Got a better deal? The reason it's such a raw deal has nothing to do with fair-use, it has nothing to do with being able to loan or resell purchased digital media, it has to do with RIAA and MPAA trying their hardest to rip you off.
If I was a major record label selling countless copies of content which can be cranked out in no time (how many songs did Brittany crank out in how short a time? I swear she's powered by a Perl script...), and I wanted to combat piracy, increase sales, and get on top of the "digital revolution" before it got on top of me, I'd be right in there with iTMS, only without the obscene, senseless money-grubbing. YOU KNOW YOU'LL GET YOUR MONEY. MORE THAN ENOUGH TO FILL J-LO'S SWIMMING POOL. When you're working with a negligeble-cost medium like digital distribution, you can focus on sales without worrying about incurring a loss per sale. Why are songs at iTMS a dollar? Can you imagine how many trillions of tracks they'd be selling if a song were a nickel, even a dime? Sure, the cost of manufacturing a CD, printing inserts, putting the whole thing together is a tiny fraction of the purchase price of a CD, we all know that. But for direct download, we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a penny per download. So why are we being price-gouged by record labels who are for some reason trying to "embrace new technologies" while maintaining their old, outdated pricing model? If you want people to actually buy your content, make it affordable. Make it easily affordable. You'll still be making money hand over fist, and considering how easy it would be to make a service faster and more reliable than LimeWire or Gnutella or whathaveyou, if songs were cheap, I would be first in line to pay for them.
Basically, who needs DRM if you're offering your content with a negligeble price (to most consumers), over a service with faster downloads, better quality, easier searching, gauranteed file integrity, no viruses or misnamed files, and a gauranteed-complete library of content?
I would happily pay $0.10 per song if I knew I could look up "teen spirit" without my search results being 90% porn, I knew that once I found the Nirvana song I was searching for that it wouldn't be a completely different song that had been misnamed, that it would be at the bitrate I wanted, and that as soon as I clicked on it and payed my dime I'd be downloading from a server with enough power to saturate my DSL connection until the download was complete. No more "find additional sources", no more bad rips or 128kbps files or misnamed files or download speeds rated in bytes per second? Sign me up!
So, basically, RIAA: stop gouging your customers and start doing smart business!
Uhmmmm... is it just me, or does anyone else not fancy the idea of a few extra permanent magnets spinning around in close proximity to CPU/GPU/HD seem like a Bad Thing?
Why do we need to track them that well? Are we afraid they'll escape? If they did, would that be a bad thing? If they get on their feet & get jobs and homes, can they take the tag out, or are they forever branded?
Or is this like one of those wildlife things where they're trying to track migration and mating paterns?
Quality products? There's a phrase microsoft avoids like the plague.
Who cares if the products are high-quality, as long as they're ubiquitous, overpriced, underdeveloped, and as long as they all leverage eachother and all the other Microsoft money machines (MSN, hotmail, etc. etc.)
That's what they care about.
If only they could do it as intelligently as Disney does it - they're the same company, they're a massive organization with countless products of all different kinds, all leveraging eachother, constantly. But you'll notice the only ads on the Disney channel are Disney ads. It's all in-network. ABC pumps Disney & their holdings constantly.
If only MS had that kind of combination of balls and business smarts - instead they just have a 100% assimilation policy.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said. - Can you say "Resistance is futile"? Yeesh. I knew they though it, just didn't think they'd be so blunt about it in a public conference!
Nope. Scabies can be transmitted through clothing to any upholstered surface, and can live there for up to 72 - 120 hours in moderate conditions, if I remember right.
Yeah, it's gross, but not at all surprising... I work in a cube farm where it's pretty much common knowledge that touching any of the equipment is going to be worse bacteria-wise than doing pushups on the mensroom floor (one of the stranger things I've seen in my cube farm days). And when you consider that equipment is shared between people on different shifts, and how strongly people are discouraged from calling in sick when they're sick, you start to get a very good picture of the kind of biological warfare taking place in the cracks between the keys. You can pick up more germs in this office by typing "WMD" than you would pick up from being attacked with one.
And don't even get me started on the transmission of scabies in shared upholstered swiveling office chairs...
With all the open source projects out there, you'd think this wouldn't be the case any more. Hopefully an open-source streaming standard will be available soon, eh?
Agreed - neither is a good option. Maybe MPEG would be a better way to go?
Of course, if it's in a signed contract that they offer Real as an option, they should abide by the contract they signed.
That doesn't make it a good option for the user, though.
I pay more than enough taxes, I think - where's my giant honking RAM disk??
Of course... didn't somebody build a supercomputer out of Xserves for $5 mil? Boy, five million dollars isn't what it used to be... why, I remember when you could make a payphone call for only 35 cents!
Having very recently been one of the intelligent but socially inept youths, I can give some thoughts on what did and didn't work for me, and what might have worked better:
Find social situations in that child's area of interest. Online forums are a great place to exchange ideas, pose questions, and give answers, and intelligent young people like to feel like they can be on a peer level with adults. You can find a free online forum for almost any area of interest these days.
I also highly recommend MUDs, a text-based multiplayer online game that is extremely socially based. There are hundreds out there, and most are free - check out http://www.mudconnect.com.
Get them engaged in group activities - theatre is a great way to give intelligent kids a way to express their creativity while working together. It also builds confidence in front of an audience.
Debate teams are another way to give kids a chance to use their intelligence in a social situation, and build confidence in their ability to speak their thoughts and to be heard while being polite and having regard for the other side's opinion.
Public speaking classes and/or groups are another good way to build confidence. And this confidence will still help in one-on-one situations.
And last, but not least, a job or internship is another great way to build social skills - you're forced to interact with your co-workers on a social level and to get your job done. If you can't, you don't have a job. Plain and simple.
Agreed! This is absurd - of course this is going to happen. When the telephone came around, people wrote fewer letters. This is the natural evolution of technology. I can't believe it took a study to figure this out!
"I wonder if IBM hates working with Apple as much as Motorola did."
Wrong way around - Apple hated working with Motorolla, because they couldn't get chips out with reliable quality, reliable quantity, or in time to meet production deadlines.
If I were them, I would've dumped Motorola too.
Yeesh. I can see it now. "Oh, hang on, that's me ringin'... what's this? @$%#!!!"
I just hope they didn' t have their ringtones set to 'Ode to Joy' or something... how depressing...
I would say probably nothing - comparing running XBox SDK on G5's to porting windows apps to OSX is an apples to oranges kind of deal. If you're talking linux x86... shouldn't be too hard to port to OSX anyway.
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Got a better deal? The reason it's such a raw deal has nothing to do with fair-use, it has nothing to do with being able to loan or resell purchased digital media, it has to do with RIAA and MPAA trying their hardest to rip you off.
If I was a major record label selling countless copies of content which can be cranked out in no time (how many songs did Brittany crank out in how short a time? I swear she's powered by a Perl script...), and I wanted to combat piracy, increase sales, and get on top of the "digital revolution" before it got on top of me, I'd be right in there with iTMS, only without the obscene, senseless money-grubbing. YOU KNOW YOU'LL GET YOUR MONEY. MORE THAN ENOUGH TO FILL J-LO'S SWIMMING POOL. When you're working with a negligeble-cost medium like digital distribution, you can focus on sales without worrying about incurring a loss per sale. Why are songs at iTMS a dollar? Can you imagine how many trillions of tracks they'd be selling if a song were a nickel, even a dime? Sure, the cost of manufacturing a CD, printing inserts, putting the whole thing together is a tiny fraction of the purchase price of a CD, we all know that. But for direct download, we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a penny per download. So why are we being price-gouged by record labels who are for some reason trying to "embrace new technologies" while maintaining their old, outdated pricing model? If you want people to actually buy your content, make it affordable. Make it easily affordable. You'll still be making money hand over fist, and considering how easy it would be to make a service faster and more reliable than LimeWire or Gnutella or whathaveyou, if songs were cheap, I would be first in line to pay for them.
Basically, who needs DRM if you're offering your content with a negligeble price (to most consumers), over a service with faster downloads, better quality, easier searching, gauranteed file integrity, no viruses or misnamed files, and a gauranteed-complete library of content?
I would happily pay $0.10 per song if I knew I could look up "teen spirit" without my search results being 90% porn, I knew that once I found the Nirvana song I was searching for that it wouldn't be a completely different song that had been misnamed, that it would be at the bitrate I wanted, and that as soon as I clicked on it and payed my dime I'd be downloading from a server with enough power to saturate my DSL connection until the download was complete. No more "find additional sources", no more bad rips or 128kbps files or misnamed files or download speeds rated in bytes per second? Sign me up!
So, basically, RIAA: stop gouging your customers and start doing smart business!
Uhmmmm... is it just me, or does anyone else not fancy the idea of a few extra permanent magnets spinning around in close proximity to CPU/GPU/HD seem like a Bad Thing?
Why do we need to track them that well? Are we afraid they'll escape? If they did, would that be a bad thing? If they get on their feet & get jobs and homes, can they take the tag out, or are they forever branded?
Or is this like one of those wildlife things where they're trying to track migration and mating paterns?
Top-runner would have to be 3 and a half years' work paid for entirely with a $2500 computer - even cheaper than outsourcing to Cheapistan :p
Quality products? There's a phrase microsoft avoids like the plague.
... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said. - Can you say "Resistance is futile"? Yeesh. I knew they though it, just didn't think they'd be so blunt about it in a public conference!
Who cares if the products are high-quality, as long as they're ubiquitous, overpriced, underdeveloped, and as long as they all leverage eachother and all the other Microsoft money machines (MSN, hotmail, etc. etc.)
That's what they care about.
If only they could do it as intelligently as Disney does it - they're the same company, they're a massive organization with countless products of all different kinds, all leveraging eachother, constantly. But you'll notice the only ads on the Disney channel are Disney ads. It's all in-network. ABC pumps Disney & their holdings constantly.
If only MS had that kind of combination of balls and business smarts - instead they just have a 100% assimilation policy.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through
Nope. Scabies can be transmitted through clothing to any upholstered surface, and can live there for up to 72 - 120 hours in moderate conditions, if I remember right.
Yeah, it's gross, but not at all surprising... I work in a cube farm where it's pretty much common knowledge that touching any of the equipment is going to be worse bacteria-wise than doing pushups on the mensroom floor (one of the stranger things I've seen in my cube farm days). And when you consider that equipment is shared between people on different shifts, and how strongly people are discouraged from calling in sick when they're sick, you start to get a very good picture of the kind of biological warfare taking place in the cracks between the keys. You can pick up more germs in this office by typing "WMD" than you would pick up from being attacked with one.
And don't even get me started on the transmission of scabies in shared upholstered swiveling office chairs...
With all the open source projects out there, you'd think this wouldn't be the case any more. Hopefully an open-source streaming standard will be available soon, eh?
Agreed - neither is a good option. Maybe MPEG would be a better way to go? Of course, if it's in a signed contract that they offer Real as an option, they should abide by the contract they signed. That doesn't make it a good option for the user, though.
I pay more than enough taxes, I think - where's my giant honking RAM disk?? Of course... didn't somebody build a supercomputer out of Xserves for $5 mil? Boy, five million dollars isn't what it used to be... why, I remember when you could make a payphone call for only 35 cents!
Having very recently been one of the intelligent but socially inept youths, I can give some thoughts on what did and didn't work for me, and what might have worked better:
Find social situations in that child's area of interest. Online forums are a great place to exchange ideas, pose questions, and give answers, and intelligent young people like to feel like they can be on a peer level with adults. You can find a free online forum for almost any area of interest these days.
I also highly recommend MUDs, a text-based multiplayer online game that is extremely socially based. There are hundreds out there, and most are free - check out http://www.mudconnect.com.
Get them engaged in group activities - theatre is a great way to give intelligent kids a way to express their creativity while working together. It also builds confidence in front of an audience.
Debate teams are another way to give kids a chance to use their intelligence in a social situation, and build confidence in their ability to speak their thoughts and to be heard while being polite and having regard for the other side's opinion.
Public speaking classes and/or groups are another good way to build confidence. And this confidence will still help in one-on-one situations.
And last, but not least, a job or internship is another great way to build social skills - you're forced to interact with your co-workers on a social level and to get your job done. If you can't, you don't have a job. Plain and simple.
Agreed! This is absurd - of course this is going to happen. When the telephone came around, people wrote fewer letters. This is the natural evolution of technology. I can't believe it took a study to figure this out!
"I wonder if IBM hates working with Apple as much as Motorola did."
Wrong way around - Apple hated working with Motorolla, because they couldn't get chips out with reliable quality, reliable quantity, or in time to meet production deadlines. If I were them, I would've dumped Motorola too.
Yeesh. I can see it now. "Oh, hang on, that's me ringin'... what's this? @$%#!!!" I just hope they didn' t have their ringtones set to 'Ode to Joy' or something... how depressing...
Not necessarily - could still end up running on x86 chips in the X2. Though I doubt AMD will be in the picture, judging from past history.
I would say probably nothing - comparing running XBox SDK on G5's to porting windows apps to OSX is an apples to oranges kind of deal. If you're talking linux x86... shouldn't be too hard to port to OSX anyway.