Business is not about what consumers might expect from the marketplace. In other words, it's not about what consumers want... It's about what they're willing to settle for.
Academically, intellectually and philosophically speaking, I acknowledge there's little that is honest, equitable or just in such a model. But that doesn't mean it doesn't serve its intended purpose... which is to generate an optimal level of profit for the investors concerned.
Financial statements are not impacted by what you might like to see in a product or service, but what you pay for it... which is to them a demonstrable record of what the market will bear. If they think they can get away with less quality for more profit, they sure as hell will test the waters.
Customers often say one thing and do another. This is why customer satisfaction surveys with automobiles never seem to parallel the actual sales trends. In fact, while people were very dissatisfied with gasoline prices during the summer, as prices went up, consumption kept going up... not down.
Further complicating the issue is that executives are not compensated on the long-term sustainable growth of an organization. They are paid on the quick and dirty... monthly and quarterly results. If the long-term picture looks ugly, that's when they collect their golden parachute and play musical chairs, moving on to the next company so they can fuck up the lives of more employees and customers in the long-run while they enjoy the bonuses and other benefits of a short-term compensation model.
No, they do not care about your need for a third knob on the stereo. If research demonstrates that the average customer pays just as much money for two knobs, don't count on a third.
How do you make Netflix better? Well, I think the answer is obvious... replace Netflix with internet-based distribution where a user can download movies to their computer and then stream them to their TV.
Best Buy is one of the largest retailers in the world, yet one out of every five or ten DVD's I purchase from them is defective. I gurarantee you they do not inspect stock from the distributors and subdistributors. In this case, I inspect the discs at the purchasing counter. I have held up other customers in the process... one of them may be you.
The Gap is one of the largest clothing retailers in the world, and one out of every three shirts I have purchased from them ends up discoloring badly in the wash in just a few months. Even though the clothing is their own brand, I guarantee you they do not inspect every shirt for quality. I no longer buy shirts from the Gap... Incidentally, I haven't had a problem with the Faconnable or Ralph Lauren polo shirts I paid $40-$70 for... you get what you pay for.
Apple is one of the largest retailers of online music downloads with global load-balanced hosting operations worldwide, and every 50 to 75 downloads I come across a music track that is encoded from a defective source. I guarantee you Apple does not inspect the contents of every item published to its library. Incidentally I've had even fewer problems with purchased physical CD's, or better yet, DVD-Audio, but I find there's a level of quality I'll accept to take advantage of certain conveniences over going out to the store and paying $20-$25 for a DVD-Audio disc.
Now, mind you I'm not defending Apple but I'm saying they're not unique at all in this regard. Obviously if there's a considerably high frequency of upsampled videos, then they've either got a problem they weren't aware of... or this is simply something they accepted and are willing to deal with it as long as customers are. The solution is to complain to Apple in a constructive way so they have an idea of what customers really want.
If the majority doesn't care then the majority doesn't care... and Apple will offer products as they see fit. I don't recall anywhere in Apple documentation that they ever stated that products in the 640x480 library were remastered from the source. So, all the energy expended whining here on slashdot about it should be spent sending complaints to Apple so that they get the picture and do what needs to be done to retain their bottom line. If a large enough percentage of consumers call them on this, they will change their practice and require all 640x480 content to be remastered... but don't expect them to be inspecting the contents of every file submitted to them, as the process to verify whether or not the content is upsampled cannot be derived from looking at the metadata... Each file would have to be inspected manually, at length. The end result is that you'd have to wait a hell of a lot longer for new releases and you'd be paying much more for them to make up the difference in labor expenditures. Then again, if you're willing to pay $10 a single and wait until three weeks after its initial release to obtain it, who am I to question?
Negative Refractive Index... specifically read the last paragraphs about superlenses and breaking the diffraction limit.
We're not talking science fiction. The concept has been tested in practical application and yielded orders of clarity beyond the diffraction limits of the wavelengths of light being captured.
Resolution does not change on a 16:9 anamorphic DVD (or any other DVD for that matter). NTSC-M standard definition DVDs have a resolution of 720 x 480, which is derived from the 720 x 486 CCIR-601/ITU-R 601 specifications for digital video back in the days of D1.
This resolution, once again, does not change. What changes is the way it is displayed (repeat after me: scanlines and digital resolution are two different things). The DVD player takes the MPEG-2 which has a frame aspect ratio of 4:3 and converts the pixel aspect ratio to 1.2:1. That is, the pixels are stretched 1.2 times wider than they are tall, resulting in an effective frame aspect of 16:9 with 720 x 480 pixels.
Note that HDTV (ATSC) is a different and thus irrelevant format in terms of discussing the NTSC-M DVD format, DVD MPEG-2 resolution never changes... it is ALWAYS 720 x 480.
This talk of "display resolution" is irrelevant. On a standard definition NTSC-M TV, the image displayed is converted from its original, digital signal to an analog one. Once the data passes a D/A converter, the discussion of digital resolution at that point is meaningless. It's only relevant insofar as the potential clarity of the final exhibition from the given source material, but not the effective clarity of the actual image. What I mean to say here is that anything except a fully-digital display does not have a resolution to speak of. Displays can support various resolutions, in principle, but NTSC-M standard definition sets are generally fixed, as opposed to multisync/multiscan.
There's fundamentally no reason why the subtitles can't be integrated into iTunes video moving forward. H.264 is MPEG-4, Part 10. MPEG-4 is a scalable, multilayered codec and while H.264 as-is may not support subtitles presently, one or another MPEG-4 variant could be configured to encapsulate the subtitles in a data stream synchronized to the video stream. All that would then be required is for the Quicktime and iTunes software to be updated to read, format and display the additional layer of text as subtitles... which is basically what a DVD player does with the MPEG-2 and subtitle data. Though the method of encapsulation is different, the idea is essentially the same.
Several posts have debated the issue of whether or not you could see if your retinae were invisible.
The issue here is being confused between points of view. If the objective of invisibility is, as I assume it would be, to be invisible to others and not invisible to one's self... then what's being convoluted in this debate is the fact that there's a difference of vectors between the light that is reflected back to you and the light that is reflected back to outside observers to whom you want to be invisible.
Consider that in order for you to see, light need only strike your retinae. It doesn't need to reflect back out to the outside observer for YOU to see. Therefore, whatever external mechanism... be it a cloak or a negative refraction index superlens (which, though they don't really clarify it in the article, is the technology to which they refer), that mechanism is being employed in this scenario to disperse the pathways of light that would normally reflect back to others... but you're behind the mechanism, so think of it as standing on the nonreflecting (translucent) side of a two-way mirror... that is, for lack of a more accurate analogy, what standing behind the refraction point of a superlens would be like.
However, conventional optics A normal lens will bend light traveling to it in both directions, within the diffraction limit. A mirror will bend light back in the direction from which it came (to an angle of reflection equal and opposite the angle of incidence), within the diffraction limit. A superlens, however, can bend light in directions not bound by the diffraction limit... the focus or diffusion of which can be manipulated electronically.
The light reflecting off you back to other observers is bent, not the light reflecting off OTHER objects TO you. The fact that your smooth retinal surfaces occasionally do reflect light has absolutely nothing to do with how you see. That surface has to actually be somewhat transparent because the rods and cones that collect light and transmit it via the optic nerve to the brain are BEHIND, not in front of, the reflective retinal membrane. This is of course one reason why human vision is far from perfect.
There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides of the argument...
Sure, in the first half of 2006, revenues for DVD rentals were $3.9 billion and $7 billion for DVD sales. However, the per unit margin and residuals from rentals have continued to rise since 1998 when revenue sharing began to replace fixed cost purchase... Incidentally about the same time the digital video market began to explode in the US.
Now the DVD market is reaching maturity, with rentals and sales declining 3.9 and 3.7 percent, respectively, in the first half of 2006. At the same time, the online rental business in the US and Europe surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time in 2005. So there's tremendous growth opportunity here whereas the DVD is reaching the maturity of its product cycle.
Mind you I am not at all an advocate for MPAA but as a financial analyst I understand their reasoning.
On a qualitative level, there do exist advantages that appeal to a significant sector of the population, but first I'd like to point out a few things:
The movies you want to watch only exist because there's money to be made... They're horrendously expensive to make, whether they're good or bad... so there's always going to be a percentage of the films that bomb horribly for which others have to pick up the slack. Arguing against paying for movies, i.e. rationalizing piracy, is an ironic stance since the most popular pirated titles still tend to be some of the highest budgeted films. If you really hate capitalism, and it's not just a front to justify refusal to pay the market price for what you willingly desire (but ostensibly do not need), then show your support for independent films and stop pirating every crap movie that helps MPAA make a case with legislators for more absurd IP laws.
Mind you I'm not arguing that there's no such thing as art... but given that money simply is a representation of work exchanged for work through an intermediary (currency)... you give something, you get something. If you give nothing, the studios do not owe you Russell Crowe's latest polished turd of a movie.
There are many people who find buying every movie under the sun tremendously impractical... as is pirating every movie under the sun, simply because even with a pile of pirated movies, who has all the time in the world to pirate movies all day long? The unemployed, for one...
So, frankly, those who are less interested in possessing an endless inventory of movies are, more often than not, employed with some disposable income. They work, have less time to watch a zillion movies, owned OR pirated... and also because they work, at least a percentage of them can certainly afford to at least rent, if not buy movies.
So why might they be flustered with Netflix? Well, turnaround time. I can't count how many times I've popped over to Hollywood Video on the spur of the moment when I just didn't want to wait a couple of days (minimum) for Netflix to send me something. In this case, purchasing a download on the spot would be ideal for me. The "for me" is the key part here... Again, we're not talking about trying to replace the DVD distro market... that would actually cannibalize a good chunk of the DVD distribution business, much of which is OWNED by the studios. We're talking about target marketing.
The other advantage for a consumer might be budgetary. Provided there's premiums to incent people toward paying for rentals OR purchases, much like iTunes Music Store has proven they could incent people to buy despite a huge volume of piracy, by providing better interface design, ease of use, higher fidelity (AAC instead of MP3) etc. and consequently outperforming all P2Ps combined in total volume... the product itself is NOT the only reason to pay.
If given the choice between two identical products, repeated studies have shown time and time again that people will pay a premium for the one with greater convenience and better service. That being said, piracy generally does not trump service
I read this and instantly thought of Henry David Thoreau. From "Walden":
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off -- that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed -- he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
That's all you have to contribute is some semantic origami? That's it? Give me a freakin' break... This is why blogs and message forums have only the appearance of intellectual discourse and have yet contributed to an overall degeneration of genuinely engaging discussion. Every damned thread turns into a pedestrian pissing contest of one sort or another where pipsqueaks come along attempting to puff themselves up with inane trivia which completely overlook the larger scope of the discussion.
For all intents and purposes, the Altair 8800 was hardly a "personal computer" in any semblance of what we consider that term to mean today. And it would be exaggerating to call the Apple I "commercially successful" in any substantial sense... unless you were under the mistaken impression I was referring to the Apple II.
But, for the record... I predicted that someone would come along and nitpick over semantics, which is why 99 percent of the discussions on Slashdot go around in circles...
Getting in one's two cents by nitpicking or playing semantic volleyball (i.e. "shifting the goalposts") is the unoriginal thinker's way of attempting to scoring points in an otherwise intellectual discussion.
Not only because the guy is a generous philanthropist and no doubt a lot of the perks he has come to benefit, directly or indirectly, the education of future generations but...
The guy invented the personal computer.
Think about that... The personal computer has been regarded in numerous surveys as the single most important invention of the entire 20th century, surpassing even airplanes, artificial hearts, lasers, radiotelescopes, semiconductors, antibiotics, television, radio.
This guy and his work are living history.
So, as far as I'm concerned, he ought to be able to walk into ANY computer store and get free products for life... they all owe him.
Imagine, if you will, Leonardo Da Vinci walking into a Sikorsky dealership, pulling out Codex B and showing the dealer his concept sketch of the helicopter...
Why is it the tendency (especially in America) of the masses to sit and talk about companies not in terms of innovation and product quality, or not even in terms of net profit margins nearly as much as in terms of market share and revenue?
People are now on this discussion fussing over whether or not Apple's release of Boot Camp presents a significant threat Dell, the Wal-Mart of computer hardware. Who the hell cares?
I can understand consumer fascination with gross revenues even less than I understand executive obsession with it. Do you think that the CEO of Rolls Royce is losing sleep because they're selling thousands fewer units than Hyundai? More importantly, do Mercedes-Benz owners bat an eye when they see umpteen times as many Fords on the road?
I'll tell you from personal experience that when you own a Mercedes, you don't give a crap what the other guy is driving or why. You didn't buy it for the gas mileage, maintenance or pricetag, either... which are largely the angles on which the majority of cars are sold.
Likewise, Dell is a mammoth and, as someone else pointed out, has to sell zillions of computers just to make money on their wafer-thin margins... just like Wal-Mart.
But let me say something about a factor in the equation you might have overlooked: Ego. Why is it that it still eats at the asses of people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell that Steve Jobs and Apple are still at it?
It might be because Apple figured out how to run a lean and profitable ship, something that is difficult to do... It's much easier to flood the market with crap at low margins, high cost and sell shitloads just by sheer media saturation... just ask any of the major motion picture studios. That's almost all they do now.
A $15 million movie can't afford a Harrison Ford or humongous marketing campaigns, so it damned well better have a great story.
I guarantee you that Mike Dell and Bill Gates are envious of Steve Jobs. Is it the $90 million Gulfstream V jet? Is it the EIGHT BILLION dollars in cash that puny little Apple has on reserves? Is it Jobs reputation as the second coming? Is it the fact that Apple has more pull in the entertainment industry than Dell, Gates and all other IT magnates combined?
In 1997, former Apple Fellow Guy Kawasaki predicted that by 2005, Microsoft would have an operating system on par with the 1997 iteration of Mac OS. He was absolutely right.
It's all of these kinds of things that fry the asses of CEO's who are in love with their own legends. Gates is so insecure that he recently wrote his own article about what he does at work (which just reads like a commercial for bland Microsoft productivity tools), and he signed the byline "Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect"... still touting that made up moniker (if you want to see how hilariously bad a programmer Bill Gates was back when he actually used to write code, read this article) like a young college graduate who's heart is all atwitter after receiving his first batch of the cheapest business cards Kinko cranks out for the falsely inflating (read: meaningless) title of Account Executive.
By contrast, Apple has a brand recognition and appeal that far exceeds almost all other brands across all other industries. But this is not an empty, manufactured status akin to Lexus (which basically rebadged high end $50,000 Toyota Camrys and thus invented a brand). It's more akin to Mercedes-Benz branding strategy. Here's a company that has vehicles that span a price range from $25,000 (C230) to $1.25 million (CLK-GTR). Daimle
Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) is the oldest car company in existence. Apple is the oldest personal computer manufacturer in existence. Both companies' brands are built on a long reputation for bringing numerous innovations to the market and have gradually established themselves a
What I find irritating about these rants against Apple and iTunes are several things that people consistently overlook.
First, nobody put a gun to your head and told you to sell your vinyl collection, your CD player, or your Macintosh G4 with iTunes. iTunes isn't suddenly going to implode one day on your machine, taking all of your precious copies of Britney Spears latest crap down in flames with it.
Second, nobody complained that the Sony PCM-F1 signaled the instantaneous death of all analog formats. Know why? Because technology cycles take a very long time to reach maturity. Case in point: Nyquist theorem laid out the specs for digital recording in the early 20th century. Philips and Sony developed optical disk technology in 1978. CD's were first marketed in 1982. This year now makes it TWENTY years since the first million-selling compact disk ("Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits). Did people suddenly lose all their music libraries? No. In fact, people are still buying CD's, despite what RIAA wants you to believe.
The point here is that there's always a phase out period. The only ones who seem to repeatedly forget this historical fact are the morons who have that compulsion to go out and buy the latest and greatest technology... blaming the manufacturers, and not their own perverse obsession with bragging rights to ownership of new gadgetry, for this conundrum of changing formats, etc. And it makes you wonder... What compelled you to buy the previous technology if not your willingness to succumb to the marketing efforts of the new technology's manufacturing predecessor?
Third... and perhaps most importantly: I have several recorded tracks I made. I guarantee you there isn't a single person in the universe complaining that I've abandoned CD's entirely and will only release my music on 24-bit PCM DVD Audio and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround from here on out. Know why? Because they don't know I exist.
The major recording companies control their catalog's available formats... Nobody will complain about my music not being on CD, but they'd complain if it were Britney Spears, Foo Fighters, or many other groups they've heard of. That you've heard of any group is a function of their marketing presence, whether it was done by the record label, or, as in the case of Ani DiFranco, by the artist. Either way, the sheer fact that you've heard of them and want to buy their stuff is a consequence of the same industry model that controls distribution options.
I'm not saying, "Be happy with what they give you." Incidentally, I'm saying the opposite... I'm saying they don't owe you a damned thing. They're not in this business to be altruistic. They're in it to make money. I know you know that... it's obvious. I just think sometimes people need to be reminded of it. Either you can buy what they're offering, or not. It's the "or not" that they respond to. No amount of fist-waving is going to get them to do things differently if you STILL BUY THEIR PRODUCT.
I'm not advocating piracy, either. All piracy does is give them cause to send lawyers, instead of get innovative... with, ironically, the exception of Apple. They weren't the only company to experiment with internet music distribution models... but they were perhaps the first to look at internet distribution in a radically different manner. Rather than seeing piracy as an illegal, unviable enemy, they chose to view it as a competitor.
By doing so, Apple realized they'd have to develop premiums... things outside of just the music alone that would give people a reason to pay versus not pay. So, they developed a user-friendly interface with search and sample capabilities, higher fidelity formats (whoever complains about a service not offering lower-fidelity MP3's has my sincerest, most heartfelt outburst of hysterical laughter), and set out to negotiate with labels large and small to acquire one of the largest libraries available... and, well, their volume output exceeds the combined distribution of all the ma
Give me a good ol' CH Products Mach series joystick for the Apple II. Those things were indestructible... even the Flightstick Pro, with its user-configurable buttons (and, get this, customizable acceleration curve)... runs circles around the just-adequate crap Nintendo and these other "game console" makers have put out.
While everyone is unable to resist the opportunity to perceive themselves as being intellectual nerds for being the 47,678th slashdotter (Slashdot being far from a paragon of news reporting OR technical savvy) to bemoan a brand name (what the hell does an iPod have to do with peas or spacecraft, anyway?)...
I'd like to point out one thing everyone seems to be ignoring:
OPTICAL FUCKING I/O
They can call it SourGrapesBook for all I care, the damned thing finally has optical I/O on-board. Now if they can just get that into AirPort Express... which they probably will. They can rename it SuperHappyFunRouter... see if I care, I'll be WAAAAY too busy streaming 24/96 audio directly to my stereo.
Apple didn't introduce a "Video iPod" to their existing line-up. Matter of fact, they didn't introduce a "Video iPod" at all.
Now, before you want to beat me down with an argument in semantics, let's take for granted that when I speak of product introductions, branding and positioning are precisely part of definitions here.
Let's put it this way... If Apple came out with some $600 Video iPod into or on top of an existing triad of flagship iPods (as opposed to the Nano and Shuffle).
Instead, they replaced their entire triad of "small, medium or large" flavors of the standard iPod with a 30GB and 60GB iPod--both having video capability. They are not branding these as "Video iPods" in the same way they did not brand the iPods as "Audio iPods".
This is actually an ingenious branding strategy because it doesn't pigeonhole exactly WHAT the iPod is. It leaves the definition flexible... so, a year from now, it'll be taken for granted that an "iPod" is the standard iPod with video and audio capability.
When you risk product cannibalization or bringing in new technologies alongside existing ones, the alternative is to simply integrate the new features into the existing lines that you're going to have out there... but the concern is how that will affect customer interest if they're forced into having no choice.
However, Apple's already clearly answered that... the 30 and 60GB iPods with video support come in at the same price points as the small and medium capacity iPods that preceded them. $299 is the starting point.
Granted, maybe the $299 iPod has slightly less capacity than its non-video capable predecessor (of this I'm not sure, but if anyone can confirm or deny... please do).... but it's not like customers have a choice between a higher capacity non-video iPod and a lower capacity video iPod. If they're going to consider an iPod at all, and they will, $299 is going to be a reasonable price point for entry when weighed against the features of the Shuffle, the Nano and the 60GB flagship iPod.
And if the point is to be made that they have a choice to go elsewhere, the answer to that is: Yes and no.
If they're price or feature shoppers, then they had just as many alternatives to a $300 iPod before the video feature came along.
If they're culture/brand shoppers, then they've only had one choice and continue to have only one choice... Apple. There's no other digital music player brand that's even remotely close to Apple in terms of its cultural status and appeal. It could be argued that there's no other brand, period, that comes remotely close to Apple today in terms of the "it" factor.
I'm not defending that type of consumer mentality, I'm just saying it exists, the market research observations support the notion that people do respond to such factors.
But let's get to a second issue here... aside from why people would buy it... Why is Apple introducing this feature now? Well, a lot of what Apple's done is cutting edge... in the sense that they've brought out a lot of features that nobody currently uses. But is that a reason to not bring out a feature?
If every company decided their feature introductions on the basis of prior use, then nothing new would ever be introduced. So, somewhere they have to take a chance. Well, by bringing the video feature into their models without actually adding them asa "top-end" option, new buyers are basically going to have the feature there whether they want it or not... but the price they'll have paid won't be that much different from the previous models that didn't have it.
This type of feature introduction often has the effect of creating demand where none existed before. Like mutations in evolutionary biology that occur regardless of need, eventually the market will find a usefulness for the feature... It might be podcasting, it might be $1.99 episodes on the go, or home movies... It might
"[b]The allegations[/b], filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google's July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. Lee started at Google the day after he resigned from Microsoft."
Fuddruckers has taken their site down and configured their DNS servers to redirect fuddruckers.com traffic to google.
According to the developer's LiveJournal, they voluntarily took the site down and apologized to him.
Yes and no. The record company loaned Britney the advance for the express purpose of recording material to fulfill her part of the contract. The money is theirs, and so are the master recordings.
However, and here's just one example of how inequitable a record deal is, if Britney's recording expenditures exceed her advance, too bad... The excess costs come out of her pocket, but she still doesn't own the rights to the masters. The record company does... that is, unless they refuse them and allow her to go shop them to another label... but they still get their loan back
She can pay that off two ways... straight out as a monetary payment back to the record company (that is, if the contract permits it), or, have another record company pick up the rights to the rejected demo and pay record company A to purchase both the rights to the recordings and the rights to the recouped advance... i.e. Britney still has to recoup the advance but now she owes it to Record Company B.
If the record company chooses, they may not reject the recordings, but they aren't necessarily under any obligation to commercially release them, either. In any event, whether Record Company A releases her material, or Record Company B buys the rights to the recording and the advance and releases the material, Britney does not own the rights to the recordings in either scenario... the underlying principle being that the record company has put up the majority of the expense for recording, manufacturing, distribution, promotion and marketing.
Yes, it sounds unfair... and it is... and that's precisely the point. It's a bad deal and more and more artists are waking up to that reality.
You're correct on your definition of "right of first refusal".
My comments should have read:
Because the record label has Right of First Refusal in their contract with the artist, the label has the first opportunity to review and accept or reject the material. Unless and until the material is rejected, the material in question cannot be shopped to other record labels. Furthermore, if it is shopped to other record labels, there may be a clause that requires Label B to pay Label A either a flat fee or a percentage of gross receipts for the distribution rights... and on top of it, the artist still owes Label A the advance unless Label B purchases the loan from Label A, in which case the artist now owes Label B the advance.
Let's not forget that all the aforementioned expenses are entirely outside of what Britney does with the rest of her life.
Any parties she throws, her mortgage, car payments, phone bills, shopping for $5000 purses, trips to Ibiza... whatever's remaining, if anything, from the advance... is pretty much her earnings for the time being.
Then, on top of it all, let's not forget the income taxes on the royalties. Of course, since a recording artist is an independent contractor and not an employee of the record label, they (or rather the accountant... yet another expenditure) are responsible for setting aside the money to pay for income taxes, insurance, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Business is not about what consumers might expect from the marketplace. In other words, it's not about what consumers want... It's about what they're willing to settle for.
Academically, intellectually and philosophically speaking, I acknowledge there's little that is honest, equitable or just in such a model. But that doesn't mean it doesn't serve its intended purpose... which is to generate an optimal level of profit for the investors concerned.
Financial statements are not impacted by what you might like to see in a product or service, but what you pay for it... which is to them a demonstrable record of what the market will bear. If they think they can get away with less quality for more profit, they sure as hell will test the waters.
Customers often say one thing and do another. This is why customer satisfaction surveys with automobiles never seem to parallel the actual sales trends. In fact, while people were very dissatisfied with gasoline prices during the summer, as prices went up, consumption kept going up... not down.
Further complicating the issue is that executives are not compensated on the long-term sustainable growth of an organization. They are paid on the quick and dirty... monthly and quarterly results. If the long-term picture looks ugly, that's when they collect their golden parachute and play musical chairs, moving on to the next company so they can fuck up the lives of more employees and customers in the long-run while they enjoy the bonuses and other benefits of a short-term compensation model.
No, they do not care about your need for a third knob on the stereo. If research demonstrates that the average customer pays just as much money for two knobs, don't count on a third.
How do you make Netflix better? Well, I think the answer is obvious... replace Netflix with internet-based distribution where a user can download movies to their computer and then stream them to their TV.
Hey, I'm a freakin genius! I'm going to be rich!
*reads Apple Expo Paris press release*
Oh, snap.
Best Buy is one of the largest retailers in the world, yet one out of every five or ten DVD's I purchase from them is defective. I gurarantee you they do not inspect stock from the distributors and subdistributors. In this case, I inspect the discs at the purchasing counter. I have held up other customers in the process... one of them may be you.
... or this is simply something they accepted and are willing to deal with it as long as customers are. The solution is to complain to Apple in a constructive way so they have an idea of what customers really want.
The Gap is one of the largest clothing retailers in the world, and one out of every three shirts I have purchased from them ends up discoloring badly in the wash in just a few months. Even though the clothing is their own brand, I guarantee you they do not inspect every shirt for quality. I no longer buy shirts from the Gap... Incidentally, I haven't had a problem with the Faconnable or Ralph Lauren polo shirts I paid $40-$70 for... you get what you pay for.
Apple is one of the largest retailers of online music downloads with global load-balanced hosting operations worldwide, and every 50 to 75 downloads I come across a music track that is encoded from a defective source. I guarantee you Apple does not inspect the contents of every item published to its library. Incidentally I've had even fewer problems with purchased physical CD's, or better yet, DVD-Audio, but I find there's a level of quality I'll accept to take advantage of certain conveniences over going out to the store and paying $20-$25 for a DVD-Audio disc.
Now, mind you I'm not defending Apple but I'm saying they're not unique at all in this regard. Obviously if there's a considerably high frequency of upsampled videos, then they've either got a problem they weren't aware of
If the majority doesn't care then the majority doesn't care... and Apple will offer products as they see fit. I don't recall anywhere in Apple documentation that they ever stated that products in the 640x480 library were remastered from the source. So, all the energy expended whining here on slashdot about it should be spent sending complaints to Apple so that they get the picture and do what needs to be done to retain their bottom line. If a large enough percentage of consumers call them on this, they will change their practice and require all 640x480 content to be remastered... but don't expect them to be inspecting the contents of every file submitted to them, as the process to verify whether or not the content is upsampled cannot be derived from looking at the metadata... Each file would have to be inspected manually, at length. The end result is that you'd have to wait a hell of a lot longer for new releases and you'd be paying much more for them to make up the difference in labor expenditures. Then again, if you're willing to pay $10 a single and wait until three weeks after its initial release to obtain it, who am I to question?
So, in other words...
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Correlation does not imply causation.
We're not talking science fiction. The concept has been tested in practical application and yielded orders of clarity beyond the diffraction limits of the wavelengths of light being captured.
Resolution does not change on a 16:9 anamorphic DVD (or any other DVD for that matter). NTSC-M standard definition DVDs have a resolution of 720 x 480, which is derived from the 720 x 486 CCIR-601/ITU-R 601 specifications for digital video back in the days of D1. This resolution, once again, does not change. What changes is the way it is displayed (repeat after me: scanlines and digital resolution are two different things). The DVD player takes the MPEG-2 which has a frame aspect ratio of 4:3 and converts the pixel aspect ratio to 1.2:1. That is, the pixels are stretched 1.2 times wider than they are tall, resulting in an effective frame aspect of 16:9 with 720 x 480 pixels. Note that HDTV (ATSC) is a different and thus irrelevant format in terms of discussing the NTSC-M DVD format, DVD MPEG-2 resolution never changes... it is ALWAYS 720 x 480. This talk of "display resolution" is irrelevant. On a standard definition NTSC-M TV, the image displayed is converted from its original, digital signal to an analog one. Once the data passes a D/A converter, the discussion of digital resolution at that point is meaningless. It's only relevant insofar as the potential clarity of the final exhibition from the given source material, but not the effective clarity of the actual image. What I mean to say here is that anything except a fully-digital display does not have a resolution to speak of. Displays can support various resolutions, in principle, but NTSC-M standard definition sets are generally fixed, as opposed to multisync/multiscan.
There's fundamentally no reason why the subtitles can't be integrated into iTunes video moving forward. H.264 is MPEG-4, Part 10. MPEG-4 is a scalable, multilayered codec and while H.264 as-is may not support subtitles presently, one or another MPEG-4 variant could be configured to encapsulate the subtitles in a data stream synchronized to the video stream. All that would then be required is for the Quicktime and iTunes software to be updated to read, format and display the additional layer of text as subtitles... which is basically what a DVD player does with the MPEG-2 and subtitle data. Though the method of encapsulation is different, the idea is essentially the same.
Several posts have debated the issue of whether or not you could see if your retinae were invisible.
The issue here is being confused between points of view. If the objective of invisibility is, as I assume it would be, to be invisible to others and not invisible to one's self... then what's being convoluted in this debate is the fact that there's a difference of vectors between the light that is reflected back to you and the light that is reflected back to outside observers to whom you want to be invisible.
Consider that in order for you to see, light need only strike your retinae. It doesn't need to reflect back out to the outside observer for YOU to see. Therefore, whatever external mechanism... be it a cloak or a negative refraction index superlens (which, though they don't really clarify it in the article, is the technology to which they refer), that mechanism is being employed in this scenario to disperse the pathways of light that would normally reflect back to others... but you're behind the mechanism, so think of it as standing on the nonreflecting (translucent) side of a two-way mirror... that is, for lack of a more accurate analogy, what standing behind the refraction point of a superlens would be like.
However, conventional optics A normal lens will bend light traveling to it in both directions, within the diffraction limit. A mirror will bend light back in the direction from which it came (to an angle of reflection equal and opposite the angle of incidence), within the diffraction limit. A superlens, however, can bend light in directions not bound by the diffraction limit... the focus or diffusion of which can be manipulated electronically.
The light reflecting off you back to other observers is bent, not the light reflecting off OTHER objects TO you. The fact that your smooth retinal surfaces occasionally do reflect light has absolutely nothing to do with how you see. That surface has to actually be somewhat transparent because the rods and cones that collect light and transmit it via the optic nerve to the brain are BEHIND, not in front of, the reflective retinal membrane. This is of course one reason why human vision is far from perfect.
There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides of the argument...
Sure, in the first half of 2006, revenues for DVD rentals were $3.9 billion and $7 billion for DVD sales. However, the per unit margin and residuals from rentals have continued to rise since 1998 when revenue sharing began to replace fixed cost purchase... Incidentally about the same time the digital video market began to explode in the US.
Now the DVD market is reaching maturity, with rentals and sales declining 3.9 and 3.7 percent, respectively, in the first half of 2006. At the same time, the online rental business in the US and Europe surpassed the $1 billion mark for the first time in 2005. So there's tremendous growth opportunity here whereas the DVD is reaching the maturity of its product cycle.
Mind you I am not at all an advocate for MPAA but as a financial analyst I understand their reasoning.
On a qualitative level, there do exist advantages that appeal to a significant sector of the population, but first I'd like to point out a few things:
The movies you want to watch only exist because there's money to be made... They're horrendously expensive to make, whether they're good or bad... so there's always going to be a percentage of the films that bomb horribly for which others have to pick up the slack. Arguing against paying for movies, i.e. rationalizing piracy, is an ironic stance since the most popular pirated titles still tend to be some of the highest budgeted films. If you really hate capitalism, and it's not just a front to justify refusal to pay the market price for what you willingly desire (but ostensibly do not need), then show your support for independent films and stop pirating every crap movie that helps MPAA make a case with legislators for more absurd IP laws.
Mind you I'm not arguing that there's no such thing as art... but given that money simply is a representation of work exchanged for work through an intermediary (currency)... you give something, you get something. If you give nothing, the studios do not owe you Russell Crowe's latest polished turd of a movie.
There are many people who find buying every movie under the sun tremendously impractical... as is pirating every movie under the sun, simply because even with a pile of pirated movies, who has all the time in the world to pirate movies all day long? The unemployed, for one...
So, frankly, those who are less interested in possessing an endless inventory of movies are, more often than not, employed with some disposable income. They work, have less time to watch a zillion movies, owned OR pirated... and also because they work, at least a percentage of them can certainly afford to at least rent, if not buy movies.
So why might they be flustered with Netflix? Well, turnaround time. I can't count how many times I've popped over to Hollywood Video on the spur of the moment when I just didn't want to wait a couple of days (minimum) for Netflix to send me something. In this case, purchasing a download on the spot would be ideal for me. The "for me" is the key part here... Again, we're not talking about trying to replace the DVD distro market... that would actually cannibalize a good chunk of the DVD distribution business, much of which is OWNED by the studios. We're talking about target marketing.
The other advantage for a consumer might be budgetary. Provided there's premiums to incent people toward paying for rentals OR purchases, much like iTunes Music Store has proven they could incent people to buy despite a huge volume of piracy, by providing better interface design, ease of use, higher fidelity (AAC instead of MP3) etc. and consequently outperforming all P2Ps combined in total volume... the product itself is NOT the only reason to pay.
If given the choice between two identical products, repeated studies have shown time and time again that people will pay a premium for the one with greater convenience and better service. That being said, piracy generally does not trump service
That's all you have to contribute is some semantic origami? That's it? Give me a freakin' break... This is why blogs and message forums have only the appearance of intellectual discourse and have yet contributed to an overall degeneration of genuinely engaging discussion. Every damned thread turns into a pedestrian pissing contest of one sort or another where pipsqueaks come along attempting to puff themselves up with inane trivia which completely overlook the larger scope of the discussion.
For all intents and purposes, the Altair 8800 was hardly a "personal computer" in any semblance of what we consider that term to mean today. And it would be exaggerating to call the Apple I "commercially successful" in any substantial sense... unless you were under the mistaken impression I was referring to the Apple II.
But, for the record... I predicted that someone would come along and nitpick over semantics, which is why 99 percent of the discussions on Slashdot go around in circles...
Getting in one's two cents by nitpicking or playing semantic volleyball (i.e. "shifting the goalposts") is the unoriginal thinker's way of attempting to scoring points in an otherwise intellectual discussion.
Not only because the guy is a generous philanthropist and no doubt a lot of the perks he has come to benefit, directly or indirectly, the education of future generations but...
The guy invented the personal computer.
Think about that... The personal computer has been regarded in numerous surveys as the single most important invention of the entire 20th century, surpassing even airplanes, artificial hearts, lasers, radiotelescopes, semiconductors, antibiotics, television, radio.
This guy and his work are living history.
So, as far as I'm concerned, he ought to be able to walk into ANY computer store and get free products for life... they all owe him.
Imagine, if you will, Leonardo Da Vinci walking into a Sikorsky dealership, pulling out Codex B and showing the dealer his concept sketch of the helicopter...
Why is it the tendency (especially in America) of the masses to sit and talk about companies not in terms of innovation and product quality, or not even in terms of net profit margins nearly as much as in terms of market share and revenue?
People are now on this discussion fussing over whether or not Apple's release of Boot Camp presents a significant threat Dell, the Wal-Mart of computer hardware. Who the hell cares?
I can understand consumer fascination with gross revenues even less than I understand executive obsession with it. Do you think that the CEO of Rolls Royce is losing sleep because they're selling thousands fewer units than Hyundai? More importantly, do Mercedes-Benz owners bat an eye when they see umpteen times as many Fords on the road?
I'll tell you from personal experience that when you own a Mercedes, you don't give a crap what the other guy is driving or why. You didn't buy it for the gas mileage, maintenance or pricetag, either... which are largely the angles on which the majority of cars are sold.
Likewise, Dell is a mammoth and, as someone else pointed out, has to sell zillions of computers just to make money on their wafer-thin margins... just like Wal-Mart.
But let me say something about a factor in the equation you might have overlooked: Ego. Why is it that it still eats at the asses of people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell that Steve Jobs and Apple are still at it?
It might be because Apple figured out how to run a lean and profitable ship, something that is difficult to do... It's much easier to flood the market with crap at low margins, high cost and sell shitloads just by sheer media saturation... just ask any of the major motion picture studios. That's almost all they do now.
A $15 million movie can't afford a Harrison Ford or humongous marketing campaigns, so it damned well better have a great story.
I guarantee you that Mike Dell and Bill Gates are envious of Steve Jobs. Is it the $90 million Gulfstream V jet? Is it the EIGHT BILLION dollars in cash that puny little Apple has on reserves? Is it Jobs reputation as the second coming? Is it the fact that Apple has more pull in the entertainment industry than Dell, Gates and all other IT magnates combined?
In 1997, former Apple Fellow Guy Kawasaki predicted that by 2005, Microsoft would have an operating system on par with the 1997 iteration of Mac OS. He was absolutely right.
It's all of these kinds of things that fry the asses of CEO's who are in love with their own legends. Gates is so insecure that he recently wrote his own article about what he does at work (which just reads like a commercial for bland Microsoft productivity tools), and he signed the byline "Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect"... still touting that made up moniker (if you want to see how hilariously bad a programmer Bill Gates was back when he actually used to write code, read this article) like a young college graduate who's heart is all atwitter after receiving his first batch of the cheapest business cards Kinko cranks out for the falsely inflating (read: meaningless) title of Account Executive.
By contrast, Apple has a brand recognition and appeal that far exceeds almost all other brands across all other industries. But this is not an empty, manufactured status akin to Lexus (which basically rebadged high end $50,000 Toyota Camrys and thus invented a brand). It's more akin to Mercedes-Benz branding strategy. Here's a company that has vehicles that span a price range from $25,000 (C230) to $1.25 million (CLK-GTR). Daimle
Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) is the oldest car company in existence. Apple is the oldest personal computer manufacturer in existence. Both companies' brands are built on a long reputation for bringing numerous innovations to the market and have gradually established themselves a
What I find irritating about these rants against Apple and iTunes are several things that people consistently overlook.
First, nobody put a gun to your head and told you to sell your vinyl collection, your CD player, or your Macintosh G4 with iTunes. iTunes isn't suddenly going to implode one day on your machine, taking all of your precious copies of Britney Spears latest crap down in flames with it.
Second, nobody complained that the Sony PCM-F1 signaled the instantaneous death of all analog formats. Know why? Because technology cycles take a very long time to reach maturity. Case in point: Nyquist theorem laid out the specs for digital recording in the early 20th century. Philips and Sony developed optical disk technology in 1978. CD's were first marketed in 1982. This year now makes it TWENTY years since the first million-selling compact disk ("Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits). Did people suddenly lose all their music libraries? No. In fact, people are still buying CD's, despite what RIAA wants you to believe.
The point here is that there's always a phase out period. The only ones who seem to repeatedly forget this historical fact are the morons who have that compulsion to go out and buy the latest and greatest technology... blaming the manufacturers, and not their own perverse obsession with bragging rights to ownership of new gadgetry, for this conundrum of changing formats, etc. And it makes you wonder... What compelled you to buy the previous technology if not your willingness to succumb to the marketing efforts of the new technology's manufacturing predecessor?
Third... and perhaps most importantly: I have several recorded tracks I made. I guarantee you there isn't a single person in the universe complaining that I've abandoned CD's entirely and will only release my music on 24-bit PCM DVD Audio and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround from here on out. Know why? Because they don't know I exist.
The major recording companies control their catalog's available formats... Nobody will complain about my music not being on CD, but they'd complain if it were Britney Spears, Foo Fighters, or many other groups they've heard of. That you've heard of any group is a function of their marketing presence, whether it was done by the record label, or, as in the case of Ani DiFranco, by the artist. Either way, the sheer fact that you've heard of them and want to buy their stuff is a consequence of the same industry model that controls distribution options.
I'm not saying, "Be happy with what they give you." Incidentally, I'm saying the opposite... I'm saying they don't owe you a damned thing. They're not in this business to be altruistic. They're in it to make money. I know you know that... it's obvious. I just think sometimes people need to be reminded of it. Either you can buy what they're offering, or not. It's the "or not" that they respond to. No amount of fist-waving is going to get them to do things differently if you STILL BUY THEIR PRODUCT.
I'm not advocating piracy, either. All piracy does is give them cause to send lawyers, instead of get innovative... with, ironically, the exception of Apple. They weren't the only company to experiment with internet music distribution models... but they were perhaps the first to look at internet distribution in a radically different manner. Rather than seeing piracy as an illegal, unviable enemy, they chose to view it as a competitor.
By doing so, Apple realized they'd have to develop premiums... things outside of just the music alone that would give people a reason to pay versus not pay. So, they developed a user-friendly interface with search and sample capabilities, higher fidelity formats (whoever complains about a service not offering lower-fidelity MP3's has my sincerest, most heartfelt outburst of hysterical laughter), and set out to negotiate with labels large and small to acquire one of the largest libraries available... and, well, their volume output exceeds the combined distribution of all the ma
Give me a good ol' CH Products Mach series joystick for the Apple II. Those things were indestructible... even the Flightstick Pro, with its user-configurable buttons (and, get this, customizable acceleration curve)... runs circles around the just-adequate crap Nintendo and these other "game console" makers have put out.
In other news... Ford Motor Co. to introduce revolutionary rack and pinion steering in all 2007 models.
I'd like to point out one thing everyone seems to be ignoring:
OPTICAL FUCKING I/O
They can call it SourGrapesBook for all I care, the damned thing finally has optical I/O on-board. Now if they can just get that into AirPort Express... which they probably will. They can rename it SuperHappyFunRouter... see if I care, I'll be WAAAAY too busy streaming 24/96 audio directly to my stereo.
Apple didn't introduce a "Video iPod" to their existing line-up. Matter of fact, they didn't introduce a "Video iPod" at all.
Now, before you want to beat me down with an argument in semantics, let's take for granted that when I speak of product introductions, branding and positioning are precisely part of definitions here.
Let's put it this way... If Apple came out with some $600 Video iPod into or on top of an existing triad of flagship iPods (as opposed to the Nano and Shuffle).
Instead, they replaced their entire triad of "small, medium or large" flavors of the standard iPod with a 30GB and 60GB iPod--both having video capability. They are not branding these as "Video iPods" in the same way they did not brand the iPods as "Audio iPods".
This is actually an ingenious branding strategy because it doesn't pigeonhole exactly WHAT the iPod is. It leaves the definition flexible... so, a year from now, it'll be taken for granted that an "iPod" is the standard iPod with video and audio capability.
When you risk product cannibalization or bringing in new technologies alongside existing ones, the alternative is to simply integrate the new features into the existing lines that you're going to have out there... but the concern is how that will affect customer interest if they're forced into having no choice.
However, Apple's already clearly answered that... the 30 and 60GB iPods with video support come in at the same price points as the small and medium capacity iPods that preceded them. $299 is the starting point.
Granted, maybe the $299 iPod has slightly less capacity than its non-video capable predecessor (of this I'm not sure, but if anyone can confirm or deny... please do).... but it's not like customers have a choice between a higher capacity non-video iPod and a lower capacity video iPod. If they're going to consider an iPod at all, and they will, $299 is going to be a reasonable price point for entry when weighed against the features of the Shuffle, the Nano and the 60GB flagship iPod.
And if the point is to be made that they have a choice to go elsewhere, the answer to that is: Yes and no.
If they're price or feature shoppers, then they had just as many alternatives to a $300 iPod before the video feature came along.
If they're culture/brand shoppers, then they've only had one choice and continue to have only one choice... Apple. There's no other digital music player brand that's even remotely close to Apple in terms of its cultural status and appeal. It could be argued that there's no other brand, period, that comes remotely close to Apple today in terms of the "it" factor.
I'm not defending that type of consumer mentality, I'm just saying it exists, the market research observations support the notion that people do respond to such factors.
But let's get to a second issue here... aside from why people would buy it... Why is Apple introducing this feature now? Well, a lot of what Apple's done is cutting edge... in the sense that they've brought out a lot of features that nobody currently uses. But is that a reason to not bring out a feature?
If every company decided their feature introductions on the basis of prior use, then nothing new would ever be introduced. So, somewhere they have to take a chance. Well, by bringing the video feature into their models without actually adding them asa "top-end" option, new buyers are basically going to have the feature there whether they want it or not... but the price they'll have paid won't be that much different from the previous models that didn't have it.
This type of feature introduction often has the effect of creating demand where none existed before. Like mutations in evolutionary biology that occur regardless of need, eventually the market will find a usefulness for the feature... It might be podcasting, it might be $1.99 episodes on the go, or home movies... It might
"[b]The allegations[/b], filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google's July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. Lee started at Google the day after he resigned from Microsoft."
Fuddruckers has taken their site down and configured their DNS servers to redirect fuddruckers.com traffic to google. According to the developer's LiveJournal, they voluntarily took the site down and apologized to him.
You just said Britney paid for them.
Yes and no. The record company loaned Britney the advance for the express purpose of recording material to fulfill her part of the contract. The money is theirs, and so are the master recordings.
However, and here's just one example of how inequitable a record deal is, if Britney's recording expenditures exceed her advance, too bad... The excess costs come out of her pocket, but she still doesn't own the rights to the masters. The record company does... that is, unless they refuse them and allow her to go shop them to another label... but they still get their loan back
She can pay that off two ways... straight out as a monetary payment back to the record company (that is, if the contract permits it), or, have another record company pick up the rights to the rejected demo and pay record company A to purchase both the rights to the recordings and the rights to the recouped advance... i.e. Britney still has to recoup the advance but now she owes it to Record Company B.
If the record company chooses, they may not reject the recordings, but they aren't necessarily under any obligation to commercially release them, either.
In any event, whether Record Company A releases her material, or Record Company B buys the rights to the recording and the advance and releases the material, Britney does not own the rights to the recordings in either scenario... the underlying principle being that the record company has put up the majority of the expense for recording, manufacturing, distribution, promotion and marketing.
Yes, it sounds unfair... and it is... and that's precisely the point. It's a bad deal and more and more artists are waking up to that reality.
My comments should have read:
Because the record label has Right of First Refusal in their contract with the artist, the label has the first opportunity to review and accept or reject the material. Unless and until the material is rejected, the material in question cannot be shopped to other record labels. Furthermore, if it is shopped to other record labels, there may be a clause that requires Label B to pay Label A either a flat fee or a percentage of gross receipts for the distribution rights... and on top of it, the artist still owes Label A the advance unless Label B purchases the loan from Label A, in which case the artist now owes Label B the advance.
Royalties, when they do get paid, are disbursed only twice a year.
Any parties she throws, her mortgage, car payments, phone bills, shopping for $5000 purses, trips to Ibiza... whatever's remaining, if anything, from the advance... is pretty much her earnings for the time being.
Then, on top of it all, let's not forget the income taxes on the royalties. Of course, since a recording artist is an independent contractor and not an employee of the record label, they (or rather the accountant... yet another expenditure) are responsible for setting aside the money to pay for income taxes, insurance, etc.