"You won't find any of those artists on eMule or Bittorrent, because P2P isn't used to trade hard-to-find music." I may not be able to find the groups you listed there but then again you didn't list any "hard-to-find" music.
I just listed bands you can't find, yet they're not hard-to-find?
Hard to find music is the stuff that we called "Alternative" before everyone thought they had right to call themselves alternative after the Sea-Rattle Grunge Scene blew up. Strangely enough I find the real hard-to-find artists on BT, winmx, shareaza and emule/edonkey easily though.
I notice you don't actually name any artists.
Oh, and it's not "Hey, I'm making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today.", they've already been paid and aren't likely to see another dollar since the record companies are worse than pimps many times and will put a band so far in debt to them that they have to continue with little pay or go bankrupt. Marketing and production costs can make the end-of-year total for a band less than $100,000. Split that 4 ways.
1.) The band willingly signed their contract, using entertainment lawyers to make sure they get a good deal they're satisfied with. That's business.
2.) How does the band magically get paid already when you don't pay for their CD? Do you know what royalties are and how they work? You're ensuring that they don't get paid anything.
3.) I doubt you've ever even asked a real, signed band how this all works or how they feel about their "evil" record contract that they willingly signed.
The REAL money is made for bands on a tour where they receive a MUCH higher percentage of the overall take(tickets, merchandising, etc.)
You don't have any proof or evidence to back this up. You don't know where "REAL money" comes in for a band. You don't know any bands, haven't asked them, and haven't been in one. You think it costs a lot of money to put out a CD? Well, what about putting on a tour with soundsystems, lighting systems, buses, equipment, road crews, and more? You really think bands are getting rich off road tours? Ask one sometime. Touring is hell, and you often don't make a lot of it back.
Touring is another one of the excuses people use. "Oh, the bands can make their money on the tours! That's it! That makes it okay for me to make sure they don't get paid today for this album they spent three months of their own time and money in the studio to record and advertise and promote."
Proof of this lies in one of the most financially successful bands of all time, The Grateful Dead
Oh, geez. So that's your proof, an unbacked statement that the Grateful Dead are one of the most financially successful bands of all time, and therefore that means it applies to every single example of a band in every single case.
who didn't care if people copied their music and taped their shows because they made all of it back on a single tour by charging for the tshirts, tickets, and getting a percentage from vendors.
Yes, it's up to the band to decide how they want to treat their material. Not the person firing up eMule. But you're not interested in the wishes of the band. You're interested in making a bunch of generalizations to justify piracy.
They actually had such a following that the band made several hundreds of times more per fan per tour than they would have ever gotten from the record company. And that's not a fluke since they did it for 25+ years.
That's why the Grateful Dead was a successful touring band--they toured for 25+ years. Sure, when you look at the lump sum of 25+ years of touring revenue, they become the most successful band, so what you're essentially saying is that any artists today who want to make a living putting out music should expect to devote 25 years to nothing but road touring to expect any sort of revenues.
It's hard for me to take you seriously when your argument basically boils down to telling every artist w
No, the fact that it is 40 years old means that the creators got whatever profit they should be entitled to. Music which has entered the common culture over a generation ago no longer should be "owned."
Then go change the law. Write your legislator, or become one yourself. Spread the word. What does any of that have to do with piracy of popular works on P2P?
And finally, the legal system should not be used as a weapon for the wealthy corporations to bludgeon poor individuals. Regardless of what the offense may be.
Oh, stop with the college dorm room rhetoric. Legally going after infringers of your copyright--as Slashdotters always tell people to do when the GPL gets violated--isn't a "weapon" to "bludgeon poor individuals." These emotion-based arguments full of emotion-based words just reveal how weak your position is.
EVERYBODY on this site, including the editors, was saying that the RIAA should be pursuing the individual infringers, back in 2000 during the Napster lawsuit. What changed? Well, the RIAA actually started doing it. And suddenly, it's wrong to protect your own copyright, and it's okay to make sure bands don't get paid for anything. Screw that, especially when legal means like iTunes are skyrocketing (and sound better than CDs anyway).
Once again, I'll repeat it--Slashdot's position five years ago was to do exactly what the RIAA is doing today. You guys just thought they wouldn't be able to do it. Turns out they were, and that makes you mad. Well, you don't have a right to a band's music, and you don't have the right to make sure they don't get paid for it. But they do have the right to make sure they get paid for it. Legally and ethically.
Some people blame high CD prices, some people blame bad artist contracts, but there is always some blamed scapegoat to justify people's behavior. It's so transparent. Piracy is nothing more than trying to get something without having to pay for it. Notice nobody responded to my points about popular music on today's charts being the most widely available and pirated on P2P networks. It's not about some culture revolution of music sharing that the RIAA wants to prevent you from hearing. It's people with high-speed connections starting downloads in eMule so they don't have to pay for the CDs. That's it.
1.) Artists willingly sign their contracts. Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's heads. This mindset of blaming the faceless RIAA for everything has been trumpeted for so long that it's settled into every single post and made people constantly go back to it. Stop ignoring the bands you're not paying money to.
2.) Why are you tired of hearing that someone gets ripped off by P2P? You think money is going to magically appear in their pockets when you don't pay them? It sounds like you just want to ignore the fact that you're not paying people for the music they put out for sale. Sorry if you're tired of hearing that, but it makes it no less 100% true.
If this is true, why do they still make billions per year on CD sales? Why are online music sales booming? You can keep saying "the business model has failed" year after year (been hearing it since 1998), but they just keep on truckin', don't they?
The price of music should be going down because the price of production has gone down, yet, the RIAA is trying to get $18-20 for a CD. People are sick of it and so they take it.
For one, if something is overpriced, don't buy it. You don't have a right to music CDs.
Two, CDs aren't $18-20. They've gone down to $12-15.
Third, music on iTunes, the largest online store, is only a buck per song and around ten bucks an album.
Finally, I object to the FBI being taken away from its mission of actually fighting violent crime to act as the enforcement arm of the RIAA.
And, finally, the tired "FBI has only twenty guys in it who are getting directed away from their other jobs" argument. The FBI is a huge organization with several departments, all of them handling various law enforcement duties. Copyright holders have rights too, and they will bust large piracy rings for economic interests
But what does the FBI have to do with this? The RIAA is only doing exactly what every Slashdotter was telling them to do in 2000 when Napster was getting sued--go after individual infringers. What really happened is that you guys said that because you thought they'd never be able to do it, then they started doing it, and now you're upset that the free ride is getting taken away. Tough.
Listen up. This post may get me modded down into oblivion, but it has to be said.
The post you're responding to never said they'd infringe on copyrights, did it? Just that they wouldn't give the RIAA any money. Nice try.
Get real. We all know what was implied and what most Slashdotters advocate.
On top of that, have you actually listened to the music being produced today? It is largely crap. Go look at what people are actually downloading over the P2P networks -- a lot of it is older music, music that under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain.
Wrong, most music on P2P networks is popular music on the charts, like Creed, Foo Fighters, Madonna, Nine Inch Nails, The New Pornographers, and so on.
I couldn't even find several bands on P2P, like the Lascivious Biddies, or Larry Coryell's "Tricycles" jazz album, or a certain jazz-metal group I like. I had to go to iTunes. This posturing of P2P as some sort of bastion for elite music lovers trading esoteric materials that the RIAA won't let you hear is bogus. It's mostly high school kids and college students trading popular music so they don't have to pay for it. If today's music is so crap, why are people pirating it? If most people aren't trading popular music of today, why are those files the ones most widely available on the networks?
Do you know about CDBaby, the most widely used service by indie artists to sell their CDs and put them on iTunes? When was the last time you bought an album from a CDBaby artist? Probably never. You won't find any of those artists on eMule or Bittorrent, because P2P isn't used to trade hard-to-find music. It's used to get popular music without having to pay for it. It's simple human nature, folks. Stop denying it already. There is no culture revolution here. It's simple freeloading.
(Or wait, do you think people should still be paying for Beatles and Elvis albums that have been burned into their neurons by radio, TV, freaking elevators for the last 40 years?)
The fact you heard it in a commercial means you have the right to it for free? That doesn't even make sense.
Face it, no one on Slashdot has ever validly justified music piracy. They demonize the RIAA to justify thier behavior while ignoring the fact it means the artist doesn't get paid for their work. Artists willingly sign their record label contracts, so don't give me the sob story about the poor, victimized artists and their new antique car collections. And don't give me the poor, victimized mothers getting sued either--their IP was logged, get over it.
Like I said, I know this might get me modded down, but geez, I'm so sick of the hegemonous, pro-piracy mindset trumpeted in the comments on Slashdot in every single article with the word "RIAA" in its headline. For pete's sake, songs are.99 each now and albums are as low as eight bucks. This "obsolete business model" argument has been dead since 2001. Legal online music is thriving, just like you guys wanted, and iTunes is already competing with P2P itself and surpassing its usage. How long is the "obsolete business model" card going to get played around here? Online music is taking off, and you guys seem to think it's still 1999.
To you, copyright is this evil system when the RIAA is mentioned, but when some company violates the GPL, suddenly everyone is calling on the EFF to sue them for...infringement of the copyright of the GPL. Various references to the phrase "stolen code" are used. Funny how that works.
People just use the RIAA as a scapegoat, as a way to make themselves forgot about the human beings in the band whose music they're pirating. It's easier to demonize some faceless company than realize, "Hey, I'm making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today."
I've never had Google go down on me for anything. Most of an office suite could be client-side code anyway with not a lot of load on the server once loaded.
I'll give you an example where MIcrosoft has already lost to an online competitor--Salesforce.com has been eating Microsoft CRM for lunch. As their CEO put it, Microsoft still wishes the Internet had never been invented. Some vague new update to Microsoft CRM is scheduled for 2006, but I doubt it will happen.
If Google releases an online office suite, it's over for Microsoft. Imagine an office productivity suite that doesn't require installation, is always up-to-date, and is integrated with the 'net.
Digg.com. You vote for the stories, and they post a TON of great front page articles, interviews, and more. Reminds me of the old Slashdot frontpage from seven years ago.
People who read Digg.com knew about the iPod nano two days before it was announced. Kevin Rose posted about it there.
BusinessWeek has also chosen Digg as the best technical news site on the net.
If bringing up security concerns over a product "raises the ire of/.'ers," perhaps those Slashdotters should consider removing their blinders and looking at things objectively. Thank goodness they had your warning to disregard it because it challenges their worldview!
Then again, I've never understood the obsession over Firefox. It has security flaws too, and its browsing features are taken from the much faster and smaller Opera.
nintendo is losing mindshare and marketshare and this is just not helping. who, precisely, are they going after with this console, with this controller? the casual gamer?
Yes. RTFAs. X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 are clearly geared toward high-end hardcore freak gamers willing to spend $300-$400 for another Halo clone.
is there such thing as a casual gamer anymore?
Not as many as there used to, thanks to X-Box/Playstation. Did you read Iwata's keynote? It's all about targeting the non-hardcore demographic again, like how Nintendo used to in the 80s and early 90s. They will target the hardcore guys, too, but they want casuals and people who left videogaming to return to it.
id's Doom gave the world WASD, and it stuck forever.
No, it didn't. You couldn't remap keys until Quake, which had some popular key remappings for download on Planetquake that used WASD. That's where I first learned it.
Nintendo would do well to emulate Apple's strategies. Increase perceived "style."
This is their plan with the Gameboy Micro, which they claim is targeted at "image-concious gamers."
Appeal to those who consider themselves too "cool" for video games. Nintendo already turns a profit doing what they do, but they can't compete with MS or Sony in volume. This is the only way.
Nintendo doesn't want to target people too cool for videogames, they want to target all the non-hardcore gamers. Look at what's happened to console gaming. When the NES came out, my father used to play Super Mario Bros. with me. It was a simple game with simple controls. Today, he could never pick up any of the games I have on my shelf and play them. They require six buttons, a long learning curve, and the gameplay isn't that great.
Microsoft and Sony's new consoles are big, expensive hardcore-gamer machines, advertising on MTV and getting lost in their own world of high-end gamers. Nintendo is swooping in underneath and targeting the big everyday-person demographic everyone else is ignoring--the demographic that made Nintendo big in the first place and restarted videogames in the 80s.
More and more, I'm not really caring all that much whether or not titles from other consoles will make it to the Revolution, because they'll be big overly-serious graphics-fests with little gameplay value. Additionally, 3rd party developers have been praising this new controller so far, so I'm not really worried. Imagine the GTA guys and the possibilities they must be imagining right now. Too bad for that exclusivity deal.
People were weirded out by the Nintendo DS as well (I remember the Slashdot discussions about how it was a "gimmick"), until it came out and it really worked out well. Same thing here.
This has very little to do with the Power Glove. Get real.
Thing to note about microphone
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Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 5, Informative
Some people have been having trouble with their dog recognizing vocal commands, until they realized they were leaning forward and practically yelling into the DS mic. The mic is very sensitive, and you only need to speak clearly at room-level volume with the DS at a normal distance, and the game will recognize your voice much more clearly.
For example, for a reason that escapes me Nintendo thought that it would be important for you to know every place in the neighborhood that your dog has peed. They're marked by little blue dots on the mini-map showing your progress on your walk. The more your dog pees in a certain spot, the larger the dot gets. Though I know it isn't always the case with Nintendogs, Lupus only peed in places he'd already done so. By the time I was ready to write this article the mini-map resembled a smurf's version of mapquest.
It's rumored that the dogs use this to mark territories. Notice that if you meet another dog during your walk, sometimes the mini-map will highlight the other dog's pee spot by making it blink in red, as though you're entering its territory. At this point, it's unknown what effect this has on the two dogs becoming playmates or fighting. There are a ton of weird undocumented little things like this in the game. I found a stick and a juice bottle, and I accidentally bopped my dog in the head with them during catch, and now he just growls and them and runs away when I bring them out. But he loves my kleenex box. Weird little virtual dogs, man.
Apple will replace your battery for less than a hundred bucks (I think it's $60). What they actually do is just swap the whole iPod with a brand-new one, so you get rid of your scratches too.
There are different hardware models of computers, but most run the same operating system--Windows. Almost all cars have the same system interface--a steering wheel, seats, an ignition, and so forth.
Asking people to start choosing between two versions of Home is going to be reeaal fun. Sigh.
There are options in the Windows world, but it's nice when every app in OS X gets free WYSIWYG and PDF saving thanks to a graphics model that also happens to use a standard printing model (the subset of Postscript that is PDF).
I wouldn't discount an operating system because of some zealotry. Linux has its share, and Windows does too (see the Microsoft-can-do-no-wrong fanboys over at the various Windows-oriented beta sites, for instance).
As the title of the article says, it confuses the market. Do you need Home Standard Edition or Home Premium Edition? Which Professional edition do you need? What is Ultimate Edition? Microsoft could easily release one version that does everything, or three versions--Home, Professional, and Server. I wondered at first if there was some devious reasoning behind this, but now I think their marketing people really are this dumb. My evidence is a series of very recent dumb marketing ideas:
1.) The name "Windows Vista"--the dumbest name for a Windows release yet (up there with Windows ME). 2.) Internet Explorer is now "Windows Internet Explorer 7." 3.) Other names like "Windows Graphics Foundation," all of them in the similar vein of "Windows Something Something."
It's an orgy of branding over there in Redmond.
Re:Hole With No Bottom
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Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is why OS X's use of a PDF-based graphics model was such a good idea. What you see on screen is how it's going to look when you print it (further solidifying the presence of Macs in the publishing industry). The Windows graphics model in 2005 is just embarrassing.
Slashdot Mirror
Salesforce has something like 75% to 80% of the market compared to Microsoft CRM's 35%. Microsoft CRM hasn't been updated in ages.
See this Forbes article for the statement from Salesforce's CEO. This info also comes from blogs like Mini-MSFT.
"You won't find any of those artists on eMule or Bittorrent, because P2P isn't used to trade hard-to-find music."
I may not be able to find the groups you listed there but then again you didn't list any "hard-to-find" music.
I just listed bands you can't find, yet they're not hard-to-find?
Hard to find music is the stuff that we called "Alternative" before everyone thought they had right to call themselves alternative after the Sea-Rattle Grunge Scene blew up. Strangely enough I find the real hard-to-find artists on BT, winmx, shareaza and emule/edonkey easily though.
I notice you don't actually name any artists.
Oh, and it's not "Hey, I'm making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today.", they've already been paid and aren't likely to see another dollar since the record companies are worse than pimps many times and will put a band so far in debt to them that they have to continue with little pay or go bankrupt. Marketing and production costs can make the end-of-year total for a band less than $100,000. Split that 4 ways.
1.) The band willingly signed their contract, using entertainment lawyers to make sure they get a good deal they're satisfied with. That's business.
2.) How does the band magically get paid already when you don't pay for their CD? Do you know what royalties are and how they work? You're ensuring that they don't get paid anything.
3.) I doubt you've ever even asked a real, signed band how this all works or how they feel about their "evil" record contract that they willingly signed.
The REAL money is made for bands on a tour where they receive a MUCH higher percentage of the overall take(tickets, merchandising, etc.)
You don't have any proof or evidence to back this up. You don't know where "REAL money" comes in for a band. You don't know any bands, haven't asked them, and haven't been in one. You think it costs a lot of money to put out a CD? Well, what about putting on a tour with soundsystems, lighting systems, buses, equipment, road crews, and more? You really think bands are getting rich off road tours? Ask one sometime. Touring is hell, and you often don't make a lot of it back.
Touring is another one of the excuses people use. "Oh, the bands can make their money on the tours! That's it! That makes it okay for me to make sure they don't get paid today for this album they spent three months of their own time and money in the studio to record and advertise and promote."
Proof of this lies in one of the most financially successful bands of all time, The Grateful Dead
Oh, geez. So that's your proof, an unbacked statement that the Grateful Dead are one of the most financially successful bands of all time, and therefore that means it applies to every single example of a band in every single case.
who didn't care if people copied their music and taped their shows because they made all of it back on a single tour by charging for the tshirts, tickets, and getting a percentage from vendors.
Yes, it's up to the band to decide how they want to treat their material. Not the person firing up eMule. But you're not interested in the wishes of the band. You're interested in making a bunch of generalizations to justify piracy.
They actually had such a following that the band made several hundreds of times more per fan per tour than they would have ever gotten from the record company. And that's not a fluke since they did it for 25+ years.
That's why the Grateful Dead was a successful touring band--they toured for 25+ years. Sure, when you look at the lump sum of 25+ years of touring revenue, they become the most successful band, so what you're essentially saying is that any artists today who want to make a living putting out music should expect to devote 25 years to nothing but road touring to expect any sort of revenues.
It's hard for me to take you seriously when your argument basically boils down to telling every artist w
No, the fact that it is 40 years old means that the creators got whatever profit they should be entitled to. Music which has entered the common culture over a generation ago no longer should be "owned."
Then go change the law. Write your legislator, or become one yourself. Spread the word. What does any of that have to do with piracy of popular works on P2P?
And finally, the legal system should not be used as a weapon for the wealthy corporations to bludgeon poor individuals. Regardless of what the offense may be.
Oh, stop with the college dorm room rhetoric. Legally going after infringers of your copyright--as Slashdotters always tell people to do when the GPL gets violated--isn't a "weapon" to "bludgeon poor individuals." These emotion-based arguments full of emotion-based words just reveal how weak your position is.
EVERYBODY on this site, including the editors, was saying that the RIAA should be pursuing the individual infringers, back in 2000 during the Napster lawsuit. What changed? Well, the RIAA actually started doing it. And suddenly, it's wrong to protect your own copyright, and it's okay to make sure bands don't get paid for anything. Screw that, especially when legal means like iTunes are skyrocketing (and sound better than CDs anyway).
Once again, I'll repeat it--Slashdot's position five years ago was to do exactly what the RIAA is doing today. You guys just thought they wouldn't be able to do it. Turns out they were, and that makes you mad. Well, you don't have a right to a band's music, and you don't have the right to make sure they don't get paid for it. But they do have the right to make sure they get paid for it. Legally and ethically.
Some people blame high CD prices, some people blame bad artist contracts, but there is always some blamed scapegoat to justify people's behavior. It's so transparent. Piracy is nothing more than trying to get something without having to pay for it. Notice nobody responded to my points about popular music on today's charts being the most widely available and pirated on P2P networks. It's not about some culture revolution of music sharing that the RIAA wants to prevent you from hearing. It's people with high-speed connections starting downloads in eMule so they don't have to pay for the CDs. That's it.
1.) Artists willingly sign their contracts. Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's heads. This mindset of blaming the faceless RIAA for everything has been trumpeted for so long that it's settled into every single post and made people constantly go back to it. Stop ignoring the bands you're not paying money to.
2.) Why are you tired of hearing that someone gets ripped off by P2P? You think money is going to magically appear in their pockets when you don't pay them? It sounds like you just want to ignore the fact that you're not paying people for the music they put out for sale. Sorry if you're tired of hearing that, but it makes it no less 100% true.
The business model has failed
If this is true, why do they still make billions per year on CD sales? Why are online music sales booming? You can keep saying "the business model has failed" year after year (been hearing it since 1998), but they just keep on truckin', don't they?
The price of music should be going down because the price of production has gone down, yet, the RIAA is trying to get $18-20 for a CD. People are sick of it and so they take it.
For one, if something is overpriced, don't buy it. You don't have a right to music CDs.
Two, CDs aren't $18-20. They've gone down to $12-15.
Third, music on iTunes, the largest online store, is only a buck per song and around ten bucks an album.
Finally, I object to the FBI being taken away from its mission of actually fighting violent crime to act as the enforcement arm of the RIAA.
And, finally, the tired "FBI has only twenty guys in it who are getting directed away from their other jobs" argument. The FBI is a huge organization with several departments, all of them handling various law enforcement duties. Copyright holders have rights too, and they will bust large piracy rings for economic interests
But what does the FBI have to do with this? The RIAA is only doing exactly what every Slashdotter was telling them to do in 2000 when Napster was getting sued--go after individual infringers. What really happened is that you guys said that because you thought they'd never be able to do it, then they started doing it, and now you're upset that the free ride is getting taken away. Tough.
Listen up. This post may get me modded down into oblivion, but it has to be said.
.99 each now and albums are as low as eight bucks. This "obsolete business model" argument has been dead since 2001. Legal online music is thriving, just like you guys wanted, and iTunes is already competing with P2P itself and surpassing its usage. How long is the "obsolete business model" card going to get played around here? Online music is taking off, and you guys seem to think it's still 1999.
The post you're responding to never said they'd infringe on copyrights, did it? Just that they wouldn't give the RIAA any money. Nice try.
Get real. We all know what was implied and what most Slashdotters advocate.
On top of that, have you actually listened to the music being produced today? It is largely crap. Go look at what people are actually downloading over the P2P networks -- a lot of it is older music, music that under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain.
Wrong, most music on P2P networks is popular music on the charts, like Creed, Foo Fighters, Madonna, Nine Inch Nails, The New Pornographers, and so on.
I couldn't even find several bands on P2P, like the Lascivious Biddies, or Larry Coryell's "Tricycles" jazz album, or a certain jazz-metal group I like. I had to go to iTunes. This posturing of P2P as some sort of bastion for elite music lovers trading esoteric materials that the RIAA won't let you hear is bogus. It's mostly high school kids and college students trading popular music so they don't have to pay for it. If today's music is so crap, why are people pirating it? If most people aren't trading popular music of today, why are those files the ones most widely available on the networks?
Do you know about CDBaby, the most widely used service by indie artists to sell their CDs and put them on iTunes? When was the last time you bought an album from a CDBaby artist? Probably never. You won't find any of those artists on eMule or Bittorrent, because P2P isn't used to trade hard-to-find music. It's used to get popular music without having to pay for it. It's simple human nature, folks. Stop denying it already. There is no culture revolution here. It's simple freeloading.
(Or wait, do you think people should still be paying for Beatles and Elvis albums that have been burned into their neurons by radio, TV, freaking elevators for the last 40 years?)
The fact you heard it in a commercial means you have the right to it for free? That doesn't even make sense.
Face it, no one on Slashdot has ever validly justified music piracy. They demonize the RIAA to justify thier behavior while ignoring the fact it means the artist doesn't get paid for their work. Artists willingly sign their record label contracts, so don't give me the sob story about the poor, victimized artists and their new antique car collections. And don't give me the poor, victimized mothers getting sued either--their IP was logged, get over it.
Like I said, I know this might get me modded down, but geez, I'm so sick of the hegemonous, pro-piracy mindset trumpeted in the comments on Slashdot in every single article with the word "RIAA" in its headline. For pete's sake, songs are
To you, copyright is this evil system when the RIAA is mentioned, but when some company violates the GPL, suddenly everyone is calling on the EFF to sue them for...infringement of the copyright of the GPL. Various references to the phrase "stolen code" are used. Funny how that works.
People just use the RIAA as a scapegoat, as a way to make themselves forgot about the human beings in the band whose music they're pirating. It's easier to demonize some faceless company than realize, "Hey, I'm making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today."
I've never had Google go down on me for anything. Most of an office suite could be client-side code anyway with not a lot of load on the server once loaded.
I'll give you an example where MIcrosoft has already lost to an online competitor--Salesforce.com has been eating Microsoft CRM for lunch. As their CEO put it, Microsoft still wishes the Internet had never been invented. Some vague new update to Microsoft CRM is scheduled for 2006, but I doubt it will happen.
iPods already display text notes, and the nanos display lyrics entered in iTunes 5. PDFs are next, trust me.
If Google releases an online office suite, it's over for Microsoft. Imagine an office productivity suite that doesn't require installation, is always up-to-date, and is integrated with the 'net.
Once iPod supports PDF viewing, all Apple has to do is start selling eBook PDFs through the Store. Then it will become mainstream.
Digg.com. You vote for the stories, and they post a TON of great front page articles, interviews, and more. Reminds me of the old Slashdot frontpage from seven years ago.
People who read Digg.com knew about the iPod nano two days before it was announced. Kevin Rose posted about it there.
BusinessWeek has also chosen Digg as the best technical news site on the net.
Almost all of those are sitting on top of the same kernel, the same Win32.
Avalon, Indigo, and the rest will all be made available for free download for Windows XP SP2.
I mean, most of that stuff, no consumer will ever care about. Ever.
If bringing up security concerns over a product "raises the ire of /.'ers," perhaps those Slashdotters should consider removing their blinders and looking at things objectively. Thank goodness they had your warning to disregard it because it challenges their worldview!
Then again, I've never understood the obsession over Firefox. It has security flaws too, and its browsing features are taken from the much faster and smaller Opera.
Mozilla has marked flaws as "Confidential" for them to sit unfixed for over a year.
nintendo is losing mindshare and marketshare and this is just not helping. who, precisely, are they going after with this console, with this controller? the casual gamer?
Yes. RTFAs. X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 are clearly geared toward high-end hardcore freak gamers willing to spend $300-$400 for another Halo clone.
is there such thing as a casual gamer anymore?
Not as many as there used to, thanks to X-Box/Playstation. Did you read Iwata's keynote? It's all about targeting the non-hardcore demographic again, like how Nintendo used to in the 80s and early 90s. They will target the hardcore guys, too, but they want casuals and people who left videogaming to return to it.
id's Doom gave the world WASD, and it stuck forever.
No, it didn't. You couldn't remap keys until Quake, which had some popular key remappings for download on Planetquake that used WASD. That's where I first learned it.
Nintendo would do well to emulate Apple's strategies. Increase perceived "style."
This is their plan with the Gameboy Micro, which they claim is targeted at "image-concious gamers."
Appeal to those who consider themselves too "cool" for video games. Nintendo already turns a profit doing what they do, but they can't compete with MS or Sony in volume. This is the only way.
Nintendo doesn't want to target people too cool for videogames, they want to target all the non-hardcore gamers. Look at what's happened to console gaming. When the NES came out, my father used to play Super Mario Bros. with me. It was a simple game with simple controls. Today, he could never pick up any of the games I have on my shelf and play them. They require six buttons, a long learning curve, and the gameplay isn't that great.
Microsoft and Sony's new consoles are big, expensive hardcore-gamer machines, advertising on MTV and getting lost in their own world of high-end gamers. Nintendo is swooping in underneath and targeting the big everyday-person demographic everyone else is ignoring--the demographic that made Nintendo big in the first place and restarted videogames in the 80s.
More and more, I'm not really caring all that much whether or not titles from other consoles will make it to the Revolution, because they'll be big overly-serious graphics-fests with little gameplay value. Additionally, 3rd party developers have been praising this new controller so far, so I'm not really worried. Imagine the GTA guys and the possibilities they must be imagining right now. Too bad for that exclusivity deal.
People were weirded out by the Nintendo DS as well (I remember the Slashdot discussions about how it was a "gimmick"), until it came out and it really worked out well. Same thing here.
This has very little to do with the Power Glove. Get real.
Some people have been having trouble with their dog recognizing vocal commands, until they realized they were leaning forward and practically yelling into the DS mic. The mic is very sensitive, and you only need to speak clearly at room-level volume with the DS at a normal distance, and the game will recognize your voice much more clearly.
For example, for a reason that escapes me Nintendo thought that it would be important for you to know every place in the neighborhood that your dog has peed. They're marked by little blue dots on the mini-map showing your progress on your walk. The more your dog pees in a certain spot, the larger the dot gets. Though I know it isn't always the case with Nintendogs, Lupus only peed in places he'd already done so. By the time I was ready to write this article the mini-map resembled a smurf's version of mapquest.
It's rumored that the dogs use this to mark territories. Notice that if you meet another dog during your walk, sometimes the mini-map will highlight the other dog's pee spot by making it blink in red, as though you're entering its territory. At this point, it's unknown what effect this has on the two dogs becoming playmates or fighting. There are a ton of weird undocumented little things like this in the game. I found a stick and a juice bottle, and I accidentally bopped my dog in the head with them during catch, and now he just growls and them and runs away when I bring them out. But he loves my kleenex box. Weird little virtual dogs, man.
Apple will replace your battery for less than a hundred bucks (I think it's $60). What they actually do is just swap the whole iPod with a brand-new one, so you get rid of your scratches too.
There are different hardware models of computers, but most run the same operating system--Windows. Almost all cars have the same system interface--a steering wheel, seats, an ignition, and so forth.
Asking people to start choosing between two versions of Home is going to be reeaal fun. Sigh.
There are options in the Windows world, but it's nice when every app in OS X gets free WYSIWYG and PDF saving thanks to a graphics model that also happens to use a standard printing model (the subset of Postscript that is PDF).
I wouldn't discount an operating system because of some zealotry. Linux has its share, and Windows does too (see the Microsoft-can-do-no-wrong fanboys over at the various Windows-oriented beta sites, for instance).
As the title of the article says, it confuses the market. Do you need Home Standard Edition or Home Premium Edition? Which Professional edition do you need? What is Ultimate Edition? Microsoft could easily release one version that does everything, or three versions--Home, Professional, and Server. I wondered at first if there was some devious reasoning behind this, but now I think their marketing people really are this dumb. My evidence is a series of very recent dumb marketing ideas:
1.) The name "Windows Vista"--the dumbest name for a Windows release yet (up there with Windows ME).
2.) Internet Explorer is now "Windows Internet Explorer 7."
3.) Other names like "Windows Graphics Foundation," all of them in the similar vein of "Windows Something Something."
It's an orgy of branding over there in Redmond.
This is why OS X's use of a PDF-based graphics model was such a good idea. What you see on screen is how it's going to look when you print it (further solidifying the presence of Macs in the publishing industry). The Windows graphics model in 2005 is just embarrassing.