This is just a continuation of the trend towards higher prices for music, in spite of plummeting costs for media and distribution. Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
Is there any reason the price is supposed to go down? Just because the cost of distribution is lowered doesn't mean the record companies are obligated to pass the savings on to you.
If you think $1.29 or even 99 is too much to pay for the songs, stop buying them. Don't listen to their music at all, pirate it, whatever you wish. If everyone else feels the same way you do and stops buying music, the labels will be forced to lower prices or find some other way to add value to the product. If everyone else continues to buy music, then apparently the price isn't too high. That's one thing people forget about the free market. Everyone is responsible for their own buying decisions, and entertainment is a luxury. A company that is truly charging too much will go out of business from not enough customers willing to pay. If people keep paying, "the price is too high" is not true.
...fired from his government job [CC]. His conversation with a co-worker about a gun he intended to buy for target shooting was overheard by someone in a nearby cubicle.
I'd be interested to hear the NRA's response to this.
Pfft. Companies don't care if they're "American" or not, heck plenty of them already have their executives living outside of the country in tax shelters.
A company that is not actually in America loses appeal with many consumers, especially in heavily manufacturing-based areas of the country. They also do not get as much "protection" from some laws, I'm sure many companies would like to avoid EU labor, antitrust, and false advertising laws but still enjoy a country with political stability/private ownership rights you may not find in some Eastern Asian countries.
But I guess nothing stops you from creating a second account and busting the first one out of jail...
Or creating a second account and breaking into and living in the home of your first character (in effect replacing them and writing off your guy in jail).
Imagine if you could murder someone in SL as well. That could give rise to virtual hitman. Someone who goes in an commits "murders" but has no interest in playing the game itself. If he gets caught he doesn't care, its only a game after all.
The guys who came up with outsourcing? I hope their jobs were outsourced.
I've often thought how nice it would be if there were laws passed saying that to be registered as a company in the U.S., you have to have X% of your workforce in the country. Or that executives had to be based in the same country as the majority of their workforce. See how interested companies are in outsourcing when it means they have to move to India.
Interesting concept. Would a virtual sentence be measured in real time or game time? So if I'm sentenced to 2 "years" in the virtual penn., can I not log in for two years and come back and be free? Or do I need to be actually logged in the whole time I want to count toward the sentence?
More importantly: have you replaced Macworld with anything? Is there any Mac-specific magazine out there that's worth spending the money on? If anybody has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them, because I have no idea as to what might be a single-source replacement. (Comments on multiple-source replacements are welcome, too.)
There have been threads in Macworld's forums about the magazine's decline (especailly the magazine getting thinner and having more ads) and the party line from the staff has always been that it's not getting that much thinner, we have fewer advertisers in the back, which reduces page count, or that there are the same amount of in-magazine ads, but they're arranged differently, which is why it seems like there are more of them.
Anyway at one point I was talking in private message to Jason Snell (Macworld's editor at the time) he said that Macworld being popular can actually hurt the publication businesswise:
...it costs a huge amount of money to print and distribute copies of a magazine. Ink, paper, and postage are massive costs. Think of it this way: it costs us x to distribute 350,000 Macworlds. How much would it cost to distribute 700,000 copies? Twice as much. Ad revenues have to double. Since most of our advertisers couldn't afford to pay us twice as much as they do now, we'd suddenly be losing a massive amount of money.
Play that in reverse and you see why we keep knocking down our circulation. Not because we couldn't have a higher circulation -- we certainly could. But because almost no advertiser could afford to pay for those extra readers. And so we drop circulation, using methods like not being aggressive about getting renewals. It's pretty scientific, actually -- the circulation number of an established magazine has almost nothing to do with how many people want to read it, and almost everything to do with how many people advertisers can afford to reach.
This didn't make a lot of sense to me. It would seem to suggest that Macworld needs to lower the price of their ads and maybe raise the price of their subscriptions to cover production costs. And I would have been willing to pay more per years for Macworld if it would go back to being a magazine it took several days for me to fully read and enjoy, instead of one where after a few articles and the back page columnist I wasn't interested in anything else.
For us to survive, we need to transform from a magazine company into a media company, and that means the web's just as good (or better!) than print. If you want to read the mag in paper form, great. If you would rather read it online, that's fine -- we will make money either way. People who are on the Web all the time, posting in forms and the like, are less likely to be magazine readers. And we're totally okay with that -- if the mag as a medium is irrelevant to you, don't read it anymore. We hope that what we offer on the web is compelling, though. And if you become our reader on the web instead of print, I tell you honestly, we don't care. A web reader is as good as a magazine reader in my book. They're different, sure -- but that's all.
As I interpreted that Macworld makes the same amount in revenue from their online advertising verses print advertising+subscription sales. So they would rather I read them online than in print, because they didn't have to pay the costs of publishing my subscription. So now I have MacCentral's RSS feed on my Firefox toolbar, and I check it for stories I'm interested in. Frankly, I don't go there that often. I get more Mac info from keeping an eye on the Rumor sites (especially Macrumors and AppleInsider), or reading Slashdot. But I still find stuff on Macworld's site that interests me. Unfortunately, even though this is supposed to be "Macworld's news service" they have a lot of stories from Playlist as well. So I still have to sift through iPod stories.
Most of the content I read on Macworld's site was showing up in the magazine later that month near the end there, that's one reason I dropped my sub. It was all old news.
However, it turned out that Mr. Thao was not even a subscriber [CC] (pdf) of the ISP [CC] (pdf) at the time of the alleged file-sharing, and therefore did not have possession of the suspect cable modem at that time.
When I first read the summary I thought they had tracked Mr. Thao down because he had registered his cable modem with the manufacturer (the warranty card) and they had gotten the ownership information from the manufacturer (it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me). But I guess he had an ISP-supplied device (a DSL router he wasn't buying outright) and since he was the person in possession of the router at the time the RIAA went looking for the owner, he was the one they sued, even though another customer had the router at the time of the infringement. I wonder if the RIAA can find out who that was. Do records of equipment leasing fall under the list of stuff ISP's are supposed to be keeping for a longer period of time now?
...or maybe no sane company would take up the offer: Anyone capable of writing a commercial encryption program already knows that DRM is folly. 'course that won't stop companies from trying to sell dreams to anyone that'll pay cash...
So what? It's the content that sells the format, not the other way around. The studios can pick whatever standard they see fit, Sony's the one who has to sell the BlueRay dream to them to make their R&D profitable. I'd say the studios are in an excellent position to ask for a little financial assurance that they aren't releasing their content in an armored car made of aluminum foil.
And I remember they often gave one or two-star ratings to prime advertisers like Apple. (They used to use stars, not mice.)
Yeah, the mice was one of the things they picked up from the MacUser merger. Remember the "Star Ratings" section? In the middle of the magazine they had a small section of pages with one to two paragraph summaries of recently reviewed products. So if you were shopping for a new printer you could open up the Star Ratings section, go to the Printers category, and get the star rating and a short blurb about printers that had been reviewed within the last 6-12 months. They dropped that, around 2000 I think. So if you wanted to get multiple reviews you now had to paw through a year's worth of Macworlds (you did keep them right?) or go through the website. I never found the search function particularly useful for finding reviews on a certain topic, though. Just individual models.
MacWorld is an awful magazine and has been for years.
And that's too bad, because they used to be a GOOD magazine. These are some things that sent MacWorld down the tubes, and they are responsible for most of them.
Pandering to newbies. They got rid of the in-depth Photoshop instructional articles, technical discussions about interfaces and architectures, and some of their better columnists. Now more content was devoted to color correcting old family photos and "secrets" to using iTunes one could get from the help function just as easily. I'm sure part of this was from Macworld buying MacUser out and needing to expand to keep MacUser's readership, but it also meant more articles that took less "work" to write, IMHO.
The iPod. It seemed every third issue had a cover story about the iPod. How to pick an iPod that was right for you. A review of the latest model of iPod, iPod accessories. Even when Macworld's publishers started a whole separate magazine devoted to digital audio and portable DAPs (note: a magazine that rarely talked about any player BUT the iPod) they still kept it up on Macworld. The magazine was less and less about the very topic it was named for!
Getting thinner. Macworld's average page count has gone down by about a third between 1998 and 2002. Some issues have half as many pages as issues from 1997. Less content, and they trimmed the size of the magazine itself in dimensions slightly, too. The magazine is so slim now they had to change the font they used on the spine for it to fit.
Ads, Ads, Ads. The number of ads in Macworld increased. It used to be most ads in Macworld were full page, half-page or sidebar style. And there would only be one type generally on each page. But around the time the size of the magazine was cut down the layout began to change, too. There might be more than one sidebar, two quarter-page ads on opposite corners. A full page on one side and the facing page having a half-page ad on it, ect. The result was Macworld appeared to be filling the margins around their advertising with content, instead of the other way around.
Everything is glowing! A saw fewer poor reviews about products, especially Apple products. They would go through a comparison on three Apple desktops and after saying model Y was not a very good value compared to model Z, they would still give model Y four stars! A third party product they considered "flawed" would still get two stars. I didn't feel I could really trust the reviewers at Macworld to give proper weight to the shortcomings of products when they wrote their reviews, which didn't make the reviews particularly usable to me.
So after being a Macworld purchaser and later subscriber for over 10 years, I let my sub end in May 2006.
Blu-ray will be effected too, since it uses AACS. Of course, Blu-ray has an added layer of protection which they've never actually used before. This will prompt Sony to tout Blu-ray to studios as a solution to the crack.
If I were a studio, I would ask for some sort of guarantee the protection would not be crackable easily. Like a financial penalty if the format is cracked within __ years of its release. Maybe Sony would work a little harder at their DRM if they had to pay out the nose for being flimsy.
As I understand it, the RIAA can go in with the order, the ISP says, "I don't think so; we're challenging this." And that's how ex parte is played.
ISPs are so large now they could give a flip less about their individual customers. Things aren't like they were back in the early '90s when each subscriber was a bigger slice of the revenue pie. The fact many people are locked between one or two high-speed providers means they have a captive customer base. There's no worry of mass-exodus over privacy issues for anyone. As the megamedia corps buy more and more markets it gets so even moving to another state isn't enough to give someone a different choice.
They'll gladly throw their customer to the wolves rather than go to bat legally for them. Their willingness to pull content whenever someone waves a DMCA notice, even when the company has no claims to the content, should be evidence enough of this.
So, in this hypothetical, who takes the liability? What if I do this at a public library? Is the library responsible?
My local library makes patrons scan their library card to log into the public computers. Instituting this means the person at the reference desk no longer has to keep track of how long people have been on (since there are not enough computers to meet demand generally). But I think the real reason they did it was so they could track who was looking at what online in case the FBI and the PATRIOT Act came calling.
If you knew anything about the oil business, you'd know that Canada's oil reserves are locked up in tar sands and under peat bogs. Oil prices have to stay over $60/barrel for Canada to remain a viable source of oil.
Yeah, so once the world is "tearing itself apart" over the lack of oil, what do you think the price per barrel will be at that point?
Okay, I can get a dual-layer DVD Burner for about seventy bucks [amazon.com] currently, which means I can burn about 8 GB (or 18% of 45 GB) for less than one-tenth of the price--nearly twice as "cost effective."
Egad! You need to stop shopping at Amazon for your computer accessories, because you can get a DL DVD burner at NewEgg for $31.99 - it was right on the front page. It even has LightScribe, too. I bought a DL burner months ago for $40 on NewEgg (no Lightscribe, though).
In a murder case, you're trying to prove that you're not a murderer. And they already get juries of not-murderers. Duh.
No, isn't it the other way around? You're innocent until proven guilty, therefore the D.A. has to prove you are a murderer. If they walk in with no case whatsoever ("You're honor, we think Mr. Smith is the murderer." "Why?" "Uh, we don't have any evidence, we just think he is.") you wouldn't have to defend yourself, as its been assumed you didn't do anything to start with.
Okay, my bad. Akamai's services are used for many reasons. The point is it isn't about net neutrality, because this isn't about your slowdowns being maliciously caused by your provider because someone else paid them. But having content cached locally across the globe would help you deal with bottlenecks on international pipes and avoid problem in small areas you happen to route through.
There's nothing political about it, and its not a money-grab avoidance exercise. It's load balancing the redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any reason the price is supposed to go down? Just because the cost of distribution is lowered doesn't mean the record companies are obligated to pass the savings on to you.
If you think $1.29 or even 99 is too much to pay for the songs, stop buying them. Don't listen to their music at all, pirate it, whatever you wish. If everyone else feels the same way you do and stops buying music, the labels will be forced to lower prices or find some other way to add value to the product. If everyone else continues to buy music, then apparently the price isn't too high. That's one thing people forget about the free market. Everyone is responsible for their own buying decisions, and entertainment is a luxury. A company that is truly charging too much will go out of business from not enough customers willing to pay. If people keep paying, "the price is too high" is not true.
I'd be interested to hear the NRA's response to this.
A company that is not actually in America loses appeal with many consumers, especially in heavily manufacturing-based areas of the country. They also do not get as much "protection" from some laws, I'm sure many companies would like to avoid EU labor, antitrust, and false advertising laws but still enjoy a country with political stability/private ownership rights you may not find in some Eastern Asian countries.
Or creating a second account and breaking into and living in the home of your first character (in effect replacing them and writing off your guy in jail).
Imagine if you could murder someone in SL as well. That could give rise to virtual hitman. Someone who goes in an commits "murders" but has no interest in playing the game itself. If he gets caught he doesn't care, its only a game after all.
I've often thought how nice it would be if there were laws passed saying that to be registered as a company in the U.S., you have to have X% of your workforce in the country. Or that executives had to be based in the same country as the majority of their workforce. See how interested companies are in outsourcing when it means they have to move to India.
Interesting concept. Would a virtual sentence be measured in real time or game time? So if I'm sentenced to 2 "years" in the virtual penn., can I not log in for two years and come back and be free? Or do I need to be actually logged in the whole time I want to count toward the sentence?
There have been threads in Macworld's forums about the magazine's decline (especailly the magazine getting thinner and having more ads) and the party line from the staff has always been that it's not getting that much thinner, we have fewer advertisers in the back, which reduces page count, or that there are the same amount of in-magazine ads, but they're arranged differently, which is why it seems like there are more of them.
Anyway at one point I was talking in private message to Jason Snell (Macworld's editor at the time) he said that Macworld being popular can actually hurt the publication businesswise:
This didn't make a lot of sense to me. It would seem to suggest that Macworld needs to lower the price of their ads and maybe raise the price of their subscriptions to cover production costs. And I would have been willing to pay more per years for Macworld if it would go back to being a magazine it took several days for me to fully read and enjoy, instead of one where after a few articles and the back page columnist I wasn't interested in anything else.
As I interpreted that Macworld makes the same amount in revenue from their online advertising verses print advertising+subscription sales. So they would rather I read them online than in print, because they didn't have to pay the costs of publishing my subscription. So now I have MacCentral's RSS feed on my Firefox toolbar, and I check it for stories I'm interested in. Frankly, I don't go there that often. I get more Mac info from keeping an eye on the Rumor sites (especially Macrumors and AppleInsider), or reading Slashdot. But I still find stuff on Macworld's site that interests me. Unfortunately, even though this is supposed to be "Macworld's news service" they have a lot of stories from Playlist as well. So I still have to sift through iPod stories.
Most of the content I read on Macworld's site was showing up in the magazine later that month near the end there, that's one reason I dropped my sub. It was all old news.
+1 Funny
When I first read the summary I thought they had tracked Mr. Thao down because he had registered his cable modem with the manufacturer (the warranty card) and they had gotten the ownership information from the manufacturer (it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me). But I guess he had an ISP-supplied device (a DSL router he wasn't buying outright) and since he was the person in possession of the router at the time the RIAA went looking for the owner, he was the one they sued, even though another customer had the router at the time of the infringement. I wonder if the RIAA can find out who that was. Do records of equipment leasing fall under the list of stuff ISP's are supposed to be keeping for a longer period of time now?
So what? It's the content that sells the format, not the other way around. The studios can pick whatever standard they see fit, Sony's the one who has to sell the BlueRay dream to them to make their R&D profitable. I'd say the studios are in an excellent position to ask for a little financial assurance that they aren't releasing their content in an armored car made of aluminum foil.
Yeah, the mice was one of the things they picked up from the MacUser merger. Remember the "Star Ratings" section? In the middle of the magazine they had a small section of pages with one to two paragraph summaries of recently reviewed products. So if you were shopping for a new printer you could open up the Star Ratings section, go to the Printers category, and get the star rating and a short blurb about printers that had been reviewed within the last 6-12 months. They dropped that, around 2000 I think. So if you wanted to get multiple reviews you now had to paw through a year's worth of Macworlds (you did keep them right?) or go through the website. I never found the search function particularly useful for finding reviews on a certain topic, though. Just individual models.
And that's too bad, because they used to be a GOOD magazine. These are some things that sent MacWorld down the tubes, and they are responsible for most of them.
So after being a Macworld purchaser and later subscriber for over 10 years, I let my sub end in May 2006.
If I were a studio, I would ask for some sort of guarantee the protection would not be crackable easily. Like a financial penalty if the format is cracked within __ years of its release. Maybe Sony would work a little harder at their DRM if they had to pay out the nose for being flimsy.
You mean like this?
ISPs are so large now they could give a flip less about their individual customers. Things aren't like they were back in the early '90s when each subscriber was a bigger slice of the revenue pie. The fact many people are locked between one or two high-speed providers means they have a captive customer base. There's no worry of mass-exodus over privacy issues for anyone. As the megamedia corps buy more and more markets it gets so even moving to another state isn't enough to give someone a different choice.
They'll gladly throw their customer to the wolves rather than go to bat legally for them. Their willingness to pull content whenever someone waves a DMCA notice, even when the company has no claims to the content, should be evidence enough of this.
Coincidence? Gee, I wonder...
you forgot the
type=feline_supplement,id=25
On Soviet Slashdot, we send Internets to YOU.
So they won in a way that didn't involve following judicial process and was much cheaper in legal bills.
Yea.
My local library makes patrons scan their library card to log into the public computers. Instituting this means the person at the reference desk no longer has to keep track of how long people have been on (since there are not enough computers to meet demand generally). But I think the real reason they did it was so they could track who was looking at what online in case the FBI and the PATRIOT Act came calling.
Yeah, so once the world is "tearing itself apart" over the lack of oil, what do you think the price per barrel will be at that point?
Egad! You need to stop shopping at Amazon for your computer accessories, because you can get a DL DVD burner at NewEgg for $31.99 - it was right on the front page. It even has LightScribe, too. I bought a DL burner months ago for $40 on NewEgg (no Lightscribe, though).
No, isn't it the other way around? You're innocent until proven guilty, therefore the D.A. has to prove you are a murderer. If they walk in with no case whatsoever ("You're honor, we think Mr. Smith is the murderer." "Why?" "Uh, we don't have any evidence, we just think he is.") you wouldn't have to defend yourself, as its been assumed you didn't do anything to start with.
when the robot crashes, it emits the Blue Scream of Death.
Okay, my bad. Akamai's services are used for many reasons. The point is it isn't about net neutrality, because this isn't about your slowdowns being maliciously caused by your provider because someone else paid them. But having content cached locally across the globe would help you deal with bottlenecks on international pipes and avoid problem in small areas you happen to route through.
There's nothing political about it, and its not a money-grab avoidance exercise. It's load balancing the redundancy.