will be a segment of users who will feel justified using the free copy versus paying even a single cent. I'd like to think that you've been around here long enough to know how petty Slashdotters can be in their justification of anything they do. This should be no different. If this experiment has any positive end result for Radiohead it should be able to do it on it's own. Otherwise it's dishonest since piracy is here to stay.
Why? If this is honestly an experiment to see how this will do why not let it run wild?
Oh, I know, I know. You guys want Radiohead to walk away with a few sacks of cash and thumb your nose at the RIAA? That's all fine and well (not really, but that's a topic for a different discussion) but have you stopped to consider what happens to music as a total if the human nature of taking what can be had for free holds?
If Radiohead, a fairly popular band, can not stand up on it's own merits even with filesharing and such doesn't it mean that their new model is broken and a new approach should be taken? Granted, I can understand if it's a small band just trying to pay rent and feed themselves but if Radiohead can't pull this off and if the RIAA gets it's balls clipped as a lot of the users here are suggesting then it's high time we find a model that works or get ready for some really shitty music to be the norm in the near future.
Whether or not music fans realize this: people who aren't paying for their music in some fashion are the ones who are going to bring down the music industry. Not the RIAA. Radiohead has and would continue to survive just fine with the RIAA. If they can't pull this off with leeches and all what does it have to say for their form of digital distribution since we have others on here claiming that most bands hardly make a nickle per album sold from a RIAA label but we know these same bands roll in cash?
I also want to note that those who are talking about throwing down a few bucks with never having heard the album and some even proclaiming that they've never heard of Radiohead but are still willing to pitch in are also a problem here. Having this experiment in music go down like it would if this thing happens everyday is important to mark the impact of such deals on the consumer and the musician. Again, if people do things to artificially make this seem like a winning plan then someone in the future is going to pay the hard way by finding out that so much of it was only charity and had nothing to do with the music.
I'd rather put good money down for good music and support that model instead of just helping to bend the numbers so I can thumb my nose at the RIAA.
I hope others see the logic in this too. An experiment that has it's data bent to support an end result artificially is only going to hurt everyone involved in the end.
If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?
Because if you would have RTFA you'd have realized that the blurb is yet another example of MS bashing FUD.
The service isn't an online office application in the flavor of Google's online service but rather an online storage area where the documents can be viewed by anyone with permission. You'd still need MS Office to edit or create.
Basically it's a free online repository for Office documents. Had the blurb said that we could be left with our normal amount of MS bashing instead of having people run around and acting all insightful over something that simply isn't true and was never even hinted at.
He just doesn't throw chairs or dance around like a drunken monkey.
I dunno about that. I think he may not be as public about it, sure. But late at night at the Jobs home.... let's just say all kind of ritualistic happenings are in full swing.
You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.
Come on now, this is MMO! It should read:
You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East. Also here: John lvl 12 Cleric
In fact, I'd say that there's no point to playing it without commentary. It's very short and does nothing that effects the story.
I will have to go back and listen to the commentary.
But as for no point in play because of the story? I beg to differ on this. If you pay close attention to the real reason that HL has endured over the years it has not as much to do with the story as it has to do with gameplay and multiplayer. Little snippets like Lost Coast are a bit of fun (and free) in their own right. The original HL player who was interested in only the story didn't keep HL afloat for so long, it was the multiplayer aspect with it's mods that kept people in the game long after good old Gord was done with his journey on Xen.
I'd even go as far as to say that without DoD, Firearms and CS that HL2 would be a joke in vaporware alongside of Duke Nuk'em Forever. Most of the HL2 buyers I know were HL1 fans who all logged in many more hours in HL Deathmatch and the various mods.
I just want to go on the record and say that Lost Coast hardly counts as a game or an episode. Any semi-talented HL2 player could run the entire map in under a half an hour. It was more like a demo and, IMHO, I think that's what Valve meant it as; a demo of their new rendering techniques.
My guess is that the overhead for a moon colony is going to be much less then that for the space station. Also, you can leave the moon base go unmanned for a longer period of time without either expense or a serious chance that it's going to degrade into unsuitability like a orbital station will.
Basically, once you pay to get building materials and previsions off of this rock, living on the moon shouldn't be too expensive.
So would you rather have a so-so moon colony and a space station or a really serious moon base with all kinds of options as far as being the first permanent space port and tons of potential in mining? Imagine if we even had something as simple as the ISS as a moon base today? The possibilities would be fantastic. The costs would be less, people could stay "on-board" for longer durations of time and we would have something we could build off of nearly endlessly.
Why would you need to replace it for a moon colony? The moon is only a few days away, having a space station stop over doesn't make sense. And as for Mars? Let's take care of the moon first. If we get there and get a colony cooking for a few years before we ever migrate to Mars it will likely be a whole different ballgame as far as landers and transports go. Trying to build a space station for the needs doesn't make a ton of sense yet. And an earth orbiting station may not make sense for Mars but I don't know how the physics and such would work out for a midpoint station. It's a neat question though.
If anyone can think of why a space station would make sense for a moon base let me know. I don't want to speak out of turn here but I just don't see the value of a space station to a colony on the moon. But I've been wrong before.
Everyone's lives aren't yours to fuck with, you pompous pricks.
Yeah, let's go back to the days when science didn't create problems like this so that we can all die of the plague as nature intended. You science types, how dare you think that you can continue to dicker in my affairs.
I'm outta here. I need to go chop wood for 12 hours a day so I don't freeze to death this winter.
If management is good, then being gone for a week and everything functioning well during that time reflects well on their ability manage efficiently.
I've never met a manager who can tell me anything about tech. I've met plenty of techs who know a good deal about management. The bottomline is that a tech who is worth anything knows when it's time to leave the internet and get cracking at their job without the need for a manager to stand over their shoulder.
And yes, I have been a manager so I know the truth of it.
From the blurb: Li's cyber bug, which earned him about 145,000 yuan after selling it to other hackers from December 2006 to February this year, can prevent infected computers from operating anti-virus software and all programs using the "exe" suffix.'
Navidad did kind of the same thing but it seems to be a coding mistake more then the intended purpose of the virus.
That's simple. reproducing recorded copies of anything is trivially cheap and easy. There is practically no barrier to entry to do it, and practically no cost to it as well. Therefor, it is worthless; there is no added value to copying a recording.
Yeah, making the copy might be cheap but you've obviously never seen or been involved in the original process to know that this takes a ton of cash to get copy 1 into the fans hands.
But, by all means, keep thinking that way. It's this mode of thinking that is going to put serious artists who aren't established yet into a funk that will likely destroy the careers of many and will give rise to Ramones* styled bands that can kick out an albums worth in a few days on any 8 track recorder that they can find.
For all the bitching I hear around here about cookie cutter styled music it seems odd that so many are begging for it.
Sure, the established artist will do fine. So most of us won't suffer much as most peoples musical tastes never develop beyond what they were listening to in their early 20s but for some of us there will be a decline. Especially smaller market musics. The up and coming pop artists may do better but if you really think that small bands touring in the back of an Econoline are raking in the cash you better think again. There's a reason that so many bands like that break up while on tour.
* Before anyone cries foul: I like the Ramones myself but I'm thankful not every band is the Ramones.
How commonplace. If someone agrees that a CD has value suddenly they're an industry shill? Come on now. Paying a onetime fee for something I can listen to for a lifetime as opposed to paying upwards of three times as much for an event I can attend once for 3 hours and can't even legally record with my own hardware? How can you honestly say a concert is a better value? And this doesn't even include driving to the event, long lines after it, the guy puking four seats over or the beer meisters who think that they need to walk in front of you every other song to get another over priced beer.
I have a certain enjoyment of concerts, don't get me wrong. But it's insane to act like CDs have next to no value compared to a concert.
Somehow though, the backlash doesn't surprise me. Anytime you point out the potential good of something that the RIAA might be involved in you automatically get modded "overrated" and called a shill.
So be it. I'm going to continue to buy CDs as they are an entertainment value. Call me whatever you want. I still have yet to see you bring a valid reason that concerts should be held in such high value and CDs marked as worthless.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
About 90% of all modern "artistic" ventures are based on the sensations of fear, shame, anger and regret. This certainly isn't limited to games.
the question with a work that spans time is that does it end in fear, shame, anger and regret? Most games don't, many other forms of expression do.
I can't speak for anyone else but for me it came down to capacity, battery life and exclusive iTunes content that got me going with the iPod. Granted, the iTunes content thing can be worked around but the convenience of not having to while looking for a new portable player is a plus.
As for all the "it's the interface" talk.... I'm still really not sold on it. Not that I'm having a problem with what it can do but rather what it doesn't seem to do:
1. No track/folder/album repeat. 2. No exclusive on/off switch.
Ok, the 2nd one isn't a big problem but there are times that I think I'm doing a shut off only to find that my iPod suddenly wants to play every song in my library. It's easy enough to work around but a switch is more convenient, IMHO.
And if anyone has a solution for a repeat play option that would be great but so far I haven't seen anything that easily does replay. Granted, I haven't bothered with it much.
Slashdot Mirror
From a purely economic point of view, you simply can't compete with "free"
Hey now. Just slow down a bit here. The RIAA has been saying this for nearly a decade now and all the music pirates who don't want to admit being pirates and the anti-DRM crowd has been shouting this down as a lie created by the RIAA. So which is it?
Consequently the experiment can only be a test if people accept the proposition and respond in fairness.
Again, hold on a minute. Fairness could have been part of the earlier long-standing music piracy "experiment". Instead of users pirating music they could have been a bit more honest, let's say fair, about it and decided to take up the good fight and boycott the industry instead of resorting to theft (that's what it is folks, regardless of what feel-good terminology you use for it). But instead we have a situation now of DRM, **AA lawsuits and people from Sam Goody looking for a new job. Playing the devil's advocate, had the consumer been "fair" in the first place we'd have a new model today that would be sponsored and embraced by the RIAA, that would likely see a drop in prices and that the consumer wouldn't need to skulk in the shadows like a common criminal to get their songs from a CD or a download to an iPod or on their cell phone. AFAIC, the user brought this onto themselves by not playing "fair" in the first place. Everything after that is simply backlash.
This wouldn't be the first situation where "pirates" recognize an honest attempt at finding a common middle ground and honor it by not cracking/releasing something.
But the situation is not real. It's still artificial. The bottom line is that even with a name-your-own-price music economy there are going to be tons of users who are going to chose zero. You admitted it yourself. This means that since the genie is out of the bottle there will be a segment of users who will feel justified using the free copy versus paying even a single cent. I'd like to think that you've been around here long enough to know how petty Slashdotters can be in their justification of anything they do. This should be no different. If this experiment has any positive end result for Radiohead it should be able to do it on it's own. Otherwise it's dishonest since piracy is here to stay.
Why? If this is honestly an experiment to see how this will do why not let it run wild?
Oh, I know, I know. You guys want Radiohead to walk away with a few sacks of cash and thumb your nose at the RIAA? That's all fine and well (not really, but that's a topic for a different discussion) but have you stopped to consider what happens to music as a total if the human nature of taking what can be had for free holds?
If Radiohead, a fairly popular band, can not stand up on it's own merits even with filesharing and such doesn't it mean that their new model is broken and a new approach should be taken? Granted, I can understand if it's a small band just trying to pay rent and feed themselves but if Radiohead can't pull this off and if the RIAA gets it's balls clipped as a lot of the users here are suggesting then it's high time we find a model that works or get ready for some really shitty music to be the norm in the near future.
Whether or not music fans realize this: people who aren't paying for their music in some fashion are the ones who are going to bring down the music industry. Not the RIAA. Radiohead has and would continue to survive just fine with the RIAA. If they can't pull this off with leeches and all what does it have to say for their form of digital distribution since we have others on here claiming that most bands hardly make a nickle per album sold from a RIAA label but we know these same bands roll in cash?
I also want to note that those who are talking about throwing down a few bucks with never having heard the album and some even proclaiming that they've never heard of Radiohead but are still willing to pitch in are also a problem here. Having this experiment in music go down like it would if this thing happens everyday is important to mark the impact of such deals on the consumer and the musician. Again, if people do things to artificially make this seem like a winning plan then someone in the future is going to pay the hard way by finding out that so much of it was only charity and had nothing to do with the music.
I'd rather put good money down for good music and support that model instead of just helping to bend the numbers so I can thumb my nose at the RIAA.
I hope others see the logic in this too. An experiment that has it's data bent to support an end result artificially is only going to hurt everyone involved in the end.
So are you saying the people who download from eMule and the like are all assholes too?
Umm... to share documents without the need to create a network? Maybe this isn't meant to target the same crowd as you're limiting it to?
If you have to have office installed, why bother with the online version? I could see them requiring office to register for an account. But why bother?
Because if you would have RTFA you'd have realized that the blurb is yet another example of MS bashing FUD.
The service isn't an online office application in the flavor of Google's online service but rather an online storage area where the documents can be viewed by anyone with permission. You'd still need MS Office to edit or create.
Basically it's a free online repository for Office documents. Had the blurb said that we could be left with our normal amount of MS bashing instead of having people run around and acting all insightful over something that simply isn't true and was never even hinted at.
What? A summary is wrong on Slashdot? The last bastion of journalistic integrity has fallen!
He just doesn't throw chairs or dance around like a drunken monkey.
I dunno about that. I think he may not be as public about it, sure. But late at night at the Jobs home.... let's just say all kind of ritualistic happenings are in full swing.
You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.
Come on now, this is MMO! It should read:
You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.
Also here: John lvl 12 Cleric
Yeah? How does WoW play on your C64?
It plays very nice.
[turns to the other Commodore users] I told him it plays very nice [chuckling from users]
Now! Go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
What's the big deal about that? My Commodore 64 can do the same thing.
Thanks for bringing up these points. It gives me something to consider.
As a side note, why so big on L5 as a destination? Or do you mean this as a good location for a station?
In fact, I'd say that there's no point to playing it without commentary. It's very short and does nothing that effects the story.
I will have to go back and listen to the commentary.
But as for no point in play because of the story? I beg to differ on this. If you pay close attention to the real reason that HL has endured over the years it has not as much to do with the story as it has to do with gameplay and multiplayer. Little snippets like Lost Coast are a bit of fun (and free) in their own right. The original HL player who was interested in only the story didn't keep HL afloat for so long, it was the multiplayer aspect with it's mods that kept people in the game long after good old Gord was done with his journey on Xen.
I'd even go as far as to say that without DoD, Firearms and CS that HL2 would be a joke in vaporware alongside of Duke Nuk'em Forever. Most of the HL2 buyers I know were HL1 fans who all logged in many more hours in HL Deathmatch and the various mods.
I just want to go on the record and say that Lost Coast hardly counts as a game or an episode. Any semi-talented HL2 player could run the entire map in under a half an hour. It was more like a demo and, IMHO, I think that's what Valve meant it as; a demo of their new rendering techniques.
My guess is that the overhead for a moon colony is going to be much less then that for the space station. Also, you can leave the moon base go unmanned for a longer period of time without either expense or a serious chance that it's going to degrade into unsuitability like a orbital station will.
Basically, once you pay to get building materials and previsions off of this rock, living on the moon shouldn't be too expensive.
So would you rather have a so-so moon colony and a space station or a really serious moon base with all kinds of options as far as being the first permanent space port and tons of potential in mining? Imagine if we even had something as simple as the ISS as a moon base today? The possibilities would be fantastic. The costs would be less, people could stay "on-board" for longer durations of time and we would have something we could build off of nearly endlessly.
Why would you need to replace it for a moon colony? The moon is only a few days away, having a space station stop over doesn't make sense. And as for Mars? Let's take care of the moon first. If we get there and get a colony cooking for a few years before we ever migrate to Mars it will likely be a whole different ballgame as far as landers and transports go. Trying to build a space station for the needs doesn't make a ton of sense yet. And an earth orbiting station may not make sense for Mars but I don't know how the physics and such would work out for a midpoint station. It's a neat question though.
If anyone can think of why a space station would make sense for a moon base let me know. I don't want to speak out of turn here but I just don't see the value of a space station to a colony on the moon. But I've been wrong before.
Take my geek card... please!
Everyone's lives aren't yours to fuck with, you pompous pricks.
Yeah, let's go back to the days when science didn't create problems like this so that we can all die of the plague as nature intended. You science types, how dare you think that you can continue to dicker in my affairs.
I'm outta here. I need to go chop wood for 12 hours a day so I don't freeze to death this winter.
If management is good, then being gone for a week and everything functioning well during that time reflects well on their ability manage efficiently.
I've never met a manager who can tell me anything about tech. I've met plenty of techs who know a good deal about management. The bottomline is that a tech who is worth anything knows when it's time to leave the internet and get cracking at their job without the need for a manager to stand over their shoulder.
And yes, I have been a manager so I know the truth of it.
From the blurb: Li's cyber bug, which earned him about 145,000 yuan after selling it to other hackers from December 2006 to February this year, can prevent infected computers from operating anti-virus software and all programs using the "exe" suffix.'
Navidad did kind of the same thing but it seems to be a coding mistake more then the intended purpose of the virus.
Just for the record: I didn't read the article.
That's simple. reproducing recorded copies of anything is trivially cheap and easy. There is practically no barrier to entry to do it, and practically no cost to it as well. Therefor, it is worthless; there is no added value to copying a recording.
Yeah, making the copy might be cheap but you've obviously never seen or been involved in the original process to know that this takes a ton of cash to get copy 1 into the fans hands.
But, by all means, keep thinking that way. It's this mode of thinking that is going to put serious artists who aren't established yet into a funk that will likely destroy the careers of many and will give rise to Ramones* styled bands that can kick out an albums worth in a few days on any 8 track recorder that they can find.
For all the bitching I hear around here about cookie cutter styled music it seems odd that so many are begging for it.
Sure, the established artist will do fine. So most of us won't suffer much as most peoples musical tastes never develop beyond what they were listening to in their early 20s but for some of us there will be a decline. Especially smaller market musics. The up and coming pop artists may do better but if you really think that small bands touring in the back of an Econoline are raking in the cash you better think again. There's a reason that so many bands like that break up while on tour.
* Before anyone cries foul: I like the Ramones myself but I'm thankful not every band is the Ramones.
How commonplace. If someone agrees that a CD has value suddenly they're an industry shill? Come on now. Paying a onetime fee for something I can listen to for a lifetime as opposed to paying upwards of three times as much for an event I can attend once for 3 hours and can't even legally record with my own hardware? How can you honestly say a concert is a better value? And this doesn't even include driving to the event, long lines after it, the guy puking four seats over or the beer meisters who think that they need to walk in front of you every other song to get another over priced beer.
I have a certain enjoyment of concerts, don't get me wrong. But it's insane to act like CDs have next to no value compared to a concert.
Somehow though, the backlash doesn't surprise me. Anytime you point out the potential good of something that the RIAA might be involved in you automatically get modded "overrated" and called a shill.
So be it. I'm going to continue to buy CDs as they are an entertainment value. Call me whatever you want. I still have yet to see you bring a valid reason that concerts should be held in such high value and CDs marked as worthless.
I've found the nin softening more recently
You mean that you thought that Trend, er Trent was hard at one point? I'm sorry.
Trent is the poster boy for emo-industrial; one step above a crying goth girl.
You're the one comparing apples to oranges:
It's sort of like expecting oil paintings to be held to the same pricing standards as mass-produced posters.
If you can hang it in your own home they have a same basic value associated with them.
You can't (legally) take a concert with you. You'll get much much more mileage out of a CD.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
About 90% of all modern "artistic" ventures are based on the sensations of fear, shame, anger and regret. This certainly isn't limited to games.
the question with a work that spans time is that does it end in fear, shame, anger and regret? Most games don't, many other forms of expression do.
I can't speak for anyone else but for me it came down to capacity, battery life and exclusive iTunes content that got me going with the iPod. Granted, the iTunes content thing can be worked around but the convenience of not having to while looking for a new portable player is a plus.
As for all the "it's the interface" talk.... I'm still really not sold on it. Not that I'm having a problem with what it can do but rather what it doesn't seem to do:
1. No track/folder/album repeat.
2. No exclusive on/off switch.
Ok, the 2nd one isn't a big problem but there are times that I think I'm doing a shut off only to find that my iPod suddenly wants to play every song in my library. It's easy enough to work around but a switch is more convenient, IMHO.
And if anyone has a solution for a repeat play option that would be great but so far I haven't seen anything that easily does replay. Granted, I haven't bothered with it much.