"... when your HDD dies.. you cant regain your music" Unlike when a CD gets broken and the music companies replace it for the cost of shipping.
If you're unable or unwilling to back up digital data, then you can't really fault Apple on this score.
"Fairplay DRM is closed" Sure is.
And the theoretical about bands is true as well. Bands on CDBaby are doing really well out of this, and they get more money per track than the RIAA member companies would allow them. They get exposure on the iTMS, the ability to sell music easily to people in other states or countries, they get something like 70c from each 99c track and their music is protected.
I liked Halo-2. I played it a bit, but never finished it. It's still there, waiting for me. The X-Box has gathered a lot of dust in the nine months or so since I last turned it on.
It's a good game, in my opinion. Not astoundingly good, but solid.
So what has it got to do with Vista?
I thought about this, and the best answer I can come up with is "absolutely nothing."
This is some marketing bozo saying "Halo sold a lot of X-Boxes, Halo-2 sold a *lot* of X-boxes, so Halo-2 will sell a **lot** of copies of Vista!"
It's not a killer app for Vista. It doesn't give you anything you can't have somewhere else. By the time it's out for Vista I expect we'll be seeing Halo-3 for the X-Box 360 anyway, and that's not a great message - "Vista: runs last year's superceded games really well!"
A real killer app for Vista would be something like a version of Office that has special abilities you can only get through the new OS. Although I don't want to draw a parallel, I'm thinking of how Apple introduced lots of new Core-XXXX features in OS X 10.4. Core Image is a solid image processing API that gives you a lot of the Photoshop filter power in only a few lines of code (and uses the GPU to accelerate it). Core Data gives you a good database-like API (although I haven't looked much at this). Spotlight and Dashboard help the UI, and so on. There are solid foundations for killer apps in OS X 10.4, and from what I can see, there should be solid foundations for killer apps in Vista.
There are two cases here: Google deals directly with Verizon, or Google deals indirectly with Verizon (through a different provider).
The first case is clear, so I won't go into it.
The second case has Google paying money to some company, which then either pays money to Verizon (and this is effectively the first case) or has a peering agreement with Verizon.
If a peering agreement exists, then that's a transaction. That provider gives Verizon customers bandwidth in return for receiving bandwidth from Verizon for its customers. A transaction like that is not specifically a financial one, but it could be seen in that light.
Either way, Google paid for the bandwidth and the provider gives some consideration to Verizon on Google's behalf (either money or bandwidth).
I think this is a fine distinction on a matter that we agree on, but to me Google have paid for access to Verizon's pipes, either directly or indirectly.
Verizon gets paid by both those hosting sites and those accessing sites. But they want to get more money for no actual effort on their part. Their justification is that Google is getting a 'free pass' on their pipes.
The RIAA member companies get paid when customers buy iTunes music. But they want to get paid more for no actual effort on their part. Their justification is that Apple are selling iPods on the back of the RIAA content.
Gary's New Laws of Business: * If your customers are happy and you're making a solid profit, look for ways to screw them to the wall so that they can leave you in droves. * If your products are selling well and you've got nothing in the pipeline, rework the pricing structure to screw your customers over so that they can leave you in droves. * Make everything look as though you're hard done by, and call your customers 'freeloaders', 'scum', 'thieves', 'pirates' and any other names you can think of. * Lobby your government to make everything you do nice and legal, where previously it was unethical, illegal, immoral, bad for business and just plain dumb.
What's your point? That Apple are wrong to offer a prize at all? Or that you think it's not enough? That they should offer their entire profit margin as prizes?
Remembering the breakdown of money from each song sold, I think Apple only get a few cents per track. At that rate, it's not a bad prize. It's even better for people who are just doing what they do anyway.
Maybe one of those other, competing music stores could offer a better prize for their billion mark.
If they meet their schedule. If the technology pans out. If they can set up fabrication. If...
Intel have something here and now. If Apple should have waited, then what would they be putting in their laptops? Certainly the G4 is dead in the water for laptops. It was top notch about three years ago, but Intel's Centrino line rapidly caught up and overtook Apple. IBM have nothing to offer in that space that competes.
So yes - Apple jumped too soon, if IBM can do everything on time and if Apple don't mind leaving the laptop business altogether.
Why don't we check back here when IBM releases the chips, and see how it all panned out?
I didn't say Macs had lots of games, but there are plenty of GPU-intensive games on OS X.
And my iBook runs a Radeon9200. Not a powerful GPU by any standard, but it runs Quartz Extreme very well. Before this I had a machine with a Rage128 (16MB) and that did a good job. Not great, but smooth enough that you didn't notice the issues often.
Perhaps you should actually find out stuff before you post?
Wikipedia is wrong if it presents those four examples. Example two is an actual ad-hominem, but the others aren't. In fact, the first example is used to undermine witnesses in courts of law, and is perfectly valid, while the fourth example is just simple business logic.
Not to disagree, but could you point out these ads on Google News? I just checked and can't see a single advertisement. What I can see are many links back to the source sites, which then have their own advertising.
I can't see how Google make a cent on this, unless the actual news providers are paying Google for click-throughs.
It's very widely known that the UK had a lot to do with slavery, as did a number of other European nations. The fact that damns the US is that so many people kept slavery going for so much longer than the rest of the world.
The rich Americans were exactly the ones involved though. They were absolutely not unwittingly addicted to slavery, but were instead willing to buy and sell slaves because they made more money by not paying wages. A lot of wealth in the US was founded on slavery, but then robber barons throughout history have been doing more or less the same thing. It's down to morality versus wealth. For some reason these seem mutually exclusive to most of the world's wealthy people.
I've got a lot to learn about women but I can't imagine lumping all females - nearly three billion of them - into one basket like this. Maybe many women want honesty, maybe some have other priorities. They're not a big club though, and they don't all think the same.
While we can certainly wipe life off the face of the planet, we've got nothing yet that can touch the planet itself.
The explosions you talk about are insignificant on the planetary scale. Even if we assume the effect is as great as you think, the worst that would happen would be to damage the upper mantle (about 20km, I think). Considering that the tectonic plates slide over and under each other, any real damage would be 'cleaned' in a few hundred million years.
There's no reason why shockwaves would cause the planet's core to explode. We've had some pretty big impacts, and it's not happened yet. In fact, looking around the Solar System we see lots of big impact craters on moons - some as big as the moon's radius - but the moons haven't exploded. There's conjecture over whether Earth's Moon hit the planet once, and it
The only way we can actually hurt the planet with the technology we have today is to wait for a massive meteor to come nearby and somehow guide it to hit the Earth. The question of guiding a meteor that large is tricky though - you need a huge reaction mass to do that quickly. Even when the thing hits the planet, the Earth will just absorb it and go on.
The critical thing is my first point though - we can wipe all life from the face of the planet, and we can do this today. That's the real cause for concern.
Yes, at the global meeting of all Mac users, we decided to say OS X wasn't Unix the other week.
Now the meeting scheduled for tonight will reverse that, and we'll all post on the Internet with this point. We do this just to irritate Slashdot posters and trolls.
We Mac users are really just one big club, and we all have the exact same viewpoints and thoughts because we all meet every week. All 60 million of us. It's a really big room.
So you argue that artists who produce works that can be reproduced have no right to profit from the sales thereof? That because something *can* be copied now, it is right and just that it be copied?
I disagree.
Someone who loves producing new and original music should be able to sell it if they want to. It's their choice. I've known a few struggling musicians, and the CDs they sell after the gig really are important to them. That money matters.
The choice to create music for them requires that they can pay the rent, and that means tickets to gigs and music sales.
If they can't pay the rent, they have to take up a regular job and that leaves them less time and energy to create music. Yes, they'll still do it but I've seen a few drop out altogether because they can't pay the bills.
It's a pretty brutal industry for musicians, and every dollar they can make means a lot to them until they hit that mythical 'big time' status.
Under your model, they wouldn't be able to (or is it 'allowed to') sell their music. The only way to make money is through gigs, which are hard to come by for new artists and reach only a handful of people in those early days.
Why shouldn't they be able to get some promotion by being on (for example) iTunes or CDbaby?
What about authors? Yes, there's a lot of schlock written these days, but there are good authors out there who can devote the time to writing only because they don't have to work 9-5. Their works can be trivially copied, often in smaller files than a single mp3, but I don't see that it's right to do so.
I agree that the music industry is not a healthy one in its general outlook and the way it conducts itself, but you must accept that artists who need to create art should be able to try to sell it.
I disagree on the 'Intel makes Apple's motherboards' point.
I've seen photos of the new iMac motherboard, and it's nothing like any Intel motherboard I've ever seen. In fact, it looks *very* much like the new iMac G5 motherboard, with a few key changes. It certainly wouldn't install into a standard PC box without unusual effort.
Unless you can come up with something more substantive, it seems that the 'evidence' (well, photos we see on the Internet) proves you wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Funniest quote of the day! Mod that up, someone with mod points!
"... when your HDD dies .. you cant regain your music"
Unlike when a CD gets broken and the music companies replace it for the cost of shipping.
If you're unable or unwilling to back up digital data, then you can't really fault Apple on this score.
"Fairplay DRM is closed"
Sure is.
And the theoretical about bands is true as well. Bands on CDBaby are doing really well out of this, and they get more money per track than the RIAA member companies would allow them. They get exposure on the iTMS, the ability to sell music easily to people in other states or countries, they get something like 70c from each 99c track and their music is protected.
What exactly is the problem?
I liked Halo-2. I played it a bit, but never finished it. It's still there, waiting for me. The X-Box has gathered a lot of dust in the nine months or so since I last turned it on.
It's a good game, in my opinion. Not astoundingly good, but solid.
So what has it got to do with Vista?
I thought about this, and the best answer I can come up with is "absolutely nothing."
This is some marketing bozo saying "Halo sold a lot of X-Boxes, Halo-2 sold a *lot* of X-boxes, so Halo-2 will sell a **lot** of copies of Vista!"
It's not a killer app for Vista. It doesn't give you anything you can't have somewhere else. By the time it's out for Vista I expect we'll be seeing Halo-3 for the X-Box 360 anyway, and that's not a great message - "Vista: runs last year's superceded games really well!"
A real killer app for Vista would be something like a version of Office that has special abilities you can only get through the new OS. Although I don't want to draw a parallel, I'm thinking of how Apple introduced lots of new Core-XXXX features in OS X 10.4. Core Image is a solid image processing API that gives you a lot of the Photoshop filter power in only a few lines of code (and uses the GPU to accelerate it). Core Data gives you a good database-like API (although I haven't looked much at this). Spotlight and Dashboard help the UI, and so on. There are solid foundations for killer apps in OS X 10.4, and from what I can see, there should be solid foundations for killer apps in Vista.
It's just that Halo-2 isn't a killer app.
one tiny split hair on a full head of agreement
I like that.
I like it a lot!
I disagree.
There are two cases here: Google deals directly with Verizon, or Google deals indirectly with Verizon (through a different provider).
The first case is clear, so I won't go into it.
The second case has Google paying money to some company, which then either pays money to Verizon (and this is effectively the first case) or has a peering agreement with Verizon.
If a peering agreement exists, then that's a transaction. That provider gives Verizon customers bandwidth in return for receiving bandwidth from Verizon for its customers. A transaction like that is not specifically a financial one, but it could be seen in that light.
Either way, Google paid for the bandwidth and the provider gives some consideration to Verizon on Google's behalf (either money or bandwidth).
I think this is a fine distinction on a matter that we agree on, but to me Google have paid for access to Verizon's pipes, either directly or indirectly.
What happened to politicians in the last 100 years or so?
I read quotes like the one above, and think how eloquent these people were, and how well put their comments.
These days it seems to be a slanging match where each side tries to claim the crown of greatest bully.
Maybe that's just Australian politics though.
Wow! That was so much faster than that crowd I sent money to over the Internet.
All they sent me was some v!4gRa.
Thanks Jaeger! My life is now complete.
Can you please buy a Mac Mini or an iBook?
I'm keen to see new lines released.
Verizon gets paid by both those hosting sites and those accessing sites.
But they want to get more money for no actual effort on their part.
Their justification is that Google is getting a 'free pass' on their pipes.
The RIAA member companies get paid when customers buy iTunes music.
But they want to get paid more for no actual effort on their part.
Their justification is that Apple are selling iPods on the back of the RIAA content.
Gary's New Laws of Business:
* If your customers are happy and you're making a solid profit, look for ways to screw them to the wall so that they can leave you in droves.
* If your products are selling well and you've got nothing in the pipeline, rework the pricing structure to screw your customers over so that they can leave you in droves.
* Make everything look as though you're hard done by, and call your customers 'freeloaders', 'scum', 'thieves', 'pirates' and any other names you can think of.
* Lobby your government to make everything you do nice and legal, where previously it was unethical, illegal, immoral, bad for business and just plain dumb.
I await my honorary economics degree.
Fair enough.
What's your point? That Apple are wrong to offer a prize at all? Or that you think it's not enough? That they should offer their entire profit margin as prizes?
Remembering the breakdown of money from each song sold, I think Apple only get a few cents per track. At that rate, it's not a bad prize. It's even better for people who are just doing what they do anyway.
Maybe one of those other, competing music stores could offer a better prize for their billion mark.
Middle of 2007. That's 16-20 months from now.
If they meet their schedule. If the technology pans out. If they can set up fabrication. If...
Intel have something here and now. If Apple should have waited, then what would they be putting in their laptops? Certainly the G4 is dead in the water for laptops. It was top notch about three years ago, but Intel's Centrino line rapidly caught up and overtook Apple. IBM have nothing to offer in that space that competes.
So yes - Apple jumped too soon, if IBM can do everything on time and if Apple don't mind leaving the laptop business altogether.
Why don't we check back here when IBM releases the chips, and see how it all panned out?
That's one I pacifically can't stand.
Supposably it's said quite a lot.
I didn't say Macs had lots of games, but there are plenty of GPU-intensive games on OS X.
And my iBook runs a Radeon9200. Not a powerful GPU by any standard, but it runs Quartz Extreme very well. Before this I had a machine with a Rage128 (16MB) and that did a good job. Not great, but smooth enough that you didn't notice the issues often.
Perhaps you should actually find out stuff before you post?
Quartz runs fine on just about any video card. A powerful GPU is great and it helps, but the minimum is only a GeForce2MX or ATi AGP card with 16MB.e /
_ updates/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextrem
You absolutely don't require anything as powerful as the X1600 for OS X.
And yes, since we don't have Doom 3, and Quake 4 won't be ported, then we don't have that many GPU intensive games on the Mac. Oh... wait a moment !
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/demos
Wikipedia is wrong if it presents those four examples. Example two is an actual ad-hominem, but the others aren't. In fact, the first example is used to undermine witnesses in courts of law, and is perfectly valid, while the fourth example is just simple business logic.
Not to disagree, but could you point out these ads on Google News? I just checked and can't see a single advertisement. What I can see are many links back to the source sites, which then have their own advertising.
I can't see how Google make a cent on this, unless the actual news providers are paying Google for click-throughs.
It's not that interesting.
It's very widely known that the UK had a lot to do with slavery, as did a number of other European nations. The fact that damns the US is that so many people kept slavery going for so much longer than the rest of the world.
The rich Americans were exactly the ones involved though. They were absolutely not unwittingly addicted to slavery, but were instead willing to buy and sell slaves because they made more money by not paying wages. A lot of wealth in the US was founded on slavery, but then robber barons throughout history have been doing more or less the same thing. It's down to morality versus wealth. For some reason these seem mutually exclusive to most of the world's wealthy people.
I've got a lot to learn about women but I can't imagine lumping all females - nearly three billion of them - into one basket like this. Maybe many women want honesty, maybe some have other priorities. They're not a big club though, and they don't all think the same.
Sounds great. By the time it launches here, there may actually be games worth having on the console.
And then I'll wait a year or more for it to drop in price. I'll probably end up buying a second-hand one for Halo-3.
Maybe.
Still haven't finished Halo-2 and my X-Box hasn't been powered on in nearly nine months.
While we can certainly wipe life off the face of the planet, we've got nothing yet that can touch the planet itself.
The explosions you talk about are insignificant on the planetary scale. Even if we assume the effect is as great as you think, the worst that would happen would be to damage the upper mantle (about 20km, I think). Considering that the tectonic plates slide over and under each other, any real damage would be 'cleaned' in a few hundred million years.
There's no reason why shockwaves would cause the planet's core to explode. We've had some pretty big impacts, and it's not happened yet. In fact, looking around the Solar System we see lots of big impact craters on moons - some as big as the moon's radius - but the moons haven't exploded. There's conjecture over whether Earth's Moon hit the planet once, and it
The only way we can actually hurt the planet with the technology we have today is to wait for a massive meteor to come nearby and somehow guide it to hit the Earth. The question of guiding a meteor that large is tricky though - you need a huge reaction mass to do that quickly. Even when the thing hits the planet, the Earth will just absorb it and go on.
The critical thing is my first point though - we can wipe all life from the face of the planet, and we can do this today. That's the real cause for concern.
Yes, at the global meeting of all Mac users, we decided to say OS X wasn't Unix the other week.
Now the meeting scheduled for tonight will reverse that, and we'll all post on the Internet with this point. We do this just to irritate Slashdot posters and trolls.
We Mac users are really just one big club, and we all have the exact same viewpoints and thoughts because we all meet every week. All 60 million of us. It's a really big room.
Why?
What's wrong with someone asserting their ownership through copyright?
It stops people copying their work and selling it as their own. That is a good thing.
Copyright should not last forever, but I can't think of a good reason why it should not exist.
So you argue that artists who produce works that can be reproduced have no right to profit from the sales thereof? That because something *can* be copied now, it is right and just that it be copied?
I disagree.
Someone who loves producing new and original music should be able to sell it if they want to. It's their choice. I've known a few struggling musicians, and the CDs they sell after the gig really are important to them. That money matters.
The choice to create music for them requires that they can pay the rent, and that means tickets to gigs and music sales.
If they can't pay the rent, they have to take up a regular job and that leaves them less time and energy to create music. Yes, they'll still do it but I've seen a few drop out altogether because they can't pay the bills.
It's a pretty brutal industry for musicians, and every dollar they can make means a lot to them until they hit that mythical 'big time' status.
Under your model, they wouldn't be able to (or is it 'allowed to') sell their music. The only way to make money is through gigs, which are hard to come by for new artists and reach only a handful of people in those early days.
Why shouldn't they be able to get some promotion by being on (for example) iTunes or CDbaby?
What about authors? Yes, there's a lot of schlock written these days, but there are good authors out there who can devote the time to writing only because they don't have to work 9-5. Their works can be trivially copied, often in smaller files than a single mp3, but I don't see that it's right to do so.
I agree that the music industry is not a healthy one in its general outlook and the way it conducts itself, but you must accept that artists who need to create art should be able to try to sell it.
I disagree on the 'Intel makes Apple's motherboards' point.
I've seen photos of the new iMac motherboard, and it's nothing like any Intel motherboard I've ever seen. In fact, it looks *very* much like the new iMac G5 motherboard, with a few key changes. It certainly wouldn't install into a standard PC box without unusual effort.
Unless you can come up with something more substantive, it seems that the 'evidence' (well, photos we see on the Internet) proves you wrong.