Take a look at what you actually wrote, not what you might have been thinking. If you're going to be as irrelevant as to bring up the cost of Macs, at least get the facts right. You claimed that you couldn't get a Mac other than an eMac without spending "thousands upon thousands" of dollars. You are wrong. Period.
...Like the fact that you can get a very GOOD Mac for much less than your "thousands upon thousands of dollars" -- and it's not an eMac. You can get a very nice iMac G4 for about $1,300. You can even get the new Power Mac G5 for just $2,000 (for the low end of the line), considerably less than thousands upon thousands.
Blatantly wrong hyperbole like that doesn't do much for the credibility of your point.
You are BADLY mistaken if you think that direct mail doesn't work. I've seen it change the results of election after election. It's most effective for state and local races, but it is very effective AND very cost-effective (particularly as compared to TV and radio for those offices).
Which requires more work or cost or effort: Clicking a delete icon for a piece of political spam or throwing away physical junk mail? That was my point. If you're getting this upset about spam, why aren't you demanding that you not receive physical junk mail, too?
As I said, IF spam works to get votes, it will be used. If enough people complain to campaigns, it won't be used. It's as simple as that.
Concerning your last sentence -- about truly interested citizens -- elections have remarkably little to do with those people. In any two-person race, there's going to be 45 percent who are for one candidate and 45 percent for the other. It's ONLY those 10 percent in the undecided middle who a campaign is aimed at. (I'm pulling these specific percentages out of the air as an example.) The people who are undecided tend NOT to be rocket scientists. They tend to be people who are ignorant or are easily swayed by emotional appeals, which is why political ads are geared toward that lowest-common denominator. (Naturally, there are exceptions, but they're not statistically significant to planning a campaign.)
Can I presume that you're also working hard to get direct mail to your snail mail box banned as well?:-)
Political speech is legally treated differently than commercial speech simply because of the fear that too many restrictions can stop political messages from getting to citizens, particularly when those messages are coming from people outside the political mainstream. Hitting the delete button a few times for political spam is much easier than throwing away physical junk mail delivering a political message, and NO court would consider banning physical junk mail because of the First Amendment concerns. As much as I hate spam, I think that deleting political e-mail is a small price to pay for making sure that political outsiders have a chance to deliver a message.
Besides, if you don't like a campaign using the method and it's that big a deal to you, contact the campaign directly and let them know that you won't vote for ANYONE who uses unsolicited e-mail. If enough people do that, they won't do it anymore, because campaigns are VERY sensitive to complaints from a large enough number of people.
(I'm a political consultant specializing in direct mail -- a.k.a. junk mail -- so I'm familiar with the sorts of complaints that will get results from campaigns.)
No. There's no mention of it on the Apple home page because it's not a big deal except to a very few geeks. The vast, vast majority of the general public doesn't KNOW what open source is and couldn't care less about the issues that matter so much to people at the FSF.
I do both walking and SOME running with one of the older iPods. There is something like 20 minutes worth of skip protection built in, which has always been plenty for me. I assume that the iPod buffers to some kind of solid state memory, but I don't recall the details. It's also my playback device for music in the car (fed into the car's audio system), and my driving has never been bad enough to cause a problem with skipping yet.:-)
I'm not an attorney, so my answer is just based on my understanding of the law and not on proper training, but I strongly suspect that there will not be recourse like what you speak of. The only way there could be recourse is if someone could PROVE that there was a conspiracy to commit fraud or stock manipulation or something of that nature. I'm speaking hypothetically, NOT in the sense of making the charge that this took place. The legal presumption would have to be that the company (SCO) went down the path it did because it believed that it was correct on the points of its charges. And I don't believe there's any way the board or the officers can be held responsible for the things you're mentioning without a litigant meeting a very high standard of proof.
I'd love to hear the opinion of a corporate attorney, though, because I might be mistaken.
Assuming that SCO loses this battle, I doubt there will be much left of the company to go after. Of course, it might be interesting for you to file suit NOW, even if you don't expect to win any substantial monetary damages. (And if you were to win, your subsequent damages could continue to be added to the total later.) The PR for your company would be worth something all by itself, because the news coverage in your local area could let companies see you as something as a leader among Linux consultants.
What about the fact that KDE was "almost as good as XP" makes you assume that it will surpass Windows anytime soon? There is ZERO logic in that statement. Just because KDE or Gnome has come from a totally primitive state to be almost as good as XP, that says NOTHING about the ability of the Linux coders to get BETTER than Windows by doing innovative things. It COULD come to pass, but there's no reason to believe so.
To see something better than Windows in the way of usability, IMO, you still have to look to MS's "usability research department" in Cupertino, Calif., more commonly known as Apple Computer.:-)
Four megapixels is NOT plenty for newspapers. If you're going to run a photo full-frame at a fairly small size, it's no big deal, but some of the best shots I ever got when I was shooting sports for newspapers came from frames where a small part of the frame had to be blown up very large. If the image you want to crop is a small portion of the frame (and that's very common), you can end up with not nearly enough pixels to do it with only four megapixels.
My Canon PowerShot S40 is a great four-megapixel digital camera, and it's perfect for most uses that I have for it when I have to have something printed (for either magazine or newspaper reproduction), BUT there have been times when I have needed to blow something up more, but I couldn't. My S40 certainly isn't designed for the kind of news or sports photography that we're talking about in this thread, but I can tell you for sure that I would NEVER want to try to shoot live news or sports with only four megapixels of resolution to work with, whether it was for newspaper or magazine use.
As an ex-journalist who started out as a newspaper reporter/photographer, I laugh when I see what some people are envisioning for this camera. Here's a news flash. Most of the time when you're shooting news events, there's not a WiFi access spot or the time (or NEED) to set one up. While I can certainly come up with theorectical uses for it, I can come up with even more potential problems in handling things that way. A laptop and a cable is still a much better (and cheaper) solution where Internet access is available, IMO.
It seems to me that this is an example of geeks liking a new technical solution and not realizing that existing technology is better for the people who really use the equipment to get actual work done.
I'm not sure if you're just a troll or if you're truly not very bright. Who is FORCING iChat AV on anyone? Nobody. It's a choice. As far as I know, nobody is forcibly taking money from people to make them take this product.
If you LIKE using low-end gear and getting low-end results, that's fine with Apple, I'm sure. They wish everyone cared about the kind of quality experience they tend to provide, but they realize that some people -- such as you, apparently -- want the computing equivalent of a Yugo. Why are you complaining? Just don't buy it. Some of us like and appreciate higher quality just for its own sake. You seem offended that someone dares offer us what you don't think we "need."
If the OS upgrade cost is THAT prohibitive to you, maybe you should put aside $10 a month to go toward OS maintenance. Just hold off on upsizing to the biggie fries a few times a month and buy fewer soft drinks and you'll save up for it in no time.:-)
If you're not talking about business, you're in the wrong conversation. This is about the music business. I'm sure there's a thread somewhere for people who just want to rant uselessly about what they wish reality were.
You're partly making my point. The cost of financing a new group (or one just becoming more professional, as opposed to a garage band) IS a very key function that the labels fulfill. And how many of those bands NEVER pay back the up-front money, simply because most groups never make it?
Actually, from the replies I've seen here, many people here do NOT understand that the labels do many important things that are necessary. Because they hate the RIAA's stand on pirating music, they decide that labels are unnecessary. If you'd like to help establish a new business model that can undergird the whole music industry, more power to you, but until there IS some new mode (or structure) in place, the labels are going to be with us in some form. That's just the practical business fact of the matter.
So if you can find one or two examples of something working, it's universal, huh? You are either terribly naive or willfully blind about this issue. Please learn something about financing a new business (which a band is) before you talkin about something you're terribly ignorant about.
I'm sorry, but you are woefully ignorant about how actual marketing works and WHY it works as it does. By your logic, marketing and advertising aren't needed in ANY industry. Someone just produces a product and people magically know about it. Right? And all the people involved in producing records and keeping a band going just volunteer their time until that distant future that a band starts making money. Right? Your notions are so ignorant that a rudimentary understanding of business makes them obviously laughable.
It's rare when I can dismiss someone's argument with such utter disdain, but you are just plain wrong. There is plenty to criticize labels for, but acting as though they don't perform functions that are necessary is just plain stupid.
You're missing the point that this is up-front money. When a band is starting, those amounts are VERY vaunting for small bands. I knew the members of a small band that was considered an up-and-coming local band around here. They won some contests and were popular at various local hangouts. But they STILL couldn't come up with the $1,000 or so to record some halfway professional demos. Financing things when there is no cash flow is one of the labels' most important functions, if not THE most important ones.
As for the cost of promotion, I suspect it would surprise all of us how much it costs. I work in marketing (in a totally unrelated industry), and it never fails to shock people how much it costs to do it right.
Considering the costs of promoting a new group, getting them recorded, producing the CDs and getting distribution, the group almost certainly wouldn't be selling ANY albums or getting ANY money if they weren't working with a record label -- because nobody would have heard of them and no CDs would exist. While labels might have too much power and take too large a cut of the revenue, the truth is that they DO fill several very important functions, which some people don't seem to understand.
I actually wish you were right, but I don't think so. I use QuarkXPress for quite a number of things I do, and I'm still running 4.04 in Mac OS X's Classic mode. Here's the bad thing from Adobe's point of view. I have had InDesign 2.0.1 on my Mac for quite some time, but I haven't used it for a single project yet. Why? Two reasons. 1) I know how to crank something out in QuarkXPress very quickly. I'm sure I could use InDesign to do just as well, but I ALREADY know how to use XPress. When I'm ready to do a job, I use the tool I already know. And when I'm NOT doing a job, the last thing I want to do is learn new software. 2) When I burn a job onto a CD to give to a printer, I KNOW that any printer I deal with can deal with a QuarkXPress file. I don't personally know of a printing company near me that is using InDesign yet. I've been asking the people I deal with. They seem to know what InDesign is, but they're in no hurry to support it.
For these reasons, I suspect that Quark will sell many, many copies of XPress. I can't stand the company, but I suspect that others will keep using their product, for reasons similar to mine.
The problem with the Tablet PC (and the reason that I never expected it to sell well) is that it's the sort of device that a lot of geeks say is, "cool," but it is NOT the sort of device that solves problems for most people. It's one of those things that many people might take for free (just because the concept seems cool), but the minor benefits of the machine aren't enough to outweigh the cost or the other negatives (for the vast majority).
There might be a few markets where the benefits outweigh the costs (vertical medical applications, maybe?), but I can't think of many where they are truly cost-effective. After trying to use laptops and PDAs for notes and schedules and such, I still find that the easiest thing for ME to use for most of my needs like that is still a piece of paper. The cost ($2 vs. $2,600) and "user interface" of a cheap paper notebook still make it superior for a lot of things, even if it DOES seem cool to geeks to be able to write on a screen with a stylus.
I don't expect Tablet PCs to take off any time soon, and I still think that PDAs as we know them are dying, too. (I thought Steve Jobs was wrong about PDAs in the beginning, but I know fewer and fewer non-geeks who use them.) A Tablet PC is interesting technology, but it doesn't solve a problem that people really want solved.
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Take a look at what you actually wrote, not what you might have been thinking. If you're going to be as irrelevant as to bring up the cost of Macs, at least get the facts right. You claimed that you couldn't get a Mac other than an eMac without spending "thousands upon thousands" of dollars. You are wrong. Period.
...Like the fact that you can get a very GOOD Mac for much less than your "thousands upon thousands of dollars" -- and it's not an eMac. You can get a very nice iMac G4 for about $1,300. You can even get the new Power Mac G5 for just $2,000 (for the low end of the line), considerably less than thousands upon thousands.
Blatantly wrong hyperbole like that doesn't do much for the credibility of your point.
You are BADLY mistaken if you think that direct mail doesn't work. I've seen it change the results of election after election. It's most effective for state and local races, but it is very effective AND very cost-effective (particularly as compared to TV and radio for those offices).
Which requires more work or cost or effort: Clicking a delete icon for a piece of political spam or throwing away physical junk mail? That was my point. If you're getting this upset about spam, why aren't you demanding that you not receive physical junk mail, too?
As I said, IF spam works to get votes, it will be used. If enough people complain to campaigns, it won't be used. It's as simple as that.
Concerning your last sentence -- about truly interested citizens -- elections have remarkably little to do with those people. In any two-person race, there's going to be 45 percent who are for one candidate and 45 percent for the other. It's ONLY those 10 percent in the undecided middle who a campaign is aimed at. (I'm pulling these specific percentages out of the air as an example.) The people who are undecided tend NOT to be rocket scientists. They tend to be people who are ignorant or are easily swayed by emotional appeals, which is why political ads are geared toward that lowest-common denominator. (Naturally, there are exceptions, but they're not statistically significant to planning a campaign.)
Can I presume that you're also working hard to get direct mail to your snail mail box banned as well? :-)
Political speech is legally treated differently than commercial speech simply because of the fear that too many restrictions can stop political messages from getting to citizens, particularly when those messages are coming from people outside the political mainstream. Hitting the delete button a few times for political spam is much easier than throwing away physical junk mail delivering a political message, and NO court would consider banning physical junk mail because of the First Amendment concerns. As much as I hate spam, I think that deleting political e-mail is a small price to pay for making sure that political outsiders have a chance to deliver a message.
Besides, if you don't like a campaign using the method and it's that big a deal to you, contact the campaign directly and let them know that you won't vote for ANYONE who uses unsolicited e-mail. If enough people do that, they won't do it anymore, because campaigns are VERY sensitive to complaints from a large enough number of people.
(I'm a political consultant specializing in direct mail -- a.k.a. junk mail -- so I'm familiar with the sorts of complaints that will get results from campaigns.)
I still know PLENTY of people who don't use computers at home or work. I know it's hard for people like us to believe, but it's very true. :-)
No. There's no mention of it on the Apple home page because it's not a big deal except to a very few geeks. The vast, vast majority of the general public doesn't KNOW what open source is and couldn't care less about the issues that matter so much to people at the FSF.
I do both walking and SOME running with one of the older iPods. There is something like 20 minutes worth of skip protection built in, which has always been plenty for me. I assume that the iPod buffers to some kind of solid state memory, but I don't recall the details. It's also my playback device for music in the car (fed into the car's audio system), and my driving has never been bad enough to cause a problem with skipping yet. :-)
I'm not an attorney, so my answer is just based on my understanding of the law and not on proper training, but I strongly suspect that there will not be recourse like what you speak of. The only way there could be recourse is if someone could PROVE that there was a conspiracy to commit fraud or stock manipulation or something of that nature. I'm speaking hypothetically, NOT in the sense of making the charge that this took place. The legal presumption would have to be that the company (SCO) went down the path it did because it believed that it was correct on the points of its charges. And I don't believe there's any way the board or the officers can be held responsible for the things you're mentioning without a litigant meeting a very high standard of proof.
I'd love to hear the opinion of a corporate attorney, though, because I might be mistaken.
Assuming that SCO loses this battle, I doubt there will be much left of the company to go after. Of course, it might be interesting for you to file suit NOW, even if you don't expect to win any substantial monetary damages. (And if you were to win, your subsequent damages could continue to be added to the total later.) The PR for your company would be worth something all by itself, because the news coverage in your local area could let companies see you as something as a leader among Linux consultants.
What about the fact that KDE was "almost as good as XP" makes you assume that it will surpass Windows anytime soon? There is ZERO logic in that statement. Just because KDE or Gnome has come from a totally primitive state to be almost as good as XP, that says NOTHING about the ability of the Linux coders to get BETTER than Windows by doing innovative things. It COULD come to pass, but there's no reason to believe so.
:-)
To see something better than Windows in the way of usability, IMO, you still have to look to MS's "usability research department" in Cupertino, Calif., more commonly known as Apple Computer.
Four megapixels is NOT plenty for newspapers. If you're going to run a photo full-frame at a fairly small size, it's no big deal, but some of the best shots I ever got when I was shooting sports for newspapers came from frames where a small part of the frame had to be blown up very large. If the image you want to crop is a small portion of the frame (and that's very common), you can end up with not nearly enough pixels to do it with only four megapixels.
My Canon PowerShot S40 is a great four-megapixel digital camera, and it's perfect for most uses that I have for it when I have to have something printed (for either magazine or newspaper reproduction), BUT there have been times when I have needed to blow something up more, but I couldn't. My S40 certainly isn't designed for the kind of news or sports photography that we're talking about in this thread, but I can tell you for sure that I would NEVER want to try to shoot live news or sports with only four megapixels of resolution to work with, whether it was for newspaper or magazine use.
As an ex-journalist who started out as a newspaper reporter/photographer, I laugh when I see what some people are envisioning for this camera. Here's a news flash. Most of the time when you're shooting news events, there's not a WiFi access spot or the time (or NEED) to set one up. While I can certainly come up with theorectical uses for it, I can come up with even more potential problems in handling things that way. A laptop and a cable is still a much better (and cheaper) solution where Internet access is available, IMO.
It seems to me that this is an example of geeks liking a new technical solution and not realizing that existing technology is better for the people who really use the equipment to get actual work done.
I'm not sure if you're just a troll or if you're truly not very bright. Who is FORCING iChat AV on anyone? Nobody. It's a choice. As far as I know, nobody is forcibly taking money from people to make them take this product.
If you LIKE using low-end gear and getting low-end results, that's fine with Apple, I'm sure. They wish everyone cared about the kind of quality experience they tend to provide, but they realize that some people -- such as you, apparently -- want the computing equivalent of a Yugo. Why are you complaining? Just don't buy it. Some of us like and appreciate higher quality just for its own sake. You seem offended that someone dares offer us what you don't think we "need."
If the OS upgrade cost is THAT prohibitive to you, maybe you should put aside $10 a month to go toward OS maintenance. Just hold off on upsizing to the biggie fries a few times a month and buy fewer soft drinks and you'll save up for it in no time. :-)
So Mac users will buy anything that Steve Jobs says to buy, huh? Is that why they all marched in lockstep to buy the Mac Cube a few years back? ;-)
If you're not talking about business, you're in the wrong conversation. This is about the music business. I'm sure there's a thread somewhere for people who just want to rant uselessly about what they wish reality were.
You're partly making my point. The cost of financing a new group (or one just becoming more professional, as opposed to a garage band) IS a very key function that the labels fulfill. And how many of those bands NEVER pay back the up-front money, simply because most groups never make it?
Actually, from the replies I've seen here, many people here do NOT understand that the labels do many important things that are necessary. Because they hate the RIAA's stand on pirating music, they decide that labels are unnecessary. If you'd like to help establish a new business model that can undergird the whole music industry, more power to you, but until there IS some new mode (or structure) in place, the labels are going to be with us in some form. That's just the practical business fact of the matter.
So if you can find one or two examples of something working, it's universal, huh? You are either terribly naive or willfully blind about this issue. Please learn something about financing a new business (which a band is) before you talkin about something you're terribly ignorant about.
I'm sorry, but you are woefully ignorant about how actual marketing works and WHY it works as it does. By your logic, marketing and advertising aren't needed in ANY industry. Someone just produces a product and people magically know about it. Right? And all the people involved in producing records and keeping a band going just volunteer their time until that distant future that a band starts making money. Right? Your notions are so ignorant that a rudimentary understanding of business makes them obviously laughable.
It's rare when I can dismiss someone's argument with such utter disdain, but you are just plain wrong. There is plenty to criticize labels for, but acting as though they don't perform functions that are necessary is just plain stupid.
You're missing the point that this is up-front money. When a band is starting, those amounts are VERY vaunting for small bands. I knew the members of a small band that was considered an up-and-coming local band around here. They won some contests and were popular at various local hangouts. But they STILL couldn't come up with the $1,000 or so to record some halfway professional demos. Financing things when there is no cash flow is one of the labels' most important functions, if not THE most important ones.
As for the cost of promotion, I suspect it would surprise all of us how much it costs. I work in marketing (in a totally unrelated industry), and it never fails to shock people how much it costs to do it right.
Considering the costs of promoting a new group, getting them recorded, producing the CDs and getting distribution, the group almost certainly wouldn't be selling ANY albums or getting ANY money if they weren't working with a record label -- because nobody would have heard of them and no CDs would exist. While labels might have too much power and take too large a cut of the revenue, the truth is that they DO fill several very important functions, which some people don't seem to understand.
I actually wish you were right, but I don't think so. I use QuarkXPress for quite a number of things I do, and I'm still running 4.04 in Mac OS X's Classic mode. Here's the bad thing from Adobe's point of view. I have had InDesign 2.0.1 on my Mac for quite some time, but I haven't used it for a single project yet. Why? Two reasons. 1) I know how to crank something out in QuarkXPress very quickly. I'm sure I could use InDesign to do just as well, but I ALREADY know how to use XPress. When I'm ready to do a job, I use the tool I already know. And when I'm NOT doing a job, the last thing I want to do is learn new software. 2) When I burn a job onto a CD to give to a printer, I KNOW that any printer I deal with can deal with a QuarkXPress file. I don't personally know of a printing company near me that is using InDesign yet. I've been asking the people I deal with. They seem to know what InDesign is, but they're in no hurry to support it.
For these reasons, I suspect that Quark will sell many, many copies of XPress. I can't stand the company, but I suspect that others will keep using their product, for reasons similar to mine.
The problem with the Tablet PC (and the reason that I never expected it to sell well) is that it's the sort of device that a lot of geeks say is, "cool," but it is NOT the sort of device that solves problems for most people. It's one of those things that many people might take for free (just because the concept seems cool), but the minor benefits of the machine aren't enough to outweigh the cost or the other negatives (for the vast majority).
There might be a few markets where the benefits outweigh the costs (vertical medical applications, maybe?), but I can't think of many where they are truly cost-effective. After trying to use laptops and PDAs for notes and schedules and such, I still find that the easiest thing for ME to use for most of my needs like that is still a piece of paper. The cost ($2 vs. $2,600) and "user interface" of a cheap paper notebook still make it superior for a lot of things, even if it DOES seem cool to geeks to be able to write on a screen with a stylus.
I don't expect Tablet PCs to take off any time soon, and I still think that PDAs as we know them are dying, too. (I thought Steve Jobs was wrong about PDAs in the beginning, but I know fewer and fewer non-geeks who use them.) A Tablet PC is interesting technology, but it doesn't solve a problem that people really want solved.