I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but if you think there's nothing that Windows does that's better than Linux than you're in denial. And most users could care less if they can look at the code, and wouldn't understand it or have the foggiest idea what to do with it if they did.
Microsoft may figure that if the OLPC can boot to either OS that users may end up preferring Windows over Linux. And for most users they may very well be correct. In addition, they will be able to more easily show off areas where Windows excels in comparison with Linux.
I won't be buying ANY HD media at least until they can be played by a player that has absolutely no moving parts. Spinning disks? Puhleeze, that's so 20th century...
Anti-terrorism provides whole new vistas for lucrative pork-barrel projects.
Chickenshits-- tell everyone to grow a backbone. America is ruled by cowards, motivated only by greed or fear. And I don't see that it's going to get any better as long as the majority of the populace continues to believe that their choice is between a Republican and a Democrat.
Doesn't this simply say that you have to be licenced to do computer forensic work for hire? What does it really say about doing it on your own PC just to learn about it? I suspect there's some mislead impressions being taken here...
APL was brilliant for its time, the only serious and also pictographic programming language that I'm aware of, a fascinating characteristic that unfortunately Iverson himself gave up on and reverted to ASCII digraphs with the language J. I often complain about the fact that programming on our current keyboard, originally adapted from existing non-computing devices as it was, has relegated us to have to resort to the available symbols * and / for multiply and divide where proper symbols were not available-- we're still using a 50 or more year old keyboard standard completely for reasons of ancient practicality, not elegance. APL was a valiant but failed effort to try to change that.
One big problem with APL as a pictographic language is extending it implies a need for new pictograms over time, and a typewriter keyboard, even redesigned for the language, is a poor candidate for such expansion. The earliest forms of APL kept that problem somewhat in check via the use of overstrikes, so that you didn't have to resort to a separate key for each symbol but instead could learn a relatively manageable set of symbols that could be reused in combination to produce the entire symbol set. However, the use of overstrikes appeared to be out of place on video terminals, and so the innovation of overstrikes gave way to video terminal keyboards with a vast array of stick-on symbols that one would have to learn the location of, in order to write programs.
APL is also about the most terse programming language ever devised, a crucially important characteristic at a time when dial-up baud rates were often 110-300. When it takes that long for characters to transmit, one-liner programs of a hundred or so pictographic symbols works pretty darn good.
And despite APL's inherent array operations, automatically parallelizing APL is a relatively crude means of taking advantage of multi-core systems, as the setup and teardown overhead would require additional logic to determine if the size of the arrays and/or complexity of the operation would warrant it. Logic that would have to be done even when determining that parallelism is not appropriate for the operation.
APL's real failure has been in the immense difficulty of standardization-- no two APL vendors ever thought about it alike, the various extensions and workspace formats differ significantly, and implementing a full APL is a complex undertaking as language implementations go.
In a world where "write once run anywhere" is an important goal, APL fares rather poorly in that regard.
While I'm sure there are some APL die-hards that are just waiting for the advent of many-core desktops as the chance for APL to "shine again." I fully expect it to disappear as anything more than a curiosity, and fairly soon as the original die-hards have been entering retirement age already for some time now. And many of those who haven't, like Iverson have chosen to move to the J language or some other ASCII based array language, giving up one of the most important things that I think made APL special, if not uniquely valuable-- its pictographic character.
For me, APL will always have a soft spot in my heart, being the first computer language I was ever exposed to and on which I learned to program (on an IBM 2741 selectric terminal). Long ago I wrote my own interpreter and have recently given it somewhat of a facelift for Windows (and mine still supports overstrikes, as I don't need the stickers-- I still remember where all the original symbols are). I use it as a super-Calculator and that's about it though (it remains really good for that). While I sometimes get wistful about its potential, and try to think of ways it could possibly mutate into something important in the modern world, I harbor no real illusions of a resurgence...
The Act also includes blanket protection from infringement actions for private, non-commercial analog audio copying, and for digital audio copies made with digital audio recording devices.
You need to get into the habit of planning for the unforseen. I think a lot of that comes with experience, after a few hard knocks with projects where new requirements caused a lot of ugly hacks to go in because the original code wasn't flexible. Every time I write a function I try to think of how else it might get used or abused and try not to lock out such growth. Often for me, it's a matter of realizing that there are features they are going to want that they powers-that-be haven't thought of yet, and coding for the eventuality. It won't completely eliminate the problem of "drift" but it can help...
They use to explain the 100,000-year critique away using the "future technology" argument-- that by the time it's a problem science will have developed new ways of dealing with the waste. I find it interesting that I'm not seeing that argument anymore-- could it be because too many people have realized how BOGUS it is? Essentially, "we don't have to worry about it, it's a problem for the future..."
I've yet to see a believable analysis that factors in 100,000 years of possible effects on the environment of nuclear, weighed against the environmental effects of coal or (insert other method here). If you only consider the immediate effects of the technologies on the environment, nuclear may seem pretty clean-- but immediate effects are not all that there are-- and you have to weight them in the "clean" equation. Not an easy task when nuclear is so different in that regard from virtually all the other technologies...
And I agree that in the long term on line distribution will win, but before it can the internet as we know it needs some substantial upgrading. Not to support the concept (it already does), but to support what happens when the masses start using it.
Well, they'll need to support affordable and reliable network streaming to the screen in the back of your SUV while you're driving the kids to grandmas.
Then they'll also need to support some way that your 80-year-old mom can purchase the media as a gift for someone else (who has a computer) without having to use a computer herself. (just try buying a gift certificate now for Amazon for someone if you can't use a computer-- and Amazon isn't even strictly downloaded products-- fortunately they're not the single source, yet anyway)
And streaming capability needs to operate equally well in remote areas of the country where currently, only dialup internet is available.
Streaming needs to operate to laptops on airplanes-- you can watch DVDs now on a flight without a problem.
In addition, a total-download world means that any competition in media rental services completely disappears, as why are the content producers going to want to cut Blockbuster, Netflix or Amazon in on the deal when they can distribute via a single source with more control (ala-iTunes) direct to the customer?
And, libraries may have some problems in making d/l content available, at least to the extent and the utility that they do now.
Personally, I hope the d/l-only media utopia NEVER HAPPENS. I buy all my media discounted or second hand, and have been known to sell or trade media that I no longer want. I've also been known to buy media that is out-of-print, and if you think that downloads can't go unavailable (essentially, out of print) if the providers choose to pull the product, you haven't thought about it enough-- I have no doubt that "limited time offers" will be an inflationary gimmick used in an all-download world. If I don't get a legit (content-owner approved) physical substrate that carries the media, I for one am not willing to pay for it, as without such a substrate, the value is transient and non-transferable. I can't buy a used download. I can't check a download out at the library. I can't sell a download on eBay. I cannot "shop-around" and find competitive deals from independent sources, or closeouts due to overstock on downloads. I have no way to legally acquire a discontinued "limited-time" download.
Make no mistake, pay-to-downloads, are "broken by design" mechanisms that intentionally limit the usefulness of a media purchase, every bit as much as DRM does. I say, insist on legit physical media, whether for music, movies or software, if they want your $$$ in exchange...
Dream on. Verizon will probably get it, after placating Google with feiged interest in the Android, enough for Google to decide to underbid in exchange-- either that or Google won't qualify at all at the last minute on some "technicality" cooked up by the FCC...
You have to realize that the US government doesn't want this as open market telecom would likely make their mechanized eavesdropping much more expensive...
The first time I have to go to work and sit in a beanbag chair, I'm giving my notice, and will flee the tech industry for something more rewarding, like ditch digging...
For one, I guess he could play the "I'm Spartacus" game and post a bunch of anonymous inflammatory comments towards the township of Manalapan and see how many other bloggers you could get to do the same...
If you can, the patent system is more than a little bit broken, though I guess we all know that by now. I would think that the existance of the brain would constitute prior art...
Each technology has its own advantages and disadvantages. Inherent in ultrasound is a tradeoff between resolution and penetration. Higher frequencies have a shorter wavelength and hence better resolution, but higher frequencies are absorbed in shorter distances. Thus "deep" and "in detail" are mutually exclusive. High power ultrasound is not a solution to the tradeoff, because high power causes cavitation (bubbles), heating, and (I guess) tissue disruption. Being an acoustic technique, ultrasound is also subject to complications from refraction, reflection, and diffraction.
Maybe someone just needs to think a little more outside the box. Perhaps using a multi-frequency signal combined with phase shifts could be used to gain both the resolution of higher frequencies and the penetration of lower ones. Or sampling techniques to allow for short term high power to get the penetration without the side-effects...
Gadolinium - not necessarily, you can see a lot without it.
Theoretically, perhaps. Problem is, this is only true if you have the latest gear, and the gear is so damn expensive that many MRI labs are using older stuff-- just try telling your local lab that you don't want them to use Gado and see how far you get...
I expect we'll see a lot of these new 3D scanning technologies in the next few years. Right now, the MRI and CT are the most common, and both are rather crude. MRI zaps a huge magnetic field yet still may require the ingestion of Gadolinium in order to produce enough contrast to see blood vessels, and Gadolinium has been linked to some unpleasant new diseases. X-rays are not without their risks either so I hope some better ultrasound or something comes along. I would think that before long a detailed 3D scan will be so safe and cheap that a kids toy could be produced that include it for playing doctor with your pet hamster and get a bio education in the process. Now that chemistry sets have been gutted for safety we need something to give kids that's a little more interesting...
I have d/l music on the internet too, but I'm not bothered like you are. I make mine entirely available for free without any strings (other than keeping my information attached, which I can't enforce but people have no reason to remove). The problem you have is you expect people to pay for a disposable commodity that once bought, no longer has monetary value.
CDs have ongoing monetary value-- after you buy them you can legally resell them.
Downloads do not preserve your monetary value. You cannot sell "used" commercial downloads. People who collect a large number of commercial downloads will ultimately realize once they tire of them that they can't do anything with them but give them away, because they're now worthless. At that point, it is impossible to stop the completely free distribution of once-commercial downloaded content. Individuals who have bought it have no vehicle by which they can liquidate it to recoup some of their original investment, because their original payment was not an investment at all. They will then likely feel no compunction whatsoever to turn them over to anyone who might want them.
Thus, downloaded content becomes an "ethereal" commodity, with a value more akin to an experiential commodity, such as a trip to an amusement park, the theater or a concert-- there you pay for a ticket to experience an "event" and beyond that it also no longer retains any monetary value-- you cannot resell your theater experience. But in comparison, an MP3 download is totally pathetic as an "experience" of that sort-- for one thing, it's not very "unique" in that you can get it anytime-- but you can't experience Jimi Hendrix live in Maui anytime you want. The rarity and quality of the experience just aren't there in a content download any more than it is in the content of a pizza parlor flyer stuck in your windshield wipers at the mall. Downloaded content is disposable content, and people aren't going to see the value in such content as it is in fact, not there to see.
You might remember when LPs gave way to CDs. In fact, there was some reduction in value in one way at that point as well, but it was somewhat mitigated by an increase in value in another. LPs were 12" square, and often had some BIG photos of the musicians or other interesting artwork that you could enjoy while listening to the music. When CDs arrived, many people bemoaned the lost of the beneficial content of the 12" sleeve-- and CD artwork looked pretty pathetic in comparison. There were some attempts to rectify this that didn't fly (you may remember the vertical box format). But, the new "digital" recording technology was supposedly better and more resistant to degradation over time. In going from LPs to CDs, value was not lost, in fact some was gained as the resell value of CDs is enahanced by the technology's resistance to degradation.
But downloads take away things without giving things in return. And legal free downloads are all-you-can-eat, the fact that they are often given away without any strings is the context in which you have to "compete."
I see downloads as simply advertising flyers. Advertising for a full CD perhaps, or better, a live concert experience that does not try to compete in a marketplace of millions of free near-equivalent alternatives. Asking people to pay for downloads is like having a radio station where listeners have to pay first for every song before you play it for them, in an ocean of free radio stations that just play music with perhaps a few advertisements interspersed.
So do yourself a favor-- don't sell downloads, and don't buy downloads. Think of downloads as a means of sticking your fliers in everyone's windshield wiper in every parking lot in the entire world with one click of a mouse.
1)record music
2)put music for sale on website
3)profit!
Actually, Gene Simmons is the one who ought to be using that business model. Either that, or:
1) Write some new tunes, and/or dust off your old ones
2) Learn to play them
3) Work with a concert promoter to sell tickets to your live show
4) Profit!
But instead he turns into a complete whiner and cries about how his royalty checks from the labels are dwindling.
- Google telegraphs their upcoming $4.5B bid repeatedly over the internet.
- Microsoft thinks "whoa, these guys are our biggest competitor and if they get away with it we could be in really big trouble." They then decide to enter a surprise snipe bid of $5B (and probably have more cash reserves than Google, or at least more experience at coming up with it as needed-- Google's may be mostly in stock and take some doing to turn into a check that they can give to the FCC)...
- Microsoft wins, but then one of two things happens. Either MS tries to keep it "proprietary" (likely, given their history) and noone wants it because it's too closed to be enough different from the telco systems (and many people hate MS about as much as the telcos), OR, the government steps in and says "I'm sorry, you're not allowed to open it up such that people can use it however they want because it's then too hard for us to monitor it for bad guys," and noone wants it because it's too closed to be enough different from the telco systems.
- Then Google steps up and says "ha ha, faked you out-- now you're out $5B, SUCKER!).
However, one thing that some of the slashdot crowd tends to ignore is that content owners have rights too. Or are we suddenly to believe that the only things that have value are physical things?
Wow, I wasn't aware that encryption is of no use except for masking the transfer of illegal content. Thanks for clearing that up. I agree then, we should by all means, scrupulously avoid encrypting any of our traffic.
Perhaps living in glass houses and wearing no clothes would be a good idea too, since it's quite clear we have nothing to hide, and curtains are tantamount to encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but if you think there's nothing that Windows does that's better than Linux than you're in denial. And most users could care less if they can look at the code, and wouldn't understand it or have the foggiest idea what to do with it if they did.
Microsoft may figure that if the OLPC can boot to either OS that users may end up preferring Windows over Linux. And for most users they may very well be correct. In addition, they will be able to more easily show off areas where Windows excels in comparison with Linux.
I won't be buying ANY HD media at least until they can be played by a player that has absolutely no moving parts. Spinning disks? Puhleeze, that's so 20th century...
Anti-terrorism provides whole new vistas for lucrative pork-barrel projects.
Chickenshits-- tell everyone to grow a backbone. America is ruled by cowards, motivated only by greed or fear. And I don't see that it's going to get any better as long as the majority of the populace continues to believe that their choice is between a Republican and a Democrat.
Doesn't this simply say that you have to be licenced to do computer forensic work for hire? What does it really say about doing it on your own PC just to learn about it? I suspect there's some mislead impressions being taken here...
with lots of money to spend on it that could actually get such legislation passed against the opposition of the movie and recording industries?
Yeah, this'll happen WHFO (When Hell Freezes Over)...
APL was brilliant for its time, the only serious and also pictographic programming language that I'm aware of, a fascinating characteristic that unfortunately Iverson himself gave up on and reverted to ASCII digraphs with the language J. I often complain about the fact that programming on our current keyboard, originally adapted from existing non-computing devices as it was, has relegated us to have to resort to the available symbols * and / for multiply and divide where proper symbols were not available-- we're still using a 50 or more year old keyboard standard completely for reasons of ancient practicality, not elegance. APL was a valiant but failed effort to try to change that.
One big problem with APL as a pictographic language is extending it implies a need for new pictograms over time, and a typewriter keyboard, even redesigned for the language, is a poor candidate for such expansion. The earliest forms of APL kept that problem somewhat in check via the use of overstrikes, so that you didn't have to resort to a separate key for each symbol but instead could learn a relatively manageable set of symbols that could be reused in combination to produce the entire symbol set. However, the use of overstrikes appeared to be out of place on video terminals, and so the innovation of overstrikes gave way to video terminal keyboards with a vast array of stick-on symbols that one would have to learn the location of, in order to write programs.
APL is also about the most terse programming language ever devised, a crucially important characteristic at a time when dial-up baud rates were often 110-300. When it takes that long for characters to transmit, one-liner programs of a hundred or so pictographic symbols works pretty darn good.
And despite APL's inherent array operations, automatically parallelizing APL is a relatively crude means of taking advantage of multi-core systems, as the setup and teardown overhead would require additional logic to determine if the size of the arrays and/or complexity of the operation would warrant it. Logic that would have to be done even when determining that parallelism is not appropriate for the operation.
APL's real failure has been in the immense difficulty of standardization-- no two APL vendors ever thought about it alike, the various extensions and workspace formats differ significantly, and implementing a full APL is a complex undertaking as language implementations go. In a world where "write once run anywhere" is an important goal, APL fares rather poorly in that regard.
While I'm sure there are some APL die-hards that are just waiting for the advent of many-core desktops as the chance for APL to "shine again." I fully expect it to disappear as anything more than a curiosity, and fairly soon as the original die-hards have been entering retirement age already for some time now. And many of those who haven't, like Iverson have chosen to move to the J language or some other ASCII based array language, giving up one of the most important things that I think made APL special, if not uniquely valuable-- its pictographic character.
For me, APL will always have a soft spot in my heart, being the first computer language I was ever exposed to and on which I learned to program (on an IBM 2741 selectric terminal). Long ago I wrote my own interpreter and have recently given it somewhat of a facelift for Windows (and mine still supports overstrikes, as I don't need the stickers-- I still remember where all the original symbols are). I use it as a super-Calculator and that's about it though (it remains really good for that). While I sometimes get wistful about its potential, and try to think of ways it could possibly mutate into something important in the modern world, I harbor no real illusions of a resurgence...Clearly, Microsoft is running out of sources of new bugs. And if your OS isn't sufficiently buggy, you won't have any reason to upgrade...
Please post a case or citation or some sort of authority for this position.
Try: AHRA of 1992
:The Act also includes blanket protection from infringement actions for private, non-commercial analog audio copying, and for digital audio copies made with digital audio recording devices.
You need to get into the habit of planning for the unforseen. I think a lot of that comes with experience, after a few hard knocks with projects where new requirements caused a lot of ugly hacks to go in because the original code wasn't flexible. Every time I write a function I try to think of how else it might get used or abused and try not to lock out such growth. Often for me, it's a matter of realizing that there are features they are going to want that they powers-that-be haven't thought of yet, and coding for the eventuality. It won't completely eliminate the problem of "drift" but it can help...
They use to explain the 100,000-year critique away using the "future technology" argument-- that by the time it's a problem science will have developed new ways of dealing with the waste. I find it interesting that I'm not seeing that argument anymore-- could it be because too many people have realized how BOGUS it is? Essentially, "we don't have to worry about it, it's a problem for the future..."
I've yet to see a believable analysis that factors in 100,000 years of possible effects on the environment of nuclear, weighed against the environmental effects of coal or (insert other method here). If you only consider the immediate effects of the technologies on the environment, nuclear may seem pretty clean-- but immediate effects are not all that there are-- and you have to weight them in the "clean" equation. Not an easy task when nuclear is so different in that regard from virtually all the other technologies...
And I agree that in the long term on line distribution will win, but before it can the internet as we know it needs some substantial upgrading. Not to support the concept (it already does), but to support what happens when the masses start using it.
Well, they'll need to support affordable and reliable network streaming to the screen in the back of your SUV while you're driving the kids to grandmas.
Then they'll also need to support some way that your 80-year-old mom can purchase the media as a gift for someone else (who has a computer) without having to use a computer herself. (just try buying a gift certificate now for Amazon for someone if you can't use a computer-- and Amazon isn't even strictly downloaded products-- fortunately they're not the single source, yet anyway)
And streaming capability needs to operate equally well in remote areas of the country where currently, only dialup internet is available.
Streaming needs to operate to laptops on airplanes-- you can watch DVDs now on a flight without a problem.
In addition, a total-download world means that any competition in media rental services completely disappears, as why are the content producers going to want to cut Blockbuster, Netflix or Amazon in on the deal when they can distribute via a single source with more control (ala-iTunes) direct to the customer?
And, libraries may have some problems in making d/l content available, at least to the extent and the utility that they do now.
Personally, I hope the d/l-only media utopia NEVER HAPPENS. I buy all my media discounted or second hand, and have been known to sell or trade media that I no longer want. I've also been known to buy media that is out-of-print, and if you think that downloads can't go unavailable (essentially, out of print) if the providers choose to pull the product, you haven't thought about it enough-- I have no doubt that "limited time offers" will be an inflationary gimmick used in an all-download world. If I don't get a legit (content-owner approved) physical substrate that carries the media, I for one am not willing to pay for it, as without such a substrate, the value is transient and non-transferable. I can't buy a used download. I can't check a download out at the library. I can't sell a download on eBay. I cannot "shop-around" and find competitive deals from independent sources, or closeouts due to overstock on downloads. I have no way to legally acquire a discontinued "limited-time" download.
Make no mistake, pay-to-downloads, are "broken by design" mechanisms that intentionally limit the usefulness of a media purchase, every bit as much as DRM does. I say, insist on legit physical media, whether for music, movies or software, if they want your $$$ in exchange...
Dream on. Verizon will probably get it, after placating Google with feiged interest in the Android, enough for Google to decide to underbid in exchange-- either that or Google won't qualify at all at the last minute on some "technicality" cooked up by the FCC...
You have to realize that the US government doesn't want this as open market telecom would likely make their mechanized eavesdropping much more expensive...
The first time I have to go to work and sit in a beanbag chair, I'm giving my notice, and will flee the tech industry for something more rewarding, like ditch digging...
For one, I guess he could play the "I'm Spartacus" game and post a bunch of anonymous inflammatory comments towards the township of Manalapan and see how many other bloggers you could get to do the same...
He's the one who wanted a "hi-tech" force, anyway, and as I recall, has himself never been in combat so the "fog" really snowed him good...
Microsoft. Most of the home PC's I know of are still running W98SE (not mine, but everyone else I know). If it ain't broke, why upgrade it?
If you can, the patent system is more than a little bit broken, though I guess we all know that by now. I would think that the existance of the brain would constitute prior art...
Each technology has its own advantages and disadvantages. Inherent in ultrasound is a tradeoff between resolution and penetration. Higher frequencies have a shorter wavelength and hence better resolution, but higher frequencies are absorbed in shorter distances. Thus "deep" and "in detail" are mutually exclusive. High power ultrasound is not a solution to the tradeoff, because high power causes cavitation (bubbles), heating, and (I guess) tissue disruption. Being an acoustic technique, ultrasound is also subject to complications from refraction, reflection, and diffraction.
Maybe someone just needs to think a little more outside the box. Perhaps using a multi-frequency signal combined with phase shifts could be used to gain both the resolution of higher frequencies and the penetration of lower ones. Or sampling techniques to allow for short term high power to get the penetration without the side-effects...
Gadolinium - not necessarily, you can see a lot without it.
Theoretically, perhaps. Problem is, this is only true if you have the latest gear, and the gear is so damn expensive that many MRI labs are using older stuff-- just try telling your local lab that you don't want them to use Gado and see how far you get...
I expect we'll see a lot of these new 3D scanning technologies in the next few years. Right now, the MRI and CT are the most common, and both are rather crude. MRI zaps a huge magnetic field yet still may require the ingestion of Gadolinium in order to produce enough contrast to see blood vessels, and Gadolinium has been linked to some unpleasant new diseases. X-rays are not without their risks either so I hope some better ultrasound or something comes along. I would think that before long a detailed 3D scan will be so safe and cheap that a kids toy could be produced that include it for playing doctor with your pet hamster and get a bio education in the process. Now that chemistry sets have been gutted for safety we need something to give kids that's a little more interesting...
I have d/l music on the internet too, but I'm not bothered like you are. I make mine entirely available for free without any strings (other than keeping my information attached, which I can't enforce but people have no reason to remove). The problem you have is you expect people to pay for a disposable commodity that once bought, no longer has monetary value.
CDs have ongoing monetary value-- after you buy them you can legally resell them.
Downloads do not preserve your monetary value. You cannot sell "used" commercial downloads. People who collect a large number of commercial downloads will ultimately realize once they tire of them that they can't do anything with them but give them away, because they're now worthless. At that point, it is impossible to stop the completely free distribution of once-commercial downloaded content. Individuals who have bought it have no vehicle by which they can liquidate it to recoup some of their original investment, because their original payment was not an investment at all. They will then likely feel no compunction whatsoever to turn them over to anyone who might want them.
Thus, downloaded content becomes an "ethereal" commodity, with a value more akin to an experiential commodity, such as a trip to an amusement park, the theater or a concert-- there you pay for a ticket to experience an "event" and beyond that it also no longer retains any monetary value-- you cannot resell your theater experience. But in comparison, an MP3 download is totally pathetic as an "experience" of that sort-- for one thing, it's not very "unique" in that you can get it anytime-- but you can't experience Jimi Hendrix live in Maui anytime you want. The rarity and quality of the experience just aren't there in a content download any more than it is in the content of a pizza parlor flyer stuck in your windshield wipers at the mall. Downloaded content is disposable content, and people aren't going to see the value in such content as it is in fact, not there to see.
You might remember when LPs gave way to CDs. In fact, there was some reduction in value in one way at that point as well, but it was somewhat mitigated by an increase in value in another. LPs were 12" square, and often had some BIG photos of the musicians or other interesting artwork that you could enjoy while listening to the music. When CDs arrived, many people bemoaned the lost of the beneficial content of the 12" sleeve-- and CD artwork looked pretty pathetic in comparison. There were some attempts to rectify this that didn't fly (you may remember the vertical box format). But, the new "digital" recording technology was supposedly better and more resistant to degradation over time. In going from LPs to CDs, value was not lost, in fact some was gained as the resell value of CDs is enahanced by the technology's resistance to degradation.
But downloads take away things without giving things in return. And legal free downloads are all-you-can-eat, the fact that they are often given away without any strings is the context in which you have to "compete."
I see downloads as simply advertising flyers. Advertising for a full CD perhaps, or better, a live concert experience that does not try to compete in a marketplace of millions of free near-equivalent alternatives. Asking people to pay for downloads is like having a radio station where listeners have to pay first for every song before you play it for them, in an ocean of free radio stations that just play music with perhaps a few advertisements interspersed.
So do yourself a favor-- don't sell downloads, and don't buy downloads. Think of downloads as a means of sticking your fliers in everyone's windshield wiper in every parking lot in the entire world with one click of a mouse.
1)record music
2)put music for sale on website
3)profit!
Actually, Gene Simmons is the one who ought to be using that business model. Either that, or:
1) Write some new tunes, and/or dust off your old ones
2) Learn to play them
3) Work with a concert promoter to sell tickets to your live show
4) Profit!
But instead he turns into a complete whiner and cries about how his royalty checks from the labels are dwindling.
I can see where this is going:
- Google telegraphs their upcoming $4.5B bid repeatedly over the internet.
- Microsoft thinks "whoa, these guys are our biggest competitor and if they get away with it we could be in really big trouble." They then decide to enter a surprise snipe bid of $5B (and probably have more cash reserves than Google, or at least more experience at coming up with it as needed-- Google's may be mostly in stock and take some doing to turn into a check that they can give to the FCC)...
- Microsoft wins, but then one of two things happens. Either MS tries to keep it "proprietary" (likely, given their history) and noone wants it because it's too closed to be enough different from the telco systems (and many people hate MS about as much as the telcos), OR, the government steps in and says "I'm sorry, you're not allowed to open it up such that people can use it however they want because it's then too hard for us to monitor it for bad guys," and noone wants it because it's too closed to be enough different from the telco systems.
- Then Google steps up and says "ha ha, faked you out-- now you're out $5B, SUCKER!).
However, one thing that some of the slashdot crowd tends to ignore is that content owners have rights too. Or are we suddenly to believe that the only things that have value are physical things?
Wow, I wasn't aware that encryption is of no use except for masking the transfer of illegal content. Thanks for clearing that up. I agree then, we should by all means, scrupulously avoid encrypting any of our traffic.Perhaps living in glass houses and wearing no clothes would be a good idea too, since it's quite clear we have nothing to hide, and curtains are tantamount to encryption.