...except that if you are going to break the licensing agreement, why pay for the songs in the first place? Legally, you don't have a leg to stand on.
I like the direction they're going, and I think 99 per song is reasonable; there's a lot of stuff out there that I'd never buy the whole album, but I'd like to buy a couple of singles.
However, it seems strange that they don't even mention the word "MP3" anywhere on the website. I realize that they are using a proprietary format, but they are trying to mislead people into thinking that this is the legit version of Napster when it's not. Until they are ready to give me complete control over the music I'm buying, I'll never subscribe. Better to buy your CD's used on Half.com (because the RIAA doesn't get a penny from it) and just rip those to MP3. All you need is a little CD polish and one good read, and then you're set.
Umm... if it's free, then how is burning it to a CD going to hurt sales?
Besides, attempts to restrict use are just plain ridiculous. Maybe you can't burn it to a CD, but you can connect the audio out of your computer to the audio in of your laptop, record directly to MP3 format and then burn to a CD.
How many billions of dollars in sales does Wal-Mart do each year? If you honestly think they are staying up late at night because of the missed revenue for a single video game title, you are sadly mistaken.
And frankly, there are larger marketing issues here which I'm sure you can't appreciate. Wal-Mart has spent a lot of money to cultivate a family-friendly image. A BMX game that overtly promotes sexuality would cost more to repair the PR damage than the revenue it would generate.
I haven't seen the numbers, but I think Apple is poised to make inroads into corporate IT, particularly if they ship systems with this 64 bit chip.
The consumer market will probably make a much smaller splash. The real market breakthroughs that Apple needs on the consumer side are more software than hardware.
When Apple started selling FireWire-based Macs, Intel immediately tried to marginalize it by saying that the technology only appealed to a niche of consumers, and oh-by-the-way here's our specs for ATA/66 and USB 2.0 (for which the detailed specs hadn't been finalized, and which didn't start hitting mainstream systems until some 2 years later).
Intel takes seriously Andy Groves's words about only the paranoid surviving.
Killing popups is one of the primary features that pushing me from IE to Mozilla. In spite of the fact that I really love IE.
Chimera also doesn't manage image permissions. I realize that that puts a drag on the speed, if you have a good-sized database of servers, but I'm tired of banner ads trying to blink me to death.
Interestingly enough, Mickey Mouse is due to enter the public domain in 2004, unless Congress passes a copyright extension. The copyright is only good for 50 years after the owner/creator's death. A move is underway to extend that to 75 years.
I don't have a DVD player at home, but I just got the new Monster's Inc. DVD (yes, I know I need to buy a player, but I'm cheap...). I happened to bring a brand-new ThinkPad home from the office to do some work. No RCA out, just S-Video. Cool, I can work with that.
So I pull out my S-Video cable, my computer speakers, and subwoofer, and get it all hooked up. Pop in the DVD and play it. Hmm... the TV is mirroring the laptop screen, but the video doesn't show up. After playing around with it for half an hour (and trying two different software players), I finally notice this little warning that says that "Copy protected DVD's will not output to the S-Video port" (or something like that).
WTF? Why even have a DVD drive and an S-Video port if I can't combine them? Note to everyone: Don't buy a ThinkPad if you think that there's EVER a chance you'll want to play a DVD through the S-Video port. If IBM is so damned concerned about DRM, they need to put a big sticker on the laptop that this is a DRM-enabled system. I guarantee that I will never buy another ThinkPad.
Anyway, next night, I bring home the Apple PowerBook. Hook everything up, pop in the DVD, hit play. No problemo.
Will there be a nuclear power plant near by? Radioactive fallout from a nuclear accident should be good enough to generate a few hundred thousand Silver Age heroes.
Or, maybe a hole in the ozone layer allows the city to be bathed by those mysterious Cosmic Rays(tm).
Personally, I'm finding that the creation of the Empire is just a little bit too silly. Considering the vastness of the Empire, and how many powerful people there are in the universe could benefit by actively installing their own government, why are we only seeing this one guy (Palpatine) doing EVERYTHING from cutting deals with the Trade Federation, to placating the Jedi, to baking the cookies?
In this grand, master plan to overthrow the peaceful government, isn't there anyone else who is plotting with him? And by that I DON'T mean the "Darth Flunkies" that get sent out to battle the Jedi. Where's all the collaborators? Where's his inner circle of political associates?
What we're seeing in the prequels is the kind of political setup you expect to see in a kid's movie -- like the author (Lucas) has little to no concept of how the real world outside of Hollywood works. It's not as cringingly bad as Highlander II, where Michael Ironside walks into a bizzarely lit boardroom, kills the CEO, and appoints himself the head of the company... no, not that bad, but it's darn close.
If an empire this vast can be overthrown by one guy with political ambition, then maybe it deserves to fall. There's obviously very little checks and balances in this system.
The fact that some games have the "-e" suffix and some don't makes me think that maybe they aren't the full versions of the original NES games. Perhaps Nintendo is trying to deal with space limitations of these cards?
Yes, and that eager, heartfelt desire is called an agenda.
Whatever the process is, there is a mechanism for deciding what gets researched and what doesn't. And many times, the scientist has in mind what he/she wants to discover (or doesn't want to discover) apriori. That's a bias that can either skew the results or skew the interpretation of the results. And I'll even go so far as to say that the less reproducible the results, the greater the opportunity for bias in the interpretation of the available data.
Scientists are human, too, and just as fallible as anyone else.
Of course they are. To suggest that scientists have somehow transcended above the human experience is ludicrous. EVERY scientist has an agenda.
Case in point, when Carl Sagan says that there are probably billions of other life forms in the universe, is this based on scientific analysis of the factual evidence, or because of an eager, heartfelt desire to prove their existence?
Yes, a G4 tower refresh is in order for January Macworld, considering that Apple announced that OS 9 would not run on shipping systems starting in January.
Typically what Apple does is they will stop production of a model and let the retail channels empty out in the couple of weeks before a new hardware introduction. They don't want the overlap, though usually there are tower systems available for a while after the MacWorld introduction.
This coming MacWorld, however, I predict that there will be a run on G4 towers before the new models are introduced, because, for the people who aren't ready to switch to OS X, this is their last shot at buying a new G4 system. I predict that Apple is going to cut production beforehand, as usual, and the increased demand will dry up the channels rather quickly.
My advice is to either buy just before MacWorld, or call your MacWarehouse rep on a daily basis to guage their inventory and buy shortly after.
Seriously, AC is right. Do what you have to and get out of there, it's too expensive. Contact some headhunters and start doing a region-wide or even nation-wide job search. No, I don't think you'll pick up 86k again just being a sysadmin (unless you've got serious programming skills), but I don't think that 45-50k is unreasonable for 7 years' experience. Sure beats the 12-14k that McDonalds will pay you, and the cost of living will probably be much cheaper.
The problem, as you stated, is that your area is flooded with overqualified candidates. It's not going to get any better anytime soon. Go someplace where the competition isn't so bad; every city in the US needs sysadmins. Like AC said, set up a 5-7 year plan and start working it. Get that degree so you can go back to Silicon Valley.
Secondly in the UK there are Open University courses which allow you to get a degree at home - You do about 90% of the work at home and attend the actual university for some workshop type courses - I'll be very surprised if there isn't an equivalent in the US (or wherever you live)
There's programs like that here in the US, too. Degrees via the internet are becoming quite popular.
I honestly question the value of an "at home" degree. Sure, you get all of the knowledge, but you miss out on most of the other benefits of a traditional program. Like getting to know your professors personally. I'm in an evening MBA program right now, and there are some professors that I have broken through and established a relationship that will outlast my time at the school.
You miss out on the classroom discussion. If the bulk of your degree is in a canned format, then you don't hear the life experiences of your fellow students in regards to various problems. This is particularly true on the graduate level.
You miss out on networking with people. An old proverb says, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." This is very, very true. You might have degrees and referrals out the yin-yang, but that big consulting contract is still going to go to the interviewer's dorm mate from college.
Finally, you miss out on class lectures, some of which is of more value than the course material because it's coming from the professor's real-life experiences, sometimes things that he/she might not want to type down and leave a record of.
Yeah, they'll tell you that all of those things exist in at-home degrees in some form or another... but there's no substitute for face-to-face contact with other people. You miss a lot with an at-home degree.
I'm currently working on my MBA. I have a full-time job, though I try to keep it at a straight 40 hours a week; I'm sure that running a 3 year old business probably requires more than that, though.
On the other hand, I have a wife and two small children. Any time outside of work that I'm spending on school I'm spending away from the kids, which is very hard.
I'm in an evening degree program, and I take two classes a semester (sometimes one, depending on the difficulty level). There are a lot of evening programs out there, even for the undergrad level. Some universities also offer accelerated executive programs, where you go to all-day Saturday classes instead of evenings; I imagine that that's more popular at the graduate level, though, as most executives would have undergrad degrees.
I'll be wrapping up in another couple of semesters. How is the business degree going to merge with my tech background? That's a question left to be answered (I aspire to be a tech entrepreneur). However, the experience of the program has been tremendous, and it's been worth the effort and expense for the knowledge I've gleaned. Has it been tough? Very. Has it been long? Yes. But, you just have to make yourself into the kind of person who sets long-term goals and keeps focused on those. Running your own business, it's very easy to start thinking only short-term. But if you can't answer the question of who that degree is going to help you become, and in a way that's meaningful to you, then you have no motivating factor to focus on.
What is your motivation for doing this? Make more money? Glean more knowledge? Keeping up with the former high school chums? Feeling a sense of inadequacy when you hire somebody who has more degrees than a protractor? Expanding your business? Changing careers? I'm not saying that I know what your motivation is, but if it's something shallow and reactionary, then yeah, there's no way that that will carry you through. You need to look at how this is going to mold you into the person you want to become and how it will benefit you long term.
And you need to make it clear to everyone who places demands on your time that you are committed to this, so if you can't go grab a brew or stay an extra hour at work, that's why.
I'm talking about games by companies with names like "LucasArts" and "Westwood" that are circa late 90's. NTCompatible.com is a good site for compatibility info.
I would argue that the support for OS 9 apps is greater under OS X than the support for Win9x apps are under WinXP. Classic mode is actually OS 9 running inside of OS X. I honestly can't think of a single OS 9 app that I have that doesn't work under OS X and hasn't been converted. Even QuarkXPress, which everyone is talking about here, runs in Classic mode.
What OS X users are grousing about is that Classic apps don't have the advanced features available that OS X apps have. Memory protection, preemptive multitasking, advanced virtual memory, etc. The Classic environment has those things as a whole, but not the individual apps inside it. The compatibility is there, though.
On my home PC, however... I upgraded from Win98 to Win2K, and half the games in my collection immediately broke. Even games that I can go down to Wal-Mart and buy right now.
There should be continued support for older software for a reasonable period (No idea what this would be though)
OS X has been available for about 2 years now. Granted, the first release was the public beta, but it was obviously sufficient enough for companies like Adobe and Macromedia to get the ball rolling on their OS X conversions.
So why do we have companies like Quark and HP that are dragging their feet on converting their code? Are they waiting to see if OS X is viable? It won't be if Mac users have to play a waiting game for software (though fortunately that hasn't really been the case). I applaud Apple for telling developers, "Ok, you've had 2 years now. Put up or shut up." Apple announced months ago that the OS 9 codebase was officially EOL'ed, so this new announcement shouldn't really come as a shock to any Mac developers.
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...except that if you are going to break the licensing agreement, why pay for the songs in the first place? Legally, you don't have a leg to stand on.
I like the direction they're going, and I think 99 per song is reasonable; there's a lot of stuff out there that I'd never buy the whole album, but I'd like to buy a couple of singles.
However, it seems strange that they don't even mention the word "MP3" anywhere on the website. I realize that they are using a proprietary format, but they are trying to mislead people into thinking that this is the legit version of Napster when it's not. Until they are ready to give me complete control over the music I'm buying, I'll never subscribe. Better to buy your CD's used on Half.com (because the RIAA doesn't get a penny from it) and just rip those to MP3. All you need is a little CD polish and one good read, and then you're set.
He said "30-40," not 3-4...
Umm... if it's free, then how is burning it to a CD going to hurt sales?
Besides, attempts to restrict use are just plain ridiculous. Maybe you can't burn it to a CD, but you can connect the audio out of your computer to the audio in of your laptop, record directly to MP3 format and then burn to a CD.
How many billions of dollars in sales does Wal-Mart do each year? If you honestly think they are staying up late at night because of the missed revenue for a single video game title, you are sadly mistaken.
And frankly, there are larger marketing issues here which I'm sure you can't appreciate. Wal-Mart has spent a lot of money to cultivate a family-friendly image. A BMX game that overtly promotes sexuality would cost more to repair the PR damage than the revenue it would generate.
Nice troll. You obviously haven't used a Mac since the early 90's.
I haven't seen the numbers, but I think Apple is poised to make inroads into corporate IT, particularly if they ship systems with this 64 bit chip.
The consumer market will probably make a much smaller splash. The real market breakthroughs that Apple needs on the consumer side are more software than hardware.
When Apple started selling FireWire-based Macs, Intel immediately tried to marginalize it by saying that the technology only appealed to a niche of consumers, and oh-by-the-way here's our specs for ATA/66 and USB 2.0 (for which the detailed specs hadn't been finalized, and which didn't start hitting mainstream systems until some 2 years later).
Intel takes seriously Andy Groves's words about only the paranoid surviving.
Act now, and we'll mail you a cadaver -- FREE -- with your enrollment!
Chimera doesn't kill popup windows.
Killing popups is one of the primary features that pushing me from IE to Mozilla. In spite of the fact that I really love IE.
Chimera also doesn't manage image permissions. I realize that that puts a drag on the speed, if you have a good-sized database of servers, but I'm tired of banner ads trying to blink me to death.
They should be giving out the PIN numbers to pay to have it turned off, not on. I think they'll make a lot more money that way.
Interestingly enough, Mickey Mouse is due to enter the public domain in 2004, unless Congress passes a copyright extension. The copyright is only good for 50 years after the owner/creator's death. A move is underway to extend that to 75 years.
Apple's next "Best Thing" has been heavily dependent on "Dilbert Office Award Winner" Motorola being able to develop faster chips in a timely manner.
With IBM entering in this equation, I have no doubt that they will be able to keep pace far, far better than Motorola.
I don't have a DVD player at home, but I just got the new Monster's Inc. DVD (yes, I know I need to buy a player, but I'm cheap...). I happened to bring a brand-new ThinkPad home from the office to do some work. No RCA out, just S-Video. Cool, I can work with that.
So I pull out my S-Video cable, my computer speakers, and subwoofer, and get it all hooked up. Pop in the DVD and play it. Hmm... the TV is mirroring the laptop screen, but the video doesn't show up. After playing around with it for half an hour (and trying two different software players), I finally notice this little warning that says that "Copy protected DVD's will not output to the S-Video port" (or something like that).
WTF? Why even have a DVD drive and an S-Video port if I can't combine them? Note to everyone: Don't buy a ThinkPad if you think that there's EVER a chance you'll want to play a DVD through the S-Video port. If IBM is so damned concerned about DRM, they need to put a big sticker on the laptop that this is a DRM-enabled system. I guarantee that I will never buy another ThinkPad.
Anyway, next night, I bring home the Apple PowerBook. Hook everything up, pop in the DVD, hit play. No problemo.
Will there be a nuclear power plant near by? Radioactive fallout from a nuclear accident should be good enough to generate a few hundred thousand Silver Age heroes.
Or, maybe a hole in the ozone layer allows the city to be bathed by those mysterious Cosmic Rays(tm).
Personally, I'm finding that the creation of the Empire is just a little bit too silly. Considering the vastness of the Empire, and how many powerful people there are in the universe could benefit by actively installing their own government, why are we only seeing this one guy (Palpatine) doing EVERYTHING from cutting deals with the Trade Federation, to placating the Jedi, to baking the cookies?
In this grand, master plan to overthrow the peaceful government, isn't there anyone else who is plotting with him? And by that I DON'T mean the "Darth Flunkies" that get sent out to battle the Jedi. Where's all the collaborators? Where's his inner circle of political associates?
What we're seeing in the prequels is the kind of political setup you expect to see in a kid's movie -- like the author (Lucas) has little to no concept of how the real world outside of Hollywood works. It's not as cringingly bad as Highlander II, where Michael Ironside walks into a bizzarely lit boardroom, kills the CEO, and appoints himself the head of the company... no, not that bad, but it's darn close.
If an empire this vast can be overthrown by one guy with political ambition, then maybe it deserves to fall. There's obviously very little checks and balances in this system.
The fact that some games have the "-e" suffix and some don't makes me think that maybe they aren't the full versions of the original NES games. Perhaps Nintendo is trying to deal with space limitations of these cards?
Yes, and that eager, heartfelt desire is called an agenda.
Whatever the process is, there is a mechanism for deciding what gets researched and what doesn't. And many times, the scientist has in mind what he/she wants to discover (or doesn't want to discover) apriori. That's a bias that can either skew the results or skew the interpretation of the results. And I'll even go so far as to say that the less reproducible the results, the greater the opportunity for bias in the interpretation of the available data.
Scientists are human, too, and just as fallible as anyone else.
Of course they are. To suggest that scientists have somehow transcended above the human experience is ludicrous. EVERY scientist has an agenda.
Case in point, when Carl Sagan says that there are probably billions of other life forms in the universe, is this based on scientific analysis of the factual evidence, or because of an eager, heartfelt desire to prove their existence?
Yes, a G4 tower refresh is in order for January Macworld, considering that Apple announced that OS 9 would not run on shipping systems starting in January.
Typically what Apple does is they will stop production of a model and let the retail channels empty out in the couple of weeks before a new hardware introduction. They don't want the overlap, though usually there are tower systems available for a while after the MacWorld introduction.
This coming MacWorld, however, I predict that there will be a run on G4 towers before the new models are introduced, because, for the people who aren't ready to switch to OS X, this is their last shot at buying a new G4 system. I predict that Apple is going to cut production beforehand, as usual, and the increased demand will dry up the channels rather quickly.
My advice is to either buy just before MacWorld, or call your MacWarehouse rep on a daily basis to guage their inventory and buy shortly after.
Seriously, AC is right. Do what you have to and get out of there, it's too expensive. Contact some headhunters and start doing a region-wide or even nation-wide job search. No, I don't think you'll pick up 86k again just being a sysadmin (unless you've got serious programming skills), but I don't think that 45-50k is unreasonable for 7 years' experience. Sure beats the 12-14k that McDonalds will pay you, and the cost of living will probably be much cheaper.
The problem, as you stated, is that your area is flooded with overqualified candidates. It's not going to get any better anytime soon. Go someplace where the competition isn't so bad; every city in the US needs sysadmins. Like AC said, set up a 5-7 year plan and start working it. Get that degree so you can go back to Silicon Valley.
Secondly in the UK there are Open University courses which allow you to get a degree at home - You do about 90% of the work at home and attend the actual university for some workshop type courses - I'll be very surprised if there isn't an equivalent in the US (or wherever you live)
There's programs like that here in the US, too. Degrees via the internet are becoming quite popular.
I honestly question the value of an "at home" degree. Sure, you get all of the knowledge, but you miss out on most of the other benefits of a traditional program. Like getting to know your professors personally. I'm in an evening MBA program right now, and there are some professors that I have broken through and established a relationship that will outlast my time at the school.
You miss out on the classroom discussion. If the bulk of your degree is in a canned format, then you don't hear the life experiences of your fellow students in regards to various problems. This is particularly true on the graduate level.
You miss out on networking with people. An old proverb says, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." This is very, very true. You might have degrees and referrals out the yin-yang, but that big consulting contract is still going to go to the interviewer's dorm mate from college.
Finally, you miss out on class lectures, some of which is of more value than the course material because it's coming from the professor's real-life experiences, sometimes things that he/she might not want to type down and leave a record of.
Yeah, they'll tell you that all of those things exist in at-home degrees in some form or another... but there's no substitute for face-to-face contact with other people. You miss a lot with an at-home degree.
I'm currently working on my MBA. I have a full-time job, though I try to keep it at a straight 40 hours a week; I'm sure that running a 3 year old business probably requires more than that, though.
On the other hand, I have a wife and two small children. Any time outside of work that I'm spending on school I'm spending away from the kids, which is very hard.
I'm in an evening degree program, and I take two classes a semester (sometimes one, depending on the difficulty level). There are a lot of evening programs out there, even for the undergrad level. Some universities also offer accelerated executive programs, where you go to all-day Saturday classes instead of evenings; I imagine that that's more popular at the graduate level, though, as most executives would have undergrad degrees.
I'll be wrapping up in another couple of semesters. How is the business degree going to merge with my tech background? That's a question left to be answered (I aspire to be a tech entrepreneur). However, the experience of the program has been tremendous, and it's been worth the effort and expense for the knowledge I've gleaned. Has it been tough? Very. Has it been long? Yes. But, you just have to make yourself into the kind of person who sets long-term goals and keeps focused on those. Running your own business, it's very easy to start thinking only short-term. But if you can't answer the question of who that degree is going to help you become, and in a way that's meaningful to you, then you have no motivating factor to focus on.
What is your motivation for doing this? Make more money? Glean more knowledge? Keeping up with the former high school chums? Feeling a sense of inadequacy when you hire somebody who has more degrees than a protractor? Expanding your business? Changing careers? I'm not saying that I know what your motivation is, but if it's something shallow and reactionary, then yeah, there's no way that that will carry you through. You need to look at how this is going to mold you into the person you want to become and how it will benefit you long term.
And you need to make it clear to everyone who places demands on your time that you are committed to this, so if you can't go grab a brew or stay an extra hour at work, that's why.
I'm talking about games by companies with names like "LucasArts" and "Westwood" that are circa late 90's. NTCompatible.com is a good site for compatibility info.
I would argue that the support for OS 9 apps is greater under OS X than the support for Win9x apps are under WinXP. Classic mode is actually OS 9 running inside of OS X. I honestly can't think of a single OS 9 app that I have that doesn't work under OS X and hasn't been converted. Even QuarkXPress, which everyone is talking about here, runs in Classic mode.
What OS X users are grousing about is that Classic apps don't have the advanced features available that OS X apps have. Memory protection, preemptive multitasking, advanced virtual memory, etc. The Classic environment has those things as a whole, but not the individual apps inside it. The compatibility is there, though.
On my home PC, however... I upgraded from Win98 to Win2K, and half the games in my collection immediately broke. Even games that I can go down to Wal-Mart and buy right now.
There should be continued support for older software for a reasonable period (No idea what this would be though)
OS X has been available for about 2 years now. Granted, the first release was the public beta, but it was obviously sufficient enough for companies like Adobe and Macromedia to get the ball rolling on their OS X conversions.
So why do we have companies like Quark and HP that are dragging their feet on converting their code? Are they waiting to see if OS X is viable? It won't be if Mac users have to play a waiting game for software (though fortunately that hasn't really been the case). I applaud Apple for telling developers, "Ok, you've had 2 years now. Put up or shut up." Apple announced months ago that the OS 9 codebase was officially EOL'ed, so this new announcement shouldn't really come as a shock to any Mac developers.