I predict that the next way that the digital music market is going to be segmented is not going to be a resurgence of subscription services (although that will gain popularity down the road, I'm sure)... rather, if Microsoft was smart, they'd look at offering songs at differing bit rates at differing costs. The biggest complaint about Apple's AAC files is that they are encoded at 128 bits, and $0.99 doesn't seem like such a great deal for a rock song that sounds like hell on your home stereo system. So what Microsoft should do is to offer 128 bit songs at $0.99 OR 256 bit songs for $1.50 or even $2.00.
Look at how wlidly popular Apple's system is right now. It's a perfect opportunity to position the 128 bit files as the low end, and upsell, upsell, UPSELL! And as long as Microsoft was the only place to get higher quality rips, then Microsoft inspires consumer loyalty. I can't believe all those ivy league MBA's at Microsoft don't see this.
The subscription model has been tried and has fallen flat.
Apple's model, where the consumer virtually owns the digital file, is an unanticipated runaway success.
In the subscription model, the RIAA pockets $120/yr. per user.
In the Apple model, there is NO price ceiling; some consumers may very well spend thousands a year.
So, seeing as how the ceiling-less model is a hit with consumers, why would the RIAA be so quick to cut their own profits by going back to a subscription model? It doesn't make sense. I would say that subscriptions do have a place, but that's years down the road, after the mainstream consumer has toyed around with the Apple model and begins looking for cheaper alternatives.
Why even spend the $10? If you violate the terms of the EULA, the $10 you spent won't cover your ass. You might have well have just gone online with LimeWire and downloaded everything imaginable for free.
Legally, you would be in the same situation either way.
Where I work, we spend most of the day running down ramps, jumping off springboards and collecting gold rings. I guess that's why I never got into Sonic the Hedgehog... it always felt to me like I was back at work. Ah well...
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck.
Ever order a computer from Dell? They'll toss in an el-cheapo mouse for free, or you can upgrade to a decent mouse for $40. Same difference here. Apple tosses in a mouse, or you can "upgrade" yourself at CompUSA. And you can even resell the Apple mouse of eBay.
...start rumors of their interest in buying out insanely large and bloated corporations, then sit back and laugh while the mindless paranoids at Microsoft fall over themselves to beat Apple to the punch, depleting their coffers.
Good point; trying to tax an intangible will simply create a black market that the government will have no control over but will frivilously spend billions trying to police.
After all, once a piece of software is written and transferred via the internet to its final destination, who can say where it originated? It's completely untraceable.
Besides that, the most obvious problem to me is how to tax something like that. By the number of lines of code, or by the number of bytes? Well, how would the government know how much of that code may have originated in the US, how much of it was foreign-made but already taxed, and how much was left to be taxed? This would be particularly troublesome for programs where great blocks of code need to be rewritten. Again, this tax would be completely dependent on the honor system, and most companies would only pay a token amount to give the illusion of compliance.
The only way for the government to get an accurate measure of software written overseas would be to set up some kind of software auditing system, with tens of thousands of software accountants whose job is to monitor software development in corporations and determine the amount of tax owed; unfortunately, the US government has no jurisdiction to enforce such things outside of the US.
Finally, a software tax would only give the advantage to overseas companies, because they don't have to pay the tax. The effect is that software companies in Germany, India, et al, would grow at a much faster rate than US companies. Do we want to be competitive with the rest of the world, or do we want to protect salaries?
I hate to say it, but it's better for the market to simply work things out on its own. Already we are seeing that outsourcing overseas may not be the cost savings that it's cracked up to be; there's really no substitute for having someone who's local and accountable who's working on your project if you want it done right and on time.
I'll tell you why Adobe is making a big deal about this: M-A-R-K-E-T-I-N-G.
Adobe realizes that a commodity PC box costs less. This is important to people that, at the end of the day, have to make the numbers work.
Yes, it's about marketing, but no, adobe doesn't care about the cost of the hardware. This specific page on Adobe's site is about digital video editing, and video editors are used to paying big bucks for their systems. Granted, prices have come down dramatically in the last five years of so, but its still about buying the right tools first and cost second. Even more so now, because cost is so much less of a factor today than it used to be.
No, what this is about is the fact that Apple has encrouched on the Adobe's digital video turf, and adobe is fighting back. What Adobe is worried about is that Apple is steering editors towards Final Cut Pro. Every Mac comes with iMovie, which has also dug into Adobe's pockets a little. And Apple is selling iDVD; I don't know if Adobe has a competing product (I don't think they do), but Apple is offering a near-complete solution for digital video that totally knocks Adobe out of the way. That's what Adobe is pissed about, and they know that editors with Macs will be considering FCP.
If they can disparage the Mac with these benchmarks, then they have completely knocked FCP out of the way.
Well, he did actually ask the USA for permission first, and they said they said "yep, go ahead, we don't care".
You're so full of shit, no wonder you posted that as AC.
Bush the elder warned Hussein many times NOT to invade Kuwait or there would be serious repercussions. Did Hussein listen? No. Did we go in and kick his ass as a result? Absolutely.
The lack-of-coordination part could be a lot of things, but it's also possible they may have already used the "e-bomb" - and that would be News.
Because the report I mentioned implies that we are monitoring their communications, I tend to think that 1) we haven't used the e-bomb yet, and 2) we consider it more important to listen in right now than to disable their communications.
For example, I don't believe we have taken out Iraqi TV, which should have been a priority target. I heard a discussion on the news today that Hussein may have had a coded message in his TV broadcast earlier. Do we care? Apparently not.
Taking Iraq will be easy. It's holding on to Iraq that will be hard.
No more difficult than Afghanistan. Remember, the Iraqis aren't fighters. This is the country that the people endure oppression rather than fight with the backing of the US. The is the army where people surrender BEFORE they see combat. I would be VERY surprised to see Iraq become another Palestine, especially considering the dramatic increase in freedoms they are about to experience.
Also keep in mind that we aren't going to be installing some WASP as president of the country. There is already a group of Iraqi nationals who have been selected as the interim leadership team while we help them build a democratic political system.
I think you give Saddam too much credit. Remember, this is the guy who honestly thought he could invade and assimilate one of the most oil-rich nations in the world, and that we would allow him to maintain his strangle-hold on the world economy.
This is also the guy who honestly thought that his forces would be able to hold their own against the US forces in 1991.
No doubt he knows that defeat is inevitable this time, and it wouldn't surprise me if he faked his own death. No matter, though, because the primary objective is regime change. Whether by death or by flight, Hussein has relinquished his hold on Iraq, and he will never have it again.
Hussein is a multi-billionaire, because he spent the last 12 years diverting profits from the "oil for food" program into his personal bank accounts; if he's on the run, maybe he thinks that he will slip out with all that cash and live a life of wealth and obscurity. The irony would be that he can never spend a lot of that money without drawing a lot of attention to himself.
Taco posts a message about the 3 or 4 oil wells that are on fire, but the big story is here.
Quote:
A senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said military intelligence was picking up signs and "circumstantial evidence" that Saddam and his senior leadership were either incapacitated or out of communication with battlefield commanders. It was too early to say if they were killed or wounded.
"We are seeing no coordinated response to our first attack," the official said. "It's little things here and there. Some individual commanders are hunkering down while others are launching small attacks and setting fires."
Military officials "believe it is significant that there is a lack of coordination and significant resistance to what we did," the official added.
Granted, it's too early to be so optimistic, but surely the lack of any battlefield coordination in Iraq after an attempted hit on Hussein is a bigger story than the 4 oil wells that are on fire.
My guess is that it has to do with Al Gore's experience with Lock Boxes. It'll look like an ordinary copy of The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on the bookshelf, but it won't be. It'll be the lock box.
This isn't the first time that Amazon has posted the wrong price for an item. In fact, they've done it quite a bit.
I bought the movie The Insider on DVD from Amazon when it was first released for $0.99 because of a pricing error.
Sometimes they will honor the pricing error on small ticket items. Usually, however, they will just send you an email announcing that they are unable to fill your order because of a pricing error and that your order is cancelled.
The economic theory behind opening the US up to a global economy is that we allow the export of many low wage positions to poorer countries, and that we retain the higher wage positions at home, and both economies are supposed to improve. However, it seems that somebody forgot to tell the other countries that they were supposed to be satisfied with just our low-wage jobs, because countries like India have entered the tech market with a vengence.
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that the next step is not an increase in jobs, but a decrease, because a sustained withdrawal of capital from the US economy means that consumers have less to spend and therefore businesses will perform even more poorly.
As an example, I think someone here said that Bank of America has a new policy that 70% of their IT development must come from overseas. They have created a ripple in the economy that will ultimately come back to haunt them as Americans have less money to deposit in their banks.
Could they have done anything about it? Not really, because if they didn't take advantage of the overseas markets, their competitors surely would. Fighting to keep the money from flowing overseas for purely economic reasons is a futile battle. Like water seeking the path of least resistance, money is going flow down the path of least cost.
VPC is useful for testing code in various browsers, but it's not a reliable test for colors. PC's are notorious for having a darker gamma than Macs, but VPC doesn't adjust for this. For web designers on Macs, there's still no substitute for having a PC box in close proximity.
What about the pr0n issue? Do they want a bunch of people sitting in their restaurants looking at pr0n? No doubt they will be doing some content filtering.
OTOH, I can see McD's as the new hangout for Quakers. Instant catered LAN party, and the participants have to buy at least one burger an hour to keep playing.
Cool! A Counterstrike server! Now, where's the Linux client that we've been asking for for years, Valve?
Anyone who knows the story of Half-Life for Mac will tell you that you shouldn't hold your breath.
Here's the story... Valve commissioned a port of Half-Life to the Mac, and it would have hit the shelves back in late 1999, a year after the PC version was released and declared a smash hit. Mac gamers were clamoring for it, and of course, there were a lot of fan sites that had already sprung up.
The code was nearly finished. Sierra was less than a week away from mass producing CD's when Gabe Newell of Valve announced the cancellation of the project. Why, because Valve didn't think they'd make money on the project? No, HL for Mac was destined to be a smash hit; DukeNukem 3D for Mac made back all of its development costs the same day it went on sale, and Half-Life for Mac was looking to be as big, if not bigger. No, Valve's problem was that they wanted to build a brand, not simply sell a game; in order to do that, they planned early on that they would make frequent patches to the game.
The problem is that the Mac port would also have to be updated frequently, and the Mac developers would have to port every patch after its release, including all of the bugs and flaws, in order to maintain full compatibility. It also meant that Mac users would frequently be cut off from the PC users during the lag time between the release of the PC patch and its conversion to the Mac. According to Valve, they decided at the last possible moment that they didn't want Mac users complaining all the time, so they kill the Mac version altogether and pissed of a WHOLE lotta people in the process.
Valve doesn't have a problem releasing HL for consoles, obviously, because they couldn't update that code even if they wanted to, so the consoles are off in their own HL universe.
It should also be noted for the record that Gabe Newell of Valve was also a senior manager at Microsoft for a long time before starting Valve, so you can't rule out the possibility that he probably feels very loyal to the Windows platform, and has little to no enthusiam for the minority platforms.
So... Half-Life for Linux or Mac? It'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that the next way that the digital music market is going to be segmented is not going to be a resurgence of subscription services (although that will gain popularity down the road, I'm sure)... rather, if Microsoft was smart, they'd look at offering songs at differing bit rates at differing costs. The biggest complaint about Apple's AAC files is that they are encoded at 128 bits, and $0.99 doesn't seem like such a great deal for a rock song that sounds like hell on your home stereo system. So what Microsoft should do is to offer 128 bit songs at $0.99 OR 256 bit songs for $1.50 or even $2.00.
Look at how wlidly popular Apple's system is right now. It's a perfect opportunity to position the 128 bit files as the low end, and upsell, upsell, UPSELL! And as long as Microsoft was the only place to get higher quality rips, then Microsoft inspires consumer loyalty. I can't believe all those ivy league MBA's at Microsoft don't see this.
From the RIAA's point-of-view...
The subscription model has been tried and has fallen flat.
Apple's model, where the consumer virtually owns the digital file, is an unanticipated runaway success.
In the subscription model, the RIAA pockets $120/yr. per user.
In the Apple model, there is NO price ceiling; some consumers may very well spend thousands a year.
So, seeing as how the ceiling-less model is a hit with consumers, why would the RIAA be so quick to cut their own profits by going back to a subscription model? It doesn't make sense. I would say that subscriptions do have a place, but that's years down the road, after the mainstream consumer has toyed around with the Apple model and begins looking for cheaper alternatives.
Why even spend the $10? If you violate the terms of the EULA, the $10 you spent won't cover your ass. You might have well have just gone online with LimeWire and downloaded everything imaginable for free.
Legally, you would be in the same situation either way.
...as the Feds slapped the cuffs on him and threw him against the hood of the car.
Where I work, we spend most of the day running down ramps, jumping off springboards and collecting gold rings. I guess that's why I never got into Sonic the Hedgehog... it always felt to me like I was back at work. Ah well...
that this is only from Mac users, who are >5% of the total PC market. $100k in less than 18 hours from less than 5% of the market.
Supposedly, Apple is already working on iTunes for Windows. Just imagine what that number is going to be when they roll the Windows version out.
The point is that you should *not* have to run out and drop *more* money to get another peripheral to make your spangling new Mac not suck.
Ever order a computer from Dell? They'll toss in an el-cheapo mouse for free, or you can upgrade to a decent mouse for $40. Same difference here. Apple tosses in a mouse, or you can "upgrade" yourself at CompUSA. And you can even resell the Apple mouse of eBay.
Big fat hairy deal.
Considering the Hulk's anger-management problem, is it really wise to put him up in another trailer?
Maybe in the sequel, the Hulk will be ordered by the courts to have Jack Nicholson move in with him to help control his anger.
At least THAT would be a far more interesting anger management movie than the dreck the Adam Sandler is currently in.
...start rumors of their interest in buying out insanely large and bloated corporations, then sit back and laugh while the mindless paranoids at Microsoft fall over themselves to beat Apple to the punch, depleting their coffers.
Good point; trying to tax an intangible will simply create a black market that the government will have no control over but will frivilously spend billions trying to police.
After all, once a piece of software is written and transferred via the internet to its final destination, who can say where it originated? It's completely untraceable.
Besides that, the most obvious problem to me is how to tax something like that. By the number of lines of code, or by the number of bytes? Well, how would the government know how much of that code may have originated in the US, how much of it was foreign-made but already taxed, and how much was left to be taxed? This would be particularly troublesome for programs where great blocks of code need to be rewritten. Again, this tax would be completely dependent on the honor system, and most companies would only pay a token amount to give the illusion of compliance.
The only way for the government to get an accurate measure of software written overseas would be to set up some kind of software auditing system, with tens of thousands of software accountants whose job is to monitor software development in corporations and determine the amount of tax owed; unfortunately, the US government has no jurisdiction to enforce such things outside of the US.
Finally, a software tax would only give the advantage to overseas companies, because they don't have to pay the tax. The effect is that software companies in Germany, India, et al, would grow at a much faster rate than US companies. Do we want to be competitive with the rest of the world, or do we want to protect salaries?
I hate to say it, but it's better for the market to simply work things out on its own. Already we are seeing that outsourcing overseas may not be the cost savings that it's cracked up to be; there's really no substitute for having someone who's local and accountable who's working on your project if you want it done right and on time.
I'll tell you why Adobe is making a big deal about this: M-A-R-K-E-T-I-N-G.
Adobe realizes that a commodity PC box costs less. This is important to people that, at the end of the day, have to make the numbers work.
Yes, it's about marketing, but no, adobe doesn't care about the cost of the hardware. This specific page on Adobe's site is about digital video editing, and video editors are used to paying big bucks for their systems. Granted, prices have come down dramatically in the last five years of so, but its still about buying the right tools first and cost second. Even more so now, because cost is so much less of a factor today than it used to be.
No, what this is about is the fact that Apple has encrouched on the Adobe's digital video turf, and adobe is fighting back. What Adobe is worried about is that Apple is steering editors towards Final Cut Pro. Every Mac comes with iMovie, which has also dug into Adobe's pockets a little. And Apple is selling iDVD; I don't know if Adobe has a competing product (I don't think they do), but Apple is offering a near-complete solution for digital video that totally knocks Adobe out of the way. That's what Adobe is pissed about, and they know that editors with Macs will be considering FCP.
If they can disparage the Mac with these benchmarks, then they have completely knocked FCP out of the way.
Well, he did actually ask the USA for permission first, and they said they said "yep, go ahead, we don't care".
You're so full of shit, no wonder you posted that as AC.
Bush the elder warned Hussein many times NOT to invade Kuwait or there would be serious repercussions. Did Hussein listen? No. Did we go in and kick his ass as a result? Absolutely.
The lack-of-coordination part could be a lot of things, but it's also possible they may have already used the "e-bomb" - and that would be News.
Because the report I mentioned implies that we are monitoring their communications, I tend to think that 1) we haven't used the e-bomb yet, and 2) we consider it more important to listen in right now than to disable their communications.
For example, I don't believe we have taken out Iraqi TV, which should have been a priority target. I heard a discussion on the news today that Hussein may have had a coded message in his TV broadcast earlier. Do we care? Apparently not.
Taking Iraq will be easy. It's holding on to Iraq that will be hard.
No more difficult than Afghanistan. Remember, the Iraqis aren't fighters. This is the country that the people endure oppression rather than fight with the backing of the US. The is the army where people surrender BEFORE they see combat. I would be VERY surprised to see Iraq become another Palestine, especially considering the dramatic increase in freedoms they are about to experience.
Also keep in mind that we aren't going to be installing some WASP as president of the country. There is already a group of Iraqi nationals who have been selected as the interim leadership team while we help them build a democratic political system.
I think you give Saddam too much credit. Remember, this is the guy who honestly thought he could invade and assimilate one of the most oil-rich nations in the world, and that we would allow him to maintain his strangle-hold on the world economy.
This is also the guy who honestly thought that his forces would be able to hold their own against the US forces in 1991.
No doubt he knows that defeat is inevitable this time, and it wouldn't surprise me if he faked his own death. No matter, though, because the primary objective is regime change. Whether by death or by flight, Hussein has relinquished his hold on Iraq, and he will never have it again.
Hussein is a multi-billionaire, because he spent the last 12 years diverting profits from the "oil for food" program into his personal bank accounts; if he's on the run, maybe he thinks that he will slip out with all that cash and live a life of wealth and obscurity. The irony would be that he can never spend a lot of that money without drawing a lot of attention to himself.
Quote:
Granted, it's too early to be so optimistic, but surely the lack of any battlefield coordination in Iraq after an attempted hit on Hussein is a bigger story than the 4 oil wells that are on fire.
My guess is that it has to do with Al Gore's experience with Lock Boxes. It'll look like an ordinary copy of The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on the bookshelf, but it won't be. It'll be the lock box.
This isn't the first time that Amazon has posted the wrong price for an item. In fact, they've done it quite a bit.
I bought the movie The Insider on DVD from Amazon when it was first released for $0.99 because of a pricing error.
Sometimes they will honor the pricing error on small ticket items. Usually, however, they will just send you an email announcing that they are unable to fill your order because of a pricing error and that your order is cancelled.
The economic theory behind opening the US up to a global economy is that we allow the export of many low wage positions to poorer countries, and that we retain the higher wage positions at home, and both economies are supposed to improve. However, it seems that somebody forgot to tell the other countries that they were supposed to be satisfied with just our low-wage jobs, because countries like India have entered the tech market with a vengence.
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that the next step is not an increase in jobs, but a decrease, because a sustained withdrawal of capital from the US economy means that consumers have less to spend and therefore businesses will perform even more poorly.
As an example, I think someone here said that Bank of America has a new policy that 70% of their IT development must come from overseas. They have created a ripple in the economy that will ultimately come back to haunt them as Americans have less money to deposit in their banks.
Could they have done anything about it? Not really, because if they didn't take advantage of the overseas markets, their competitors surely would. Fighting to keep the money from flowing overseas for purely economic reasons is a futile battle. Like water seeking the path of least resistance, money is going flow down the path of least cost.
VPC is useful for testing code in various browsers, but it's not a reliable test for colors. PC's are notorious for having a darker gamma than Macs, but VPC doesn't adjust for this. For web designers on Macs, there's still no substitute for having a PC box in close proximity.
This is the quickest I ever installed software... hot off the press.
I LOVE mozilla... too bad more users don't have this expirience.
Just installed it on OS X. Installation was literally "dragon-drop" (ba dum bum).
By golly, you're right! Let the terrorists blow up all the skyscrapers they want, because we have science!
Gotta be able to load it, first...
What about the pr0n issue? Do they want a bunch of people sitting in their restaurants looking at pr0n? No doubt they will be doing some content filtering.
OTOH, I can see McD's as the new hangout for Quakers. Instant catered LAN party, and the participants have to buy at least one burger an hour to keep playing.
Cool! A Counterstrike server! Now, where's the Linux client that we've been asking for for years, Valve?
Anyone who knows the story of Half-Life for Mac will tell you that you shouldn't hold your breath.
Here's the story... Valve commissioned a port of Half-Life to the Mac, and it would have hit the shelves back in late 1999, a year after the PC version was released and declared a smash hit. Mac gamers were clamoring for it, and of course, there were a lot of fan sites that had already sprung up.
The code was nearly finished. Sierra was less than a week away from mass producing CD's when Gabe Newell of Valve announced the cancellation of the project. Why, because Valve didn't think they'd make money on the project? No, HL for Mac was destined to be a smash hit; DukeNukem 3D for Mac made back all of its development costs the same day it went on sale, and Half-Life for Mac was looking to be as big, if not bigger. No, Valve's problem was that they wanted to build a brand, not simply sell a game; in order to do that, they planned early on that they would make frequent patches to the game.
The problem is that the Mac port would also have to be updated frequently, and the Mac developers would have to port every patch after its release, including all of the bugs and flaws, in order to maintain full compatibility. It also meant that Mac users would frequently be cut off from the PC users during the lag time between the release of the PC patch and its conversion to the Mac. According to Valve, they decided at the last possible moment that they didn't want Mac users complaining all the time, so they kill the Mac version altogether and pissed of a WHOLE lotta people in the process.
Valve doesn't have a problem releasing HL for consoles, obviously, because they couldn't update that code even if they wanted to, so the consoles are off in their own HL universe.
It should also be noted for the record that Gabe Newell of Valve was also a senior manager at Microsoft for a long time before starting Valve, so you can't rule out the possibility that he probably feels very loyal to the Windows platform, and has little to no enthusiam for the minority platforms.
So... Half-Life for Linux or Mac? It'll never happen.