802.11n was never advertised openly and originally as part of the capabilities of the products in question. For that matter, Quicktime Pro's feature sets are not advertised as part of standard Quicktime... but you don't see anyone complaining that users have to pay a license fee to unlock the Quicktime Pro bundle of features that already exist on your Mac in a disabled state.
For that matter, the same can be said of many different types of software. If you get a digital converter box from your cable company, by virtue of having the box you aren't granted access to every channel the box can theoretically decode.
The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
I understand that. I also understand that I must do my part as a citizen. If citizens have any weight at all against lobbies, it's the power of the popular vote. If we fail to remind our elected Congress of this, then we have no chance. As citizens we also have pocketbooks, and I make my voice heard with my money as well... If we're all serious about change, then vote with your checkbook and pay for legitimate download services and demonstrate the validity of the internet distribution model. Record companies will have no choice but to enter that arena, and as they do, they'll be forced toward a more level playing field as long as we hold court over both the economy and the voting polls as a consumer collective.
Throwing my hands up isn't going to accomplish anything. I also cannot suddenly conjure up millions of dollars but I don't have to. I can, however, encourage others to act as well. There are other issues, sure, but it takes a minute to write a letter on this particular issue. It takes no effort at all to modify music purchasing habits to support internet distribution.
Whatever I choose to do, though, the reality is that internet distribution isn't going away. All the record industry can do is attempt to slow down the inevitable... they can't stop it. Despite that, I must still do my part to support its proliferation.
At this time, no. The only reason is that I had authored it as a print document and then lost the disk it was on. So I have no softcopies; unless my professor kept one, I have the only two hardcopies remaining in existence.
It's not a very exciting read, as it follows a market analysis/business proposal type of format. It's not the kind of zeitgeist punditry you'd expect from all manner of bloggers these days falling over themselves to predict what the next great thing is going to be. It's just really a brief 10-15 page analysis of the state of the industry, the state of the internet and the points of potential confluence between the two... underscoring the need of record companies (in 1996) to seriously explore the potential of various technologies including Quicktime and Real. I only discussed Real Audio at the time because it was one of the only alternatives to Quicktime.
Much of the paper is spent describing the current distribution model and how recording artists get paid... and how under this model 85 percent of them fail to recoup the advances paid to them. It's not really a "ooh ahh" vision-of-the-future kind of piece.
I didn't really make any big predictions about where it would go from there. More or less I concluded only that internet distribution would open many doors for content creators to become distributors in their own right and that record companies would be wise to pursue internet distribution to replace their model which survives only because of litigation that is keeping it on life support... which is good for no one, not even record companies.
As a content creator in my own right, and a Copyright holder of both written and recorded content, I do not see the PERFORM Act legislation, put forth by Sens. Alexander, Biden, Feinstein and Graham as being conducive to protecting the pre-eminent rights of "fair use", encouraging competition and creativity in the marketplace, or protecting the rights of copyright owners from substantial losses.
In 1996, I authored a paper on internet music distribution as a student conducting research at the University of Minnesota. It was clear then that the world is moving into an age of internet distributed content. What was not clear, least of all to the senators who enacted the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was that the negative reaction to internet distribution from the recording industry had little to do with losses from piracy.
The truth is, RIAA is scared to death of the internet. It threatens a distribution monopoly they have held since the 1940s (see Shemel and Krasilovksy's "This Business of Music"). The internet represents an opportunity for individuals such as myself to gain audiences worldwide without resigning to the fiefdom of a recording contract in which the recording artist is made a debtor to the recording company. In the 1990's, fewer than 15 percent of recording artists from major recording labels sold enough copies to break even on the recording advances paid to them to cover the COSTS of recording the album being produced for the record company's gain and to a lesser extent their own. This means that 85 percent of the recording artists then did not see a dime of royalties for their creations.
The world is on the edge of a revolution in independent film making and music making... and the recording industry wants to stop this under the guise of antipiracy legislation. Note that I discourage people from supporting illegitimate downloads because that only solidifies RIAA/MPAA's case to lobby senators just like you to enact such unnecessary legislation... putting a clamp on internet distribution. RIIAA throws lawyers at every grandmother and twelve year old and from my experience employed in internet security enforcement, I can see they're ice-skating uphill. Again, I refuse to support their business case by piracy and instead voice my support of internet distribution by purchasing exclusively through legitimate services like iTunes to show this IS a profitable channel of distribution. However, they're ice-skating uphill nonetheless... but they know it. They have no choice because when artists realize we don't need to subject ourselves to the modern form of indentured servitude, record company executives will be forced to either think innovatively or find another business to work in.
I urge you to condemn the PERFORM Act which seeks to stifle the rights of consumers IN THEIR OWN HOMES, rights which were established by 17 USC 1, 107, and further reinforced by the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act which protected the consumer's right to record broadcasts for their own, personal use. There are already laws protecting piracy and illegal distribution, and these cases should follow due process of law and have their days in court... but this legislation is, like DMCA, aimed squarely at attempting to stifle the inevitable decentralization of RIAA's distribution monopoly and seems to make criminal even the recording of content from individuals such as myself who have created our own material on our own dime, in our own studios, with our own equipment, our own imagination, and hoped that the internet would give us a chance for our creative expressions to be heard.
The internet is the common man's greatest weapon in the information economy against the tyranny of a majority or minority... and it is every Senator's duty, under Oath to the Constitution, to protect our pre-eminent rights from being eroded in this manner.
Thank you for your valuable time and consideration.
You said it can't be changed. It can. In System Preferences > Security, you can enable/disable: Automatic login, password authentication for changing each secure system preference (i.e. prompt password once to unlock all preferences instead of each individual). However, you can't change the authentication for application installation... and this is a good thing.
The main point of this nested thread was along the lines of why Microsoft makes it the default. Microsoft has a habit of putting convenience first and the worst example of this was in prior iterations of their OS when the default network preferences allowed inbound sessions to all ports... This is a HUGE security no-no, and especially for the average user who doesn't need to enable any kind of inbound sessions to his/her machine. Apple could make authentication horrendously complex but TFA demonstrated that they find a pretty well-organized compromise that makes security administration also rather convenient.
Neither plasma nor LCD can compare to the black levels and image clarity achieved by a good CRT. The best example being Sony Trinitron CRTs, which have remained the standard reference monitor for the television and film industries, and for NTSC-M broadcast.
The fact is, while LCD and CRT boast bogus "dynamic" contrast ratios, the human eye at best can detect a 500:1 continuous contrast ratio in an adequately lit room. I say adequately lit because a completely dark room is uncomfortable for the eyes. A bit of lighting around the perimeter of the display relieves the eye from making constant adjustments to focus against the dark areas around the screen and the lit areas of the screen. Motion picture exhibition has a contrast ratio of 500:1 and currently SMPTE is discussing setting the theatrical digital projection contrast ratio standard at 2000:1. Dynamic contrast ratios are bogus because they mangle the luminance of the entire screen area in relation to what it should be.
Another difference is that CRT's are not dependent on a backlight. Regardless of the contrast ratio, the small amount of light bleeding through an LCD display causes noticeably grey black levels. On a plasma, there are no backlight issues but the entire display does lose luminance after just 2000 hours... but colors look mottled and abrupt contrast changes produce mottled transitions.
Of the two, though, the bigger problem is color representation... and suffice it to say that between LCD/Plasma and CRT, there is no comparison. This is important because, while your eyes cannot really discern contrast ratios higher than 500:1, they can detect changes in light wavelength of one nanometer... far narrower than the margin of error for LCD/Plasma color accuracy.
Lastly, there's bang for the buck... The Sony 34" WEGA XBR HDTV Trinitron CRT costs just under $1000. The closest image and color clarity I've seen to this, which is still not quite as accurate but just behind it, is a $7000 Sony SXRD XBR Grand WEGA. Seven times the price... no contest. The irony is that long after that 70 inch SXRD will have died on the user, the Trinitron will probably still be alive and running as accurately as it did when it was purchased.
I suspect that with increased R&D on the SXRD line, which is arguably the best imaging technology amongst LCD/Plasma, these sets will reach a point where they're sufficiently comparable to CRT's and also much more cost-effective. But at the moment this isn't the case.
You may want to view this presentation given by Wil Shipley at the 2005 WWDC. In fact, anyone who doesn't get why Apple development is a profitable business decision should view this presentation.
It's a function of reconstruction errors. In recent articles published in the journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), engineers addressed the misconception that aliasing is itself a function of digital sampling compression. This is not always the case. Even when a decent encoder is used to compress a video or audio signal, its the reconstruction errors that take place during decoding that constitute the greatest cause of aliasing/artifacts.
AES engineers determined that Dolby AAC at 128kbps is perceptibly indiscernible from 16-bit dithered LPCM (CD Audio). AAC is a perceptual coding algorithm that, in essence, differs from MP3 in that it doesn't simply discard data indiscriminately. Perceptual coding algorithms like AAC and AC-3 (Dolby Digital) work to reduce the necessary data to reconstruct only that which is demonstrably perceptible to the human ear and within a dynamic range compression schema and lowpass filtering (at 20kHz for Dolby Digital main channels) that, by further reducing the bandwidth requirements, minimizes artifacts upon reconstruction.
Rather than trying to sound like an advertisement for Dolby Laboratories, I'm using an example of a company that closely manages the quality control of its licensed encoders and decoders (both hardware and software-based) to contrast it with the myriad MP3 and MPEG-4 decoders that may have poorly defined encoding AND decoding algorithms that result in greater errors upon reconstruction.
The truth is, I have not met a self-professed audiophile who can CONSISTENTLY tell the difference between AAC and 16-bit LPCM when blind-tested. I've heard zillions of anecdotes, but no real scientific evidence to demonstrate that, fundamentally, the average person can tell the difference between these two formats.
That is not to say that there are NO differences between any two formats... Put the average listener in a room with 16-bit LPCM and 24-bit LPCM, and yes most of them will be able to hear a discernible (read: obvious) difference that they don't have to be squinting their ears for or making up what they think might be a difference. But I don't hear a lot of audiophiles pissing and moaning that few if any recordings are ever mastered to 24-bit uncompressed linear PCM. Even SACD at best produces results that perceptibly sound no different than 19-bit LPCM.
For casual listening, I find 128 to 192kbps AAC to be pretty sufficient. For critical listening, 24-bit LPCM is my preferred format... but good luck finding a vast array of titles mastered to this format. DVD-Audio is currently the only physical medium that supports it on standalone players. I don't know how many softwares support it but I can tell you that iTunes does in fact support playback of 24-bit/48kHz LPCM. For this reason alone, software-based codecs are still far superior to physically fixed standalone players and discs because of the ease in upgrading to incorporate newer codecs. Furthermore, the myriad other artifacts that audiophiles claim, including digital jitter, are generally not a problem for modern CPU's and DAC's that have their own internal reclocking of the buffered signal to prevent exactly those kind of errors from ever being heard.
I generally do not trust audiophile claims... these are the same people who will tell you that $300 per foot speaker cable is better than $1 per foot... failing to understand that the only two things that affect inductance and resistance are the thickness and length of the cable (assuming it's all oxygen-free annealed copper, which can be purchased for less than a buck a foot)...
He might come across this morning's Zune story... You know, the one that indicates 75% of retailers are still recommending the iPod and analysts don't think Zune will present any kind of formidable competition.
Then he might want to look at the overall maturity and decline in CD and DVD sales looming on the horizon. After that, he might then take a look at Apple's iTunes Music Store sales of music and video.
Finally, Morris *might* come to the realization that Ali G's Ice Cream Glove was, in retrospect, a more sound business strategy than this.
So... Universal is seeking remuneration from Apple for marketing a device that contributes to illegal behavior.
Remind me, again... What's the position of the entertainment industry when it comes to lawsuits against them for publishing content that contributes to the criminal behavior of minors?
1. MS introduces unprofitable business model to light a fire under Apple's ass. 2. Unprofitable business model sinks Zune (ill-conceived hardware design/UI notwithstanding). 3. MS pulls Zune, retreats to XBOX and Windows Bloatware Caves of Profitability. 4. Non-Existent Zune = Profit???
5. Jobs laughs maniacally. Deadpans, "No," when RIAA attempts feebly to re-negotiate on the basis of a ludicrous business case built on an eleventh-hour all nighter fueled by energy drinks, Chinese takeout and heavy doses of THC.
Lesson to RIAA: When MS strongly encourages you to drink their Kool-Aid, don't.
Folks, let's try to remember that the reason we don't get our scientific theories from mainstream media outlets is the same reason we ought not take Creationists seriously.
Until Monckton has published his paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, this is not a news item of any scientific merit whatsoever.
No worries... only a matter of time before the guy who cut the funding is blown away by Jake Busey and Jodie Foster finds out that (surprise!) John Hurt built a second machine...
Lesson: When soliciting funds for SETI projects from an eccentric billionaire, quote Marty McFly at the last minute.
Who is Matthias Winkelmann and why should I care about his hackneyed (read: unsubstantiated) analysis?
From what source data does he derive these so-called BATNA charts? I'm a financial analyst responsible for revenue analysis and forecasting of over $250 million and what I see here is no clothes, no emperor... just a straw man argument.
His definition of BATNA is extremely arbitrary in the sense that one has to accept what HE defines as Best Alternative to even believe the graph's imaginary plots and quadrants... and then assume that he really knows what was going on in the contract negotiations, which he doesn't.
Case in point: In August, Lions Gate Films CEO let slip that they had already secured digital distribution with Apple. I *presume* (I don't claim to know) this means that currently, they're working out the logistics of library transcoding and content delivery. This is not something that happens over night, folks... And for an existing back-library, studios might be apprehensive about trickling out a title here, a title there... To achieve any kind of break-even, they might need to get the entire library up so they have a "shelf presence" on iTunes Store all at once... giving them better visibility and a better chance of getting volume on their backlog of older films that, typically, don't do as high a collective volume as new releases all put together.
Its also incorrect to claim that the iTMS model had pushed record companies in a corner to need DRM. Why? If that were the scenario, and I were your typical short-sighted CEO, my response would probably be, "Why should I bow to the distribution model of a company that has less than five percent of the PC market?" The answer is a bit more complicated than Winkelmann would like to think.
Record companies balked at internet distribution since it became a possibility in the early to mid 1990's. By 1996, RealAudio and Quicktime had given rise to, albeit imperfect, reasonable multimedia content delivery systems.... Quicktime being the vastly superior of the two. However, the PERCEPTION among industry pundits was that the demand was not overwhelming. This was partly due to the fact that they didn't view piracy as competition, and more importantly because they didn't have a clue, technologically speaking, of internet distribution's potential.
Enter iTunes... iTunes arrived at least three years prior to the inception of iTunes Music Store. At this time, Apple was still in the process of trying to prove a point concerning the "appliance" model of thinking with regard to electronic devices and the "digital hub" mentality toward the computer as the backbone of home entertainment and productivity.
A billion downloads later, Apple has proved their point.... at least as far as music is concerned. However, while iTunes was useful before the music store emerged, because the LACK of DRM on CD's (not the lack or presence of DRM on iTunes, mind you) allowed users to easily make use of iTunes to store their existing library.
The same cannot be said of DVD's... At least not for the majority of us. It's considerably more cumbersome to rip a DVD than a CD, and this inconvenience makes it a bit more difficult, but not impossible, for Apple to prove a point regarding the utility of iTunes as a digital hub for movie exhibition in the home.
So the hurdle is not about Best Alternatives, BATNA, or any imaginary negotiations on contracts taking place in Winkelmann's head. It's about hard numbers... the hard numbers were there to prove that not only did people want digital distribution and a user-friendly UI, but the combination of the two proved to be worth the premium (paying instead of pirating). It took TIME to prove this, yes... but that's what Winkelmann doesn't seem to get. iTunes Music Store was not an overnight success... It seems like it's been around forever to those of us who were first adopters (honestly I have trouble remembering when exactly in my usage of iTunes the Music Store came along), but it
[quote]name ONE song you can download on iTunes that you can't find in any P2P network[/quote]
Let's not get into semantic origami... I mentioned three things in that sentence, one of which was selection. It's the combination of the three, not each individually, that the P2P's cannot match.
[quote]songs on p2p networks have an average of 50% higher bitrate to iTunes (128kbit/s against 192kbit/s)[/quote]
So? iTunes AAC (which licenses technologies from Dolby, Fraunhofer -- yes, the same organization that developed MPEG-1, Layer 3 -- and others) is a more efficient perceptual coding schema at lower bitrates than Mp3. At 128kbps, AES engineers have gone on record stating that Dolby AAC is perceptibly indiscernible from 16-bit LPCM. The same cannot be said of MPEG-1.
That's even ignoring the fact that searching P2P will often yield you bitrates all over the board, files that are corrupted or transcoded improperly, or possess artifacts from encoding from crappy sources... At least with iTunes you can be reasonably certain of what you're getting every time you shell out 99 cents. With P2P, you get what you pay for...
[quote]are you kidding me? Apple throws tons of lawsuits to the Wall and sees what sticks all the time! get informed![/quote]
This isn't a pissing match, you can relax. What I'm saying is that, piracy being the subject of discussion, cannot be beaten by throwing lawyers at it. Patent infringement lawsuits have much stronger prima facie evidence than do DMCA-based antipiracy litigation. The way to beat piracy is not through the DMCA. And for the record, what Apple's lawyers do with their time has absolutely nothing to do with what RIAA and the major label's lawyers do with theirs. Apple does not invest one dime in antipiracy litigation or lobbying for legislative changes.
[quote]if the price was on convenience, fidelity and selection, then it was legal to download songs (maybe with a low bitrate) from p2p networks and put them on an mp3 player via a filebrowser... ask the 20.000 people, the RIAA sued, if they paied 3750$ average to the RIAA for fun or because the songs are NOT free[/quote]
Piracy litigation is a very minor deterrent. That lawsuits were filed against many people clearly didn't deter them, and millions of others, from doing it in the first place.
But let's be honest... do you mean to tell me that there is a P2P engine out there that has the functionality, design aesthetic, ergonomics and range of features of iTunes? Also lump in the quality control over the OS and hardware (Wintel PC's excluded) that contribute to the user experience... something P2P developers have no control in or vested interest toward.
We're not talking about installing cheap aftermarket brakes on a Pontiac here... I'd liken it to the ABS sensors on a Mercedes-Benz. Who are people more likely to trust with those ABS sensors? Mercedes-Benz, or Sears Automotive? Brand integrity is a major reason why Apple created the Apple Stores... to maintain quality control at every stage of the user experience because discount stores manned by low-wage morons who are not specially trained to sell Apple hardware weren't doing a very good job of keeping up the Apple name. It's also the same reason that Mercedes-Benz and BMW have full-service warranties where they take care of just about every maintenance item including oil changes... because they are premium products with a reputation to protect.
Get a P2P and you get what you pay for... in most cases a text listing of available titles with limited search functionality. That is to say that if you don't know the name of the title or the artist, you're pretty much screwed in finding that track you think you know but (as far as I know) can't audition on any P2P service.
The fact is, if as you proposed we assume that P2P filesharing were entirely legal... would the P2P applications as they are today survive in the marketplace? Probably not... They're generally devoid of the variety of features and ea
A: Our core initial strategy on the store was that if you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price. In essence, we would make a deal with people. If they would pay a fair price, we would give them a better product and they would stop being pirates
I've been making this point repeatedly since 1996. This simple fact... that Jobs chose to view piracy as competition, is the single most important reason for iTunes Store's, and consequently Apple's, success.
In a sense, the song is free. The user is paying for convenience (robust UI), fidelity (AAC vs. MP3) and selection that the P2P services cannot provide. Whether you want to call this a form of RDF-ing the features/benefits, the fact is that people do pay for design, convenience and selection.
For this reason, tracing back to Jobs' philosophy of Piracy-IS-Competition (as opposed to the "Throw Tons of Lawsuits to the Wall and See What Sticks" approach), Apple distributes more volume than all P2P services combined... even though their product is free.
Because of the product-software integration Apple has, they have a degree of quality control Microsoft cannot touch. Microsoft does not understand hardware the way Apple does. They see hardware as a repository for their bloatware. Whereas Apple sees software as a means to enable hardware to do things related to productivity and entertainment, but the hardware itself must be built to appeal to the consumer's needs, not the shareholder's.
True but in the real world, ego stands in the way of sound business decisions. Men who wield power do so by applying their own version of the Reality Distortion Field to their otherwise commonplace ideas, regarding themselves as innovators for having re-invented the wheel for the umpteenth time.
The problem is that great ideas are hard to come by, and "insanely great" ideas are extremely rare... So, when a leaner, more agile company that operates according to this economy of scale comes along and tosses aside the "throw shit to the wall and see what sticks" business model, much to the befuddlement of many men who were utterly convinced that many mediocre ideas are more profitable than a few brilliant ones, they're very threatened.
They're not threatened monetarily... Bill Gates is still and will still be the richest man in the world. But he will never, and can never, be successful at the economy of scale that Steve Jobs has been... and, perhaps more importantly, he doesn't possess at all any of the brand image or personal image that Apple and Steve Jobs hold in the marketplace of ideas... and that has been a point of contention between the two for a very long time.
Most men, though they get older, do not get wiser... and this is why grown men in their 40s, 50s and beyond, running mega-corporations, continue to let their egos drive them down the abyss of terribly myopic business strategies.
Same reason RIAA and MPAA hurl lawyers at 12-year olds. Figuring out how to make brilliant movies is harder... much harder. Figuring out how to make a business case for their own companies when the internet renders recording companies and motion picture distributors unnecessary is simply beyond the capacity of these used car salesmen.
More than piracy, more than losing retailers, more than losing money, what frightens the modern corporate executive is the possibility of being unimportant.
Higher resolution imagery demonstrated that the spot was comprised of millions of rectangular objects of unknown origin, each with dimensions of 1 x 4 x 9.
I, for one, welcome our new universal and infinite intelligence.
Adding Value to the Internet...
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IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
The problem with adding value to the internet is that every attempt to do so invariably fails for a very good reason: The internet is not a thing. Nowhere has it been put more eloquently what the internet is and isn't than at World of Ends.
The internet, an agreement between parties to speak a common language when communicating, has immense value because it leaves the prioritization and customization of services to the retailers (i.e. enduser ISP's, content providers, distributors, etc.) which facilitates choice through diversity/competition and therefore quality and optimal pricing.
Trying to make the internet do some things better than others, as World of Ends so eloquently puts it, obviously comes at the cost of doing some things worse than others.
If the idea is to be capable of assuring customers of the pristine quality of every frame of video, then every frame of video has to be expected... otherwise the assurance is based on a a falsehood and therefore that puts you right back to square one and you might as well not guarantee it at all, because you can't.
The problem is, the more elaborate the claim made by Company ABC, the more it invites lawsuits and therefore the less cost effective it becomes for the company and therefore the consumer. Any consumer who thinks that such costs aren't always passed on to the customer is simply deluded. Whether that is right or wrong morally is a whole other discussion, but misguided is he who believes that any company is in business to profit its customers more than it profits itself.
And foolish is the person who thinks that the customer isn't made to pay the marginal cost of guaranteeing products against defects, etc. and also the legal defenses needed for the lawsuits that arise when such guarantees fail to be fulfilled. Just as surely as insurance companies charge much more for policies which pay the value of a brand new replacement versus the depreciated value of the owned item, products and services with superior SLA's or warranties are going to cost you more as well.
That's not an argument against higher expectations... that's me telling you that you can get more, but as long as the majority of consumers are willing to settle for any less, you will inevitably pay more for that superior product or service you so desire.
I was told that my statements were absurd for telling it like it is. How absurd is it to think if you buy an $18,000 Ford you'll get the same level of service as if you buy a $47,000 Lexus? Equally insane is the Lexus customer who thinks they will get the same level of service as someone who buys a $400,000 Maybach 62...
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802.11n was never advertised openly and originally as part of the capabilities of the products in question. For that matter, Quicktime Pro's feature sets are not advertised as part of standard Quicktime... but you don't see anyone complaining that users have to pay a license fee to unlock the Quicktime Pro bundle of features that already exist on your Mac in a disabled state.
For that matter, the same can be said of many different types of software. If you get a digital converter box from your cable company, by virtue of having the box you aren't granted access to every channel the box can theoretically decode.
The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
- Anthem, Part Eleven
I understand that. I also understand that I must do my part as a citizen. If citizens have any weight at all against lobbies, it's the power of the popular vote. If we fail to remind our elected Congress of this, then we have no chance. As citizens we also have pocketbooks, and I make my voice heard with my money as well... If we're all serious about change, then vote with your checkbook and pay for legitimate download services and demonstrate the validity of the internet distribution model. Record companies will have no choice but to enter that arena, and as they do, they'll be forced toward a more level playing field as long as we hold court over both the economy and the voting polls as a consumer collective.
Throwing my hands up isn't going to accomplish anything. I also cannot suddenly conjure up millions of dollars but I don't have to. I can, however, encourage others to act as well. There are other issues, sure, but it takes a minute to write a letter on this particular issue. It takes no effort at all to modify music purchasing habits to support internet distribution.
Whatever I choose to do, though, the reality is that internet distribution isn't going away. All the record industry can do is attempt to slow down the inevitable... they can't stop it. Despite that, I must still do my part to support its proliferation.
At this time, no. The only reason is that I had authored it as a print document and then lost the disk it was on. So I have no softcopies; unless my professor kept one, I have the only two hardcopies remaining in existence.
It's not a very exciting read, as it follows a market analysis/business proposal type of format. It's not the kind of zeitgeist punditry you'd expect from all manner of bloggers these days falling over themselves to predict what the next great thing is going to be. It's just really a brief 10-15 page analysis of the state of the industry, the state of the internet and the points of potential confluence between the two... underscoring the need of record companies (in 1996) to seriously explore the potential of various technologies including Quicktime and Real. I only discussed Real Audio at the time because it was one of the only alternatives to Quicktime.
Much of the paper is spent describing the current distribution model and how recording artists get paid... and how under this model 85 percent of them fail to recoup the advances paid to them. It's not really a "ooh ahh" vision-of-the-future kind of piece.
I didn't really make any big predictions about where it would go from there. More or less I concluded only that internet distribution would open many doors for content creators to become distributors in their own right and that record companies would be wise to pursue internet distribution to replace their model which survives only because of litigation that is keeping it on life support... which is good for no one, not even record companies.
Dear Amy:
As a content creator in my own right, and a Copyright holder of both written and recorded content, I do not see the PERFORM Act legislation, put forth by Sens. Alexander, Biden, Feinstein and Graham as being conducive to protecting the pre-eminent rights of "fair use", encouraging competition and creativity in the marketplace, or protecting the rights of copyright owners from substantial losses.
In 1996, I authored a paper on internet music distribution as a student conducting research at the University of Minnesota. It was clear then that the world is moving into an age of internet distributed content. What was not clear, least of all to the senators who enacted the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was that the negative reaction to internet distribution from the recording industry had little to do with losses from piracy.
The truth is, RIAA is scared to death of the internet. It threatens a distribution monopoly they have held since the 1940s (see Shemel and Krasilovksy's "This Business of Music"). The internet represents an opportunity for individuals such as myself to gain audiences worldwide without resigning to the fiefdom of a recording contract in which the recording artist is made a debtor to the recording company. In the 1990's, fewer than 15 percent of recording artists from major recording labels sold enough copies to break even on the recording advances paid to them to cover the COSTS of recording the album being produced for the record company's gain and to a lesser extent their own. This means that 85 percent of the recording artists then did not see a dime of royalties for their creations.
The world is on the edge of a revolution in independent film making and music making... and the recording industry wants to stop this under the guise of antipiracy legislation. Note that I discourage people from supporting illegitimate downloads because that only solidifies RIAA/MPAA's case to lobby senators just like you to enact such unnecessary legislation... putting a clamp on internet distribution. RIIAA throws lawyers at every grandmother and twelve year old and from my experience employed in internet security enforcement, I can see they're ice-skating uphill. Again, I refuse to support their business case by piracy and instead voice my support of internet distribution by purchasing exclusively through legitimate services like iTunes to show this IS a profitable channel of distribution. However, they're ice-skating uphill nonetheless... but they know it. They have no choice because when artists realize we don't need to subject ourselves to the modern form of indentured servitude, record company executives will be forced to either think innovatively or find another business to work in.
I urge you to condemn the PERFORM Act which seeks to stifle the rights of consumers IN THEIR OWN HOMES, rights which were established by 17 USC 1, 107, and further reinforced by the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act which protected the consumer's right to record broadcasts for their own, personal use. There are already laws protecting piracy and illegal distribution, and these cases should follow due process of law and have their days in court... but this legislation is, like DMCA, aimed squarely at attempting to stifle the inevitable decentralization of RIAA's distribution monopoly and seems to make criminal even the recording of content from individuals such as myself who have created our own material on our own dime, in our own studios, with our own equipment, our own imagination, and hoped that the internet would give us a chance for our creative expressions to be heard.
The internet is the common man's greatest weapon in the information economy against the tyranny of a majority or minority... and it is every Senator's duty, under Oath to the Constitution, to protect our pre-eminent rights from being eroded in this manner.
Thank you for your valuable time and consideration.
Couple of things...
You said it can't be changed. It can. In System Preferences > Security, you can enable/disable: Automatic login, password authentication for changing each secure system preference (i.e. prompt password once to unlock all preferences instead of each individual). However, you can't change the authentication for application installation... and this is a good thing.
The main point of this nested thread was along the lines of why Microsoft makes it the default. Microsoft has a habit of putting convenience first and the worst example of this was in prior iterations of their OS when the default network preferences allowed inbound sessions to all ports... This is a HUGE security no-no, and especially for the average user who doesn't need to enable any kind of inbound sessions to his/her machine. Apple could make authentication horrendously complex but TFA demonstrated that they find a pretty well-organized compromise that makes security administration also rather convenient.
Two of the advantages of living on the tenth floor of a high-rise:
1. Concrete floors to keep my 200 pound TV from falling through.
2. Would-be thieves won't get far before throwing out their back or getting crushed by the TV falling on them.
Neither plasma nor LCD can compare to the black levels and image clarity achieved by a good CRT. The best example being Sony Trinitron CRTs, which have remained the standard reference monitor for the television and film industries, and for NTSC-M broadcast.
The fact is, while LCD and CRT boast bogus "dynamic" contrast ratios, the human eye at best can detect a 500:1 continuous contrast ratio in an adequately lit room. I say adequately lit because a completely dark room is uncomfortable for the eyes. A bit of lighting around the perimeter of the display relieves the eye from making constant adjustments to focus against the dark areas around the screen and the lit areas of the screen. Motion picture exhibition has a contrast ratio of 500:1 and currently SMPTE is discussing setting the theatrical digital projection contrast ratio standard at 2000:1. Dynamic contrast ratios are bogus because they mangle the luminance of the entire screen area in relation to what it should be.
Another difference is that CRT's are not dependent on a backlight. Regardless of the contrast ratio, the small amount of light bleeding through an LCD display causes noticeably grey black levels. On a plasma, there are no backlight issues but the entire display does lose luminance after just 2000 hours... but colors look mottled and abrupt contrast changes produce mottled transitions.
Of the two, though, the bigger problem is color representation... and suffice it to say that between LCD/Plasma and CRT, there is no comparison. This is important because, while your eyes cannot really discern contrast ratios higher than 500:1, they can detect changes in light wavelength of one nanometer... far narrower than the margin of error for LCD/Plasma color accuracy.
Lastly, there's bang for the buck... The Sony 34" WEGA XBR HDTV Trinitron CRT costs just under $1000. The closest image and color clarity I've seen to this, which is still not quite as accurate but just behind it, is a $7000 Sony SXRD XBR Grand WEGA. Seven times the price... no contest. The irony is that long after that 70 inch SXRD will have died on the user, the Trinitron will probably still be alive and running as accurately as it did when it was purchased.
I suspect that with increased R&D on the SXRD line, which is arguably the best imaging technology amongst LCD/Plasma, these sets will reach a point where they're sufficiently comparable to CRT's and also much more cost-effective. But at the moment this isn't the case.
Quick, look and see if there are any comments posted by EarlDittman!
You may want to view this presentation given by Wil Shipley at the 2005 WWDC. In fact, anyone who doesn't get why Apple development is a profitable business decision should view this presentation.
It's a function of reconstruction errors. In recent articles published in the journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), engineers addressed the misconception that aliasing is itself a function of digital sampling compression. This is not always the case. Even when a decent encoder is used to compress a video or audio signal, its the reconstruction errors that take place during decoding that constitute the greatest cause of aliasing/artifacts.
AES engineers determined that Dolby AAC at 128kbps is perceptibly indiscernible from 16-bit dithered LPCM (CD Audio). AAC is a perceptual coding algorithm that, in essence, differs from MP3 in that it doesn't simply discard data indiscriminately. Perceptual coding algorithms like AAC and AC-3 (Dolby Digital) work to reduce the necessary data to reconstruct only that which is demonstrably perceptible to the human ear and within a dynamic range compression schema and lowpass filtering (at 20kHz for Dolby Digital main channels) that, by further reducing the bandwidth requirements, minimizes artifacts upon reconstruction.
Rather than trying to sound like an advertisement for Dolby Laboratories, I'm using an example of a company that closely manages the quality control of its licensed encoders and decoders (both hardware and software-based) to contrast it with the myriad MP3 and MPEG-4 decoders that may have poorly defined encoding AND decoding algorithms that result in greater errors upon reconstruction.
The truth is, I have not met a self-professed audiophile who can CONSISTENTLY tell the difference between AAC and 16-bit LPCM when blind-tested. I've heard zillions of anecdotes, but no real scientific evidence to demonstrate that, fundamentally, the average person can tell the difference between these two formats.
That is not to say that there are NO differences between any two formats... Put the average listener in a room with 16-bit LPCM and 24-bit LPCM, and yes most of them will be able to hear a discernible (read: obvious) difference that they don't have to be squinting their ears for or making up what they think might be a difference. But I don't hear a lot of audiophiles pissing and moaning that few if any recordings are ever mastered to 24-bit uncompressed linear PCM. Even SACD at best produces results that perceptibly sound no different than 19-bit LPCM.
For casual listening, I find 128 to 192kbps AAC to be pretty sufficient. For critical listening, 24-bit LPCM is my preferred format... but good luck finding a vast array of titles mastered to this format. DVD-Audio is currently the only physical medium that supports it on standalone players. I don't know how many softwares support it but I can tell you that iTunes does in fact support playback of 24-bit/48kHz LPCM. For this reason alone, software-based codecs are still far superior to physically fixed standalone players and discs because of the ease in upgrading to incorporate newer codecs. Furthermore, the myriad other artifacts that audiophiles claim, including digital jitter, are generally not a problem for modern CPU's and DAC's that have their own internal reclocking of the buffered signal to prevent exactly those kind of errors from ever being heard.
I generally do not trust audiophile claims... these are the same people who will tell you that $300 per foot speaker cable is better than $1 per foot... failing to understand that the only two things that affect inductance and resistance are the thickness and length of the cable (assuming it's all oxygen-free annealed copper, which can be purchased for less than a buck a foot)...
He might come across this morning's Zune story... You know, the one that indicates 75% of retailers are still recommending the iPod and analysts don't think Zune will present any kind of formidable competition.
Then he might want to look at the overall maturity and decline in CD and DVD sales looming on the horizon. After that, he might then take a look at Apple's iTunes Music Store sales of music and video.
Finally, Morris *might* come to the realization that Ali G's Ice Cream Glove was, in retrospect, a more sound business strategy than this.
So... Universal is seeking remuneration from Apple for marketing a device that contributes to illegal behavior.
Remind me, again... What's the position of the entertainment industry when it comes to lawsuits against them for publishing content that contributes to the criminal behavior of minors?
1. MS introduces unprofitable business model to light a fire under Apple's ass.
2. Unprofitable business model sinks Zune (ill-conceived hardware design/UI notwithstanding).
3. MS pulls Zune, retreats to XBOX and Windows Bloatware Caves of Profitability.
4. Non-Existent Zune = Profit???
5. Jobs laughs maniacally. Deadpans, "No," when RIAA attempts feebly to re-negotiate on the basis of a ludicrous business case built on an eleventh-hour all nighter fueled by energy drinks, Chinese takeout and heavy doses of THC.
Lesson to RIAA: When MS strongly encourages you to drink their Kool-Aid, don't.
Folks, let's try to remember that the reason we don't get our scientific theories from mainstream media outlets is the same reason we ought not take Creationists seriously.
Until Monckton has published his paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, this is not a news item of any scientific merit whatsoever.
No worries... only a matter of time before the guy who cut the funding is blown away by Jake Busey and Jodie Foster finds out that (surprise!) John Hurt built a second machine...
Lesson: When soliciting funds for SETI projects from an eccentric billionaire, quote Marty McFly at the last minute.
Who is Matthias Winkelmann and why should I care about his hackneyed (read: unsubstantiated) analysis?
From what source data does he derive these so-called BATNA charts? I'm a financial analyst responsible for revenue analysis and forecasting of over $250 million and what I see here is no clothes, no emperor... just a straw man argument.
His definition of BATNA is extremely arbitrary in the sense that one has to accept what HE defines as Best Alternative to even believe the graph's imaginary plots and quadrants... and then assume that he really knows what was going on in the contract negotiations, which he doesn't.
Case in point: In August, Lions Gate Films CEO let slip that they had already secured digital distribution with Apple. I *presume* (I don't claim to know) this means that currently, they're working out the logistics of library transcoding and content delivery. This is not something that happens over night, folks... And for an existing back-library, studios might be apprehensive about trickling out a title here, a title there... To achieve any kind of break-even, they might need to get the entire library up so they have a "shelf presence" on iTunes Store all at once... giving them better visibility and a better chance of getting volume on their backlog of older films that, typically, don't do as high a collective volume as new releases all put together.
Its also incorrect to claim that the iTMS model had pushed record companies in a corner to need DRM. Why? If that were the scenario, and I were your typical short-sighted CEO, my response would probably be, "Why should I bow to the distribution model of a company that has less than five percent of the PC market?" The answer is a bit more complicated than Winkelmann would like to think.
Record companies balked at internet distribution since it became a possibility in the early to mid 1990's. By 1996, RealAudio and Quicktime had given rise to, albeit imperfect, reasonable multimedia content delivery systems.... Quicktime being the vastly superior of the two. However, the PERCEPTION among industry pundits was that the demand was not overwhelming. This was partly due to the fact that they didn't view piracy as competition, and more importantly because they didn't have a clue, technologically speaking, of internet distribution's potential.
Enter iTunes... iTunes arrived at least three years prior to the inception of iTunes Music Store. At this time, Apple was still in the process of trying to prove a point concerning the "appliance" model of thinking with regard to electronic devices and the "digital hub" mentality toward the computer as the backbone of home entertainment and productivity.
A billion downloads later, Apple has proved their point.... at least as far as music is concerned. However, while iTunes was useful before the music store emerged, because the LACK of DRM on CD's (not the lack or presence of DRM on iTunes, mind you) allowed users to easily make use of iTunes to store their existing library.
The same cannot be said of DVD's... At least not for the majority of us. It's considerably more cumbersome to rip a DVD than a CD, and this inconvenience makes it a bit more difficult, but not impossible, for Apple to prove a point regarding the utility of iTunes as a digital hub for movie exhibition in the home.
So the hurdle is not about Best Alternatives, BATNA, or any imaginary negotiations on contracts taking place in Winkelmann's head. It's about hard numbers... the hard numbers were there to prove that not only did people want digital distribution and a user-friendly UI, but the combination of the two proved to be worth the premium (paying instead of pirating). It took TIME to prove this, yes... but that's what Winkelmann doesn't seem to get. iTunes Music Store was not an overnight success... It seems like it's been around forever to those of us who were first adopters (honestly I have trouble remembering when exactly in my usage of iTunes the Music Store came along), but it
As is yours...
[quote]name ONE song you can download on iTunes that you can't find in any P2P network[/quote]
Let's not get into semantic origami... I mentioned three things in that sentence, one of which was selection. It's the combination of the three, not each individually, that the P2P's cannot match.
[quote]songs on p2p networks have an average of 50% higher bitrate to iTunes (128kbit/s against 192kbit/s)[/quote]
So? iTunes AAC (which licenses technologies from Dolby, Fraunhofer -- yes, the same organization that developed MPEG-1, Layer 3 -- and others) is a more efficient perceptual coding schema at lower bitrates than Mp3. At 128kbps, AES engineers have gone on record stating that Dolby AAC is perceptibly indiscernible from 16-bit LPCM. The same cannot be said of MPEG-1.
That's even ignoring the fact that searching P2P will often yield you bitrates all over the board, files that are corrupted or transcoded improperly, or possess artifacts from encoding from crappy sources... At least with iTunes you can be reasonably certain of what you're getting every time you shell out 99 cents. With P2P, you get what you pay for...
[quote]are you kidding me? Apple throws tons of lawsuits to the Wall and sees what sticks all the time! get informed![/quote]
This isn't a pissing match, you can relax. What I'm saying is that, piracy being the subject of discussion, cannot be beaten by throwing lawyers at it. Patent infringement lawsuits have much stronger prima facie evidence than do DMCA-based antipiracy litigation. The way to beat piracy is not through the DMCA. And for the record, what Apple's lawyers do with their time has absolutely nothing to do with what RIAA and the major label's lawyers do with theirs. Apple does not invest one dime in antipiracy litigation or lobbying for legislative changes.
[quote]if the price was on convenience, fidelity and selection, then it was legal to download songs (maybe with a low bitrate) from p2p networks and put them on an mp3 player via a filebrowser... ask the 20.000 people, the RIAA sued, if they paied 3750$ average to the RIAA for fun or because the songs are NOT free[/quote]
Piracy litigation is a very minor deterrent. That lawsuits were filed against many people clearly didn't deter them, and millions of others, from doing it in the first place.
But let's be honest... do you mean to tell me that there is a P2P engine out there that has the functionality, design aesthetic, ergonomics and range of features of iTunes? Also lump in the quality control over the OS and hardware (Wintel PC's excluded) that contribute to the user experience... something P2P developers have no control in or vested interest toward.
We're not talking about installing cheap aftermarket brakes on a Pontiac here... I'd liken it to the ABS sensors on a Mercedes-Benz. Who are people more likely to trust with those ABS sensors? Mercedes-Benz, or Sears Automotive? Brand integrity is a major reason why Apple created the Apple Stores... to maintain quality control at every stage of the user experience because discount stores manned by low-wage morons who are not specially trained to sell Apple hardware weren't doing a very good job of keeping up the Apple name. It's also the same reason that Mercedes-Benz and BMW have full-service warranties where they take care of just about every maintenance item including oil changes... because they are premium products with a reputation to protect.
Get a P2P and you get what you pay for... in most cases a text listing of available titles with limited search functionality. That is to say that if you don't know the name of the title or the artist, you're pretty much screwed in finding that track you think you know but (as far as I know) can't audition on any P2P service.
The fact is, if as you proposed we assume that P2P filesharing were entirely legal... would the P2P applications as they are today survive in the marketplace? Probably not... They're generally devoid of the variety of features and ea
I've been making this point repeatedly since 1996. This simple fact... that Jobs chose to view piracy as competition, is the single most important reason for iTunes Store's, and consequently Apple's, success.
In a sense, the song is free. The user is paying for convenience (robust UI), fidelity (AAC vs. MP3) and selection that the P2P services cannot provide. Whether you want to call this a form of RDF-ing the features/benefits, the fact is that people do pay for design, convenience and selection.
For this reason, tracing back to Jobs' philosophy of Piracy-IS-Competition (as opposed to the "Throw Tons of Lawsuits to the Wall and See What Sticks" approach), Apple distributes more volume than all P2P services combined... even though their product is free.
Because of the product-software integration Apple has, they have a degree of quality control Microsoft cannot touch. Microsoft does not understand hardware the way Apple does. They see hardware as a repository for their bloatware. Whereas Apple sees software as a means to enable hardware to do things related to productivity and entertainment, but the hardware itself must be built to appeal to the consumer's needs, not the shareholder's.
It means precisely what I intended.
True but in the real world, ego stands in the way of sound business decisions. Men who wield power do so by applying their own version of the Reality Distortion Field to their otherwise commonplace ideas, regarding themselves as innovators for having re-invented the wheel for the umpteenth time.
The problem is that great ideas are hard to come by, and "insanely great" ideas are extremely rare... So, when a leaner, more agile company that operates according to this economy of scale comes along and tosses aside the "throw shit to the wall and see what sticks" business model, much to the befuddlement of many men who were utterly convinced that many mediocre ideas are more profitable than a few brilliant ones, they're very threatened.
They're not threatened monetarily... Bill Gates is still and will still be the richest man in the world. But he will never, and can never, be successful at the economy of scale that Steve Jobs has been... and, perhaps more importantly, he doesn't possess at all any of the brand image or personal image that Apple and Steve Jobs hold in the marketplace of ideas... and that has been a point of contention between the two for a very long time.
Most men, though they get older, do not get wiser... and this is why grown men in their 40s, 50s and beyond, running mega-corporations, continue to let their egos drive them down the abyss of terribly myopic business strategies.
Same reason RIAA and MPAA hurl lawyers at 12-year olds. Figuring out how to make brilliant movies is harder... much harder. Figuring out how to make a business case for their own companies when the internet renders recording companies and motion picture distributors unnecessary is simply beyond the capacity of these used car salesmen.
More than piracy, more than losing retailers, more than losing money, what frightens the modern corporate executive is the possibility of being unimportant.
Higher resolution imagery demonstrated that the spot was comprised of millions of rectangular objects of unknown origin, each with dimensions of 1 x 4 x 9.
I, for one, welcome our new universal and infinite intelligence.
The internet, an agreement between parties to speak a common language when communicating, has immense value because it leaves the prioritization and customization of services to the retailers (i.e. enduser ISP's, content providers, distributors, etc.) which facilitates choice through diversity/competition and therefore quality and optimal pricing.
Trying to make the internet do some things better than others, as World of Ends so eloquently puts it, obviously comes at the cost of doing some things worse than others.
If the idea is to be capable of assuring customers of the pristine quality of every frame of video, then every frame of video has to be expected... otherwise the assurance is based on a a falsehood and therefore that puts you right back to square one and you might as well not guarantee it at all, because you can't.
The problem is, the more elaborate the claim made by Company ABC, the more it invites lawsuits and therefore the less cost effective it becomes for the company and therefore the consumer. Any consumer who thinks that such costs aren't always passed on to the customer is simply deluded. Whether that is right or wrong morally is a whole other discussion, but misguided is he who believes that any company is in business to profit its customers more than it profits itself.
And foolish is the person who thinks that the customer isn't made to pay the marginal cost of guaranteeing products against defects, etc. and also the legal defenses needed for the lawsuits that arise when such guarantees fail to be fulfilled. Just as surely as insurance companies charge much more for policies which pay the value of a brand new replacement versus the depreciated value of the owned item, products and services with superior SLA's or warranties are going to cost you more as well.
That's not an argument against higher expectations... that's me telling you that you can get more, but as long as the majority of consumers are willing to settle for any less, you will inevitably pay more for that superior product or service you so desire.
I was told that my statements were absurd for telling it like it is. How absurd is it to think if you buy an $18,000 Ford you'll get the same level of service as if you buy a $47,000 Lexus? Equally insane is the Lexus customer who thinks they will get the same level of service as someone who buys a $400,000 Maybach 62...
Economies of scale...