Well, Vista's yet to give me an orgasm, but the UI does offer two HUGE improvements over XP:
1. They fixed the alt+tab interface - you can actually see what you're switching between, and the desktop is one of the options. (The aero windows button+tab is even better; much better even than expose on the Mac).
2. The start menu. Hit the windows button, type the name of the program you want, hit enter. Don't need to touch the mouse, don't need to navigate countless inscrutable menus organized by the name of the software publisher.
Because Apple wants you to use the iTunes music store. It used to be that Apple had a lock on iPod users because they had a proprietary DRM scheme, and everyone else used an incompatible one. Now there's a market shift away from DRM, which means Apple can't lock the player to music tracks anymore. So instead, they're locking the player to the store itself.
His position on DRM, by the way, was pretty obviously a reaction to the EU antitrust lawsuit. This latest move puts lie to Jobs' assertion that he didn't care about the lock-in created by the DRM.
The people at Poland Springs and Avian would be pretty shocked to hear that. Fact is, there's plenty of business models that not only compete with free but are built around giving stuff away for free, so that argument just doesn't fly.
They'll never eliminate piracy entirely, but they can successfully compete with it. Price is just one way to compete - you can also compete on quality, convenience, marketing, and legitimacy, among others. There's a lot of ways you can make a consumer be willing to spend $0.99 on something he could otherwise have for free; to assert otherwise is just a failure of imagination and those people deserve to go out of business and get replaced by people who can figure it out.
It's the only way the consumer can BUY the product digitally. It's not the only way the consumer can GET the product digitally. The Pirate Bay offers a hell of a better user experience than the iTMS.
The number of illegal music downloads still dwarf legal ones by leaps and bounds. And that's not going to change until the legal ones stop offering an inferior product.
I bought XM for my mom solely on account of the MLB, and got a second receiver for myself since the second subscription is half price. I like it a lot, but I'm certainly looking forward to getting Stern & NPR among others, which were previously unavailable to me.
I'd expect when all is said and done for the combined service to have even more music channels than either one offers now, which can only be a good thing for me.
Besides, if I was really that anal about what specific tracks were playing, I'd be using my iPod rather than a satellite radio.
People who joined Flickr early got their preferred screen name. "MyPhotography123" or something like that, and built up an identity and reputation around that. Many people were complaining that the same screen name they had on Flickr isn't available on Yahoo, which suffers from 10+ years of people registering accounts with them and a refusal to retire dead ones.
It also raises a larger issue of identity management: There are people who (for whatever reason) don't want their activities on Flickr linked to other Yahoo services (and people do use Finance, Answers, etc). It makes it harder to keep discrete identities (and discrete levels of anonymity) across the web. That's my complaint about the whole thing, although honestly it bothers me more with Google than Yahoo simply because I use more of Google's stuff. That's a bigger issue than just Flickr/Yahoo though.
And yeah, there are people who just hate Yahoo, as they don't have a stellar record when it comes to customer service, privacy, or account security.
None of this is the end of the world, but neither is it trivial.
It's always perplexed me that all the illegal stuff (cracking programs, torrent sites, ) are both more comprehensive AND more user friendly than legal stuff; if they weren't operating below the law they'd certainly have my business.
Ditto. I always get the sense that the pirates are more concerned with the quality of my viewing/listening experience than any of the **AA folks. If The Pirate bay was actually legal and started charging for the torrents, I'd happily pay it. There isn't a legal service yet that comes close to the same quality of experience - even if you put aside the DRM issues, they still push low quality files, ugly as sin sites plagued with advertising, unnavigable user interfaces, and incomplete libraries.
It's really bad when the people doing this illegally and without pay care more about customer service than the people who expect me to fork over money to them...
This is precisely right. The problem with things such as NFL games only being on Sirius isn't a problem with anticompetitveness, it's a problem with exclusive licensing agreements.
What's the difference? A monopoly by a monopoly is any other name, and Sirius has a monopoly on NFL broadcasts. That would be no different whether XM or 10 other satellite radio providers existed. Seems pretty anti-competitive to me.
If the FCC was really looking out for consumers, it would put an end to that practice and force the two companies to compete on price and quality of service.
4. Be able to take it off a charger on Friday, fly to another city, use it heavily over the weekend, and fly back on Monday with at least two bars still left on the battery.
It doesn't sound like the iPhone will be able to make it through a workday without a charger, let alone a weekend. So it doesn't interest me.
Why anyone would want to is beside the point - the question is whether we have the right to. I've never seen a parsing of the first amendment that can justify the current prohibitions on "indecency" in any sort of rational way.
Nudity is a staple of political protest - PETA is quite fond of using it, there's also the annual World Naked Bike Ride, etc.
Nudity is also a staple of art; I'm sure I don't have to list examples of that.
One could also point out that how you dress is usually protected speech
So yeah, I'd say that public nudity is speech. I've never understood the twisted legal logic that gets from "Congress shall pass no law [...] abridging the freedom to speech" to "except if the speech is obscene" and "the standard for obscenity is the most uptight sexually repressed grandmother we can find"
If the freedom of speech doesn't protect my right to speech that most people would find offensive (and even that's debatable), then can it even be said that we have such a freedom?
I get so sick of reading this particular lie, time and time again. Consumers have plenty of choice when it comes to artistic works. The fact that you can't obtain freely works that th artist did not release freely has nothing to do with a particular industry "stranglehold" but instead with an artists right to maintain or relinquish control of their creations. If you don't like the way an artist choses to license their work then chose a different artist. If the consumer makes this change then business will need to change their model to survive.
It's not a lie - copyright grants the copyright holder a monopoly on the work in question. So if I want a copy of Star Wars, for example, I have no choice but to get that copy on George Lucas's terms, at the price he sets. I can't (legally) attain Star Wars from another vendor offering it at better quality, with no DRM, or lower price.
The argument that I can go to another artist who offers their works on better terms only goes so far - there's only one Star Wars, and if that's the movie I'm looking for, I have no "choice" in the matter. Copyright law doesn't offer any consumer protections whatsoever, beyond some shrinking fair use rights.
Until very recently, artists who wanted distribution had no option but to agree to the terms set by these companies. They couldn't license the work differently if they wanted to. That's perhaps the worse sin than what goes on on the consumer end - what good is a copyright law that allows actual creators to be robbed of the rights to their work before anyone even has a chance to see it?
Personally, I'd love to say "fuck you" to the RIAA and MPAA and simply go to different artists, as you say - but they control 90% of all the "art" that's created, and almost the entirety of our common culture for most of the 20th century. So there needs to be a retroactive changes to copyright law.
Yeah, but that was also the episode that featured a government conspiracy to fake a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center by crashing a plane into the building, six months before 9/11. Mind you, I don't believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories one iota, but damn... I'm willing to overlook anything else in that episode just for that bit of prescience.
It's possible they were able to power up some of it (enough to turn on the lights), but lacked a power source capable of making the thing fly and other power-hungry systems.
Holy crap that's gotten tiresome after 6 fucking books about "dumb adults".
Most every kid's story out there is a story about "dumb adults". Watch Nickelodeon sometime - the parents/teachers/principal/authority figure is always clueless, the kids are always outsmarting them, and it's always the unique insight and perspective of the kid that saves the day.
Actually, I give the potter books credit for just how much Harry *is* wrong and *should* have listened to Dumbledore.
My own opinion of them is that they're great in the same way that the original Star Wars trilogy is great. Rowling builds a universe rich in detail that engages the imagination. She doesn't win any real points for literary style, but she makes up for it with sheer fun. The story is mostly your standard good vs. evil, borrowing heavily from classic epic tales and legend - it doesn't score points for originality, but when does that stuff ever get old?
It's a "Web 2.0" story because everyone saw the video on YouTube and no one saw it on CNN.
Who broke the story hardly matters - if that's the metric, then bloggers don't matter at all since 99% of the original content out there is still written by "old media". Bloggers (currently) serve as filters, fact-checkers, and in some cases (this case), amplifiers. I simply can't imagine that it would have had the longevity and impact it did without Youtube+Bloggers, who kept it going long after the mainstream media would have forgotten it.
While Time magazine and "Person of the Year" is kind of a meaningless joke at this point... this is one of the few choices I can get behind. YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, etc. changed the world in the last year. And I think crediting the users of those sites makes a lot more sense than crediting the builders of those same sites. And even the most casual users participate by, favoriting, or simply increasing the view counts that help items get to the front page over others.
If that doesn't convince you, look at it this way: it could be worse. They could have named "Web 2.0" the person of the year.
Windows *is* user friendly. From the standpoint of *anyone* whos ever just picked up a computer to check email, browse a website, or do basic office functions, Windows is VERY user friendly. Some of the software may require training, but I've never heard of a grandmother, aunt, uncle, child, or otherwise require training to use the basic software that comes with windows.
There's a fine distinction here between knowing how to use it and knowing how to use it without collecting spyware, malware, or otherwise rendering the system unstable.
Sure, anyone can get behind the wheel of a car and figure out how to use the gas pedal to make it go. It's another thing to be able to use that car without crashing it into a wall and killing yourself. Which standard should we really use when it comes to judging user friendly-ness?
I run Windows and I don't have a problem with it. In terms of doing basic tasks like word processing, getting online, checking your email, I think that all the major OS's are about equal (even Linux, especially flavors like Ubuntu). But Windows is the only one that comes without safety belts or airbags, and basically requires a high level of competence to use without crashing. In my mind that's not user friendly.
Christianists believe that killing other Bible-thumping Christians will lead you to an eternity of hellfire. They're largely okay with killing homosexuals, muslims, abortion doctors, and anyone else who doesn't look or think like them. They're just doing God's work, in that case.
Christians, actual followers of Jesus' teachings (which include "turn the other cheek", "love thy neighbor", pacificism, modesty, and charity) are too few and far between for me to have much of an opinion of them one way or the other.
Maximizing profits on the short term. They're shooting themselves in the foot on the long term.
Compare the long term viability of any moderately successful sci-fi franchise to Survivor or American Idol. After the first run those latter shows are practically worthless. Sci-fi shows tend to have affluent viewers and loyal fanbases. They'll watch re-runs, buy related merchandise, buy the show on DVD, market it virally for you, and in a pinch even organize to support the show's sponsors.
Not every show will be the next Star Trek, but most of these shows will generate modest revenues for a long time, and eventually surpass shows that do big revenues one time only.
With regards to the actual search products, you're correct. But for the actual scanning effort, cooperation would make a lot more sense: I fail to see how scanning the same book multiple times benefits anyone. It's inefficient and ultimately wasted effort.
Ideally, all the companies interested in doing this should get together, pool their efforts and resources, and share the underlying dataset. Let the competition be for who can build the best product(s) around that data, not for the data itself.
They pay Google because that's where the stuff they want to buy (eyeballs) are. Cheaper ads don't make a lick of difference if no one is looking at them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Vista's yet to give me an orgasm, but the UI does offer two HUGE improvements over XP:
1. They fixed the alt+tab interface - you can actually see what you're switching between, and the desktop is one of the options. (The aero windows button+tab is even better; much better even than expose on the Mac).
2. The start menu. Hit the windows button, type the name of the program you want, hit enter. Don't need to touch the mouse, don't need to navigate countless inscrutable menus organized by the name of the software publisher.
Because Apple wants you to use the iTunes music store. It used to be that Apple had a lock on iPod users because they had a proprietary DRM scheme, and everyone else used an incompatible one. Now there's a market shift away from DRM, which means Apple can't lock the player to music tracks anymore. So instead, they're locking the player to the store itself.
His position on DRM, by the way, was pretty obviously a reaction to the EU antitrust lawsuit. This latest move puts lie to Jobs' assertion that he didn't care about the lock-in created by the DRM.
The people at Poland Springs and Avian would be pretty shocked to hear that. Fact is, there's plenty of business models that not only compete with free but are built around giving stuff away for free, so that argument just doesn't fly.
They'll never eliminate piracy entirely, but they can successfully compete with it. Price is just one way to compete - you can also compete on quality, convenience, marketing, and legitimacy, among others. There's a lot of ways you can make a consumer be willing to spend $0.99 on something he could otherwise have for free; to assert otherwise is just a failure of imagination and those people deserve to go out of business and get replaced by people who can figure it out.
It's the only way the consumer can BUY the product digitally. It's not the only way the consumer can GET the product digitally. The Pirate Bay offers a hell of a better user experience than the iTMS.
The number of illegal music downloads still dwarf legal ones by leaps and bounds. And that's not going to change until the legal ones stop offering an inferior product.
Okay - well I'm a 1% then.
I bought XM for my mom solely on account of the MLB, and got a second receiver for myself since the second subscription is half price. I like it a lot, but I'm certainly looking forward to getting Stern & NPR among others, which were previously unavailable to me.
I'd expect when all is said and done for the combined service to have even more music channels than either one offers now, which can only be a good thing for me.
Besides, if I was really that anal about what specific tracks were playing, I'd be using my iPod rather than a satellite radio.
Ah, fair enough, misunderstanding on my part. Thanks for the info.
In fairness, it's a big deal for some.
People who joined Flickr early got their preferred screen name. "MyPhotography123" or something like that, and built up an identity and reputation around that. Many people were complaining that the same screen name they had on Flickr isn't available on Yahoo, which suffers from 10+ years of people registering accounts with them and a refusal to retire dead ones.
It also raises a larger issue of identity management: There are people who (for whatever reason) don't want their activities on Flickr linked to other Yahoo services (and people do use Finance, Answers, etc). It makes it harder to keep discrete identities (and discrete levels of anonymity) across the web. That's my complaint about the whole thing, although honestly it bothers me more with Google than Yahoo simply because I use more of Google's stuff. That's a bigger issue than just Flickr/Yahoo though.
And yeah, there are people who just hate Yahoo, as they don't have a stellar record when it comes to customer service, privacy, or account security.
None of this is the end of the world, but neither is it trivial.
Ditto. I always get the sense that the pirates are more concerned with the quality of my viewing/listening experience than any of the **AA folks. If The Pirate bay was actually legal and started charging for the torrents, I'd happily pay it. There isn't a legal service yet that comes close to the same quality of experience - even if you put aside the DRM issues, they still push low quality files, ugly as sin sites plagued with advertising, unnavigable user interfaces, and incomplete libraries.
It's really bad when the people doing this illegally and without pay care more about customer service than the people who expect me to fork over money to them...
What's the difference? A monopoly by a monopoly is any other name, and Sirius has a monopoly on NFL broadcasts. That would be no different whether XM or 10 other satellite radio providers existed. Seems pretty anti-competitive to me.
If the FCC was really looking out for consumers, it would put an end to that practice and force the two companies to compete on price and quality of service.
4. Be able to take it off a charger on Friday, fly to another city, use it heavily over the weekend, and fly back on Monday with at least two bars still left on the battery.
It doesn't sound like the iPhone will be able to make it through a workday without a charger, let alone a weekend. So it doesn't interest me.
Why anyone would want to is beside the point - the question is whether we have the right to. I've never seen a parsing of the first amendment that can justify the current prohibitions on "indecency" in any sort of rational way.
Nudity is a staple of political protest - PETA is quite fond of using it, there's also the annual World Naked Bike Ride, etc.
Nudity is also a staple of art; I'm sure I don't have to list examples of that.
One could also point out that how you dress is usually protected speech
So yeah, I'd say that public nudity is speech. I've never understood the twisted legal logic that gets from "Congress shall pass no law [...] abridging the freedom to speech" to "except if the speech is obscene" and "the standard for obscenity is the most uptight sexually repressed grandmother we can find"
If the freedom of speech doesn't protect my right to speech that most people would find offensive (and even that's debatable), then can it even be said that we have such a freedom?
It's not a lie - copyright grants the copyright holder a monopoly on the work in question. So if I want a copy of Star Wars, for example, I have no choice but to get that copy on George Lucas's terms, at the price he sets. I can't (legally) attain Star Wars from another vendor offering it at better quality, with no DRM, or lower price.
The argument that I can go to another artist who offers their works on better terms only goes so far - there's only one Star Wars, and if that's the movie I'm looking for, I have no "choice" in the matter. Copyright law doesn't offer any consumer protections whatsoever, beyond some shrinking fair use rights.
Until very recently, artists who wanted distribution had no option but to agree to the terms set by these companies. They couldn't license the work differently if they wanted to. That's perhaps the worse sin than what goes on on the consumer end - what good is a copyright law that allows actual creators to be robbed of the rights to their work before anyone even has a chance to see it?
Personally, I'd love to say "fuck you" to the RIAA and MPAA and simply go to different artists, as you say - but they control 90% of all the "art" that's created, and almost the entirety of our common culture for most of the 20th century. So there needs to be a retroactive changes to copyright law.
mod +1 funny. ...that was a joke, right?
Yeah, but that was also the episode that featured a government conspiracy to fake a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center by crashing a plane into the building, six months before 9/11. Mind you, I don't believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories one iota, but damn... I'm willing to overlook anything else in that episode just for that bit of prescience.
It's possible they were able to power up some of it (enough to turn on the lights), but lacked a power source capable of making the thing fly and other power-hungry systems.
Most every kid's story out there is a story about "dumb adults". Watch Nickelodeon sometime - the parents/teachers/principal/authority figure is always clueless, the kids are always outsmarting them, and it's always the unique insight and perspective of the kid that saves the day.
Actually, I give the potter books credit for just how much Harry *is* wrong and *should* have listened to Dumbledore.
My own opinion of them is that they're great in the same way that the original Star Wars trilogy is great. Rowling builds a universe rich in detail that engages the imagination. She doesn't win any real points for literary style, but she makes up for it with sheer fun. The story is mostly your standard good vs. evil, borrowing heavily from classic epic tales and legend - it doesn't score points for originality, but when does that stuff ever get old?
Democracy has always been an illusion. But it's an illusion with a lot of power.
It's a "Web 2.0" story because everyone saw the video on YouTube and no one saw it on CNN.
Who broke the story hardly matters - if that's the metric, then bloggers don't matter at all since 99% of the original content out there is still written by "old media". Bloggers (currently) serve as filters, fact-checkers, and in some cases (this case), amplifiers. I simply can't imagine that it would have had the longevity and impact it did without Youtube+Bloggers, who kept it going long after the mainstream media would have forgotten it.
While Time magazine and "Person of the Year" is kind of a meaningless joke at this point... this is one of the few choices I can get behind. YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, etc. changed the world in the last year. And I think crediting the users of those sites makes a lot more sense than crediting the builders of those same sites. And even the most casual users participate by, favoriting, or simply increasing the view counts that help items get to the front page over others.
If that doesn't convince you, look at it this way: it could be worse. They could have named "Web 2.0" the person of the year.
There's a fine distinction here between knowing how to use it and knowing how to use it without collecting spyware, malware, or otherwise rendering the system unstable.
Sure, anyone can get behind the wheel of a car and figure out how to use the gas pedal to make it go. It's another thing to be able to use that car without crashing it into a wall and killing yourself. Which standard should we really use when it comes to judging user friendly-ness?
I run Windows and I don't have a problem with it. In terms of doing basic tasks like word processing, getting online, checking your email, I think that all the major OS's are about equal (even Linux, especially flavors like Ubuntu). But Windows is the only one that comes without safety belts or airbags, and basically requires a high level of competence to use without crashing. In my mind that's not user friendly.
Christianists believe that killing other Bible-thumping Christians will lead you to an eternity of hellfire. They're largely okay with killing homosexuals, muslims, abortion doctors, and anyone else who doesn't look or think like them. They're just doing God's work, in that case.
Christians, actual followers of Jesus' teachings (which include "turn the other cheek", "love thy neighbor", pacificism, modesty, and charity) are too few and far between for me to have much of an opinion of them one way or the other.
Maximizing profits on the short term. They're shooting themselves in the foot on the long term.
Compare the long term viability of any moderately successful sci-fi franchise to Survivor or American Idol. After the first run those latter shows are practically worthless. Sci-fi shows tend to have affluent viewers and loyal fanbases. They'll watch re-runs, buy related merchandise, buy the show on DVD, market it virally for you, and in a pinch even organize to support the show's sponsors.
Not every show will be the next Star Trek, but most of these shows will generate modest revenues for a long time, and eventually surpass shows that do big revenues one time only.
With regards to the actual search products, you're correct. But for the actual scanning effort, cooperation would make a lot more sense: I fail to see how scanning the same book multiple times benefits anyone. It's inefficient and ultimately wasted effort.
Ideally, all the companies interested in doing this should get together, pool their efforts and resources, and share the underlying dataset. Let the competition be for who can build the best product(s) around that data, not for the data itself.
They pay Google because that's where the stuff they want to buy (eyeballs) are. Cheaper ads don't make a lick of difference if no one is looking at them.