As I understand the Copyright Act (and I'm definitely not a lawyer), private copying is permitted if you copy to a medium for which you've paid the levy.
So I can lend you CDs and you can burn copies to CDs...but if you rip them to your hard drive without burning to CD, or I dump the contents of my iPod to your hard drive, then we're infringers.
For downloaders, I believe the courts said downloading falls under this same private-copying provision, but uploading does not. (Which reminds me of the Catch-22 prostitution law: the act itself is legal, but communicating for purposes of arranging the transaction is not.)
There's no levy on hard drives, and no levy on portable players (it was $25 for the higher-capacity players for a while). I believe that got tossed based on the argument that such devices are clearly configured for people to make personal copies, not pirated copies.
Never heard anything about any retailers boycotting the levy. Paying it on behalf of customers, I could believe. Silently accepting it, I can most readily believe. But Future Shop, take a principled stand? Hmmm....sounds unusual.
I'd like you to show me where I said Apple was a threat to Linux or Windows.
What I have said is that Apple is a successful company and the Macintosh is a viable platform.
If you're reading that as "Apple is going to make a large impact" you're reading too much into it. What I do think is that the computing world is large enough for Apple to be successful -- even wildly successful -- without posing a significant threat to other platforms.
Besides, so many Mac users buy Office and/or VPC that Microsoft actually loses very little, if any, money from people switching to (or sticking with) the Mac. (And Office may not be a large-revenue product, but it is a high-margin one.)
I thought the options figures were only released with the other financials yesterday; i.e. this is not options granted, but exercised.
As for the shuffle...I was probably wrong to call them "low-margin" but if you look at the numbers it's clear enough that compared to last quarter, they sold more iPods and took in less money for them. (Something like 5.5 M units/$1.08B vs. 4.5 M units/$1.2 B.) True, that doesn't necessarily mean less profit, but it does represent a shift to a mass-market strategy that's unfamiliar to Apple.
I'm not convinced that "tradition" and "sell on news, buy on rumor" is enough to explain this. I do think that despite incredible revenue and income numbers, the stock is still very expensive.
Among the many things you're not getting, this is a key one. When Apple innovated with Newton, they were first to market and made a shitload of mistakes for the benefit of the latecomers.
They avoided that with the iPod by not being first but instead taking an existing idea with niche appeal and perfecting it for the mass market. Oh, how terribly stupid of them!
Of course, naysayers will look on one strategy and mock the mistakes; and then they'll look at the other and mock the "lack of innovation." Who gives a shit? Would you rather be first and a big fat failure, or second and most successful?
As for "3% of the desktop" representing "death", why not look at it as four million CPUs sold annually? That's a viable platform, whether you like it or not. (If it's so irrelevant, why do you even care?)
Oh, and look. Roughly 30% growth in CPU sales versus the year-earlier quarter. Gee, how does that compare to the industry?
It's not about "all hailing Apple's great success", it's about letting go of the idiotic idea that a small percentage share of a gargantuan market is a sign of impending doom. While we're at it, how about letting go of the equally idiotic idea that a company that scores a success outside its core market has somehow done a bad or irrelevant thing.
Are people dissatisfied that apple did not exceed expectations by more? I dont get it.
They're dissatisfied by the creation of 13 million new shares through the exercise of options, and they're wary because the price has already tripled in the past year. They might also see the iPod numbers as indicating that the low-margin shuffle is responsible for the rise in unit sales. (Compared to last quarter: unit sales up by almost a million, revenue down by about $200 M, per-iPod revenue down by about $70.)
No surprises here. Could be a buying opportunity if you figure Tiger will drive an upgrade cycle and bring some nice high-margin software sales...but it's a speculative gamble no matter how you look at it.
Not true. The later G3 (CRT) iMacs had slot-loading drives, and the G5 iMac has a slot-loader, but all the G4s (Flat Panel) are tray loaders. (The link is to a description + photo of the final G4 iMac revision, and as you can see there's no slot-loading drive.)
But don't you also need to ask if the publication ban is being used to shield the government from damaging news? The article indicates the government is using the time under the ban to force elections before the news can get out.
Yes, that's an important question. In this case, though, any article that "indicates" that the government is using the time to any particular purpose is indulging in pure speculation.
No one outside the government knows what the government is planning to do, election-wise.
What the government says is actually "Let's let the commission finish its work so that voters can make up their minds based on the facts instead of rumors."
That may be spun all to hell, but it sounds to me like they want to buy time before there's an election. In fact, IMO it makes more sense to conclude that the government is hampered by the ban: with the testimony floating around in the form of rumours, its ability to spin-doctor and sacrifice scapegoats is severely hampered. It will all come out, openly and freely, sooner or later. The longer the time between the reveal and the election, the better for the government.
The are obviously using the ban in this case to avoid the political fallout, or at least do some major damage control.
Everyone is assuming that, but it's not obvious to me. Exactly what is happening and why is subject to much speculation, some of it reasonably well-informed, some of it terribly naive.
Do the media bans only come into effect with high-profile crimes? Or does every crime go unreported until after the trial of the accused? I imagine it doesn't.
It's never automatic, and it's not every high-profile case that is subject to one. And of course there wouldn't be much point in such a ban for a low-profile case, would there? Where the profile is low, the media simply fails to provide coverage. Sometimes there are even partial bans, leading to partial reporting of cases in progress.
And there are restrictions that apply in all criminal cases: no cameras in the courtroom, no revealing the identity of juvenile accused (unless being tried as an adult), no reporting that would identify a juvenile victim.
Now that's funny.
on
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· Score: 2, Funny
At the time, to be honest, I blamed it on the snow; it was that awkward period between winter and spring where you know spring is coming, but fear that it'll snow again first; so you spend your life wondering if you should be picking out your short-sleeve shirts or salting your stairs.
Oddly enough, Sunday was a gorgeous, sunny day, the second in a row but also only the second such day this year, and I was feeling a bit grumpy for being inside...and knowing that there's still time for a nice dump of icky wet snow.
Indeed, everyone seems quite cranky at the end of winter. The office-bound insist that they NEED to go home, for sanity's sake, to stop looking at the same pasty faces and drab walls. The home-office-bound insist that they will go mad, absolutely mad, if they don't get out of the house NOW. Five solid months of snow, ice and darkness will do that to you, and more. Then the sun comes back and spends weeks melting the snow and revealing dog turds. Weeks, endless weeks go by before that damned sun can coax any greenery out of anything but an evergreen.
Seems you may have run into a seasonal attitude a second time, this time online.
So do come back at some other time of year, but I'd say skip the summer proper. The best months are May, June, September and October. But July and August: sticky heat and wall-to-wall festivals. (In Montreal, at any rate.) It that's your thing, great. If you're a weary local it's time to flee to the countryside...if you can afford it.
On the off chance you're still reading: I find that fascinating and surprising. (Your French is great, better than mine, and though I could answer in French it would be too slow for me to do that.)
The only hypothesis I have is that you were taken as being from France. In many (though far from all) circles in Quebec, someone from France is assumed to be a snob who will put on haughty airs, until proven otherwise.
Of course, I have actually met French people living and working here who do have a disdainful attitude toward the Québécois and their way of speaking -- something which they sometimes confide to me because of my lack of a strong Québécois accent.
As for the British, my observations have again been quite the opposite of your experience. From what I've seen, Brits who speak passable French and who work in the communication field will find doors opened to them solely because someone from Britain (especially England) is automatically assumed to have a superior command of written English.
So I suppose the other variable worth mentioning is whom you're dealing with: someone beset with provincial attitudes and prejudices, or someone who leaves all that crap aside? I guess I'm just fortunate in that the vast majority of people I deal with simply don't bother with that kind of crap.
Go back to your original post: your point was the generalization that if you speak French fluently but with a non-Quebec, non-France accent, "they" get bitchy.
I don't even know what that means. What's your accent? American, anglo-Canadian, English, Welsh, Haitian, Martiniquais, West African? How fluent are you, really? Pourrait-on continuer la discussion en français? All these variables and more can affect the reception you get...
So, yes, generalizing is perilous. I will venture this, though: from my experience of living here, observing, and interacting I can think of few if any circumstances where not speaking French is preferable to speaking fluent, accented French.
The point is still that what you call "nothing special" might as well be a bunch of instructions in Chinese to the average consumer. And consumers do expect to be able to open up the things they buy, plug them in, and have them work.
If you can't do that with a new Windows PC, then there's a problem. Not a problem for you, I know that, but a problem for the average consumer.
I'm a mainly English-speaking Quebecer, and my French is "neither here nor there." Because of the way I learned it, it's an odd mix of accents and a high degree of fluency. No matter how close to "native speaker" my accent gets, anyone can tell it's "neither French nor French-Canadian."
Guess what? I get along just fine with most francophones, be they Canadian or European. I don't know why our experiences are so different. Is it possible that your "fluency" isn't really as fluent as you think, and you were somehow inadvertently rude? (When speaking in a second language, the easiest thing in the world is to be inadvertently rude.)
To say "all Quebecers are nasty to everyone who speaks French but isn't a native speaker" is an absurd stereotype that hardly captures any complexity at all.
Some Quebecers are nasty with pretty much everyone, some can't abide an English-speaker's accent, some probably hate Germans, some think of French-from-France as weird exotic creatures. And some (I would say most) are very open-minded, and listen to the content of what you have to say, not your accent.
I make sure to fdisk the mbr before an instal, just to make sure someone did not hide something on the hard drive before the instal. I do the instal off-line. Add a software firewall, then connect through a router to the net to get the service packs. I have never had any spyware on my system ever. I disable active-x from IE, and when I did my instal the only net protocol I install is tcp/ip, I do not instal the other 2- client or file & printer sharing.
And all this "nothing special" you do is basically done by anyone who installs Windows?
Right here you've nicely illustrated the trouble with Windows: as a power user you have no problems because you know that there's all this stuff, which is on by default, that you have to disable. You know that you have to have to add a firewall before connecting to the net. You know that you can't take a new Windows computer out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, and go on the net.
For the average user this is way beyond "not doing anything special," and it's decidedly non-trivial.
In Quebec, digital-satellite cinema is being sold as a way of dramatically lowering distribution costs (no more weighty 35-mm prints), thus increasing the diversity of what can be shown in movie theatres.
It remains to be seen if exhibitors in remote areas will actually increase the diversity of their offerings; ultimately, it's up to audiences. I don't think the tech inherently favors the big studios...unless they directly control it.
iTMS already has some strange design ideas behind it - why are the musical selections different for varying countries? I don't get it.
This is a consequence of different entities holding/controlling music distribution rights for different countries. I'm sure Apple would like to secure the worldwide rights for all recorded music...but of course they can't. Hence the patchwork of different virtual "stores" divided along national lines.
In the long run, [boycotting DRM vendors] is a false option. More and more CDs are copy protected and eventually there will be no more cds made, just as they no longer make LPs.
Except that CD technology is widely available to independent creators, much more widely than LP technology is/was. And that if enough people avoid DRM more and more suppliers will eschew it. And there are non-DRM online vendors, too. A lot of them.
With all the non-DRM options out there, it looks to me as if it's not at all too late to thwart that long-run all-DRM world you're afraid of. Why aren't activists such as Jon and yourself busy working to make those options the most popular and successful ones?
Why is it that instead you claim that boycotting is useless, and that attacking is the only option? And in this specific case, the attack involves...buying product from the victim!
This will help your cause how, exactly?
From where I sit, your priorities look skewed. If online vendors and CD manufacturers are pushing DRM, maybe we should be looking at the main behavior that makes them adopt that option: indiscriminate p2p sharing. If you're doing nothing to discourage people from infringing copyright (you don't seriously believe p2p falls within fair use, do you?), you will never convince the corporations to forget about DRM.
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It was implemented and later dropped. (Quashed legally by some means -- not sure if it was a court, the CRTC, or some other body.)
I paid it a year or so ago on my girlfriend's iPod, but not this year on mine.
As I understand the Copyright Act (and I'm definitely not a lawyer), private copying is permitted if you copy to a medium for which you've paid the levy.
So I can lend you CDs and you can burn copies to CDs...but if you rip them to your hard drive without burning to CD, or I dump the contents of my iPod to your hard drive, then we're infringers.
For downloaders, I believe the courts said downloading falls under this same private-copying provision, but uploading does not. (Which reminds me of the Catch-22 prostitution law: the act itself is legal, but communicating for purposes of arranging the transaction is not.)
There's no levy on hard drives, and no levy on portable players (it was $25 for the higher-capacity players for a while). I believe that got tossed based on the argument that such devices are clearly configured for people to make personal copies, not pirated copies.
Never heard anything about any retailers boycotting the levy. Paying it on behalf of customers, I could believe. Silently accepting it, I can most readily believe. But Future Shop, take a principled stand? Hmmm....sounds unusual.
So how is Microsoft's service "father reaching"?
It'll reach all the way from wherever you are to Redmond, WA.
I'd like you to show me where I said Apple was a threat to Linux or Windows.
What I have said is that Apple is a successful company and the Macintosh is a viable platform.
If you're reading that as "Apple is going to make a large impact" you're reading too much into it. What I do think is that the computing world is large enough for Apple to be successful -- even wildly successful -- without posing a significant threat to other platforms.
Besides, so many Mac users buy Office and/or VPC that Microsoft actually loses very little, if any, money from people switching to (or sticking with) the Mac. (And Office may not be a large-revenue product, but it is a high-margin one.)
I thought the options figures were only released with the other financials yesterday; i.e. this is not options granted, but exercised.
As for the shuffle...I was probably wrong to call them "low-margin" but if you look at the numbers it's clear enough that compared to last quarter, they sold more iPods and took in less money for them. (Something like 5.5 M units/$1.08B vs. 4.5 M units/$1.2 B.) True, that doesn't necessarily mean less profit, but it does represent a shift to a mass-market strategy that's unfamiliar to Apple.
I'm not convinced that "tradition" and "sell on news, buy on rumor" is enough to explain this. I do think that despite incredible revenue and income numbers, the stock is still very expensive.
When oh when will Apple innovate again?
Among the many things you're not getting, this is a key one. When Apple innovated with Newton, they were first to market and made a shitload of mistakes for the benefit of the latecomers.
They avoided that with the iPod by not being first but instead taking an existing idea with niche appeal and perfecting it for the mass market. Oh, how terribly stupid of them!
Of course, naysayers will look on one strategy and mock the mistakes; and then they'll look at the other and mock the "lack of innovation." Who gives a shit? Would you rather be first and a big fat failure, or second and most successful?
As for "3% of the desktop" representing "death", why not look at it as four million CPUs sold annually? That's a viable platform, whether you like it or not. (If it's so irrelevant, why do you even care?)
Oh, and look. Roughly 30% growth in CPU sales versus the year-earlier quarter. Gee, how does that compare to the industry?
It's not about "all hailing Apple's great success", it's about letting go of the idiotic idea that a small percentage share of a gargantuan market is a sign of impending doom. While we're at it, how about letting go of the equally idiotic idea that a company that scores a success outside its core market has somehow done a bad or irrelevant thing.
Mmmmmkay?
Are people dissatisfied that apple did not exceed expectations by more? I dont get it.
They're dissatisfied by the creation of 13 million new shares through the exercise of options, and they're wary because the price has already tripled in the past year. They might also see the iPod numbers as indicating that the low-margin shuffle is responsible for the rise in unit sales. (Compared to last quarter: unit sales up by almost a million, revenue down by about $200 M, per-iPod revenue down by about $70.)
No surprises here. Could be a buying opportunity if you figure Tiger will drive an upgrade cycle and bring some nice high-margin software sales...but it's a speculative gamble no matter how you look at it.
Appple owns 3% of the desktop market. That's not "dying," that's pretty fucking dead already.
You get back to us when your quarterly sales top $3 billion and your market cap is over $30 billion, mmmmkay?
Not true. The later G3 (CRT) iMacs had slot-loading drives, and the G5 iMac has a slot-loader, but all the G4s (Flat Panel) are tray loaders. (The link is to a description + photo of the final G4 iMac revision, and as you can see there's no slot-loading drive.)
Careful with that "tray-loading" business: all iMac G4 models are tray-loading, and they're definitely supported.
Simple solution: stop carving your cylinders out of ear wax.
Nah, that kind of suit is way too porous for this kind of dust.
But don't you also need to ask if the publication ban is being used to shield the government from damaging news? The article indicates the government is using the time under the ban to force elections before the news can get out.
Yes, that's an important question. In this case, though, any article that "indicates" that the government is using the time to any particular purpose is indulging in pure speculation.
No one outside the government knows what the government is planning to do, election-wise.
What the government says is actually "Let's let the commission finish its work so that voters can make up their minds based on the facts instead of rumors."
That may be spun all to hell, but it sounds to me like they want to buy time before there's an election. In fact, IMO it makes more sense to conclude that the government is hampered by the ban: with the testimony floating around in the form of rumours, its ability to spin-doctor and sacrifice scapegoats is severely hampered. It will all come out, openly and freely, sooner or later. The longer the time between the reveal and the election, the better for the government.
The are obviously using the ban in this case to avoid the political fallout, or at least do some major damage control.
Everyone is assuming that, but it's not obvious to me. Exactly what is happening and why is subject to much speculation, some of it reasonably well-informed, some of it terribly naive.
Do the media bans only come into effect with high-profile crimes? Or does every crime go unreported until after the trial of the accused? I imagine it doesn't.
It's never automatic, and it's not every high-profile case that is subject to one. And of course there wouldn't be much point in such a ban for a low-profile case, would there? Where the profile is low, the media simply fails to provide coverage. Sometimes there are even partial bans, leading to partial reporting of cases in progress.
And there are restrictions that apply in all criminal cases: no cameras in the courtroom, no revealing the identity of juvenile accused (unless being tried as an adult), no reporting that would identify a juvenile victim.
Almost.
$30 ??? Shit! I paid $50!
At the time, to be honest, I blamed it on the snow; it was that awkward period between winter and spring where you know spring is coming, but fear that it'll snow again first; so you spend your life wondering if you should be picking out your short-sleeve shirts or salting your stairs.
Oddly enough, Sunday was a gorgeous, sunny day, the second in a row but also only the second such day this year, and I was feeling a bit grumpy for being inside...and knowing that there's still time for a nice dump of icky wet snow.
Indeed, everyone seems quite cranky at the end of winter. The office-bound insist that they NEED to go home, for sanity's sake, to stop looking at the same pasty faces and drab walls. The home-office-bound insist that they will go mad, absolutely mad, if they don't get out of the house NOW. Five solid months of snow, ice and darkness will do that to you, and more. Then the sun comes back and spends weeks melting the snow and revealing dog turds. Weeks, endless weeks go by before that damned sun can coax any greenery out of anything but an evergreen.
Seems you may have run into a seasonal attitude a second time, this time online.
So do come back at some other time of year, but I'd say skip the summer proper. The best months are May, June, September and October. But July and August: sticky heat and wall-to-wall festivals. (In Montreal, at any rate.) It that's your thing, great. If you're a weary local it's time to flee to the countryside...if you can afford it.
On the off chance you're still reading: I find that fascinating and surprising. (Your French is great, better than mine, and though I could answer in French it would be too slow for me to do that.)
The only hypothesis I have is that you were taken as being from France. In many (though far from all) circles in Quebec, someone from France is assumed to be a snob who will put on haughty airs, until proven otherwise.
Of course, I have actually met French people living and working here who do have a disdainful attitude toward the Québécois and their way of speaking -- something which they sometimes confide to me because of my lack of a strong Québécois accent.
As for the British, my observations have again been quite the opposite of your experience. From what I've seen, Brits who speak passable French and who work in the communication field will find doors opened to them solely because someone from Britain (especially England) is automatically assumed to have a superior command of written English.
So I suppose the other variable worth mentioning is whom you're dealing with: someone beset with provincial attitudes and prejudices, or someone who leaves all that crap aside? I guess I'm just fortunate in that the vast majority of people I deal with simply don't bother with that kind of crap.
Go back to your original post: your point was the generalization that if you speak French fluently but with a non-Quebec, non-France accent, "they" get bitchy.
I don't even know what that means. What's your accent? American, anglo-Canadian, English, Welsh, Haitian, Martiniquais, West African? How fluent are you, really? Pourrait-on continuer la discussion en français? All these variables and more can affect the reception you get...
So, yes, generalizing is perilous. I will venture this, though: from my experience of living here, observing, and interacting I can think of few if any circumstances where not speaking French is preferable to speaking fluent, accented French.
The point is still that what you call "nothing special" might as well be a bunch of instructions in Chinese to the average consumer. And consumers do expect to be able to open up the things they buy, plug them in, and have them work.
If you can't do that with a new Windows PC, then there's a problem. Not a problem for you, I know that, but a problem for the average consumer.
Yes, amazing.
I'm a mainly English-speaking Quebecer, and my French is "neither here nor there." Because of the way I learned it, it's an odd mix of accents and a high degree of fluency. No matter how close to "native speaker" my accent gets, anyone can tell it's "neither French nor French-Canadian."
Guess what? I get along just fine with most francophones, be they Canadian or European. I don't know why our experiences are so different. Is it possible that your "fluency" isn't really as fluent as you think, and you were somehow inadvertently rude? (When speaking in a second language, the easiest thing in the world is to be inadvertently rude.)
To say "all Quebecers are nasty to everyone who speaks French but isn't a native speaker" is an absurd stereotype that hardly captures any complexity at all.
Some Quebecers are nasty with pretty much everyone, some can't abide an English-speaker's accent, some probably hate Germans, some think of French-from-France as weird exotic creatures. And some (I would say most) are very open-minded, and listen to the content of what you have to say, not your accent.
I am not doing anything special.
Great.
I make sure to fdisk the mbr before an instal, just to make sure someone did not hide something on the hard drive before the instal. I do the instal off-line. Add a software firewall, then connect through a router to the net to get the service packs. I have never had any spyware on my system ever. I disable active-x from IE, and when I did my instal the only net protocol I install is tcp/ip, I do not instal the other 2- client or file & printer sharing.
And all this "nothing special" you do is basically done by anyone who installs Windows?
Right here you've nicely illustrated the trouble with Windows: as a power user you have no problems because you know that there's all this stuff, which is on by default, that you have to disable. You know that you have to have to add a firewall before connecting to the net. You know that you can't take a new Windows computer out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, and go on the net.
For the average user this is way beyond "not doing anything special," and it's decidedly non-trivial.
In Quebec, digital-satellite cinema is being sold as a way of dramatically lowering distribution costs (no more weighty 35-mm prints), thus increasing the diversity of what can be shown in movie theatres.
It remains to be seen if exhibitors in remote areas will actually increase the diversity of their offerings; ultimately, it's up to audiences. I don't think the tech inherently favors the big studios...unless they directly control it.
Again, blame the rights holders.
iTMS already has some strange design ideas behind it - why are the musical selections different for varying countries? I don't get it.
This is a consequence of different entities holding/controlling music distribution rights for different countries. I'm sure Apple would like to secure the worldwide rights for all recorded music...but of course they can't. Hence the patchwork of different virtual "stores" divided along national lines.
In the long run, [boycotting DRM vendors] is a false option. More and more CDs are copy protected and eventually there will be no more cds made, just as they no longer make LPs.
Except that CD technology is widely available to independent creators, much more widely than LP technology is/was. And that if enough people avoid DRM more and more suppliers will eschew it. And there are non-DRM online vendors, too. A lot of them.
With all the non-DRM options out there, it looks to me as if it's not at all too late to thwart that long-run all-DRM world you're afraid of. Why aren't activists such as Jon and yourself busy working to make those options the most popular and successful ones?
Why is it that instead you claim that boycotting is useless, and that attacking is the only option? And in this specific case, the attack involves...buying product from the victim!
This will help your cause how, exactly?
From where I sit, your priorities look skewed. If online vendors and CD manufacturers are pushing DRM, maybe we should be looking at the main behavior that makes them adopt that option: indiscriminate p2p sharing. If you're doing nothing to discourage people from infringing copyright (you don't seriously believe p2p falls within fair use, do you?), you will never convince the corporations to forget about DRM.