Sorry I led you a little astray..... I live 400 miles from New York City, near Buffalo, NY.
Sorry about that...when you said "suburban New York" I assumed you meant the city. You coulda said suburban Buffalo, and unlike many US high school graduates, I would have known exactly where you're talking about.:)
And yes, for an area like Buffalo that amount of money is freakin' insane.
The strip often gets neglected. Filler strips disrupt story lines and punish those who expect the strip to be his day job. A little drama and suspense is okay, but we're not talking about cliffhangers here, Pete outright drops the entire thing for days at a time. And he's always got excuses too-- there for us to read. His material isn't that current, so he may as well build a buffer of a week and take advantage of those great days and not so great days. "Gone Fishing"? If this were his real job, he'd have something prepared to fill the space.
This pretty much describes why I have a hard time getting into most webcomics. Going a week without a "real" update annoys me. No, I don't expect the average webcomic artist to drop his whole life for my amusement (since for many webcomic artists this is not their day job). But they shouldn't expect me to hang around waiting for new material either.
Penny Arcade has been, with few exceptions, updated regularly for years now. Yes, the newspost is often up a bit late...but it is always up that day. As for the comic, while the page my not be updated, you can usually punch the link to the image in directly and see it between midnight and 1am Pacific, right on time. Sure, as you mentioned, the E3/convention sketchbooks are a departure from the usual color strips, but they are still funny and relevant, and have come to be thought of as a feature, rather than filler.
I find it amusing that the very day that many people asked why Sluggy Freelance doesn't get as much play as Penny Arcade, I point my browser to it and get a "Gone Fishin'" Page. Same for Megatokyo (filler page, that is). Which is the reason I don't read them. The last time I remember Penny Arcade not updating was 9/11/2001, because they just weren't in the mood to do anything funny that day.
Actually, I think there have been a couple guest strips since then, if you count those. But they're still more dependable by an order of magnitude than anybody else.
Even before Penny Arcade was their day jobs, Mike and Jerry treated it like their day job. Now that it is their day job, they're treating it like it's a calling: starting charities, holding expos, merchandising. And you know what? It's working. More power to them.
3. PA generally has interesting and (mostly) well-written games-related info along with the comic. Certainly better than the write up for most comics and games sites, anyway.
I think a lot of people don't realize how important the nwesposts are to PA. Many of the comics aren't nearly the same without the associated post...I've noticed this since I downloaded them all and started using them as my screensaver. The posts help turn Penny Arcade into more of an online gaming magazine, rather that just a webcomic.
Though it has kinda been the WoW show lately...which is sad, because for reasons outside of my control I have not yet been physically able to play WoW.
...mostly because it's true.
I've found installing Linux to be a bit easier than installing Windows, especially provided you know what the hell you are doing.
A lot of the questions the installer will tend to ask you (this is, of course, all dependant on your distro) might be a little daunting for the average user. They tend to soil themselves at the first sign of "jargon," which of course means any word not in the average sixth-grade-reading-level vocabulary. Acronyms tend to scare them away too. This is why many people consider Windows to be "easier" to install...there may be more steps, it may be more of a pain in the ass, but they dumb it down enough that the average user doesn't realize it's a pain in the ass.
No, installing Linux is easy. Using Linux, however, can be a real pain in the ass.
Not difficult - just ridiculously unintuitive. Kind of like putting your front door lock on one of the side windows would be. What's wrong with the eject button being next to the thing it ejects, like on all other things in the entire world like DVD players, videos, toasters, ejector seats etc etc etc.
I would say it's only unintuitive because it's different. It's only unintuitive if you are thinking of the DVD drive as a seperate piece of equipment, rather than a part of the computer. If you think of it as a part of the computer, then it would make sense you would use either the keyboard (eject button), mouse (drag to trash can), or some combination (click on icon, hit Command-E) to eject it, since 99.9% of your interaction with the computer is done through the keyboard/mouse.
Personally, the only reason it tends to piss ME off is because I've run into a situation where I couldn't eject the darn disc. I forget how it happened, but I believe a program crashed while it was in the middle of ejecting it...so for some reason the OS though the disc was ejected already, but there it was still in the drive. And I didn't even have a little "emergency eject hole" as so many other disc drives tend to. While I'm sure there MAY have been a better way to fix this problem, I ended up having to reboot the damn machine (when it booted back up, it re-scanned the drive, and recognized the disc in there...i was then able to eject). Hell, it's not even that hard to figure out...have the OS scan the drive if you press the eject button, instead of assuming it knows. Either way, that's why I like old-fashioned eject buttons right on the drive...because they are (generally) a direct link to the hardware. This can be a bad thing (if, for instance, you are in the middle of a game or copying off the drive at the time), but it also avoids stupid stuff like this. But I don't think they're necessarily more untuitive than the alternative.
Easy compared to what? In my experience teaching across both KDE/Linux and OSX I see University students taking around a day to become very comfortable with KDE yet after a week teaching students new to OSX I am still getting fundamental useability questions, especially surrounding mouse/selection useage and the 'Finder'.
KDE isn't especially hard to use, especially if you're in a setting where it's already all set up and ready to go (as in a school computer lab). I think if you're wanting a user to install/administer (as they would be doing on a personal machine) it's a whole different animal.
And I think you're correct as to why: KDE seems to be set up to mimic Windows as much as possible throughout the interface, to make the transition as easy as possible for people who aren't terribly comfortable to begin with.
Personally, I think most of the interface of OSX makes more sense than Windows/KDE (doesn't it seem awkward to group those?) I think for anybody who is truly comfortable with a computer, which to me means somebody who generally has the ability to figure out how to do something on their own if they need to, OSX is a much more intuitive interface. Most people don't know how to use computers, they know how to use Windows.
Also, in the OSX lab you were teaching in, did you have one-button mice or two? I've found that that is by far the hardest part of the transition, so if we're talking about a classroom environment it might be best to make sure it's being made as easy as possible...I'd recommend the two-button mice.
I firmly believe that the courts would uphold my arguement that I rented the media that it's on but bought a license to watch the movie. In fact, Blockbuster's terms and conditions does not stipulate how many times you may watch a movie that you've rented, it merely stipulates how long you can keep the media. I've time-shifted the right to watch the movie until after the media is returned, but that doesn't negate my right to watch it, and the Supreme Court upheld my right to time shift it.
First, I wouldn't put too much faith in the courts...because while common sense may be on your side, and one might think the law is as well, courts have this nifty way of changing the law, especially when large amounts of money are involved.
Also, assuming you are in the US, you may have another problem...the DMCA. You are circumventing a copy-protection scheme to make that copy, assuming of course we are talking about a DVD. Unless that has changed in the last couple years...I haven't been following it much.
Of course, it's not likely to matter. It's hard to get caught if you aren't involving a second party. I've done this a few times too, usually so I can watch them on my laptop during a flight, but also a few times to avoid those pesky late fees.
I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
Generally, in a business like this, you always want to cast a wide net. As soon as you start judging what music is "worth" carrying, based on values rather than economics, you are taking a pretty big risk. You aimed for a niche, and it looks like it hurt you.
Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
Maybe. Of course, maybe this is also a sign that people put a higher value on books than music, so with limited disposable income they choose to spend it on books first, and download music. I think books are just worth more than CD's, especially with the inflated price of CD's.
Sure, piracy is a factor in the downfall of many independant record stores. But it is FAR from the only one. Could it be, perhaps, that amazon.com has the ability to undercut your prices horribly, while still offering a better selection (even in Christian rock) than your record store? Even without online piracy, online retailers would still be gutting the local record shops. Especially in a weak economy...when I have very few extra dollars to spend, the difference between 16.99 or 17.99 and 11.99 seems a LOT bigger, especially if I can get free shipping.
I'd even go so far as to say that online piracy has almost NO effect at all on local independant music stores. Any customers that were that worried about the price of music (and thus inclined to download it for free) you would have lost anyway to online vendors or large chains.
Oh, and I do realize that this post was probably just total bullshit, but I thought it would be fun to pick apart a couple of the points anyway.
On a final note...
On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes.
Not with the connection speeds that many of us have. To get hundreds (which I read as $200 or more) of dollars worth of music would take me well over an hour.
You'd think, with iTunes, that people would be buying music they like (a four or five rating) in a much higher proportion than music they'd rate as a three.
You're not accounting for whole albums ripped/downloaded. Even the average CD that I love usually will contain at least one crappy track, and several "okay" tracks. Most CD's I have on my hard drive weigh in at about 25% 4/5 star, 50% 3 star, and 25% crap (2/1 Star). Why don't I delete the crap songs? Because I like to maintain the integrity of the album, and sometimes I'll listen to whole albums, crap songs and all, because it's a different experience than "radio style."
Factor in that of the 5000+ songs on my hard drive, only about 1000 are NOT part of a complete album, and you figure I have a LOT of 1/2/3 Star songs.
My rating system, for instance, goes as follows:
5 Star - Songs I really like. Wouldn't mind hearing them every day.
4 Star - Songs I like, but might not want to hear every day.
3 Star - Songs I'm neutral on, possibly like a bit. I don't dislike them. Make good filler so that I don't get bored of my 4/5 Star songs.
2 Star - Songs I actively dislike, and would not want to hear unless I'm listening to the whole album.
1 Star - Broken songs (corrupted data, etc.), "skits" (popular on rap/punk CD's), intros, etc. Basically not valid songs.
Add grouping tags to remove long classical/techno pieces, audiobooks, and spoken word CD's, and everything's pretty well sorted.
(Yes, I've had a lot of time on my hands over the last year.)
Has none of these "outsourcing uber-alles" types ever considered this, or do they just not believe it would happen?
Most people have problems imagining that the status quo will ever change, especially when said status quo is rather comfortable for them.
Hopefully the CEO-types will have invested their money in something barter-able beforehand, because it's hard to raise a private army to protect you from lots of angry, poor, armed people when all you have to pay them with is dollars, which have since become worthless.
State College is about as rural as Des Moines and Fargo. For city dwellers, I'm sure that it sounds as if it is rural, but it really isn't.
Yeah, some of these kids have never been to places like most of Montana, Wyoming, or the Dakotas. Go hang out in Cut Bank, MT for a couple years, and tell me you dig the rural lifestyle. Far as I'm concerned, almost nothing east of the Appalachians is "rural"...you're not rural if you're within an hour or two of a city of a million or more, dammit!:)
Sounds like you live in the kind of rural area I'd like to live in. However, when most people think of "rural" areas, they are thinking of the other 85 to 90 percent of the US west of the Mississippi. The portion of the country without reasonable access to a major metro area (the nearest for me is a 6-8 hour drive or so, depending on what you define as "major.")
There are really 3 main environments in my mind. Urban, rural-near-a-city, and rural-not-near-a-city. I've always found the second one to be my favorite, but given a choice between straight urban or "true" rural, I'll go urban every time.
Though, even in the semi-rural area I live in (town of about 20k+a college), I still have most of the amenities of an urban area...DSL, fast food, most chain stores (though unfortunately they are becoming the only shopping option), a fairly decent theatre, etc. But I miss having access to things like museums, more concerts (they're rare where I live...at least decent ones), more theaters, the actual theare, etc. Basically, culture. Unless you're into the whole rodeo/cowboy thing, it's lacking when you get farther from a major metro area.
All of our money will (and already is) going out... and not coming back in... We are reducing our own country's value for the same of a few lame ass CEOs and a small echelon of the investor-class.
But I would think that this can't go on forever. Once all the jobs are outsourced, we'll hit the point where we can't consume the products India and China are exporting, at any price. Then it will be a wake-up call for them, because it sucks to be a business when your biggest customer is gone. Eventually we'll see Indian and Chinese companies outsourcing to the US, because we're so poor we're willing to work for less.
But in the long run what I see happening, the final effect of the global economy, will be a sort of equalizing effect when it comes to wealth across the world. Indians and Afghanis and Mexicans become more wealthy, and Americans less. The humanitarian in me cannot help but see that as a good thing. Of course, the American in me thinks it freakin' sucks.
That, and it wouldn't happen overnight, and the process wouldn't be pretty. I'm talking "Gee, doesn't the Great Depression look like it might have been a fun thing to live through" not pretty.
Of course, I'm talking about the difference between maybe Portland/Seattle compared to, say, Wichita. The average housing price in Wichita buys you essentially the same that the average housing price in Portland and Seattle would. You're not getting more space or anything in the bargain. And once you factor in the adjusted salary for cost of living, you have about the same buying power for the same house quality as you would have with the bigger salary on the west coast.
I think the article was talking about towns more like Salina that Wichita. Or maybe Tonganoxie. You know, actual small towns, not undersized cities with delusions of grandeur. And housing in a place like Salina, KS or State Center, IA is cheaper than housing in Seattle or San Jose, even after adjusting for median income. Housing in both major and minor urban areas is in the middle of a huge bubble, but there are plenty of towns in the sub-10k range that have not yet been hit, or have not been hit as hard.
The average teacher salary in my school district is over $80,000 a year.
First, I'll say that your district seems to be an exception to the whole "low pay" thing. In my state, first year teachers are lucky to make over $30,000, depending on the districts (some districts that I know of just broke the $20,000 dollar mark in the last year or two!). My wife was looking at what teachers make in the San Francisco area (we were thinking of moving there), and about the highest we came across was about $50,000...which if you're wanting to live in/within commuting distance of San Franciso isn't as much as one might think (much like, I would guess, $80,000 in the New York area).
But I'm also certain that there are a lot of really bad ones making better money than 80% of the community.
Whenever comparing what teachers make to what the community at large makes, you also have to make sure to compare them only to those in the community with at least a 4-year degree. If you're talking average teacher salary (which that $80k was), you have to bump that up even higher...continued education requirements mean that many teachers are well on their way to a Master's, if they don't already have it. I'd be willing to bet that $80k is a fairly median salary for somebody in New York City with a Bachelor's degree plus 12-24 credit-hours (or more) under their belt.
Also, as to the low quality of teachers considering what they make, you have to consider that however well paid they may be in New York City, NYC is probably still drawing from the "national pool" of Education grads. You are bound to have a lot of duds in that pool, considering that most states/districts aren't offering the same kind of salaries you are seeing in your district. Unfortunately, because of grade inflation and the generally non-competitive nature of most Education programs, it's probably hard for your district to know which ones are the duds before they hire them, so you end up with some teachers that are only worth the $20k or so that they would make in areas of my home state making the $50k or $60k that your district starts them off at.
Oh, and I liked your story, and I've heard many other BS stories out of the teaching profession. Sometimes I wonder why anybody does it.
If you think about it, 500 million sales == $500 million (this is total sales). As far as I know, that is pretty much small potatoes in this industry.
Actually, that isn't the RIAA's problem. The problem is that
500 million songs sold == about 50 to 100 million LESS albums sold == 0 dollars. (or worse...see below)
($500 million brought in, minus the $500 million in lost record sales, assuming the low end number of 50 million lost record sales and a low end price of $9.99 an album. Assume higher numbers of lost album sales, or more expensive albums, and iTMS is a LOSS for the labels.)
Every time I pay 99 cents for the one song off the album I want, I'm not spending the $9.99 to $14.99 that the album would have cost me, and the label loses 9 to 14 bucks. While better than the 10 to 15 they'd lose if I just pirated it, I would hope people might understand why this would make them unhappy (whether or not you agree with them or not).
They don't want to price the songs higher so they will make more money off them...they want to price the songs higher so they will make LESS money off them, because people will just not buy them and instead buy the album. That, or begin "renting" their music, which seems to be what the other services are offering. And if they choose to pirate instead, they'll just sue them into bankrupcy (or try).
If a cd has a average of 12 songs and the cd proce is 20-25 dollars...
Where the hell are some of these people shopping for music? I can't even see it costing that much in Canadian dollars. Usually anywhere from 11.99 US to 16.99 US (depending on if you're shopping at a megachain like Target or Wal-Mart down to a small locally-owned shop) for brick and mortar, and usually 9.99 US to 14.99 US online.
To be fair, iTMS is now profitable...but IIRC it is not profitable enough to be a significant portion of what Apple brings in. So no, it's not there to make money, it's there to sell iPods, as the parent said.
A seller will increase it's price until enough buyers stop demanding.
True. And it seems that enough buyers stopped demanding about the same time Napster came out.
And it wasn't just because Napster was free, though that made the effect a lot more potent. It was also because for the first time ever there was competition, in any form, in the music industry.
I've even heard that they try preventing you from converting the file to other formats, is that true?
Actually, that's absolutely untrue. You can easily burn it to audio CD, at which point you can re-rip it and re-encode it into whatever format you choose. Though, of course, if you choose another lossy format (such as MP3) you will lose more quality on the second go-round...but that's just due to the nature of compression in general, not a plot by Apple (or the record labels, for that matter).
What the hell? They're selling a frickin' commodity - a virtually unnecessary and frequently crappy one at that - so let them charge whatever they want.
Except that copyright is not God-given. It was granted by the government to encourage production in the arts, for the good of society as a whole. Music (and theatre, and literature, and now movies) was not meant to be consumed only by the wealthy. The only reason this monopoly is granted at all is to encourage artists to create. Without copyright, the artists and record labels would have no product to sell, because all of us would be allowed to share it with each other, from the moment it was created, for free.
Copyright was NOT originally meant to protect the authors/creators. It was meant to benefit society...it's just that the only way to do that was to make sure that artists made some money for their work.
We, as in the people, gave them copyright, gave them this commodity, so that everybody would be uplifted. Personally, by extending the public domain into near infinity, I think they have failed to live up to their end of the bargain. In my opinion, we should take this commodity back. On a subconcious level, I think that is what many music pirates are doing...I don't think they are all the mindless thieving zombies they are made out to be.
And while music is virtually unnecessary in a literal sense, I think a world without music (or the rest of the arts) would be an unpleasant world to live in.
While the record companies have a point saying that increased demand should allow for price increases, the market has already made it clear that many consumers are not willing to follow their pricing model.
Perhaps increased demand should lead to higher prices...but then, if we're pricing music based on supply and demand, then the nearly infinite "supply" of digital music should make it damn near free.
I guess could agree that music should be priced at what the public is willing to pay, based on demand. But continued piracy of music online shows that even at 99 cents a song, much of the public feels that price is too high. One would argue that it's hard to compete with somebody giving away your product for free, but at the same time I really do feel there is a price point at which a vast majority of people would choose the legitimate market over the black market. I just don't think the record labels have dipped that low yet, and I know they don't want to.
Really, the quality of the product being given away for free is also much lower than what is being sold. I'm more than willing to give up good money to have a physical disc, at full audio quality, that I can re-rip should I lose my files. I like liner notes. Hell, I even think buying a full album on iTunes has some value...such as knowing that the entire CD will have been ripped at the same quality, with accurate and consistant tags without my having to take the time to do/fix it myself.
But is the physical CD worth $14.99 to me? Is the "virtual" CD worth $11.99 or $12.99 (the price the labels seem to be pushing for full albums on iTunes, compared to the original $9.99)? No.
For sake of argument, my personal price point would be more like $9.99 for physical CD's (and I'm not talking old/surplus stuff) and $6.99 or $7.99 for whole album downloads. $0.99 a song actually doesn't bother me, as for many CD's it would be saving me about ten bucks, as there is often only one song I want. Do the labels want to try these price points? Hell no. They'd argue that they cannot possibly make money at those levels.
At which point I would pull out a tape of MTV Cribs, which to me is absolute proof there is some room to lower prices. And that's just what artists pull in...I also know that there aren't many record execs driving Civics.
Your comment is disturbingly sadist (regardless of the pains you take to stress that you only hurt "evil" people). In my opinion, gratuitous violence like that which you describe is titillation (as with porn), not "gameplay."
This is the problem I always had with GTA 3 and GTA:VC (never bothered with SA)...the game itself didn't impress me, and I'm not generally into violence just for violence sake. Same reason that GTA:LC is not an incentive for me to get into a PSP, whereas most people bill it as a big selling point.
Slashdot Mirror
In the old days, an announcement like this would have been an instant death blow to the competing company.
:)
Yeah, now it's only a death blow when Google does it.
Sorry I led you a little astray..... I live 400 miles from New York City, near Buffalo, NY.
:)
Sorry about that...when you said "suburban New York" I assumed you meant the city. You coulda said suburban Buffalo, and unlike many US high school graduates, I would have known exactly where you're talking about.
And yes, for an area like Buffalo that amount of money is freakin' insane.
The strip often gets neglected. Filler strips disrupt story lines and punish those who expect the strip to be his day job. A little drama and suspense is okay, but we're not talking about cliffhangers here, Pete outright drops the entire thing for days at a time. And he's always got excuses too-- there for us to read. His material isn't that current, so he may as well build a buffer of a week and take advantage of those great days and not so great days. "Gone Fishing"? If this were his real job, he'd have something prepared to fill the space.
This pretty much describes why I have a hard time getting into most webcomics. Going a week without a "real" update annoys me. No, I don't expect the average webcomic artist to drop his whole life for my amusement (since for many webcomic artists this is not their day job). But they shouldn't expect me to hang around waiting for new material either.
Penny Arcade has been, with few exceptions, updated regularly for years now. Yes, the newspost is often up a bit late...but it is always up that day. As for the comic, while the page my not be updated, you can usually punch the link to the image in directly and see it between midnight and 1am Pacific, right on time. Sure, as you mentioned, the E3/convention sketchbooks are a departure from the usual color strips, but they are still funny and relevant, and have come to be thought of as a feature, rather than filler.
I find it amusing that the very day that many people asked why Sluggy Freelance doesn't get as much play as Penny Arcade, I point my browser to it and get a "Gone Fishin'" Page. Same for Megatokyo (filler page, that is). Which is the reason I don't read them. The last time I remember Penny Arcade not updating was 9/11/2001, because they just weren't in the mood to do anything funny that day.
Actually, I think there have been a couple guest strips since then, if you count those. But they're still more dependable by an order of magnitude than anybody else.
Even before Penny Arcade was their day jobs, Mike and Jerry treated it like their day job. Now that it is their day job, they're treating it like it's a calling: starting charities, holding expos, merchandising. And you know what? It's working. More power to them.
Yes, I'm a rabid PA fan.
3. PA generally has interesting and (mostly) well-written games-related info along with the comic. Certainly better than the write up for most comics and games sites, anyway.
I think a lot of people don't realize how important the nwesposts are to PA. Many of the comics aren't nearly the same without the associated post...I've noticed this since I downloaded them all and started using them as my screensaver. The posts help turn Penny Arcade into more of an online gaming magazine, rather that just a webcomic.
Though it has kinda been the WoW show lately...which is sad, because for reasons outside of my control I have not yet been physically able to play WoW.
...mostly because it's true. I've found installing Linux to be a bit easier than installing Windows, especially provided you know what the hell you are doing.
A lot of the questions the installer will tend to ask you (this is, of course, all dependant on your distro) might be a little daunting for the average user. They tend to soil themselves at the first sign of "jargon," which of course means any word not in the average sixth-grade-reading-level vocabulary. Acronyms tend to scare them away too. This is why many people consider Windows to be "easier" to install...there may be more steps, it may be more of a pain in the ass, but they dumb it down enough that the average user doesn't realize it's a pain in the ass.
No, installing Linux is easy. Using Linux, however, can be a real pain in the ass.
Not difficult - just ridiculously unintuitive. Kind of like putting your front door lock on one of the side windows would be. What's wrong with the eject button being next to the thing it ejects, like on all other things in the entire world like DVD players, videos, toasters, ejector seats etc etc etc.
I would say it's only unintuitive because it's different. It's only unintuitive if you are thinking of the DVD drive as a seperate piece of equipment, rather than a part of the computer. If you think of it as a part of the computer, then it would make sense you would use either the keyboard (eject button), mouse (drag to trash can), or some combination (click on icon, hit Command-E) to eject it, since 99.9% of your interaction with the computer is done through the keyboard/mouse.
Personally, the only reason it tends to piss ME off is because I've run into a situation where I couldn't eject the darn disc. I forget how it happened, but I believe a program crashed while it was in the middle of ejecting it...so for some reason the OS though the disc was ejected already, but there it was still in the drive. And I didn't even have a little "emergency eject hole" as so many other disc drives tend to. While I'm sure there MAY have been a better way to fix this problem, I ended up having to reboot the damn machine (when it booted back up, it re-scanned the drive, and recognized the disc in there...i was then able to eject). Hell, it's not even that hard to figure out...have the OS scan the drive if you press the eject button, instead of assuming it knows. Either way, that's why I like old-fashioned eject buttons right on the drive...because they are (generally) a direct link to the hardware. This can be a bad thing (if, for instance, you are in the middle of a game or copying off the drive at the time), but it also avoids stupid stuff like this. But I don't think they're necessarily more untuitive than the alternative.
Easy compared to what? In my experience teaching across both KDE/Linux and OSX I see University students taking around a day to become very comfortable with KDE yet after a week teaching students new to OSX I am still getting fundamental useability questions, especially surrounding mouse/selection useage and the 'Finder'.
KDE isn't especially hard to use, especially if you're in a setting where it's already all set up and ready to go (as in a school computer lab). I think if you're wanting a user to install/administer (as they would be doing on a personal machine) it's a whole different animal.
And I think you're correct as to why: KDE seems to be set up to mimic Windows as much as possible throughout the interface, to make the transition as easy as possible for people who aren't terribly comfortable to begin with.
Personally, I think most of the interface of OSX makes more sense than Windows/KDE (doesn't it seem awkward to group those?) I think for anybody who is truly comfortable with a computer, which to me means somebody who generally has the ability to figure out how to do something on their own if they need to, OSX is a much more intuitive interface. Most people don't know how to use computers, they know how to use Windows.
Also, in the OSX lab you were teaching in, did you have one-button mice or two? I've found that that is by far the hardest part of the transition, so if we're talking about a classroom environment it might be best to make sure it's being made as easy as possible...I'd recommend the two-button mice.
I firmly believe that the courts would uphold my arguement that I rented the media that it's on but bought a license to watch the movie. In fact, Blockbuster's terms and conditions does not stipulate how many times you may watch a movie that you've rented, it merely stipulates how long you can keep the media. I've time-shifted the right to watch the movie until after the media is returned, but that doesn't negate my right to watch it, and the Supreme Court upheld my right to time shift it.
First, I wouldn't put too much faith in the courts...because while common sense may be on your side, and one might think the law is as well, courts have this nifty way of changing the law, especially when large amounts of money are involved.
Also, assuming you are in the US, you may have another problem...the DMCA. You are circumventing a copy-protection scheme to make that copy, assuming of course we are talking about a DVD. Unless that has changed in the last couple years...I haven't been following it much.
Of course, it's not likely to matter. It's hard to get caught if you aren't involving a second party. I've done this a few times too, usually so I can watch them on my laptop during a flight, but also a few times to avoid those pesky late fees.
I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
Generally, in a business like this, you always want to cast a wide net. As soon as you start judging what music is "worth" carrying, based on values rather than economics, you are taking a pretty big risk. You aimed for a niche, and it looks like it hurt you.
Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
Maybe. Of course, maybe this is also a sign that people put a higher value on books than music, so with limited disposable income they choose to spend it on books first, and download music. I think books are just worth more than CD's, especially with the inflated price of CD's.
Sure, piracy is a factor in the downfall of many independant record stores. But it is FAR from the only one. Could it be, perhaps, that amazon.com has the ability to undercut your prices horribly, while still offering a better selection (even in Christian rock) than your record store? Even without online piracy, online retailers would still be gutting the local record shops. Especially in a weak economy...when I have very few extra dollars to spend, the difference between 16.99 or 17.99 and 11.99 seems a LOT bigger, especially if I can get free shipping.
I'd even go so far as to say that online piracy has almost NO effect at all on local independant music stores. Any customers that were that worried about the price of music (and thus inclined to download it for free) you would have lost anyway to online vendors or large chains.
Oh, and I do realize that this post was probably just total bullshit, but I thought it would be fun to pick apart a couple of the points anyway.
On a final note...
On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes.
Not with the connection speeds that many of us have. To get hundreds (which I read as $200 or more) of dollars worth of music would take me well over an hour.
You'd think, with iTunes, that people would be buying music they like (a four or five rating) in a much higher proportion than music they'd rate as a three.
You're not accounting for whole albums ripped/downloaded. Even the average CD that I love usually will contain at least one crappy track, and several "okay" tracks. Most CD's I have on my hard drive weigh in at about 25% 4/5 star, 50% 3 star, and 25% crap (2/1 Star). Why don't I delete the crap songs? Because I like to maintain the integrity of the album, and sometimes I'll listen to whole albums, crap songs and all, because it's a different experience than "radio style."
Factor in that of the 5000+ songs on my hard drive, only about 1000 are NOT part of a complete album, and you figure I have a LOT of 1/2/3 Star songs.
My rating system, for instance, goes as follows:
5 Star - Songs I really like. Wouldn't mind hearing them every day.
4 Star - Songs I like, but might not want to hear every day.
3 Star - Songs I'm neutral on, possibly like a bit. I don't dislike them. Make good filler so that I don't get bored of my 4/5 Star songs.
2 Star - Songs I actively dislike, and would not want to hear unless I'm listening to the whole album.
1 Star - Broken songs (corrupted data, etc.), "skits" (popular on rap/punk CD's), intros, etc. Basically not valid songs.
Add grouping tags to remove long classical/techno pieces, audiobooks, and spoken word CD's, and everything's pretty well sorted.
(Yes, I've had a lot of time on my hands over the last year.)
Has none of these "outsourcing uber-alles" types ever considered this, or do they just not believe it would happen?
Most people have problems imagining that the status quo will ever change, especially when said status quo is rather comfortable for them.
Hopefully the CEO-types will have invested their money in something barter-able beforehand, because it's hard to raise a private army to protect you from lots of angry, poor, armed people when all you have to pay them with is dollars, which have since become worthless.
Screw that. Hopefully they haven't.
State College is about as rural as Des Moines and Fargo. For city dwellers, I'm sure that it sounds as if it is rural, but it really isn't.
:)
Yeah, some of these kids have never been to places like most of Montana, Wyoming, or the Dakotas. Go hang out in Cut Bank, MT for a couple years, and tell me you dig the rural lifestyle. Far as I'm concerned, almost nothing east of the Appalachians is "rural"...you're not rural if you're within an hour or two of a city of a million or more, dammit!
State College is a nice town, though.
Sounds like you live in the kind of rural area I'd like to live in. However, when most people think of "rural" areas, they are thinking of the other 85 to 90 percent of the US west of the Mississippi. The portion of the country without reasonable access to a major metro area (the nearest for me is a 6-8 hour drive or so, depending on what you define as "major.")
There are really 3 main environments in my mind. Urban, rural-near-a-city, and rural-not-near-a-city. I've always found the second one to be my favorite, but given a choice between straight urban or "true" rural, I'll go urban every time.
Though, even in the semi-rural area I live in (town of about 20k+a college), I still have most of the amenities of an urban area...DSL, fast food, most chain stores (though unfortunately they are becoming the only shopping option), a fairly decent theatre, etc. But I miss having access to things like museums, more concerts (they're rare where I live...at least decent ones), more theaters, the actual theare, etc. Basically, culture. Unless you're into the whole rodeo/cowboy thing, it's lacking when you get farther from a major metro area.
All of our money will (and already is) going out... and not coming back in... We are reducing our own country's value for the same of a few lame ass CEOs and a small echelon of the investor-class.
But I would think that this can't go on forever. Once all the jobs are outsourced, we'll hit the point where we can't consume the products India and China are exporting, at any price. Then it will be a wake-up call for them, because it sucks to be a business when your biggest customer is gone. Eventually we'll see Indian and Chinese companies outsourcing to the US, because we're so poor we're willing to work for less.
But in the long run what I see happening, the final effect of the global economy, will be a sort of equalizing effect when it comes to wealth across the world. Indians and Afghanis and Mexicans become more wealthy, and Americans less. The humanitarian in me cannot help but see that as a good thing. Of course, the American in me thinks it freakin' sucks.
That, and it wouldn't happen overnight, and the process wouldn't be pretty. I'm talking "Gee, doesn't the Great Depression look like it might have been a fun thing to live through" not pretty.
Of course, I'm talking about the difference between maybe Portland/Seattle compared to, say, Wichita. The average housing price in Wichita buys you essentially the same that the average housing price in Portland and Seattle would. You're not getting more space or anything in the bargain. And once you factor in the adjusted salary for cost of living, you have about the same buying power for the same house quality as you would have with the bigger salary on the west coast.
I think the article was talking about towns more like Salina that Wichita. Or maybe Tonganoxie. You know, actual small towns, not undersized cities with delusions of grandeur. And housing in a place like Salina, KS or State Center, IA is cheaper than housing in Seattle or San Jose, even after adjusting for median income. Housing in both major and minor urban areas is in the middle of a huge bubble, but there are plenty of towns in the sub-10k range that have not yet been hit, or have not been hit as hard.
The average teacher salary in my school district is over $80,000 a year.
First, I'll say that your district seems to be an exception to the whole "low pay" thing. In my state, first year teachers are lucky to make over $30,000, depending on the districts (some districts that I know of just broke the $20,000 dollar mark in the last year or two!). My wife was looking at what teachers make in the San Francisco area (we were thinking of moving there), and about the highest we came across was about $50,000...which if you're wanting to live in/within commuting distance of San Franciso isn't as much as one might think (much like, I would guess, $80,000 in the New York area).
But I'm also certain that there are a lot of really bad ones making better money than 80% of the community.
Whenever comparing what teachers make to what the community at large makes, you also have to make sure to compare them only to those in the community with at least a 4-year degree. If you're talking average teacher salary (which that $80k was), you have to bump that up even higher...continued education requirements mean that many teachers are well on their way to a Master's, if they don't already have it. I'd be willing to bet that $80k is a fairly median salary for somebody in New York City with a Bachelor's degree plus 12-24 credit-hours (or more) under their belt.
Also, as to the low quality of teachers considering what they make, you have to consider that however well paid they may be in New York City, NYC is probably still drawing from the "national pool" of Education grads. You are bound to have a lot of duds in that pool, considering that most states/districts aren't offering the same kind of salaries you are seeing in your district. Unfortunately, because of grade inflation and the generally non-competitive nature of most Education programs, it's probably hard for your district to know which ones are the duds before they hire them, so you end up with some teachers that are only worth the $20k or so that they would make in areas of my home state making the $50k or $60k that your district starts them off at.
Oh, and I liked your story, and I've heard many other BS stories out of the teaching profession. Sometimes I wonder why anybody does it.
If you think about it, 500 million sales == $500 million (this is total sales). As far as I know, that is pretty much small potatoes in this industry.
Actually, that isn't the RIAA's problem. The problem is that
500 million songs sold == about 50 to 100 million LESS albums sold == 0 dollars. (or worse...see below)
($500 million brought in, minus the $500 million in lost record sales, assuming the low end number of 50 million lost record sales and a low end price of $9.99 an album. Assume higher numbers of lost album sales, or more expensive albums, and iTMS is a LOSS for the labels.)
Every time I pay 99 cents for the one song off the album I want, I'm not spending the $9.99 to $14.99 that the album would have cost me, and the label loses 9 to 14 bucks. While better than the 10 to 15 they'd lose if I just pirated it, I would hope people might understand why this would make them unhappy (whether or not you agree with them or not).
They don't want to price the songs higher so they will make more money off them...they want to price the songs higher so they will make LESS money off them, because people will just not buy them and instead buy the album. That, or begin "renting" their music, which seems to be what the other services are offering. And if they choose to pirate instead, they'll just sue them into bankrupcy (or try).
I feel sorry for the poor hip hop stars. Do you have any idea how much it costs to insure a Ferrari?
It's not the Ferrari that gets you, it's the freakin' payments on the jet. Those Gulfstreams ain't cheap.
If a cd has a average of 12 songs and the cd proce is 20-25 dollars...
Where the hell are some of these people shopping for music? I can't even see it costing that much in Canadian dollars. Usually anywhere from 11.99 US to 16.99 US (depending on if you're shopping at a megachain like Target or Wal-Mart down to a small locally-owned shop) for brick and mortar, and usually 9.99 US to 14.99 US online.
To be fair, iTMS is now profitable...but IIRC it is not profitable enough to be a significant portion of what Apple brings in. So no, it's not there to make money, it's there to sell iPods, as the parent said.
A seller will increase it's price until enough buyers stop demanding.
True. And it seems that enough buyers stopped demanding about the same time Napster came out.
And it wasn't just because Napster was free, though that made the effect a lot more potent. It was also because for the first time ever there was competition, in any form, in the music industry.
I've even heard that they try preventing you from converting the file to other formats, is that true?
Actually, that's absolutely untrue. You can easily burn it to audio CD, at which point you can re-rip it and re-encode it into whatever format you choose. Though, of course, if you choose another lossy format (such as MP3) you will lose more quality on the second go-round...but that's just due to the nature of compression in general, not a plot by Apple (or the record labels, for that matter).
What the hell? They're selling a frickin' commodity - a virtually unnecessary and frequently crappy one at that - so let them charge whatever they want.
Except that copyright is not God-given. It was granted by the government to encourage production in the arts, for the good of society as a whole. Music (and theatre, and literature, and now movies) was not meant to be consumed only by the wealthy. The only reason this monopoly is granted at all is to encourage artists to create. Without copyright, the artists and record labels would have no product to sell, because all of us would be allowed to share it with each other, from the moment it was created, for free.
Copyright was NOT originally meant to protect the authors/creators. It was meant to benefit society...it's just that the only way to do that was to make sure that artists made some money for their work.
We, as in the people, gave them copyright, gave them this commodity, so that everybody would be uplifted. Personally, by extending the public domain into near infinity, I think they have failed to live up to their end of the bargain. In my opinion, we should take this commodity back. On a subconcious level, I think that is what many music pirates are doing...I don't think they are all the mindless thieving zombies they are made out to be.
And while music is virtually unnecessary in a literal sense, I think a world without music (or the rest of the arts) would be an unpleasant world to live in.
While the record companies have a point saying that increased demand should allow for price increases, the market has already made it clear that many consumers are not willing to follow their pricing model.
Perhaps increased demand should lead to higher prices...but then, if we're pricing music based on supply and demand, then the nearly infinite "supply" of digital music should make it damn near free.
I guess could agree that music should be priced at what the public is willing to pay, based on demand. But continued piracy of music online shows that even at 99 cents a song, much of the public feels that price is too high. One would argue that it's hard to compete with somebody giving away your product for free, but at the same time I really do feel there is a price point at which a vast majority of people would choose the legitimate market over the black market. I just don't think the record labels have dipped that low yet, and I know they don't want to.
Really, the quality of the product being given away for free is also much lower than what is being sold. I'm more than willing to give up good money to have a physical disc, at full audio quality, that I can re-rip should I lose my files. I like liner notes. Hell, I even think buying a full album on iTunes has some value...such as knowing that the entire CD will have been ripped at the same quality, with accurate and consistant tags without my having to take the time to do/fix it myself.
But is the physical CD worth $14.99 to me? Is the "virtual" CD worth $11.99 or $12.99 (the price the labels seem to be pushing for full albums on iTunes, compared to the original $9.99)? No.
For sake of argument, my personal price point would be more like $9.99 for physical CD's (and I'm not talking old/surplus stuff) and $6.99 or $7.99 for whole album downloads. $0.99 a song actually doesn't bother me, as for many CD's it would be saving me about ten bucks, as there is often only one song I want. Do the labels want to try these price points? Hell no. They'd argue that they cannot possibly make money at those levels.
At which point I would pull out a tape of MTV Cribs, which to me is absolute proof there is some room to lower prices. And that's just what artists pull in...I also know that there aren't many record execs driving Civics.
Your comment is disturbingly sadist (regardless of the pains you take to stress that you only hurt "evil" people). In my opinion, gratuitous violence like that which you describe is titillation (as with porn), not "gameplay."
This is the problem I always had with GTA 3 and GTA:VC (never bothered with SA)...the game itself didn't impress me, and I'm not generally into violence just for violence sake. Same reason that GTA:LC is not an incentive for me to get into a PSP, whereas most people bill it as a big selling point.