Assuming you'd make less selling at $1.09 instead of $.99 isn't exactly a foregone conclusion. Keep in mind that no one is forking out actual cash for these songs, they're linked to a CC account. "Eh, it's only $.10 more and I really like this song *click*click*download*," is the refrain I'd anticipate, personally.
FWIW, you can buy 256kbps AAC non-DRM'd versions of just about everything on iTunes for a bit more.
If you're really concerned about better quality music and artists, iTunes isn't the best place to discover them, but if they are indies and self-release their albums, the cut that the actual artist receives is HUGE for that $.99 sale ($.70 per download and more for the non-DRM version, "iTunes Plus" I think its called). iTunes isn't the problem here, since they're passing most of the sale onto the rights holder. The labels are the "problem", but only in the sense that they recoup their costs out of that $.70 (or around $7 for an album download), and their notoriously corrupt practices cut deeply into the artists' cut.
TuneCore (and another services) allow indies to publish to a variety of sources that includes iTunes.
Incidentally, it can be argued that eMusic is actually not as good to the artists in terms of paying them as iTunes is, due to the way they determine how much you get paid for downloads. Obviously, there's a lot of variables there, but I'm much more in favor of flat rates vs variable rates.
Make no mistake, getting paid for making music is a complex, tough process.
Say I record a song and I put it on iTunes. It sells for $.99, I get $.70, Apple gets $.29
The only reason the "record company" gets the $.70 is because they are the rights holder. Via things like TuneCore, its perfectly possible to get $.70 of that $.99 sale going directly to the artist.
Of course, without the record label's promotional network/contacts you're much less likely to know about said band, but that's another topic.
While we're at it let's just let housing prices fall into the dirt, so the JP Morgan's can prey equally on Mainstreet homeowners as well.
Housing prices are still far, far above the historical trend line, and have been overvalued for years. The prices dropping precipitously, while hard on people who bought at the top and thought they'd be able to "trade up" in 5 years before their ARM reset, is a GOOD thing overall.
FWIW, I've been using a 9600GT for about a year now with no real problems. There was a thread back either here or on Ars asking people to chime in about their 8xxx/9xxx cards and if they'd had a problem with them, and it was a big thread of people saying they didn't have any issues. So... not sure if on a *practical* level this is really a huge issue for users.
But, I'm not religiously devoted to either Nvidia or ATI (though historically I've had much better luck with Nvidia's driver software than ATI's. ymmv).
The whole point of layered security is that the redundancy allows some layers to fail without exposing the rest of the system to failure. That is, the entire paradigm is conceived with failure in mind.
The problem with many organizations is that they do the "hard shell / gooey center" implementation, and often think that if they have 3 hard shells, its still okay to have the gooey center. Obviously this isn't the case.
Furthermore, if you've ever looked at most telecom or government network infrastructures, the number of poorly run (lacking even basic essential security paradigms) networks is surprisingly high (telecoms have the further problem that they're not really organically grown, planned networks, but rather a bunch of them jammed together after acquisitions).
There's a reason why IT gets outsourced a lot, many IT people *aren't*very*good*at*their*jobs*.
I'm not going to bother with the rest of your strawmen.
iMovie: Very limited and don't work as "fast" as Apple makes it seem. Making your 10 minute youtube clip can easily take an hour even if it's rather simple. I wouldn't be surprised if there existed a similar but better free alternative. Still the iLife application I use because it's the only one I have and it work.
The previous version of iMovie was superior to the most recent. If you look around you can still find it. I have no idea what possessed them to fuck up iMove.
Garageband: I've got the impression some people actually like this! I don't have a MIDI keyboard or such so I wouldn't know. There is some application for making audio which also runs on Linux which is supposed to be rather cheap and work good, I have no idea what the name was.
I posted this earlier in the thread, but i'll do it here too: Garageband is UNREASONABLY useful for its price. You can couple it with some pretty nice audio hardware and do some very nice recordings. It's not as good as Pro Tools, but it's much better than anything else in its price range. This alone would make a hackintosh useful if you do digital audio recording/producing and want a desktop machine that is beefy that doesn't cost $2600.
The MOTU 8pre I have cost me $500 on its own, so if I could have spent $1000 for OEM hardware instead of $2000 for the MBP I'd have jumped at it, instead of skimping on the microphones. $1000 buys some nice mics:D
You need to understand that mac hardware has an extremely long relevant lifespan, even macs with the powerpc architecture are still useful. Sure they won't be able to run 10.6 but 10.5 is more than enough to get in the water and get some work done.
The hardware in your Mac is the same as in anything from Dell or HP at this point. Even the motherboards are Foxconn boards that are made in the same factory (probably the same assembly line, just on thursdays instead of wednesdays) as the other system assemblers.
The thing that Macs have that PCs don't get is Garageband. I've used a variety of music programs, and Garageband is UNREASONABLY USEFUL for being a pack-in program. Logic Express is also surprisingly powerful for a low-cost program, and both "Pro" versions (yeah I know that Pro Tools isn't the literal pro version of Garage Band, but it might as well be if you ask me) I think this is the one place where Macs continue to shine.
However, for graphic design, (i've done it on both platforms) there's virtually no difference between OS X and Windows machines. Get the cheapest of either that meets your system requirements.
I tried for a while to use my MBP as my primary machine. Apple desperately needs to make a docking station for that thing. The 3rd party docks also seem to almost all suck:/
Long post short, if I close the last window an application has open, there's no reason for the application to still be running when there is no visual representation of the app. I am not using it, it should go away. Most PC users don't like dealing with that "quirky" behaviour.
Not really quirky, just a design choice.
In a way, it's similar to how Window Managers work in UNIX vs Windows. If I turn off my Window Manager in Windows XX, it turns off the computer. Not necessarily so in UNIX.
It's a matter of knowing the OS you're working with, and how it behaves. Neither way is particularly better.
In my experience the "major security breaches caused by personal [whatever]" is code for, "we didn't do a very good job when we created our layered security model".
There's no reason at all why simple personal use should result in any more than one machine being compromised (the initial vector). There's plenty of technology in place that prevents that AND allows for non-draconian PC usage. Having managed machines on a "wild-west", large LAN environment, I know it can be done. It requires the IT people to have a clue, however, and that particular attribute is often in short supply.
While in theory you are right, the majority of people have neither the time, nor the capacity, to critically think about every issue in depth. Until really recently, the Obama campaign had a terminal case of TL;DR in just about everything they did.
Recently they've figured out how to do soundbites and how to get their message across without boring the "Friends" crowd to death. While it's a sad indictment of the average level of intelligence in our society, it's how you gotta do things in politics (and no, it isn't going to change).
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs.
Decades, really?
Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer?
Even today, nobody cares about this.
Untrue. The difference between instanced scenarios and public quests is one of the key differences between WoW and Warhammer. For MMO gamers, this is a thing to be interested in.
The only reason I'm giving this game a try (after the requisite MMO release buffer time) is because Mythic did incredibly fun things with regard to PvE and PvP balance in DAoC. I still regard nights playing in Thid as some of my favorite gameplay experiences, hands down.
I'd mod you insightful if I could. Buffet was lucky in that he was working for a company and in a time, where his sort of investment was welcomed by his employer (and it obviously worked out well for him). These days it's all about quarterly profits and what not, and if you have a bunch of quarters where Carl Ichon is unhappy with how you've made his stock price behave, he throws a fit and goes on a rampage (for example).
Long term thinking is not rewarded in public companies at the present time in the US, sadly.
"do nothing unless it's profitable" isn't the issue
It is, "do not do anything that may negatively effect profits". It is, indeed, the overriding job of a public company to make money for its shareholders.
I also agree this isn't necessarily a good thing (the relatively recent obsession with quarterly profits, for example, has basically destroyed long-term investments in things like R&D by companies in the US), but it is what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you'd make less selling at $1.09 instead of $.99 isn't exactly a foregone conclusion. Keep in mind that no one is forking out actual cash for these songs, they're linked to a CC account. "Eh, it's only $.10 more and I really like this song *click*click*download*," is the refrain I'd anticipate, personally.
All of mp3 was Russian-based and had some... interesting views to whom they needed to pay royalties.
FWIW, you can buy 256kbps AAC non-DRM'd versions of just about everything on iTunes for a bit more.
If you're really concerned about better quality music and artists, iTunes isn't the best place to discover them, but if they are indies and self-release their albums, the cut that the actual artist receives is HUGE for that $.99 sale ($.70 per download and more for the non-DRM version, "iTunes Plus" I think its called). iTunes isn't the problem here, since they're passing most of the sale onto the rights holder. The labels are the "problem", but only in the sense that they recoup their costs out of that $.70 (or around $7 for an album download), and their notoriously corrupt practices cut deeply into the artists' cut.
TuneCore (and another services) allow indies to publish to a variety of sources that includes iTunes.
Incidentally, it can be argued that eMusic is actually not as good to the artists in terms of paying them as iTunes is, due to the way they determine how much you get paid for downloads. Obviously, there's a lot of variables there, but I'm much more in favor of flat rates vs variable rates.
Make no mistake, getting paid for making music is a complex, tough process.
Er, almost.
Say I record a song and I put it on iTunes. It sells for $.99, I get $.70, Apple gets $.29
The only reason the "record company" gets the $.70 is because they are the rights holder. Via things like TuneCore, its perfectly possible to get $.70 of that $.99 sale going directly to the artist.
Of course, without the record label's promotional network/contacts you're much less likely to know about said band, but that's another topic.
While we're at it let's just let housing prices fall into the dirt, so the JP Morgan's can prey equally on Mainstreet homeowners as well.
Housing prices are still far, far above the historical trend line, and have been overvalued for years. The prices dropping precipitously, while hard on people who bought at the top and thought they'd be able to "trade up" in 5 years before their ARM reset, is a GOOD thing overall.
FWIW, I've been using a 9600GT for about a year now with no real problems. There was a thread back either here or on Ars asking people to chime in about their 8xxx/9xxx cards and if they'd had a problem with them, and it was a big thread of people saying they didn't have any issues. So... not sure if on a *practical* level this is really a huge issue for users.
But, I'm not religiously devoted to either Nvidia or ATI (though historically I've had much better luck with Nvidia's driver software than ATI's. ymmv).
The whole point of layered security is that the redundancy allows some layers to fail without exposing the rest of the system to failure. That is, the entire paradigm is conceived with failure in mind.
The problem with many organizations is that they do the "hard shell / gooey center" implementation, and often think that if they have 3 hard shells, its still okay to have the gooey center. Obviously this isn't the case.
Furthermore, if you've ever looked at most telecom or government network infrastructures, the number of poorly run (lacking even basic essential security paradigms) networks is surprisingly high (telecoms have the further problem that they're not really organically grown, planned networks, but rather a bunch of them jammed together after acquisitions).
There's a reason why IT gets outsourced a lot, many IT people *aren't*very*good*at*their*jobs*.
I'm not going to bother with the rest of your strawmen.
Little over 20 years.
I replaced 3 dozen motherboards last year because of leaking capacitors near the CPU socket in Optiplex 270's that caused them to fail.
iMovie: Very limited and don't work as "fast" as Apple makes it seem. Making your 10 minute youtube clip can easily take an hour even if it's rather simple. I wouldn't be surprised if there existed a similar but better free alternative. Still the iLife application I use because it's the only one I have and it work.
The previous version of iMovie was superior to the most recent. If you look around you can still find it. I have no idea what possessed them to fuck up iMove.
Garageband: I've got the impression some people actually like this! I don't have a MIDI keyboard or such so I wouldn't know. There is some application for making audio which also runs on Linux which is supposed to be rather cheap and work good, I have no idea what the name was.
I posted this earlier in the thread, but i'll do it here too: Garageband is UNREASONABLY useful for its price. You can couple it with some pretty nice audio hardware and do some very nice recordings. It's not as good as Pro Tools, but it's much better than anything else in its price range. This alone would make a hackintosh useful if you do digital audio recording /producing and want a desktop machine that is beefy that doesn't cost $2600.
The MOTU 8pre I have cost me $500 on its own, so if I could have spent $1000 for OEM hardware instead of $2000 for the MBP I'd have jumped at it, instead of skimping on the microphones. $1000 buys some nice mics :D
You need to understand that mac hardware has an extremely long relevant lifespan, even macs with the powerpc architecture are still useful. Sure they won't be able to run 10.6 but 10.5 is more than enough to get in the water and get some work done.
The hardware in your Mac is the same as in anything from Dell or HP at this point. Even the motherboards are Foxconn boards that are made in the same factory (probably the same assembly line, just on thursdays instead of wednesdays) as the other system assemblers.
The thing that Macs have that PCs don't get is Garageband. I've used a variety of music programs, and Garageband is UNREASONABLY USEFUL for being a pack-in program. Logic Express is also surprisingly powerful for a low-cost program, and both "Pro" versions (yeah I know that Pro Tools isn't the literal pro version of Garage Band, but it might as well be if you ask me) I think this is the one place where Macs continue to shine.
However, for graphic design, (i've done it on both platforms) there's virtually no difference between OS X and Windows machines. Get the cheapest of either that meets your system requirements.
I tried for a while to use my MBP as my primary machine. Apple desperately needs to make a docking station for that thing. The 3rd party docks also seem to almost all suck :/
Long post short, if I close the last window an application has open, there's no reason for the application to still be running when there is no visual representation of the app. I am not using it, it should go away. Most PC users don't like dealing with that "quirky" behaviour.
Not really quirky, just a design choice.
In a way, it's similar to how Window Managers work in UNIX vs Windows. If I turn off my Window Manager in Windows XX, it turns off the computer. Not necessarily so in UNIX.
It's a matter of knowing the OS you're working with, and how it behaves. Neither way is particularly better.
Bingo. This was a slashvertisement.
In my experience the "major security breaches caused by personal [whatever]" is code for, "we didn't do a very good job when we created our layered security model".
There's no reason at all why simple personal use should result in any more than one machine being compromised (the initial vector). There's plenty of technology in place that prevents that AND allows for non-draconian PC usage. Having managed machines on a "wild-west", large LAN environment, I know it can be done. It requires the IT people to have a clue, however, and that particular attribute is often in short supply.
Im my experience the "US" bias tends to be smaller companies (which can be good). Craigslist seems to have a few of those.
I don't think you even know what a "hardcore socialist" is.
There has never been a viable socialist candidate in the US, much less a "hardcore" one.
While in theory you are right, the majority of people have neither the time, nor the capacity, to critically think about every issue in depth. Until really recently, the Obama campaign had a terminal case of TL;DR in just about everything they did.
Recently they've figured out how to do soundbites and how to get their message across without boring the "Friends" crowd to death. While it's a sad indictment of the average level of intelligence in our society, it's how you gotta do things in politics (and no, it isn't going to change).
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs.
Decades, really?
Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer?
Even today, nobody cares about this.
Untrue. The difference between instanced scenarios and public quests is one of the key differences between WoW and Warhammer. For MMO gamers, this is a thing to be interested in.
I'd mod you up if I could.
The only reason I'm giving this game a try (after the requisite MMO release buffer time) is because Mythic did incredibly fun things with regard to PvE and PvP balance in DAoC. I still regard nights playing in Thid as some of my favorite gameplay experiences, hands down.
For whatever reason, "more problems with the European release" seems to be something I note a lot when it comes to MMO discussions.
All anyone cares about these days is the short term, when it comes to "investing".
Tee hee.
I'd mod you insightful if I could. Buffet was lucky in that he was working for a company and in a time, where his sort of investment was welcomed by his employer (and it obviously worked out well for him). These days it's all about quarterly profits and what not, and if you have a bunch of quarters where Carl Ichon is unhappy with how you've made his stock price behave, he throws a fit and goes on a rampage (for example).
Long term thinking is not rewarded in public companies at the present time in the US, sadly.
"do nothing unless it's profitable" isn't the issue
It is, "do not do anything that may negatively effect profits". It is, indeed, the overriding job of a public company to make money for its shareholders.
I also agree this isn't necessarily a good thing (the relatively recent obsession with quarterly profits, for example, has basically destroyed long-term investments in things like R&D by companies in the US), but it is what it is.