No, of course it doesn't. Haven't you heard, the free market regulates itself through supply and demand! It's impossible for anyone to charge more than their product is worth.
Perhaps. On the other hand, this all reminds me of something my brother told me. He said he got an iPod, ripped all his CDs in iTunes, and then went looking on iTMS for music he liked. He found a whole bunch of stuff, CDs that he always meant to buy, or single songs that he never bought because they were the only thing he wanted on the CD. Over the span of a couple months, he made regular purchases on iTMS because it was so convenient.
After a few months, he went through a few times looking for more music, and every time he found something he liked, he realized he already had it. He looked for other CDs from bands that he liked, and realized that he had everything he wanted from those bands. Finally he e-mailed me about this, because he wanted to know if I had any recommendations. Mostly, I didn't.
I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, but neither of us are finding new music, that we haven't heard before, that we like. I'm not trying to push any theory about the record industry doing a bad job. In fact, I would say that I know very little about it. But whenever I turn on a radio, I don't like what I hear. When I listen to the hot new bands, I feel no urge to hear any of those songs a second time. When people point me to cool underground independent bands, I usually don't like them either.
So if my brother and I are any indication, Apple and RIAA can expect a flurry of purchases whenever someone buys a new iPod, and then those purchases will trail off into practically nothing. These days, I'll pay a couple dollars for an episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica if I miss an episode, and that's about it.
What you're saying is probably true enough if you're in a business, in a position to have a file server and tape drive. But now let's imagine you're a home user with a laptop. You already have a DVD+-RW drive built in to your laptop and a 2 GB of personal data you want to archive. What are you going to do then?
Re:I have a hard time believing claims like this
on
Vista the End of An Era?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You're right. Microsoft has been talking about taking a radical new approach ever since Windows 95, which actually was a radical change from Windows 3.1. I remember when Windows 2000 was going to have a totally different interface, filesystem, etc. Little by little, news came out that the more radical changes were going to be pushed out until the next version, and Windows 2000 would focus on transitioning to the NT kernel. Same with XP, and same with Vista.
You want to know, what? I don't think it's the worst thing. Really, I love it when someone comes up with something incredible and revolutionary and new, but incremental improvements are good too. Just so long as the improvements are real and helpful. It helps is the cost of upgrade is proportionate to the usefulness of the improvements.
But why, then, this phrase: "being necessary to the security of a Free State"? So the amendment is suggestion that it's necessary to have a military force separate from the official army, and implying that this is inherently necessary for a "Free" state. What is the connection between non-governmental military power and freedom, and how could one possibly be necessary for the other?
The only interpretation possible, I think, is that the writer believed that it was necessary for common people to arm themselves against the government.
Think again of the context in which it was written. America had only been formed about a decade before, from a collection of colonies who rebelled against a government they found oppressive. The American government was formed in opposition to the British government-- many of the explicit principles in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights were set to limit governmental powers to prevent the abuses of power which the British government had visited on the colonies.
For example, one of the amendments you don't really hear about is the third, which prohibits the government from quartering soldiers in people's houses. Why on earth would such an obscure idea be put along side the freedom of speech? The reason is, the British government had done exactly that. They forced people to take soldiers into their homes, which caused problems for the would-be rebels.
Given the context, it's obvious that the Bill of Rights was meant to prohibit the then-new American government from having the ability to use tactics that the British government used to try to quell the American rebellion. Therefore, I find it hard to doubt that the intention was to preserve the ability of the people to rebel against a government they don't like. Especially so, when you consider that many of the "founding fathers" were fans of Locke, who argued that men had a right to rebel against bad governments.
I am compelled to conclude that the general idea behind the 2nd ammendment was to ensure that in the event of an invasion...
I think you're on the wrong track already. The 2nd amendment (and the entire bill of rights) was intended to protect the people against the government itself from getting out of control. Many of the personal freedoms acknowledged by the constitution and bill of rights give people the ability to conspire against and fight even a legitimate and lawful government.
First, I don't know that anyone is talking about storing originals here. Would you store the original master recordings in DivX instead? I'd hope not. I would hope that, if you were really talking about storing originals, you want a lossless format.
H.264 is very good, and can be basically lossless at a high enough bitrate. It's one of the better-quality options on the new high definition DVD formats.
From knowing a little about this kind of business, I'd guess that Apple probably doesn't receive original recordings for iTMS. Most likely, the content providers provide the content already encoded. If you have a problem with the quality of iTMS videos, you probably have the provider to blame, not Apple.
I've been saying this since Microsoft first started using activation: As an anti-piracy technique, it doesn't really work. If there's a chink in the activation-scheme's armor, pirates will find it, and you'll still see pirated versions of the OS all over the place. The people this really hurts is Microsoft's legitimate customers, who certainly bought Windows anyway because it came with their fracking machine. They should finally just cut this crap out, and focus on helping their customers.
Re: Apple and "Random", apparently "Random" is his way of saying, "we have no chance whatsoever, but I want to pretend like it could happen at any moment". Yes, of course, technically Apple could use DivX, but they've already chosen the video format they want to use, and integrated it into their OS and iPod. Even if DivX offered improvements to power-consumption, it would already take quite a bit for Apple to back away from h264 and encode the iTMS in some other format. Maybe... maybe if DivX was vastly superior in some way, then I could imagine it. But it isn't.
I always had this vague feeling that whoever ran DivX was an asshole, and now I feel vindicated. I spent too many years just wanting the codec, and only being allowed to download it with a bunch of crappy software.
In the past, creators had natural protections. Technology has made it trivial to reproduce and distribute the works of others, requiring artificial protections to compensate.
You are ignoring history. The artificial protection of "copyright" came long before it was trivial to reproduce and distribute works of others. Even with a printing press, it still took quite an investment to set the type, buy materials, and distribute writings. The law was not made to protect books from being read by unauthorized readers, but to prevent other presses from publishing work without a license from the author. The purpose here was to protect the new distribution method represented by the printing industry.
And yes, once upon a time, Mozart's music could not be enjoyed by the general public without paying *someone* to perform it, but that doesn't mean that they had to pay Mozart at any time. In fact, I'm not familiar with anyone in particular, but many artists and composers relied on wealthy patrons to pay them. They didn't make money by selling tickets to their performances, but they wrote/painted on commission. If they stopped performing or painting, they stopped getting paid. From what I can remember, in spite of being fairly prolific, Mozart was not terribly rich, either.
Microwave ovens are made to be ovens. That the idea arose because of radar systems is irrelevant to this discussion
It's not irrelevant, though you might lack the imagination to see the connection. The point is that technology is often developed for one purpose, and then later found to have other uses. Most technological development comes from mixing and matching different ideas and technology from different areas. Mankind didn't start making microwaves in order to cook food, nor did they produce aspirin in order to treat heart-attack patients. Running electricity to people's houses was originally meant for lights, but all those years ago, no one imagined it would be used for running plasma televisions and laptops.
To claim that we should only use technology for "intended purposes" is completely ignorant of how technologies are developed.
They very well knew, or should have known, the consequences of their actions but they did it anyway.
Yeah, sure, damn those 10 year olds for downloading a song. They should have known that clinking on a link would cause their grandmother to get sued for tens of thousands of dollars.
It also ignores that fact that downloading that MP3 is directly opposed to the content creator's wishes, as evidenced by the fact that he chose to sign a distribution contract with an **AA company.
Not really. It assumes that the creators wishes are not paramount in all cases. Did Shakespeare want Romeo & Juliet to be made into a musical? I don't know, but who cares? IP protection is granted to creators by society for the good of society, and not so their whims can be carried out in perpetuity.
The idea that an artist can't be motivated by money and still produce decent art always seems to come up in submissions like these, as if it is a binary choice.
And yet... that's not what I was saying. At all. I will grant you immediately that money can be a motivating factor towards producing a given work of art. However, this leads copyright supporters to a conclusion which does not follow: that most good artist would not be creative if not for the possibility of making millions of dollars from a single work of art. What I would like to put forward, at least as a possibility, is that those who would cease making art because of no promise of untold riches are not great artists anyhow. There are plenty of other motivating factors, including fame, moderate wealth, and sex with groupies. Besides all that, a certain number of people produce artwork out of a creative compulsion, with not motive other than the need for a creative outlet.
Therefore, I am suggesting that, contrary to all arguments, mp3 trading over the internet will not bring about the end of music.
Even with your example of yourself, you're asking people to pay you for going somewhere and taking pictures of a specific thing. Would that end without copyright protection? No. If someone wanted you to go to Bolivia and follow a writer around, you could still demand money for that.
I don't know... CDs can be carved into excellent throwing stars.
Seriously, though, lots of great things come from using things for purposes other than what they were intended for. Microwaves ovens were made after someone noticed that radar systems could melt candybars. CDs were originally intended, AFAIK, for audio, and only later adapted for general data discs for computers. That's often how technology advances: people realize they can use one discovery for an unintended and unrelated purpose.
The quality of work has probably increased as a result of copyright?
I would be amazed if you could come up with evidence of that. Take all the works that existed before copyrights, and all those released directly to public domain (or a creative-commons/open-source license), and compare them to those which have been copyrighted, in terms of quality?
People want to be brilliant artists and rock stars. They want to write the great American novel. You don't need a motivating factor beyond that. Where the financial problem comes in is, if the creative people can't afford the time to create because they're working all day. The problem comes if a book publisher who is excellent at finding and fostering writers can't afford to maintain their facilities and equipment because every time they come up with a popular book, some other publisher manages to steal the work and undercut prices.
Those are the problems copyrights are intended to address. Let's say there is some guy out there who won't write a book because it will only make him famous, remembered throughout history, and pay his bills, but won't make him a super-ultra-mega rich billionaire. Do you really think that what he would have written would be so immensely incredible that we should hold up society and destroy people's lives because someone might download an MP3?
It's not even to encourage the artists to create. Never, during the whole of human history, has there been difficulty in getting people to participate in creative works. There are going to be people who want to make music, paintings, movies, and books, even if there's no reward but fame.
The purpose is to make it economically feasible to publish works. Without copyright protection, the large investment to bring a work to market would not have been worth it, considering that someone else could simply copy that work and sell it if it actually became popular enough to cover your investment. Therefore, record companies and book publishers would not have been able to make a profit from funding new works.
Therefore, as the technology improves and the price of development and distribution costs come down, and it becomes cheaper to bring a work to market, it follows naturally that we should become less strict on copyright protections. Should development costs, production costs, and distribution costs ever reach the point where they're free, then it probably means that we'll have reached the point where IP protection is completely obsolete.
Sorry to hear about that. I'm not sure it matters terrifically whether you're "clinically depressed" or just unhappy, overworked, and stressed out. Either way, it usually calls for some kind of a change. Depending on the situation, you might just need to get out more, or exercise more. Sometimes it just helps to talk to someone.
Seriously, little things can make a difference. Forcing yourself to take a break and go for a walk can make more of a difference than you'd imagine. However, if you're not feeling sure, you may as well talk to a psycho-therapist. There's no shame in it, and it's like going to see the doctor if something physically weird is going on. It's often better to be safe than sorry.
I can't tell if you mean to be insulting me. Insight is generally obvious after the fact, but in any case I didn't mod myself "insightful".
Anyway, the purpose of Windows ME was... oh, who the hell knows. There was no good reason for it, except maybe to release *something*, while they worked on transitioning everything to the NT kernel.
The purpose of the XP Home edition isn't to keep things simple, but to have an entry-level product that they can sell cheaply. They want a version of Windows that they can sell to people who don't know any better and want to save a hundred dollars, while preventing anyone who knows the difference from wanting to buy the cheap version. It's a marketing move, and not an attempt to really meet the needs of customers.
You see, all the different versions of Windows is contrary to what I mean when I say they should keep it simple. XP Home and XP Pro, it's not clear what the difference is, until you try to do something in XP Home that they've crippled. Even worse, Vista has, what, 5 different versions? How does this added complexity serve the customer? It doesn't. It's a crappy marketing idea.
Keeping it simple means things like, giving you a default setup, but making it easy to remove things you don't want. It means implementing standards without special tweaks that will bite you in the ass when you try to do things in standard ways. It means not restricting admins from being able to complete standard and obvious tasks.
But that's just it-- whatever they charge for the iTV, the price won't be justified by playing Bejeweled. People will pay the price (if they'll pay it at all) because they want a good way of accessing their iTMS content on their televisions. However, if the iTV has casual games and you can buy movies through the 360, their markets begin to intersect.
Not necessarily. Typically, especially during the years where people are rushing out to buy these consoles, the console itself is a loss-leader. They want you to buy the games and the accessories, and the console makes money on those items, as well as licensing to other companies who make those items. This might not be true closer to the end of the product's life, but supposedly they never make much of a margin. As the console gets old, they have to keep cutting prices.
At least, this has been the conventional wisdom. Rumor is that Microsoft has started breaking even on the 360 already, which is a quick turn around. However, they're also likely to cut prices soon. Apparently Nintendo has been making money off of the Wii from the start. So it's just not clear that Microsoft's economic incentive is really towards selling Xbox consoles. It's a common belief that the reason they entered the market at all was in order to protect their Windows monopoly. One of the reasons people stick with Windows is that other platforms don't have games, and there were rumors that Sony had aims for making the Playstation into a media-center. By ignoring the console market, they were opening themselves up to a threat to Windows' dominance. Therefore, they threw a lot of money into an attempt to take over the console market to remove the threat.
Sure, why not? If not, which component makes it not a PC? If I have three cores, it's not a PC? What if I have 4? Or 8? Do PCs need to be based on Intel chips? Do PCs need to have particular video cards? Must PC operating systems run from hard drives rather than some other media?
A couple years ago, you could have bought a quad PPC based Apple machine with a custom video card, and now you can buy a dual-core Intel-based Macintosh running more generic hardware. Rumor is, Apple's working on laptops that use solid-state storage for the operating system. Do these changes make the machines more or less fitting of the category "personal computer"?
Other than a lock that Microsoft built into the hardware, there's nothing really prohibiting the XBox 360 from having Linux installed on it, and using it as a desktop machine. So, yes, indeed, the current line up of game consoles are optimized both in hardware and software for gaming. However, there isn't any fundamental difference between these systems and the PC under your desk.
The problem isn't really the learning curve. From an administrative/UI standpoint, you should be able to move to another OS without too much difficulty. The real problem is interoperability/compatibility. Most of the world uses Windows, Office, and IE, so if you want to work with most of the world, you need to be able to interface with Microsoft protocols and formats. It seems like every time the FOSS community makes headway in that area, Microsoft comes up with a new protocol or format in order to break compatibility and force users onto the upgrade treadmill.
If switched people over to Linux or OSX before, and I've had other times where I've tried to switch someone over and failed. The failures are never due to a problem with the new OS itself or the learning curve. The problem is always an application that the user needs, or a file format that can't be read/written properly by any applications but those which exist on Windows.
Glorified input switcher? I don't know what you mean. Rumor is that it will have a hard drive to store movies, music, and TV shows, along with a menu system to sort through and play them. Plus, you'll supposedly be able to buy stuff from iTMS directly from the iTV. No word on whether there will be any PVR capabilities. It should be a handy little device.
Despite what you may have read in the popular press, the Xbox isn't just a modified PC running Windows.
You're right, it's not a modified PC running Windows. It's a PC running a modified version of Windows.
If Apple were to try this themselves, they'd need to throw out most of OS X and drop back to just running the Darwin kernel. They'd need to pick a GPU and stick with it for a few years, and give the developers complete access to it's internals.
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No, of course it doesn't. Haven't you heard, the free market regulates itself through supply and demand! It's impossible for anyone to charge more than their product is worth.
Perhaps. On the other hand, this all reminds me of something my brother told me. He said he got an iPod, ripped all his CDs in iTunes, and then went looking on iTMS for music he liked. He found a whole bunch of stuff, CDs that he always meant to buy, or single songs that he never bought because they were the only thing he wanted on the CD. Over the span of a couple months, he made regular purchases on iTMS because it was so convenient.
After a few months, he went through a few times looking for more music, and every time he found something he liked, he realized he already had it. He looked for other CDs from bands that he liked, and realized that he had everything he wanted from those bands. Finally he e-mailed me about this, because he wanted to know if I had any recommendations. Mostly, I didn't.
I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly, but neither of us are finding new music, that we haven't heard before, that we like. I'm not trying to push any theory about the record industry doing a bad job. In fact, I would say that I know very little about it. But whenever I turn on a radio, I don't like what I hear. When I listen to the hot new bands, I feel no urge to hear any of those songs a second time. When people point me to cool underground independent bands, I usually don't like them either.
So if my brother and I are any indication, Apple and RIAA can expect a flurry of purchases whenever someone buys a new iPod, and then those purchases will trail off into practically nothing. These days, I'll pay a couple dollars for an episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica if I miss an episode, and that's about it.
I'm not sure why that would cause sales to drop. You have the option of ignoring the TV shows and movies and still buying music, same as before.
What you're saying is probably true enough if you're in a business, in a position to have a file server and tape drive. But now let's imagine you're a home user with a laptop. You already have a DVD+-RW drive built in to your laptop and a 2 GB of personal data you want to archive. What are you going to do then?
You're right. Microsoft has been talking about taking a radical new approach ever since Windows 95, which actually was a radical change from Windows 3.1. I remember when Windows 2000 was going to have a totally different interface, filesystem, etc. Little by little, news came out that the more radical changes were going to be pushed out until the next version, and Windows 2000 would focus on transitioning to the NT kernel. Same with XP, and same with Vista.
You want to know, what? I don't think it's the worst thing. Really, I love it when someone comes up with something incredible and revolutionary and new, but incremental improvements are good too. Just so long as the improvements are real and helpful. It helps is the cost of upgrade is proportionate to the usefulness of the improvements.
But why, then, this phrase: "being necessary to the security of a Free State"? So the amendment is suggestion that it's necessary to have a military force separate from the official army, and implying that this is inherently necessary for a "Free" state. What is the connection between non-governmental military power and freedom, and how could one possibly be necessary for the other?
The only interpretation possible, I think, is that the writer believed that it was necessary for common people to arm themselves against the government.
Think again of the context in which it was written. America had only been formed about a decade before, from a collection of colonies who rebelled against a government they found oppressive. The American government was formed in opposition to the British government-- many of the explicit principles in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights were set to limit governmental powers to prevent the abuses of power which the British government had visited on the colonies.
For example, one of the amendments you don't really hear about is the third, which prohibits the government from quartering soldiers in people's houses. Why on earth would such an obscure idea be put along side the freedom of speech? The reason is, the British government had done exactly that. They forced people to take soldiers into their homes, which caused problems for the would-be rebels.
Given the context, it's obvious that the Bill of Rights was meant to prohibit the then-new American government from having the ability to use tactics that the British government used to try to quell the American rebellion. Therefore, I find it hard to doubt that the intention was to preserve the ability of the people to rebel against a government they don't like. Especially so, when you consider that many of the "founding fathers" were fans of Locke, who argued that men had a right to rebel against bad governments.
I am compelled to conclude that the general idea behind the 2nd ammendment was to ensure that in the event of an invasion...
I think you're on the wrong track already. The 2nd amendment (and the entire bill of rights) was intended to protect the people against the government itself from getting out of control. Many of the personal freedoms acknowledged by the constitution and bill of rights give people the ability to conspire against and fight even a legitimate and lawful government.
I've been saying this since Microsoft first started using activation: As an anti-piracy technique, it doesn't really work. If there's a chink in the activation-scheme's armor, pirates will find it, and you'll still see pirated versions of the OS all over the place. The people this really hurts is Microsoft's legitimate customers, who certainly bought Windows anyway because it came with their fracking machine. They should finally just cut this crap out, and focus on helping their customers.
Re: Apple and "Random", apparently "Random" is his way of saying, "we have no chance whatsoever, but I want to pretend like it could happen at any moment". Yes, of course, technically Apple could use DivX, but they've already chosen the video format they want to use, and integrated it into their OS and iPod. Even if DivX offered improvements to power-consumption, it would already take quite a bit for Apple to back away from h264 and encode the iTMS in some other format. Maybe... maybe if DivX was vastly superior in some way, then I could imagine it. But it isn't.
I always had this vague feeling that whoever ran DivX was an asshole, and now I feel vindicated. I spent too many years just wanting the codec, and only being allowed to download it with a bunch of crappy software.
In the past, creators had natural protections. Technology has made it trivial to reproduce and distribute the works of others, requiring artificial protections to compensate.
You are ignoring history. The artificial protection of "copyright" came long before it was trivial to reproduce and distribute works of others. Even with a printing press, it still took quite an investment to set the type, buy materials, and distribute writings. The law was not made to protect books from being read by unauthorized readers, but to prevent other presses from publishing work without a license from the author. The purpose here was to protect the new distribution method represented by the printing industry.
And yes, once upon a time, Mozart's music could not be enjoyed by the general public without paying *someone* to perform it, but that doesn't mean that they had to pay Mozart at any time. In fact, I'm not familiar with anyone in particular, but many artists and composers relied on wealthy patrons to pay them. They didn't make money by selling tickets to their performances, but they wrote/painted on commission. If they stopped performing or painting, they stopped getting paid. From what I can remember, in spite of being fairly prolific, Mozart was not terribly rich, either.
Microwave ovens are made to be ovens. That the idea arose because of radar systems is irrelevant to this discussion
It's not irrelevant, though you might lack the imagination to see the connection. The point is that technology is often developed for one purpose, and then later found to have other uses. Most technological development comes from mixing and matching different ideas and technology from different areas. Mankind didn't start making microwaves in order to cook food, nor did they produce aspirin in order to treat heart-attack patients. Running electricity to people's houses was originally meant for lights, but all those years ago, no one imagined it would be used for running plasma televisions and laptops.
To claim that we should only use technology for "intended purposes" is completely ignorant of how technologies are developed.
They very well knew, or should have known, the consequences of their actions but they did it anyway.
Yeah, sure, damn those 10 year olds for downloading a song. They should have known that clinking on a link would cause their grandmother to get sued for tens of thousands of dollars.
It also ignores that fact that downloading that MP3 is directly opposed to the content creator's wishes, as evidenced by the fact that he chose to sign a distribution contract with an **AA company.
Not really. It assumes that the creators wishes are not paramount in all cases. Did Shakespeare want Romeo & Juliet to be made into a musical? I don't know, but who cares? IP protection is granted to creators by society for the good of society, and not so their whims can be carried out in perpetuity.
The idea that an artist can't be motivated by money and still produce decent art always seems to come up in submissions like these, as if it is a binary choice.
And yet... that's not what I was saying. At all. I will grant you immediately that money can be a motivating factor towards producing a given work of art. However, this leads copyright supporters to a conclusion which does not follow: that most good artist would not be creative if not for the possibility of making millions of dollars from a single work of art. What I would like to put forward, at least as a possibility, is that those who would cease making art because of no promise of untold riches are not great artists anyhow. There are plenty of other motivating factors, including fame, moderate wealth, and sex with groupies. Besides all that, a certain number of people produce artwork out of a creative compulsion, with not motive other than the need for a creative outlet.
Therefore, I am suggesting that, contrary to all arguments, mp3 trading over the internet will not bring about the end of music.
Even with your example of yourself, you're asking people to pay you for going somewhere and taking pictures of a specific thing. Would that end without copyright protection? No. If someone wanted you to go to Bolivia and follow a writer around, you could still demand money for that.
I don't know... CDs can be carved into excellent throwing stars.
Seriously, though, lots of great things come from using things for purposes other than what they were intended for. Microwaves ovens were made after someone noticed that radar systems could melt candybars. CDs were originally intended, AFAIK, for audio, and only later adapted for general data discs for computers. That's often how technology advances: people realize they can use one discovery for an unintended and unrelated purpose.
The quality of work has probably increased as a result of copyright?
I would be amazed if you could come up with evidence of that. Take all the works that existed before copyrights, and all those released directly to public domain (or a creative-commons/open-source license), and compare them to those which have been copyrighted, in terms of quality?
People want to be brilliant artists and rock stars. They want to write the great American novel. You don't need a motivating factor beyond that. Where the financial problem comes in is, if the creative people can't afford the time to create because they're working all day. The problem comes if a book publisher who is excellent at finding and fostering writers can't afford to maintain their facilities and equipment because every time they come up with a popular book, some other publisher manages to steal the work and undercut prices.
Those are the problems copyrights are intended to address. Let's say there is some guy out there who won't write a book because it will only make him famous, remembered throughout history, and pay his bills, but won't make him a super-ultra-mega rich billionaire. Do you really think that what he would have written would be so immensely incredible that we should hold up society and destroy people's lives because someone might download an MP3?
It's not even to encourage the artists to create. Never, during the whole of human history, has there been difficulty in getting people to participate in creative works. There are going to be people who want to make music, paintings, movies, and books, even if there's no reward but fame.
The purpose is to make it economically feasible to publish works. Without copyright protection, the large investment to bring a work to market would not have been worth it, considering that someone else could simply copy that work and sell it if it actually became popular enough to cover your investment. Therefore, record companies and book publishers would not have been able to make a profit from funding new works.
Therefore, as the technology improves and the price of development and distribution costs come down, and it becomes cheaper to bring a work to market, it follows naturally that we should become less strict on copyright protections. Should development costs, production costs, and distribution costs ever reach the point where they're free, then it probably means that we'll have reached the point where IP protection is completely obsolete.
Sorry to hear about that. I'm not sure it matters terrifically whether you're "clinically depressed" or just unhappy, overworked, and stressed out. Either way, it usually calls for some kind of a change. Depending on the situation, you might just need to get out more, or exercise more. Sometimes it just helps to talk to someone.
Seriously, little things can make a difference. Forcing yourself to take a break and go for a walk can make more of a difference than you'd imagine. However, if you're not feeling sure, you may as well talk to a psycho-therapist. There's no shame in it, and it's like going to see the doctor if something physically weird is going on. It's often better to be safe than sorry.
I can't tell if you mean to be insulting me. Insight is generally obvious after the fact, but in any case I didn't mod myself "insightful".
Anyway, the purpose of Windows ME was... oh, who the hell knows. There was no good reason for it, except maybe to release *something*, while they worked on transitioning everything to the NT kernel.
The purpose of the XP Home edition isn't to keep things simple, but to have an entry-level product that they can sell cheaply. They want a version of Windows that they can sell to people who don't know any better and want to save a hundred dollars, while preventing anyone who knows the difference from wanting to buy the cheap version. It's a marketing move, and not an attempt to really meet the needs of customers.
You see, all the different versions of Windows is contrary to what I mean when I say they should keep it simple. XP Home and XP Pro, it's not clear what the difference is, until you try to do something in XP Home that they've crippled. Even worse, Vista has, what, 5 different versions? How does this added complexity serve the customer? It doesn't. It's a crappy marketing idea.
Keeping it simple means things like, giving you a default setup, but making it easy to remove things you don't want. It means implementing standards without special tweaks that will bite you in the ass when you try to do things in standard ways. It means not restricting admins from being able to complete standard and obvious tasks.
But that's just it-- whatever they charge for the iTV, the price won't be justified by playing Bejeweled. People will pay the price (if they'll pay it at all) because they want a good way of accessing their iTMS content on their televisions. However, if the iTV has casual games and you can buy movies through the 360, their markets begin to intersect.
Not necessarily. Typically, especially during the years where people are rushing out to buy these consoles, the console itself is a loss-leader. They want you to buy the games and the accessories, and the console makes money on those items, as well as licensing to other companies who make those items. This might not be true closer to the end of the product's life, but supposedly they never make much of a margin. As the console gets old, they have to keep cutting prices.
At least, this has been the conventional wisdom. Rumor is that Microsoft has started breaking even on the 360 already, which is a quick turn around. However, they're also likely to cut prices soon. Apparently Nintendo has been making money off of the Wii from the start. So it's just not clear that Microsoft's economic incentive is really towards selling Xbox consoles. It's a common belief that the reason they entered the market at all was in order to protect their Windows monopoly. One of the reasons people stick with Windows is that other platforms don't have games, and there were rumors that Sony had aims for making the Playstation into a media-center. By ignoring the console market, they were opening themselves up to a threat to Windows' dominance. Therefore, they threw a lot of money into an attempt to take over the console market to remove the threat.
Sure, why not? If not, which component makes it not a PC? If I have three cores, it's not a PC? What if I have 4? Or 8? Do PCs need to be based on Intel chips? Do PCs need to have particular video cards? Must PC operating systems run from hard drives rather than some other media?
A couple years ago, you could have bought a quad PPC based Apple machine with a custom video card, and now you can buy a dual-core Intel-based Macintosh running more generic hardware. Rumor is, Apple's working on laptops that use solid-state storage for the operating system. Do these changes make the machines more or less fitting of the category "personal computer"?
Other than a lock that Microsoft built into the hardware, there's nothing really prohibiting the XBox 360 from having Linux installed on it, and using it as a desktop machine. So, yes, indeed, the current line up of game consoles are optimized both in hardware and software for gaming. However, there isn't any fundamental difference between these systems and the PC under your desk.
The problem isn't really the learning curve. From an administrative/UI standpoint, you should be able to move to another OS without too much difficulty. The real problem is interoperability/compatibility. Most of the world uses Windows, Office, and IE, so if you want to work with most of the world, you need to be able to interface with Microsoft protocols and formats. It seems like every time the FOSS community makes headway in that area, Microsoft comes up with a new protocol or format in order to break compatibility and force users onto the upgrade treadmill.
If switched people over to Linux or OSX before, and I've had other times where I've tried to switch someone over and failed. The failures are never due to a problem with the new OS itself or the learning curve. The problem is always an application that the user needs, or a file format that can't be read/written properly by any applications but those which exist on Windows.
Glorified input switcher? I don't know what you mean. Rumor is that it will have a hard drive to store movies, music, and TV shows, along with a menu system to sort through and play them. Plus, you'll supposedly be able to buy stuff from iTMS directly from the iTV. No word on whether there will be any PVR capabilities. It should be a handy little device.
Despite what you may have read in the popular press, the Xbox isn't just a modified PC running Windows.
You're right, it's not a modified PC running Windows. It's a PC running a modified version of Windows.
If Apple were to try this themselves, they'd need to throw out most of OS X and drop back to just running the Darwin kernel. They'd need to pick a GPU and stick with it for a few years, and give the developers complete access to it's internals.
Oh, gosh, there's no way Apple could do that.