Perhaps cracked is more of an operating word than meant- I have to wonder if increased sales are in any way related to the cracking of the format (people not feeling so locked-in- so they can put the dvd on their ipod, etc).
Why the hell would anyone buy a more expensive blu-ray disk and player to put it on their iPod when the cheaper DVD will definitely fill that need more simply?
Well if they can give me a phone that lets me easily remember which girls name and number is which from my phone book I might be interested... all that search experiance has to be good for something!!
Someone does need to solve this problem. I remember when I was single I once had three versions of the name Tara in my phone and couldn't recall any girls named Tara at all.
Now unlimited high speed data "might" be worth it. Might be because for the most part people don't need it. Businesses and self employed might need it. Say going to a client and making a presentation and you need stuff from outside at the last minute. Regular people? What, watch YouTube on my phone? I guess some will.
It's useful for more than watching YouTube on your phone. You can use your phone as a modem in a lot of cases. And if you are doing that and the speed is fast enough for actual internet access, this bill could allow you to combine your cell phone bill and internet bill. (3G speeds and above I bet would be acceptable to most consumers) So when you look at it as 100-150 a month for unlimited cell/unlimited internet, that's not so bad.
Having spent much of my youth among Fundamentalists in the Deep South, I have never, ever heard a call among them for instituting e.g. the public stoning of homosexuals or taking the lash to adultresses, punishments which are extremely common in the most theocratic parts of the Muslim world. The things that American conservative Christians are vocal about, say, allowing a prayer before a high school football game or tweaking a biology textbook, as odious as they may be to many desiring complete separation of church and state, are in no way comparable to the gory brutality of Muslim theocracies that exist as we speak.
Right, well they are restrained by political correctness. People must remember that a movement hardly starts out as a full wanting of what they eventually end up getting. Today they might simply want to ban gay marriage, then they want to push gay rights back in another way and then after a while it keeps getting worse as the anti-gay rights agenda continues to pull votes. Fundamentalists fundamentally hate gays, it's part of their particular belief set. People that hate people will express it in any way they are given power to. Right now, fortunately, it would be the equivalent of climbing legal mount everest to get people stoned to death for being gay. However, this isn't because of the deep south, this is because of the people on the so-hated "liberal left" that actually believe in things like not killing other people because they have different beliefs and actually giving minorities rights fit for the majority. Every social equality measure that has been passed in the last century has been fought vehemently against by the deep south and other hardcore conservatives who stop just short of believing that the country wouldn't be better off if the south would've been able to keep their slaves. The republican party and the right wing have been hijacked by the south into playing social equality issues as a party platform and in this way oppose freedom much as they reinforced it in Lincoln's day.
That rant aside, what I mean to say is this: Many southerner fundamentalists (I'm not going to say all or most) are radical to the point of Muslim extremists. However, their rights to be radical are curtailed in this country by rule of law. It's lucky for all of us that the entire country isn't full of these radicals or they probably would start stoning the gay population and slaying anyone who doesn't believe in Christ.
What I find intriguing about the Borat movie which most people whitewash over in favor of the naked fighting scenes or the overt prejudice against Jewish people used for comedic purposes (even though Cohen himself is Jewish), is the way it exposes the deep south and fundamentalists and their core beliefs by changing the way the subject matter is presented. Under different circumstances, I can't imagine that the rodeo person in Borat would've admitted that part of his agenda, deep down in the back of it was to get gay people killed. However, under false pretenses he was presented with a situation which allowed him to actually admit this. When Borat says that in his country, gay people killed, the man replies: that's what we're trying to get happen here. Yes, they aren't that extreme, yet, because they are being curtailed. With any luck they will stay that way. But make no bones about it, even if they aren't overtly that extreme they believe in hatred deep down in their heart. Given the power to unleash it on the world they would indeed do so. Which in a lot of ways makes them similar to Al Queda.
Also, Dell would have to distribute CDs with the source code since OpenOffice is GPL'd, etc, etc. None of it is a show-stopper, but why go through all the hassle with no reward? Distributing free software that they don't want to support (or don't think they can sell support on) doesn't make sense for Dell.
I'm actually kind of here to moderate, but, what about the reward of more customers? You know, I bet a lot of people aren't particularly happy that you don't get any real office software when you get your computer. I can imagine people having conversations such as the following taking place:
Person 1:Computers are such a rip-off, I just bought a new computer and now I have to buy office because my kids can't use what they gave us for schoolwork.
Person 2:I don't know, I bought my computer from Dell, we got office for free and it works pretty well.
People don't know the real difference between office packages. There's people who have used works for years until they run into incompatibility issues with others. People will use what is shipped. They don't have to pay Microsoft anything to ship a version of OpenOffice with their Dell, and they can advertise that they include a full office suite with their PC. Word gets around, it could become quite a little bonus for Dell. So to say there's no benefit is a little misleading.
And the worst part is that when the studios make good content, it's canceled or sunk very quickly. Most people have probably never heard of Idiocracy, but everyone I've heard who's seen it says it's awesome, but it only ran for one weekend in 8 theaters because some exec got scared because it made fun of all the idiots of the world. And then there's Firefly, and Dr. Who, and Torchwood, which got shown out of order and canceled, butchered unrecognizably to add commercials, and completely ignored respectively.
Dear Consumer,
We appreciate you voicing your concerns on this pressing matter and are glad that you choose us for your entertainment purposes. It's people like you that make mass media what it is and we thank you. Unfortunately, many of the shows and movies you listed were not watched by a lot of people so we had to cancel them. The problem is that we need one billion dollars in ad revenue instead of the mere millions that a company would receive by airing quality entertainment and not pandering to ratings. (I mean, who, these days, can afford to run a company on the millions?). You mentioned an interest in the movie and/or television program "Idiocracy," I'm glad to inform you that on the violence channel, one of our best hits "Ow! My Balls" is entering it's 25th season with no end in sight. Perhaps if you enjoyed some of our other quality entertainment, you will find this enticing.
P.S. Don't you dare use other internet media outlets for your entertainment purposes or we will consider you a pirate and sue you for living. And if you don't buy/see our movies we will consider this profit loss due to the aforementioned piracy.
I hope it inspires a change in the way that people choose to consume content - perhaps learning the value in seeking out lesser known artists instead of spending their cash on whatever happens to be pushed through more commercialized channels.
Don't get too high on the hype. If the people I know are any indicator there are two types of music listeners, and one is about 10x more popular than the other:
People that actually enjoy music - These people actually like music for music's sake, they enjoy the composition, the content, the lyrics, the entire package. They generally enjoy the concept of art as an abstract thing and enjoy the self-expression, creation and craft involved with such works. Music to them is a type of masterpiece in the same way it is as other things (painted art, literature, etc).
People that enjoy music that fits needs, be it popularity, etc. - These people, and I honestly do think that they constitute more of the majority of listeners these days, aren't particularly concerned with quality. They want dancing music, or they want music with lyrics that relate to an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend that pisses them off or other utilitarian type listens. They use music as a way of relating to others in that they like what's popular because it is popular, either in general or in their particular little group. These type of people generally only like either what's popular or one particular type of music or what they've been exposed to repeatedly. Music isn't something new to be discovered, it's a social phenomenon upon which they build their friendships and status. People in this category generally don't like anything that's not already part of their peer group or they haven't been introduced to by a member of their group, or their particular form of popular music exposure.
Leaving generalities behind, I honestly think that people will not necessarily change what they like simply because a popular radio station has to play some alternative music. In fact, I think you'll find that people actually do prefer Britney Spears squealing out a couple of crappy songs to anything alternative in some cases. The truth is that for far too many people, music isn't music for music's sake. It's a means to a goal, it's an end in some form. They have a stake in it other than the enjoyment of it itself.
Every now and then you'll get a band like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin that can innovate and still remain popular, however, it's not usually the case. In most cases the public gets exactly what it craves: bland repeat crap from the same five artists because they can't wrap their brains around anything new or different. At least this public, this generation. Maybe I'm just too cynical and the people I hang around are dullards that don't appreciate different music. But it sure seems like that's the majority of people from my angle.
Every week he seems to make a few comments bashing Canada, usually at public events, and typically without any real justification. Some of these comments are patently false, or non-applicable to the Canadian reality, many of them are mean spirited and seem to be designed to damage the historically good relations between Canada and the US. The guy is single handedly responsible for 78% of the anti- american sentiment in Canada.
Most people in America are pretty cool, but remember to watch out for Dave, he's a dick!
In my opinion the most frustrating one of these is the fact that the application itself handles window frame messages.
Definitely. I remember first reading about how the window has to repaint itself too and I remember thinking, "well isn't that odd, that explains why windows just go white and unresponsive sometimes." To me, when you see a window not repainting itself it becomes very self-evident that no matter what design decisions the application programmer made, this should NEVER happen in the OS and whatever OS design allowed it to happen is fundamentally flawed in one way or another.
Can't even be bothered to read the summary, eh? The research used a video game to find out that depressed people are bad at spatial memory. It did not show that playing video games cures depression.
The summary, hell, the title of the entry is "VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area," he obviously didn't even read that.
I guess this proves that it's not just Sony that puts the "boom" into laptops.
And further proves my personal theory that corporations with the letters S O N and Y in their name are bad at battery manufacturing and quality control. =P
Well... the reality is Jobs is selling the music because he is comming closer than anyone to what customers ACTUALLY want. Online sales more than doubled and who caused that? Also of note is that they never said CD sales are down... only that revenue is down. Expenses such as suing so many people might drain revenue no?
I'm so sick of this revenue is down shit. They use it all the time as a guilt ploy against the public or to lobby congress. Here's the deal: there's nothing saying we have to buy music. Got it? Awesome.
Profits can go down without it being piracy's fault. People could STOP buying the new rubbish that these people churn out. The fact that they can't prove if its piracy or declining sales for other reasons gives their argument no leg to stand on and I, for one, am quite sick of the complaining.
I advocate not supporting these people, pirate or don't buy music from major labels, whatever you like. Maybe when they start to get more of the hot air drained from their balloon they'll start to realize that they're going down and start treating the customers like customers instead of thieves.
But nothing says that sales have to keep going up, there's reasons why industries fail that have nothing to do with piracy. These companies need to look at their own actions. The fact that if I listen to radio the only thing I'm exposed to is the same 5 songs per station (not counting classic radio), and the same songs cross station if stations are the same genre. They've effectively put a stranglehold on the forms of distribution in order to push the 3 artists a year they see as the biggest potential cashcows. Don't come whining to the government when customers refuse to bite.
I guess it's like that old thought that companies are only pro laissez faire capitalism when they are in the black, when they start losing money or marketshare because their tactics in the marketplace aren't working, they want their old pal government control to bounce them back.
MS made a format that fits the very definition of what they said will be required in this bill. Is this bill just going to lead to government organizations upgrading to the new Office? Technically, all of these things apply even if the implementation of the "standard" will later be forked by MS with their extend and extinguish model. In short, does this really mean truly open formats will get a boost? Or that MS's new format will seem like the solution to a problem they have practically invented?
I certainly don't have time to listen to 100 bad tunes to find one good one.
I need filtering, or i'm just going to keep on listening to Zeppelin.
Exactly, what the web needs, and if it happens, you can say you heard it here first is a giant digital repository for digital music that is well set up. Something like an Amazon.com, where you can have reviews, genres, and look at the top rated by editors, top rated by music buyers, top purchased, etc. There has to be some metric to skim through the crap I don't want. People complain about the radio/TV/etc for band exposure, saying you have to sell out or whatever to get through these avenues, but you have to remember another thing: you have to be half decent most times to get through these venues. You have to produce music someone would want to listen to at some point or you won't get signed. That's just the bottom line.
You can't listen to the entirety of music that's being made at this moment, but if you could skim off the top layer, you'd have a chance. Nobody wants to pay even $.50 a track for garbage and it's too time consuming to listen to everything. They should have reviewing as part of the built-in mechanism and charge a nominal fee per download of the song, some kind of percentage, plus they could supplement that with ad views. I could almost guarantee that if enough small bands signed on it would become the next generation's MTV, and I for one would support it whole heartedly. If this worked right, it could become a YouTube for music almost, kind of like myspace sort of attempts to be nowadays.
CompUSA seems to be going through the same type of identity crisis that is common amongst retail stores that are soon to be out of business. What do they sell? Computers, and accessories? Software? Video games? Consumer electronics? Cell Phones? They do a dozen things and none of them stand out. There is nothing that people want to buy where they think "CompUSA" when they are deciding where to go to get it.
You touched on the primary issue. When I was helping my brother with a drive install, I noticed it didn't come with a serial ATA cable and so I set out on an adventure to find one. CompUSA was one of my first stops, what with Comp in the name and all, but it was out of stock. When you are a "computer" store and you are out of stock of items that you definitely should carry and have enough of for no apparent reason (I bet they had two cables and sold 1 of them last month and one last week and forgot to order more, it's not like there was a rush), you have lost. I found the cable at Best Buy for a premium. It was for these last minute purchases where you don't want to wait 2 - 3 days for something that computer stores should exist, but CompUSA was insufficient in these cases. It's pretty bad when Best Buy keeps more basic cabling/computer accessories in stock than you do when you are supposedly primarily in the computer business. Everytime I go in there you can almost hear a pin drop, kind of like radioshack seems to be too nowadays. This doesn't come as a surprise at all. Get back into what you should be there for, the crap we don't have the time to order online and need last minute.
In the US we are watching a lot of small personal freedoms be legislated away. This is one of them: to do what we wish with what we purchase. I understand it isn't 'in the constitution' but it is implied in our way of life. The fact that our leaders continue to propose bills of 'fair use' that don't allow 'fair use' is more telling of who is in control. This is yet another tiny step nowhere for the 'fair use' debate.
I've got one solution: become a pirate. Seriously, they can't prosecute 100% of the population, introduce everyone to piracy. If you don't buy their products they won't have the money to lobby congress, they won't have the money to include more DRM and they'll see that including the DRM was worthless for preventing piracy. If everyone started pirating today the battle on piracy would eventually end in our favor, and these people would have to start being civil to their customers again.
They can try, but they can't jail and sue all of us. Consider it 21st century's repeal of prohibition by popular demand.
I mean, how hard can it be? The key either is valid or it isn't. Compare the key for validity using the same algorithm that Windows installation uses and compare it against the database of invalidated keys and that's it. No other software products have no problems with validating keys, why is this causing so much problems for Microsoft?
There's other variables. There's volume licensing, there's tying each license to a specific set of hardware involved and documenting all that. Make no bones about it, I'm sure this is a very complicated process after all the variables are taken into account and it is these variables that will lead to false positives. Funny enough, these same false positives will eventually (as is happening now) result in more lenient policies, and these more lenient policies will be used to then crack the system for the pirates.
One of the more ingenious Vista cracks stems from the fact that Vista had to provide a way to activate installations with no access to the Internet. Because of these problems, they allowed a "30-day grace" period in order to attempt to resolve the licensing issues. With a few date tricks, hackers were able to make Vista effectively always be in this grace period using a local run copy of whatever server MS uses to do its licensing in bulk.
The problem is that the tighter you grip, the more legitimate customers leak out the sides, and when you try to catch them, you effectively lose hold of everything as is happening now. I wonder how many pirates right now are snickering at their "not sure" and downloading updates.
I believe an earlier post is right. Make it apparent to customers which vendors are posing an issue and not giving good merchandise, but don't go pirate hunting. It doesn't help anyone in the end, and will just wind up costing you a bunch of money. When the big companies figure this out for themselves, which may take a couple days, you can watch things like WGA vanish before your eyes.
because in those days 1 copy of windows would supply dozens of people (family, friends, their family, etc).
Do you _really_ expect people to buy a copy of an OS for each machine in their home? Because it's not going to happen, ever. The only way MS has gotten away with this "you can't reuse your OS" crap is because there is a copy of Windows they pay you to use with every installation. If consumers had to go out and buy one box per computer, you'd better believe there'd be an uproar about this.
Though it won't happen. Bask in ruminations of what would happen if Apple bought AMD.
I'd be stuck between buying Apple and Intel machines as a choice (See: rock and hard place) until another company put enough funds out for research to make decent alternative chips (see: close to never). It took us long enough to get a viable alternative to Intel, let's just hope it sticks around.
Consider the social aspect of a ringtone to a teenager, and the potential need for instant replacement if a certain ringtone is frowned upon by friends. With that in perspective, it's likely that the ringtones are priced at a point the market will bear, as sad and painful as that may be to the technically inclined.
The price of ringtones is reasonable only to spoiled teenagers and people with more money than brains. Everyone sane usually uses a stock ringer, or gets one ringer every 2 years. Nobody wants to pay 1.99 for something you'll have to replace if you get a new phone. People who I wouldn't consider exactly technologically proficient have enough brains to realize these things and might get one midi ringtone and stick with it for the rest of the phone's life. Maybe there's some trendy hip-hop loving teenagers that have to have "I want to love (f**k) you" as their ringtone this week and then something else next week, but I believe this makes up the vast minority of consumers.
My phone I can just put straight MP3s as ringtones, so I win, and for other people who feel the need to get ringtones, you guys should try a service such as mbuzzy which only costs you the account (if you buy one) + download per kb charge from your service provider.
It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."
Yeah, really. They can lie all they want, but the fact of the matter is that I have a degree in computer science, now it's not from a major technology school, but it seems I can't buy a career in IT, even in call assistance.
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Why the hell would anyone buy a more expensive blu-ray disk and player to put it on their iPod when the cheaper DVD will definitely fill that need more simply?
Someone does need to solve this problem. I remember when I was single I once had three versions of the name Tara in my phone and couldn't recall any girls named Tara at all.
It's useful for more than watching YouTube on your phone. You can use your phone as a modem in a lot of cases. And if you are doing that and the speed is fast enough for actual internet access, this bill could allow you to combine your cell phone bill and internet bill. (3G speeds and above I bet would be acceptable to most consumers) So when you look at it as 100-150 a month for unlimited cell/unlimited internet, that's not so bad.
Right, well they are restrained by political correctness. People must remember that a movement hardly starts out as a full wanting of what they eventually end up getting. Today they might simply want to ban gay marriage, then they want to push gay rights back in another way and then after a while it keeps getting worse as the anti-gay rights agenda continues to pull votes. Fundamentalists fundamentally hate gays, it's part of their particular belief set. People that hate people will express it in any way they are given power to. Right now, fortunately, it would be the equivalent of climbing legal mount everest to get people stoned to death for being gay. However, this isn't because of the deep south, this is because of the people on the so-hated "liberal left" that actually believe in things like not killing other people because they have different beliefs and actually giving minorities rights fit for the majority. Every social equality measure that has been passed in the last century has been fought vehemently against by the deep south and other hardcore conservatives who stop just short of believing that the country wouldn't be better off if the south would've been able to keep their slaves. The republican party and the right wing have been hijacked by the south into playing social equality issues as a party platform and in this way oppose freedom much as they reinforced it in Lincoln's day.
That rant aside, what I mean to say is this: Many southerner fundamentalists (I'm not going to say all or most) are radical to the point of Muslim extremists. However, their rights to be radical are curtailed in this country by rule of law. It's lucky for all of us that the entire country isn't full of these radicals or they probably would start stoning the gay population and slaying anyone who doesn't believe in Christ.
What I find intriguing about the Borat movie which most people whitewash over in favor of the naked fighting scenes or the overt prejudice against Jewish people used for comedic purposes (even though Cohen himself is Jewish), is the way it exposes the deep south and fundamentalists and their core beliefs by changing the way the subject matter is presented. Under different circumstances, I can't imagine that the rodeo person in Borat would've admitted that part of his agenda, deep down in the back of it was to get gay people killed. However, under false pretenses he was presented with a situation which allowed him to actually admit this. When Borat says that in his country, gay people killed, the man replies: that's what we're trying to get happen here. Yes, they aren't that extreme, yet, because they are being curtailed. With any luck they will stay that way. But make no bones about it, even if they aren't overtly that extreme they believe in hatred deep down in their heart. Given the power to unleash it on the world they would indeed do so. Which in a lot of ways makes them similar to Al Queda.
I'm actually kind of here to moderate, but, what about the reward of more customers? You know, I bet a lot of people aren't particularly happy that you don't get any real office software when you get your computer. I can imagine people having conversations such as the following taking place:
Person 1:Computers are such a rip-off, I just bought a new computer and now I have to buy office because my kids can't use what they gave us for schoolwork.
Person 2:I don't know, I bought my computer from Dell, we got office for free and it works pretty well.
People don't know the real difference between office packages. There's people who have used works for years until they run into incompatibility issues with others. People will use what is shipped. They don't have to pay Microsoft anything to ship a version of OpenOffice with their Dell, and they can advertise that they include a full office suite with their PC. Word gets around, it could become quite a little bonus for Dell. So to say there's no benefit is a little misleading.
Dear Consumer,
We appreciate you voicing your concerns on this pressing matter and are glad that you choose us for your entertainment purposes. It's people like you that make mass media what it is and we thank you. Unfortunately, many of the shows and movies you listed were not watched by a lot of people so we had to cancel them. The problem is that we need one billion dollars in ad revenue instead of the mere millions that a company would receive by airing quality entertainment and not pandering to ratings. (I mean, who, these days, can afford to run a company on the millions?). You mentioned an interest in the movie and/or television program "Idiocracy," I'm glad to inform you that on the violence channel, one of our best hits "Ow! My Balls" is entering it's 25th season with no end in sight. Perhaps if you enjoyed some of our other quality entertainment, you will find this enticing.
P.S. Don't you dare use other internet media outlets for your entertainment purposes or we will consider you a pirate and sue you for living. And if you don't buy/see our movies we will consider this profit loss due to the aforementioned piracy.
Yours Truly,
The Mass Media Overlords
Let me be the first to say:
<borat>Nice</borat>
Sir, you can't edit that article, you don't have the credentials!
>> IT'S OKAY, I'M A LIMO DRIVER!
Don't get too high on the hype. If the people I know are any indicator there are two types of music listeners, and one is about 10x more popular than the other:
Leaving generalities behind, I honestly think that people will not necessarily change what they like simply because a popular radio station has to play some alternative music. In fact, I think you'll find that people actually do prefer Britney Spears squealing out a couple of crappy songs to anything alternative in some cases. The truth is that for far too many people, music isn't music for music's sake. It's a means to a goal, it's an end in some form. They have a stake in it other than the enjoyment of it itself.
Every now and then you'll get a band like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin that can innovate and still remain popular, however, it's not usually the case. In most cases the public gets exactly what it craves: bland repeat crap from the same five artists because they can't wrap their brains around anything new or different. At least this public, this generation. Maybe I'm just too cynical and the people I hang around are dullards that don't appreciate different music. But it sure seems like that's the majority of people from my angle.
Most people in America are pretty cool, but remember to watch out for Dave, he's a dick!
Here's one I found interesting
Especially when you look at the cities: Elmhurst, IL is obviously the place with the most wankers which comes as a surprise to well....nobody really.
Definitely. I remember first reading about how the window has to repaint itself too and I remember thinking, "well isn't that odd, that explains why windows just go white and unresponsive sometimes." To me, when you see a window not repainting itself it becomes very self-evident that no matter what design decisions the application programmer made, this should NEVER happen in the OS and whatever OS design allowed it to happen is fundamentally flawed in one way or another.
The summary, hell, the title of the entry is "VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area," he obviously didn't even read that.
And further proves my personal theory that corporations with the letters S O N and Y in their name are bad at battery manufacturing and quality control. =P
I'm so sick of this revenue is down shit. They use it all the time as a guilt ploy against the public or to lobby congress. Here's the deal: there's nothing saying we have to buy music. Got it? Awesome.
Profits can go down without it being piracy's fault. People could STOP buying the new rubbish that these people churn out. The fact that they can't prove if its piracy or declining sales for other reasons gives their argument no leg to stand on and I, for one, am quite sick of the complaining.
I advocate not supporting these people, pirate or don't buy music from major labels, whatever you like. Maybe when they start to get more of the hot air drained from their balloon they'll start to realize that they're going down and start treating the customers like customers instead of thieves.
But nothing says that sales have to keep going up, there's reasons why industries fail that have nothing to do with piracy. These companies need to look at their own actions. The fact that if I listen to radio the only thing I'm exposed to is the same 5 songs per station (not counting classic radio), and the same songs cross station if stations are the same genre. They've effectively put a stranglehold on the forms of distribution in order to push the 3 artists a year they see as the biggest potential cashcows. Don't come whining to the government when customers refuse to bite.
I guess it's like that old thought that companies are only pro laissez faire capitalism when they are in the black, when they start losing money or marketshare because their tactics in the marketplace aren't working, they want their old pal government control to bounce them back.
MS made a format that fits the very definition of what they said will be required in this bill. Is this bill just going to lead to government organizations upgrading to the new Office? Technically, all of these things apply even if the implementation of the "standard" will later be forked by MS with their extend and extinguish model. In short, does this really mean truly open formats will get a boost? Or that MS's new format will seem like the solution to a problem they have practically invented?
Exactly, what the web needs, and if it happens, you can say you heard it here first is a giant digital repository for digital music that is well set up. Something like an Amazon.com, where you can have reviews, genres, and look at the top rated by editors, top rated by music buyers, top purchased, etc. There has to be some metric to skim through the crap I don't want. People complain about the radio/TV/etc for band exposure, saying you have to sell out or whatever to get through these avenues, but you have to remember another thing: you have to be half decent most times to get through these venues. You have to produce music someone would want to listen to at some point or you won't get signed. That's just the bottom line.
You can't listen to the entirety of music that's being made at this moment, but if you could skim off the top layer, you'd have a chance. Nobody wants to pay even $.50 a track for garbage and it's too time consuming to listen to everything. They should have reviewing as part of the built-in mechanism and charge a nominal fee per download of the song, some kind of percentage, plus they could supplement that with ad views. I could almost guarantee that if enough small bands signed on it would become the next generation's MTV, and I for one would support it whole heartedly. If this worked right, it could become a YouTube for music almost, kind of like myspace sort of attempts to be nowadays.
You touched on the primary issue. When I was helping my brother with a drive install, I noticed it didn't come with a serial ATA cable and so I set out on an adventure to find one. CompUSA was one of my first stops, what with Comp in the name and all, but it was out of stock. When you are a "computer" store and you are out of stock of items that you definitely should carry and have enough of for no apparent reason (I bet they had two cables and sold 1 of them last month and one last week and forgot to order more, it's not like there was a rush), you have lost. I found the cable at Best Buy for a premium. It was for these last minute purchases where you don't want to wait 2 - 3 days for something that computer stores should exist, but CompUSA was insufficient in these cases. It's pretty bad when Best Buy keeps more basic cabling/computer accessories in stock than you do when you are supposedly primarily in the computer business. Everytime I go in there you can almost hear a pin drop, kind of like radioshack seems to be too nowadays. This doesn't come as a surprise at all. Get back into what you should be there for, the crap we don't have the time to order online and need last minute.
I've got one solution: become a pirate. Seriously, they can't prosecute 100% of the population, introduce everyone to piracy. If you don't buy their products they won't have the money to lobby congress, they won't have the money to include more DRM and they'll see that including the DRM was worthless for preventing piracy. If everyone started pirating today the battle on piracy would eventually end in our favor, and these people would have to start being civil to their customers again.
They can try, but they can't jail and sue all of us. Consider it 21st century's repeal of prohibition by popular demand.
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There's other variables. There's volume licensing, there's tying each license to a specific set of hardware involved and documenting all that. Make no bones about it, I'm sure this is a very complicated process after all the variables are taken into account and it is these variables that will lead to false positives. Funny enough, these same false positives will eventually (as is happening now) result in more lenient policies, and these more lenient policies will be used to then crack the system for the pirates.
One of the more ingenious Vista cracks stems from the fact that Vista had to provide a way to activate installations with no access to the Internet. Because of these problems, they allowed a "30-day grace" period in order to attempt to resolve the licensing issues. With a few date tricks, hackers were able to make Vista effectively always be in this grace period using a local run copy of whatever server MS uses to do its licensing in bulk.
The problem is that the tighter you grip, the more legitimate customers leak out the sides, and when you try to catch them, you effectively lose hold of everything as is happening now. I wonder how many pirates right now are snickering at their "not sure" and downloading updates.
I believe an earlier post is right. Make it apparent to customers which vendors are posing an issue and not giving good merchandise, but don't go pirate hunting. It doesn't help anyone in the end, and will just wind up costing you a bunch of money. When the big companies figure this out for themselves, which may take a couple days, you can watch things like WGA vanish before your eyes.
Do you _really_ expect people to buy a copy of an OS for each machine in their home? Because it's not going to happen, ever. The only way MS has gotten away with this "you can't reuse your OS" crap is because there is a copy of Windows they pay you to use with every installation. If consumers had to go out and buy one box per computer, you'd better believe there'd be an uproar about this.
I'd be stuck between buying Apple and Intel machines as a choice (See: rock and hard place) until another company put enough funds out for research to make decent alternative chips (see: close to never). It took us long enough to get a viable alternative to Intel, let's just hope it sticks around.
The price of ringtones is reasonable only to spoiled teenagers and people with more money than brains. Everyone sane usually uses a stock ringer, or gets one ringer every 2 years. Nobody wants to pay 1.99 for something you'll have to replace if you get a new phone. People who I wouldn't consider exactly technologically proficient have enough brains to realize these things and might get one midi ringtone and stick with it for the rest of the phone's life. Maybe there's some trendy hip-hop loving teenagers that have to have "I want to love (f**k) you" as their ringtone this week and then something else next week, but I believe this makes up the vast minority of consumers.
My phone I can just put straight MP3s as ringtones, so I win, and for other people who feel the need to get ringtones, you guys should try a service such as mbuzzy which only costs you the account (if you buy one) + download per kb charge from your service provider.
Ringtones seem fun at first, but get old fast.
Yeah, really. They can lie all they want, but the fact of the matter is that I have a degree in computer science, now it's not from a major technology school, but it seems I can't buy a career in IT, even in call assistance.