"I am a champion of choice and a champion of anything that breaks vendor lockins (and that include people buying music from live acts in pubs instead of RIAA junk). Maybe if the RIAA had competition then you'd start to see prices dropping and some 'singer?' dancer moving out of there $Million mansion."
I'd like choice too but I'm not siding with Real on this one. Apple will open iTunes and the iPod within the next two years. Otherwise, there will be monopolistic charges against them. Unfortunately, just like with instant messaging, it will be Microsoft complaining about Apple's stranglehold on the market. Microsoft's complaints about AIM put a bunch of restrictions on the AOL Time Warner merger that doomed it to its current state. Quite frankly, of all parties involved, I'd rather it not be Microsoft claiming to be standing up for me against other monopolists. Especially when AAC sounds better than WMA.
Granted, you do have a sympathetic ear to adding OGG and FLAC support to the iPods. Again, I think that'll be in two years once Apple smartens up and realizes that the majority of iRiver's sales have to do with OGG support. Well, that and Jenna Jameson as their poster girl, but that's a whole different subject.:)
"I don't know about your specific site, but there is an FAA website I routinely use that I can't get to work fully on Firefox, Konqueror, etc. However, I can get it to function completely with Opera."
But are you accessing those pages with Opera by having it set to report to websites that it is actually IE? That may be the reason why Opera works and the others do not. Just a thought.
"And this come from the man that prevents ITunes music from running on anything other that an IPod and prevents Real from releasing DRMed music for the IPod."
The music industry does not pay the bandwidth cost of the iTunes Music Store. Apple pays for that from the profits generated from iPods sold.
Why are you championing Real? Did Real pioneer the concept of buying music online? No, they were the main force behind MusicNet, which was a music rental system. It was totally unsuccessful.
Real also went ahead and broke the Fairplay DRM, which arguably is a violation of the DMCA. So again, how is Real the good guy here?
"Finally someone in a power position stands up against the RIAA. However, IMHO $1 is still too expensive. Anyone know how much artists get from that $1? "No more record company pimpin'" - Ice Cube"
Probably around 10 cents. The group that gets the largest cut (supposedly) from each song sold on iTunes at 99 cents is the RIAA. Reportedly, the RIAA gets 30 cents, which is even more than the actual music label.
"I never bought a song on iTunes - I've gotten them all for free with Pepsi caps. I don't usually drink Pepsi, but when I see those yellow caps, I tip the bottles, find a winner, then get a Pepsi (instead of the Coke I would buy otherwise) and get my free song."
No kidding. I got my 200 song credits in this past Pepsi promo. It helped that there was also the chance to win an iPod with each point as well throughout the duration of the promotion.
However, with these Pepsi promotions, I found myself having to switch to Diet Pepsi for obvious reasons. Of course, now all I buy is Diet Pepsi because I cannot stand the taste of Diet Coke, which is the exact opposite reaction I have to their non-diet counterparts. So unless I'm having a soft drink at a restaurant with my food, Coke has lost me as a loyal customer.
And now, its all about getting those Xbox360 points!:)
"I have Cingular. I have Firefox. I have never experienced any difficulties in paying my Cingular bill on their website."
Multiple people have posted about not having a problem with Cingular and their web browser but I'll just reply directly to your comment.
When I last experienced an issue with Firefox and the Cingular website in terms of paying my bill, it was in July 2005.
During this same time, Mac OS X users trying to access their Cingular accounts while using the Safari web browser were also running into issues, as can be read here:
"Most banks offer their own bill paying system for their customers. Instead of setting up Cingular's automated online payments, you could consult your bank and find out if their system would work with Cingular."
I would do that if I were with a bank and not a credit union. Apparently the way my account is set up with my credit union, it has issues with services such as Yahoo Bill Payer, and thus I do not sign up for such services. However, if a reader was with a large bank that offered online services such as that, then that would probably be the way to go as long as the bank in question allowed for the use of non-IE web browsers.
"Assuming customer choice is important, a customer can elect to not use Firefox and remove it from their system. Can the customer remove IE? Can the customer even elect to not use IE, or does the OS still force them to use IE for some tasks?"
I would advise not removing IE because its not just Microsoft that has issues with non-IE browsers. A few months back, I tried to pay my Cingular bill and the website would not work with Firefox (same goes for Safari, from what I've read). I had already uninstalled IE, and thus I went back to Microsoft's website to download it, but it would not let me. Nor would Windows Update allow me to download IE. I guess I could've downloaded the AOL browser, but that's going to extremes.
The first party guilty of ineptitude was Cingular for only supporting IE when other browsers in total account for 10-15% of users. The second guilty party is Microsoft for not allowing a legitimiately registered copy of WinXP to download IE. And I guess the third party would be myself for assuming that in today's tech world, you should be able to get by with just Firefox.
what about b-sides, bootlegs, and back catalogs?
on
The Chumbawamba Factor
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If BigChampagne's is so rock-solid, why aren't the labels rushing to get b-sides, unreleased covers, bootlegs, and out-of-print back catalog material up on iTunes and other commercial services? For me, that was the greatest thing about the Napster of old...material that wasn't commercially available for one reason or another. There's a goldmine to be had on that stuff and even Steve Jobs has mentioned how much material the labels are sitting on and haven't done anything with yet complain about declining sales and blaming piracy for their woes.
Pretty fitting if you think about it. Earlier this year, IBM encouraged Apple to switch to Intel x86 based processors. Draw your own conclusion if that means the PowerPC series of chips is reaching its retirement years...:)
"Does anyone remember the movie waterworld? I remember that a lot of people thought it was a horrible movie, and I don't think it ever did that well. Guess people weren't ready to face the real possibilty of an entire planet covered in water."
No, it wasn't that. Its just most people who went and saw the film did not have a secret fetish to drink their own urine and thus the word-of-mouth was bad and had a negative consequence on the box office take.
I only admire the flick for the fact that it was a "mad bomber" type scenario to get Matsushita paranoid about MCA/Universal and force the Japanese firm to panic into selling the company off to a more media saavy outfit who would not reject future media acquisitions. That's why the budget was allowed to blow up on "Waterworld." To get Matsushita to flinch and sell the studio. The plan worked.
"Remember Lex Luthors plan to get rich ? Buy all the property on the east side of the san andreas fault, then set off nukes in the fault to sink the west half of the state. Lex would overnite own the majority of waterfront property in california."
Sounds like Zorin's plan to get rich by flooding Silicon Valley in the James Bond flick *A View to a Kill* if you ask me.
ps. Superman is lame. Bruce Wayne can kick Kal-El's Kryptonian keister.
Have Dasani (aka "Coca-Cola") and AquaFina (aka "Pepsi") bottle up the glacier derived waters. And thus people themselves in the Western world will pay to clean up the environmental damange that they were largely responsible for, and have it be trendy as well in the process.
I for one welcome the melting of Antartic ice. We'll finally be able to see the continent buried under all that ice and probably find the remnants of Atlantis if it hasn't eroded away...:)
"Yes it was. The NES port of Smash TV had a mode where each player held two controllers."
Because that's how it was in the arcade. Williams' SmashTV was harking back to Williams' earlier arcade smash-hit known as *Robotron: 2084* which also used two joysticks to control the character's movement as well as his 360 degree firing. The Atari 7800 port of the game also had a mode to allow you to play arcade style with both ProControllers, which was very slick.
Other arcade games that used two joysticks were Atari's "Battle Zone" and "Vindicators".
"Not only the D-pad and the analog stick, but the rumble pak, controller expansion slot, top trigger buttons, wireless controller, and of course the DS. Where would gaming be without Nintendo?"
Pokemon (Digimon, CardCaptors, Yu-gi-oh) free. Think how better the world (whether we are talking about children as well as gaming in general) would be without that nonsense.
That stuff makes G.I. Joe and the TransFormers from my youth look like high art.
"How many people want to bet that one of the new Nintendo DS plug-ins will be an orientation detector? This would make the DS essentially an additional controller for the Revolution. Wouldn't work too good for games like sword-fighting, but it would probably be very good for games like pac'n roll or a driving game."
Not revolutionary. Atari was the first company to plan this by using the Lynx as an advanced ("smart") controller for the Jaguar. Unfortunately, the Company ran out of money and abandoned the industry before implementing this in the market.
As usual, Nintendo made a trip to *Atari Idea Land* and decided this was a great feature, claimed it as their own, and implemented it for the GameCube and the GBA. Although I'm only aware of a Pac-Man game that uses the functionality.
"The original Nintendo Entertainment System dispensed with the single joystick/button and came out with the direction pad (D-Pad) - something that's still included on every single controller design today, including Sony's and Microsoft's."
And that was a step backwards, if you ask me. It gave the world "gamer's thumb." The joystick was and still is better than a D-Pad, IMHO, and the popularity of the analog stick being supplied in addition to D-Pads on modern controllers is an indication as such.
What you cite as controller innovation on Nintendo's part can be balanced and refuted by all the innovations Atari did before them.
"The first destroyed the Commodore Amiga, which was one of the biggest threats Microsoft faced during the eighties. The second harmed Microsoft's biggest competitor (at that time) on the Internet, a competitor who, by funding the development of Mozilla, was putting a big dent in Microsoft's plan to control the Internet. The third saved Microsoft $9 billion. And the fourth will help Microsoft's ongoing plan to control the Internet."
I dunno. Microsoft was successful in 1984/85, but I don't see a grand conspiracy at the time to put the hurt on Amiga; Microsoft wasn't that strong then. However, Gates courted Tramiel to make Windows the GUI on what became the Atari ST but it wasn't ready so GEM got the nodd. Gates also successfully courted Tramiel over the standard format of the Atari CD-ROM that was promised during the debut of the Atari ST at the 1985 CES but was put on hold for years because it would've cost more than the computer itself. And Microsoft Word/Write was released for the ST to compete with WordPerfect.
"Or for the same reason. Cultural reasons due to the number of people (idiots I call them) who think that any and all nuclear technology is bad. Personally, I'd love to see this in a working rocket. Especially if we got one of those 1,000 ton liberty ship boosters over at nuclearspace.com."
I wouldn't mind my own personal pebble reactor or a Mr. Fusion to power my rigs running BOINC/Seti. It currently tends to increase my electricity bill more than I'd like.
"I find that some video podcasts are actually quite good. For example, Diggnation is quite good: http://revision3.com/diggnation as is Systm"
Might as well admit you are a Kevin Rose fanboi.:)
Kevin's "The Broken" should also count (thebroken.org)
I myself am anxious for the proper return of television's Martin Sargent in a videopodcast version of his former show "Unscrewed." Fitting since he joined the crew of Revision3 and has his blog finally up (sargeworld.com).
"I'd be really interested to see what Apple can do for video on a portable jukebox. iRiver's implementation, while nice, seems a bit 'after the fact' so I know there is potential."
All the modern *color* iPods (starting with the iPod Photo models) can do video based upon the abilities built into the chipset. Apple just hasn't enabled it.
For video podcasts, I can't see why Apple won't enable it. For watching movies, well, that's a different ballgame. I think that will be limited to future iPod Video models with a screen equal in size to what we currently see with the Sony PSP. Otherwise, it would be rather ridiculous watching a widescreen format motion picture on a screen the size of my current iPod Photo model.
Slashdot Mirror
"I am a champion of choice and a champion of anything that breaks vendor lockins (and that include people buying music from live acts in pubs instead of RIAA junk). Maybe if the RIAA had competition then you'd start to see prices dropping and some 'singer?' dancer moving out of there $Million mansion."
:)
I'd like choice too but I'm not siding with Real on this one. Apple will open iTunes and the iPod within the next two years. Otherwise, there will be monopolistic charges against them. Unfortunately, just like with instant messaging, it will be Microsoft complaining about Apple's stranglehold on the market. Microsoft's complaints about AIM put a bunch of restrictions on the AOL Time Warner merger that doomed it to its current state. Quite frankly, of all parties involved, I'd rather it not be Microsoft claiming to be standing up for me against other monopolists. Especially when AAC sounds better than WMA.
Granted, you do have a sympathetic ear to adding OGG and FLAC support to the iPods. Again, I think that'll be in two years once Apple smartens up and realizes that the majority of iRiver's sales have to do with OGG support. Well, that and Jenna Jameson as their poster girl, but that's a whole different subject.
"I don't know about your specific site, but there is an FAA website I routinely use that I can't get to work fully on Firefox, Konqueror, etc. However, I can get it to function completely with Opera."
But are you accessing those pages with Opera by having it set to report to websites that it is actually IE? That may be the reason why Opera works and the others do not. Just a thought.
"And this come from the man that prevents ITunes music from running on anything other that an IPod and prevents Real from releasing DRMed music for the IPod."
The music industry does not pay the bandwidth cost of the iTunes Music Store. Apple pays for that from the profits generated from iPods sold.
Why are you championing Real? Did Real pioneer the concept of buying music online? No, they were the main force behind MusicNet, which was a music rental system. It was totally unsuccessful.
Real also went ahead and broke the Fairplay DRM, which arguably is a violation of the DMCA. So again, how is Real the good guy here?
"Finally someone in a power position stands up against the RIAA. However, IMHO $1 is still too expensive. Anyone know how much artists get from that $1? "No more record company pimpin'" - Ice Cube"
Probably around 10 cents. The group that gets the largest cut (supposedly) from each song sold on iTunes at 99 cents is the RIAA. Reportedly, the RIAA gets 30 cents, which is even more than the actual music label.
"I never bought a song on iTunes - I've gotten them all for free with Pepsi caps. I don't usually drink Pepsi, but when I see those yellow caps, I tip the bottles, find a winner, then get a Pepsi (instead of the Coke I would buy otherwise) and get my free song."
:)
No kidding. I got my 200 song credits in this past Pepsi promo. It helped that there was also the chance to win an iPod with each point as well throughout the duration of the promotion.
However, with these Pepsi promotions, I found myself having to switch to Diet Pepsi for obvious reasons. Of course, now all I buy is Diet Pepsi because I cannot stand the taste of Diet Coke, which is the exact opposite reaction I have to their non-diet counterparts. So unless I'm having a soft drink at a restaurant with my food, Coke has lost me as a loyal customer.
And now, its all about getting those Xbox360 points!
"I have Cingular. I have Firefox. I have never experienced any difficulties in paying my Cingular bill on their website."
0 825.shtml
Multiple people have posted about not having a problem with Cingular and their web browser but I'll just reply directly to your comment.
When I last experienced an issue with Firefox and the Cingular website in terms of paying my bill, it was in July 2005.
During this same time, Mac OS X users trying to access their Cingular accounts while using the Safari web browser were also running into issues, as can be read here:
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/07/2005071413
I did not have any problems with Cingular's website after this "issue" became known online, starting in August when I again accessed the site.
"Most banks offer their own bill paying system for their customers. Instead of setting up Cingular's automated online payments, you could consult your bank and find out if their system would work with Cingular."
I would do that if I were with a bank and not a credit union. Apparently the way my account is set up with my credit union, it has issues with services such as Yahoo Bill Payer, and thus I do not sign up for such services. However, if a reader was with a large bank that offered online services such as that, then that would probably be the way to go as long as the bank in question allowed for the use of non-IE web browsers.
"Assuming customer choice is important, a customer can elect to not use Firefox and remove it from their system. Can the customer remove IE? Can the customer even elect to not use IE, or does the OS still force them to use IE for some tasks?"
I would advise not removing IE because its not just Microsoft that has issues with non-IE browsers. A few months back, I tried to pay my Cingular bill and the website would not work with Firefox (same goes for Safari, from what I've read). I had already uninstalled IE, and thus I went back to Microsoft's website to download it, but it would not let me. Nor would Windows Update allow me to download IE. I guess I could've downloaded the AOL browser, but that's going to extremes.
The first party guilty of ineptitude was Cingular for only supporting IE when other browsers in total account for 10-15% of users. The second guilty party is Microsoft for not allowing a legitimiately registered copy of WinXP to download IE. And I guess the third party would be myself for assuming that in today's tech world, you should be able to get by with just Firefox.
If BigChampagne's is so rock-solid, why aren't the labels rushing to get b-sides, unreleased covers, bootlegs, and out-of-print back catalog material up on iTunes and other commercial services? For me, that was the greatest thing about the Napster of old...material that wasn't commercially available for one reason or another. There's a goldmine to be had on that stuff and even Steve Jobs has mentioned how much material the labels are sitting on and haven't done anything with yet complain about declining sales and blaming piracy for their woes.
"The Chumbawamba Factor..."
:)
Great lyrical work! Might I suggest you encourage Stallman to sing that live on *Call for Help*?
"I'd still try to sleep with Mayday"
:)
Dolph Lungren, is that you???
"SmashTV and the sequel, Total Carnage, were fun but the ability to continue detracted from the insanity that Robotron provides."
True. I'm not too fond of the Robotron update from a few years back in comparison to how fond of Tempest2000 I am (still).
Pretty fitting if you think about it. Earlier this year, IBM encouraged Apple to switch to Intel x86 based processors. Draw your own conclusion if that means the PowerPC series of chips is reaching its retirement years...
"Does anyone remember the movie waterworld? I remember that a lot of people thought it was a horrible movie, and I don't think it ever did that well. Guess people weren't ready to face the real possibilty of an entire planet covered in water."
No, it wasn't that. Its just most people who went and saw the film did not have a secret fetish to drink their own urine and thus the word-of-mouth was bad and had a negative consequence on the box office take.
I only admire the flick for the fact that it was a "mad bomber" type scenario to get Matsushita paranoid about MCA/Universal and force the Japanese firm to panic into selling the company off to a more media saavy outfit who would not reject future media acquisitions. That's why the budget was allowed to blow up on "Waterworld." To get Matsushita to flinch and sell the studio. The plan worked.
"Remember Lex Luthors plan to get rich ? Buy all the property on the east side of the san andreas fault, then set off nukes in the fault to sink the west half of the state. Lex would overnite own the majority of waterfront property in california."
Sounds like Zorin's plan to get rich by flooding Silicon Valley in the James Bond flick *A View to a Kill* if you ask me.
ps. Superman is lame. Bruce Wayne can kick Kal-El's Kryptonian keister.
Have Dasani (aka "Coca-Cola") and AquaFina (aka "Pepsi") bottle up the glacier derived waters. And thus people themselves in the Western world will pay to clean up the environmental damange that they were largely responsible for, and have it be trendy as well in the process.
I for one welcome the melting of Antartic ice. We'll finally be able to see the continent buried under all that ice and probably find the remnants of Atlantis if it hasn't eroded away...
"Yes it was. The NES port of Smash TV had a mode where each player held two controllers."
Because that's how it was in the arcade. Williams' SmashTV was harking back to Williams' earlier arcade smash-hit known as *Robotron: 2084* which also used two joysticks to control the character's movement as well as his 360 degree firing. The Atari 7800 port of the game also had a mode to allow you to play arcade style with both ProControllers, which was very slick.
Other arcade games that used two joysticks were Atari's "Battle Zone" and "Vindicators".
"Not only the D-pad and the analog stick, but the rumble pak, controller expansion slot, top trigger buttons, wireless controller, and of course the DS. Where would gaming be without Nintendo?"
Pokemon (Digimon, CardCaptors, Yu-gi-oh) free. Think how better the world (whether we are talking about children as well as gaming in general) would be without that nonsense.
That stuff makes G.I. Joe and the TransFormers from my youth look like high art.
"How many people want to bet that one of the new Nintendo DS plug-ins will be an orientation detector? This would make the DS essentially an additional controller for the Revolution. Wouldn't work too good for games like sword-fighting, but it would probably be very good for games like pac'n roll or a driving game."
Not revolutionary. Atari was the first company to plan this by using the Lynx as an advanced ("smart") controller for the Jaguar. Unfortunately, the Company ran out of money and abandoned the industry before implementing this in the market.
As usual, Nintendo made a trip to *Atari Idea Land* and decided this was a great feature, claimed it as their own, and implemented it for the GameCube and the GBA. Although I'm only aware of a Pac-Man game that uses the functionality.
"The original Nintendo Entertainment System dispensed with the single joystick/button and came out with the direction pad (D-Pad) - something that's still included on every single controller design today, including Sony's and Microsoft's."
And that was a step backwards, if you ask me. It gave the world "gamer's thumb." The joystick was and still is better than a D-Pad, IMHO, and the popularity of the analog stick being supplied in addition to D-Pads on modern controllers is an indication as such.
What you cite as controller innovation on Nintendo's part can be balanced and refuted by all the innovations Atari did before them.
"The first destroyed the Commodore Amiga, which was one of the biggest threats Microsoft faced during the eighties. The second harmed Microsoft's biggest competitor (at that time) on the Internet, a competitor who, by funding the development of Mozilla, was putting a big dent in Microsoft's plan to control the Internet. The third saved Microsoft $9 billion. And the fourth will help Microsoft's ongoing plan to control the Internet."
I dunno. Microsoft was successful in 1984/85, but I don't see a grand conspiracy at the time to put the hurt on Amiga; Microsoft wasn't that strong then. However, Gates courted Tramiel to make Windows the GUI on what became the Atari ST but it wasn't ready so GEM got the nodd. Gates also successfully courted Tramiel over the standard format of the Atari CD-ROM that was promised during the debut of the Atari ST at the 1985 CES but was put on hold for years because it would've cost more than the computer itself. And Microsoft Word/Write was released for the ST to compete with WordPerfect.
"Or for the same reason. Cultural reasons due to the number of people (idiots I call them) who think that any and all nuclear technology is bad. Personally, I'd love to see this in a working rocket. Especially if we got one of those 1,000 ton liberty ship boosters over at nuclearspace.com."
I wouldn't mind my own personal pebble reactor or a Mr. Fusion to power my rigs running BOINC/Seti. It currently tends to increase my electricity bill more than I'd like.
"Hello, Apple? Yes, I'd like the new Jenna Jameson iPod Nano, please."
She [Jenna Jameson] already does print advertisements for iRiver.
This public service announcement was not brought to you by NBC, Sleep Train, or G.I. Joe.
"I find that some video podcasts are actually quite good. For example, Diggnation is quite good: http://revision3.com/diggnation
:)
as is Systm"
Might as well admit you are a Kevin Rose fanboi.
Kevin's "The Broken" should also count (thebroken.org)
I myself am anxious for the proper return of television's Martin Sargent in a videopodcast version of his former show "Unscrewed." Fitting since he joined the crew of Revision3 and has his blog finally up (sargeworld.com).
"I'd be really interested to see what Apple can do for video on a portable jukebox. iRiver's implementation, while nice, seems a bit 'after the fact' so I know there is potential."
All the modern *color* iPods (starting with the iPod Photo models) can do video based upon the abilities built into the chipset. Apple just hasn't enabled it.
For video podcasts, I can't see why Apple won't enable it. For watching movies, well, that's a different ballgame. I think that will be limited to future iPod Video models with a screen equal in size to what we currently see with the Sony PSP. Otherwise, it would be rather ridiculous watching a widescreen format motion picture on a screen the size of my current iPod Photo model.