You should go ahead and market this magical device which allows a user to transfer music by simply "writing a scipt." I'm sure you'll have dozens of satisfied users!
As for the other 99.9999% of America, they'll stick with iPod/iTunes and its horrible uninuitive system where you transfer your music by *gasp* plugging in the device and auto-syncing. The horror!
Check out Amazon.com's sales rankings. If HD-DVD is "dead," then Blu-Ray was never born. The Toshiba player ranks 300-400 in electronics, while Samsung's Blu-Ray player is in the 8000's.
Sources from inside Sony have told me that they are going to try to unify all their recent dumb moves by creating a rootkit which only affects the computers of black people. It's going to retail for $1000, but being the latest in racist spyware technology you will be PRIVILEGED to get it for that cheap.
I am personally very excited by this development. If Sony succeeds, they should finally meet their goal of being hated by everyone!
Who exactly is modding up the post by the guy who thought Mosaic was "stupid?" And then, just in case he hadn't hammered in the point that he's a moron, followed that statement with "I could have been right."
Yeah...that whole WWW thing just barely made it. We are all very fortunate that the internet didn't just fold up shop and quit in the 90's.
I've read every comment in this thread thus far, and yours is the first to mention the reason why HD-DVD will win. It's dead simple - Blu-ray players cost twice as much as HD-DVD players. Not only that, but the Blu-Ray discs also cost more because they have to be produced using a totally different process than current DVD's. You can argue all you want that Blu-Ray is slightly better as a format, but this is EXACTLY the reason a slightly better Beta format lost to VHS. When two products look exactly the same to most consumers, and one is significantly cheaper than the other, consumers will pick the less expensive one.
You can argue all you want about prices dropping soon, but they will drop on both sides. It is pretty clear that Blu-Ray will stay more expensive in the near future when this battle will be decided.
Well...I don't know of a movie that can't be put on 1 or 2 DVDs with a ton of extra features. And I've never destroyed a disc by scratching it. So that leaves higher quality video. I have an HD-upconverting DVD player and it works great on my 50' plasma screen. Never once have I said, "This sucks! I really need to drop a bunch of money on a new player and pay $5-$10 more per disc!"
In other words, I am exactly the target audience of the these new formats (a young, tech-savvy guy with a HDTV and disposable income) and I have no desire whatsoever to convert to using Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. So who DOES want it?
Not to mention that all movies will be downloadable in the near future and discs will be completely unnecessary.
At some point, people will start to think you are fleecing them. Especially when your product is going to sit right alongside two others that are direct competitors which can be had for hundreds of dollars less.
Anna Eshoo (one of the cosponsors of this bill) is the Representative for Google and Yahoo's district. I wouldn't underestimate their ability to fight for Network Neutrality and push this bill through. After all, I have heard that they have both made a decent amount of money recently...
If you seriously think that all coding jobs within Google are equal, you are nuts. As a software engineer who graduated from a top school, I can tell you that people in this industry are VERY big into what project you're working on. If you think that an engineer for search quality or Google Earth isn't more respected within the company than someone who maintains the software behind the parallelized OS or does some other relatively more mundane job, then you are reading far too many WSJ articles that idealize things.
If they're using it for search, it isn't for PageRank. PR needs the entity sending "influence" to a website's PageRank to itself have influence. And since there's no way to rank the importance of any particular piece of mail, that isn't possible.
Even beyond PageRank modifications, I seriously doubt that they use mail records for search. It would be too easy to game the system - if mail contents mattered there would surely be companies opening up hundreds of gmail accounts and emailing links to people in order to boost their search ranking.
You are certainly underestimating MS here - I'm sure it took a lot of effort and collaboration between the IE and MS Live teams to ensure that they create a product which works well on IE6 but is feature limited on Firefox.
Huh? I have a Powerbook that is almost 2 and a half years old and I haven't noticed much drop off on the battery charge time at all. It must be nice for Dell to have customers who expect key parts on their computers to fail after just a year's time. Can't disappoint those who start with ridiculously low expectations, huh?
What's your point? All that means is that Apple Computer is currently the most relevant company with the Apple moniker and would come to mind far before a record label that primarily distributes 35 year old songs. It's not illegal to have the same name as another company. And it's not illegal to be much bigger than the other similarly named company so that your company generally comes to mind first when the shared name is used. The agreement was that Apple Computer would never become a record label, and they definitely are not a record label. Their services don't overlap the services of Apple Corps in any way whatsoever, so I don't see how Apple Corps. has a case here.
This is an amazingly intelligent post. As a new grad coming out with a CS Master's degree from a top university, I did not even consider MS for these very reasons. Simple observation of the attitudes surrounding software employers at my school points to the fact that MS is now considered in the same group as companies like IBM and Oracle. This is not a good thing. The days when MS was getting the brightest and the best are long past.
I've read so many posts about how Apple is totally screwing consumers with 128kbps songs that I had to check out the difference. For various reasons, I have a handful of songs in my library that I have both ripped from CD and bought from iTunes (CD was lost then found, or borrowed from friend after buying online, etc.). So I sat here this morning and listened to exact duplicates of the same song for a couple different songs - the only difference is that one was ripped @ 192 kbps and the other is 128 kbps AAC. Now, I have Computer speakers that are not that expensive ($150 or so JBL speakers) but that is pretty representative of most people that are "fools" for buying music online.
So here's the kicker - I sat here playing a bunch of songs with my girlfriend standing over my shoulder. NEITHER OF US COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE. Not even a little bit.
So to get back on track - for most of the population, you would have to be a complete retard to pay twice as much for a 256 kbps song than you do for a 128 kbps track. Most of us don't own and will never own equipment that can differentiate the two. And you would have to have had a frontal lobotomy to consider paying 4x as much for a lossless track when I seriously doubt many audio devices can even take full advantage of the 256 kbps bitrate. So Apple will NEVER price the tracks this way, and people who think that is a good idea are about as intelligent as those aforementioned frontal lobotomized folks.
Marketing Guy at Symantec:
"Hey - people are starting to realize that anti-virus software for a Mac is totally worthless because there are no viruses! What do we do?"
Engineer at Symantec:
"Well...let me see - if you download this file, which sorta looks like it could be an image, double click it, and then hit OK twice, you could theoretically install malicious software on your Mac. But from what I know, nobody's ever done that....
Marketing Guy:
"GREAT! I'll let the guy at the WSJ know about the epidemic right away!"
I think it's stupid to pay $15 for most new CDs. I think it's stupid to pay for an entire CD when you want only one song. I think it's stupid to have to clear out a lot of physical space in order to hold your CD collection. I think it's stupid to force yourself to either a) go to a store to buy a CD or b) wait days in order to receive your purchase when the whole process can happen instantly. So I buy songs online. The DRM isn't really an issue to those of us that have actually used iTunes and know that it is very possible to get mp3's out of your m4p files.
Oh, and about the author's brilliant scheme of buying CDs and returning them the next day - if I wanted to get music while screwing the artist out of any money, I would just download the song for free.
News flash: about 99.9% of people who make >5 copies of the same CD are not doing so for "private and personal" purposes. Heck, I can't even think a situation where one would need 6 copies of the same CD for "private and personal" use.
While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."
I would venture to guess that the number of people who know PERL, do not know C, and program games, is about...7.
Plus the only game I know of that made very heavy use of scripting languages is Civ4. And that game is the most poorly programmed hunk of crap that I've ever played. The unbelievable slowdown takes quite a bit away from a great game.
MS can look like a small American company FOR FREE. Just cut 50,000 jobs. I just saved them hundreds of millions with this advice!/to what address do I send my bill?
Slashdot Mirror
You should go ahead and market this magical device which allows a user to transfer music by simply "writing a scipt." I'm sure you'll have dozens of satisfied users! As for the other 99.9999% of America, they'll stick with iPod/iTunes and its horrible uninuitive system where you transfer your music by *gasp* plugging in the device and auto-syncing. The horror!
Check out Amazon.com's sales rankings. If HD-DVD is "dead," then Blu-Ray was never born. The Toshiba player ranks 300-400 in electronics, while Samsung's Blu-Ray player is in the 8000's.
Sources from inside Sony have told me that they are going to try to unify all their recent dumb moves by creating a rootkit which only affects the computers of black people. It's going to retail for $1000, but being the latest in racist spyware technology you will be PRIVILEGED to get it for that cheap.
I am personally very excited by this development. If Sony succeeds, they should finally meet their goal of being hated by everyone!
Who exactly is modding up the post by the guy who thought Mosaic was "stupid?" And then, just in case he hadn't hammered in the point that he's a moron, followed that statement with "I could have been right." Yeah...that whole WWW thing just barely made it. We are all very fortunate that the internet didn't just fold up shop and quit in the 90's.
What was stopping you from inventing AJAX then? And if the implementation of AJAX is "trivial," why didn't anyone think of it earlier?
I've read every comment in this thread thus far, and yours is the first to mention the reason why HD-DVD will win. It's dead simple - Blu-ray players cost twice as much as HD-DVD players. Not only that, but the Blu-Ray discs also cost more because they have to be produced using a totally different process than current DVD's. You can argue all you want that Blu-Ray is slightly better as a format, but this is EXACTLY the reason a slightly better Beta format lost to VHS. When two products look exactly the same to most consumers, and one is significantly cheaper than the other, consumers will pick the less expensive one.
You can argue all you want about prices dropping soon, but they will drop on both sides. It is pretty clear that Blu-Ray will stay more expensive in the near future when this battle will be decided.
Well...I don't know of a movie that can't be put on 1 or 2 DVDs with a ton of extra features. And I've never destroyed a disc by scratching it. So that leaves higher quality video. I have an HD-upconverting DVD player and it works great on my 50' plasma screen. Never once have I said, "This sucks! I really need to drop a bunch of money on a new player and pay $5-$10 more per disc!"
In other words, I am exactly the target audience of the these new formats (a young, tech-savvy guy with a HDTV and disposable income) and I have no desire whatsoever to convert to using Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. So who DOES want it?
Not to mention that all movies will be downloadable in the near future and discs will be completely unnecessary.
At some point, people will start to think you are fleecing them. Especially when your product is going to sit right alongside two others that are direct competitors which can be had for hundreds of dollars less.
Congratulations. This might possibly be the dumbest argument I've ever read. My IQ dropped 10 points in the course of your 2 sentences.
Anna Eshoo (one of the cosponsors of this bill) is the Representative for Google and Yahoo's district. I wouldn't underestimate their ability to fight for Network Neutrality and push this bill through. After all, I have heard that they have both made a decent amount of money recently...
If you seriously think that all coding jobs within Google are equal, you are nuts. As a software engineer who graduated from a top school, I can tell you that people in this industry are VERY big into what project you're working on. If you think that an engineer for search quality or Google Earth isn't more respected within the company than someone who maintains the software behind the parallelized OS or does some other relatively more mundane job, then you are reading far too many WSJ articles that idealize things.
If they're using it for search, it isn't for PageRank. PR needs the entity sending "influence" to a website's PageRank to itself have influence. And since there's no way to rank the importance of any particular piece of mail, that isn't possible. Even beyond PageRank modifications, I seriously doubt that they use mail records for search. It would be too easy to game the system - if mail contents mattered there would surely be companies opening up hundreds of gmail accounts and emailing links to people in order to boost their search ranking.
You are certainly underestimating MS here - I'm sure it took a lot of effort and collaboration between the IE and MS Live teams to ensure that they create a product which works well on IE6 but is feature limited on Firefox.
If iTunes is "unusable," what IS usable?
Huh? I have a Powerbook that is almost 2 and a half years old and I haven't noticed much drop off on the battery charge time at all. It must be nice for Dell to have customers who expect key parts on their computers to fail after just a year's time. Can't disappoint those who start with ridiculously low expectations, huh?
What's your point? All that means is that Apple Computer is currently the most relevant company with the Apple moniker and would come to mind far before a record label that primarily distributes 35 year old songs. It's not illegal to have the same name as another company. And it's not illegal to be much bigger than the other similarly named company so that your company generally comes to mind first when the shared name is used. The agreement was that Apple Computer would never become a record label, and they definitely are not a record label. Their services don't overlap the services of Apple Corps in any way whatsoever, so I don't see how Apple Corps. has a case here.
This is an amazingly intelligent post. As a new grad coming out with a CS Master's degree from a top university, I did not even consider MS for these very reasons. Simple observation of the attitudes surrounding software employers at my school points to the fact that MS is now considered in the same group as companies like IBM and Oracle. This is not a good thing. The days when MS was getting the brightest and the best are long past.
I assume iTunes can...
I've read so many posts about how Apple is totally screwing consumers with 128kbps songs that I had to check out the difference. For various reasons, I have a handful of songs in my library that I have both ripped from CD and bought from iTunes (CD was lost then found, or borrowed from friend after buying online, etc.). So I sat here this morning and listened to exact duplicates of the same song for a couple different songs - the only difference is that one was ripped @ 192 kbps and the other is 128 kbps AAC. Now, I have Computer speakers that are not that expensive ($150 or so JBL speakers) but that is pretty representative of most people that are "fools" for buying music online.
So here's the kicker - I sat here playing a bunch of songs with my girlfriend standing over my shoulder. NEITHER OF US COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE. Not even a little bit.
So to get back on track - for most of the population, you would have to be a complete retard to pay twice as much for a 256 kbps song than you do for a 128 kbps track. Most of us don't own and will never own equipment that can differentiate the two. And you would have to have had a frontal lobotomy to consider paying 4x as much for a lossless track when I seriously doubt many audio devices can even take full advantage of the 256 kbps bitrate. So Apple will NEVER price the tracks this way, and people who think that is a good idea are about as intelligent as those aforementioned frontal lobotomized folks.
Marketing Guy at Symantec:
"Hey - people are starting to realize that anti-virus software for a Mac is totally worthless because there are no viruses! What do we do?"
Engineer at Symantec:
"Well...let me see - if you download this file, which sorta looks like it could be an image, double click it, and then hit OK twice, you could theoretically install malicious software on your Mac. But from what I know, nobody's ever done that....
Marketing Guy:
"GREAT! I'll let the guy at the WSJ know about the epidemic right away!"
i've NEVER heard a song that i wanted just that song and not the whole album
Well...that make one of us.
/sometimes it amazes me how people refuse to acknowledge that not everyone shares their opinions
I think it's stupid to pay $15 for most new CDs. I think it's stupid to pay for an entire CD when you want only one song. I think it's stupid to have to clear out a lot of physical space in order to hold your CD collection. I think it's stupid to force yourself to either a) go to a store to buy a CD or b) wait days in order to receive your purchase when the whole process can happen instantly. So I buy songs online. The DRM isn't really an issue to those of us that have actually used iTunes and know that it is very possible to get mp3's out of your m4p files.
Oh, and about the author's brilliant scheme of buying CDs and returning them the next day - if I wanted to get music while screwing the artist out of any money, I would just download the song for free.
News flash: about 99.9% of people who make >5 copies of the same CD are not doing so for "private and personal" purposes. Heck, I can't even think a situation where one would need 6 copies of the same CD for "private and personal" use.
While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."
I would venture to guess that the number of people who know PERL, do not know C, and program games, is about...7.
Plus the only game I know of that made very heavy use of scripting languages is Civ4. And that game is the most poorly programmed hunk of crap that I've ever played. The unbelievable slowdown takes quite a bit away from a great game.
MS can look like a small American company FOR FREE. Just cut 50,000 jobs. I just saved them hundreds of millions with this advice! /to what address do I send my bill?