How many of those dual-boot users running Windows will actually be running licensed versions?
The same as the precentage of people who are upgrading from an older version of Windows.
Seeing that Boot Camp only supports installing Windows XP SP2, a person who wants to install a priated version will have to search online for a DMCA-breaking instruction for cracking Windows XP's anti-piracy DRM technology first. There shouldn't be any technical advantages over installing a pirated Windows XP on an Intel-Mac Architecture than installing it on an IBM-compatible, non-Mac Windows 9x/2k machine.
The academia usually doesn't get censored very often in the West. During Chairman Mao's rule, Chinese professors were criticised for being "anti-revolutionaries." Smart people who know shit and know what's going on are liable to expose the administration's lie.
It's Microsoft's strategy. Develop a video DRM solution, then make it playable only on their OS. I've visited a company that streams DRMed video, and streaming DRMed Windows Media pretty much requires all the servers to be Windows.
iTunes Music Store already has video downloads, and they don't permit burning video to a format playable on generic DVD players. So, iTMS is not better but the same.
What about people who had only enough money to buy 1 PC, felt they needed Windows, and was interested in OS X... If a dual-bootable Mac was offered, they might give it a try. (Although judging from the past dual-boot article discussions, I'm sure there are a lot of divided opinions on the merit of this.)
I think companies get pissed when a potential business opportunity is missed due to trademark infringement, even if it's unlikely that Apple Corp. will come close to ever reaching the level of iTMS success, or even if they would have never even bothered to think about entering an iTMS-like online music store business model had there not been a trademark conflict. To avoid conflict, maybe Apple Computer should use a different name for their music store -- for example, instead of calling it Apple Music Store, they could call it the iTunes Music Store. Oh, wait...
There's only one format that's important for enticing potential buyers: MP3. That's because people don't have most of the original CDs for their $1,000,000.00 music collection to re-rip into a new format. AAC is added into the supported formats mainly in the interests of Apple's business strategy. Since not many competitors' players support AAC, an iTunes user with their AAC files will feel less inclined to buy a player that doesn't support that format.
I don't think it's worth supporting an artist who can only produce 1 good song.
Well, I even give money to homeless people sometimes, even though he hasn't made a single hit. If a penny or two goes to the artists for my song purchase, it can't be such a bad thing. She/he's got more talent than me.
Also, most the the CD's i've bought recently have been $15. You can often find old stuff for even cheapter, $10. I find that the quality and freedom are well worth the extra cash
Used CDs can be cheap, but I hate scratches more than quality loss that comes from transcoding. $15.00 per CD is a good deal, but such good deals aren't always common in every country. I found a double CD album being sold for $25 on iTMS, $13 on Amazon.com. And guess what, I chose the album from Amazon.com.
... no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it.
Only until recently, all record companies sold digital, lossless, DRM-free music. All CDs that I buy are DRM-free, not because I have been avoiding DRM CDs (although I would), I just haven't encountered them from the artists that I am interested in. I doubt that the CD DRMs are hard to crack (just disable autorun?), but with their warnings stickers, that it may break my CD player, my CD drive, or my PC, and that nobody will refund me the CD or the damaged hardware if that happened, makes me not want to buy it at all even if I didn't mind the copy restrictions. So yeah, 100% of the CDs that I buy come from record companies that didn't add DRM.
For me it's cost over quality. Buying one song at $0.99 USD makes more economic sense than buying the $17.00 CD. However, sometimes the real CD sold at online stores can be cheaper than what iTunes downloads offer. And for me, my ears don't care about quality loss from burn & rip transcoding, but make sure to tag it as such. Sometimes I care about quality, and for those I buy the real CD. Online downloads complement my CD purchases, not replace it.
Apple traditionally has had understated their iPod battery life. If you look at companies like iriver on the other hand, they market their storage capacity in hours of music at 64kbps and hide this fact, while Apple is more honest by measuring theirs at 128kbps.
Yeah, there was once a video made by an iPod owner who was complaining about battery life, but he didn't give a full view of the situation, plus alot has changed since then (like battery life quadrupling).
Update: there was also a baby boom during '71-'74. Also in the early 20th cent, quite a large labor population went to Brazil, but that was before WWII so I guess it is not of our concern.
Any country with a labor shortage problem has some sort of immigration policy that is stricter than free-for-all. The fact that Japan gets picked upon as being xenophobic is based more on stereotype than not. I'm not sure if the US is a good example to compare against, especially after 9-11, with their eye-scanning or fingerprinting or whatever, for all visitors. You can't even fly domestic in the US without a passport now. Yeah, the US has dual citizenship and stuff, but what about other Asian countries? China, Indonesia, et al. don't allow dual citizenship either. The countries with people who want to migrate to Japan tend to have stricter immigration laws. And the US also has porous borders with Mexico and Canada, which means their policy should also have to reflect these geographical realities. Maybe comparing Japan with Australia or the UK (no continental borders) could be more interesting, although I don't think such comparisons can change the public view of Japan much. Even US immigration policy is always being criticised by Mexican politicians. It seems that if country A is a popular destination for migrants, there will continuously be a background radiation of immigration policy complaints.
I think Japan is susceptible to being seen as a 'weird' country, and that people often hyperbolate, over-emphasise, or misunderstand differences. The reason being that after WWII, the occupying powers were tasked with the process of eliminating militarism and ultra-nationalism. In order to do this, they had to psycho-analyse "the Japanese mind" - how can we change the way they think? what's wrong with them? And this sort of attitude still lingers overseas as well as within Japan, since nobody liked the war and it was a big concern for the entire world. In this environment, even somewhat inaccurate or exaggerated theories about Japan tend to be popular.
You say "near constant labor shortage" since World War II in Japan: however, there was a baby boom during '47-'50 which became a large laber pool for the country. This labor pool is currently in the process of retiring, which is why Japan has a growing elderly population, which only worsens the situation caused by a shrinking child population.
Maybe you are an elderly in Japan and can better speak for them than anyone else here. Many of them want to continue their lives in remote villages instead of changing their environment by moving to a nursing home. Frankly, not many people are interested in helping these people even at nursing homes, much less at remote villages. Depending on what comes out of this research, the elderlies may also prefer robots over people for financial and privacy reasons. It may be that this technology will eventually find its ways into fields that are different from its original intended purpose, or it maybe just pork barrel spending. They see a future need, and spending money in research is one of the ways they figured how to spend money today for it. Why spend money into researching anything (i.e. RFID tags) if immigrants can be employed at lower wages? That sounds like a luddite way of thinking. To dismiss this research as simply "xenophobia" is rather delusional.
I agree that there is xenophobia in any large enough population. If you look at any large enough population, you'll see people with all sorts of personalities, including xenophobia - it wouldn't make much sense to disagree with that.
Equally, it doesn't make any sense to assign a single negative personality (e.g. xenophobia) to a population as large as Japan (127 million+ people). Not only is that woefully inaccurate but in many ways irrational. It's also a very biased perspective to say technological innovation is a sign of social illness.
Speaking of whether race will merge into one, that may not happen. Just as there are only 4 blood types (A, B, AB, O), there are only 6 shades of skin color. No matter how much the human race has interracial offsprings, unless 5 skin colors somehow go extinct, there will always be a variety. But what is a "race" anyway? Scientists nowadays shy away from racial classification of peoples because of its an inherently inaccurate nature. Instead they describe people by genetic analysis to determine their anthropological roots.
You compare the US and Japan, and wonder why the US isn't spending as much money in research for the elderly. Japan has one of the slowest population growth rates, while the US has a healthy, relatively normal population growth rate. Japan's problem is an increasing elderly population and and a shrinking young population. Given these facts, is the only explanation that you can give why Japan is spending more money in elderly care, is anti-Japanese stereotype? The Korean Japanese are not banned from receiving citizenship. Quite the opposite - often times the government wants them to choose Japanese citizenship, but they want to keep their Korean citizenship for various personal reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of those dual-boot users running Windows will actually be running licensed versions?
The same as the precentage of people who are upgrading from an older version of Windows.
Seeing that Boot Camp only supports installing Windows XP SP2, a person who wants to install a priated version will have to search online for a DMCA-breaking instruction for cracking Windows XP's anti-piracy DRM technology first. There shouldn't be any technical advantages over installing a pirated Windows XP on an Intel-Mac Architecture than installing it on an IBM-compatible, non-Mac Windows 9x/2k machine.
Sort of defeats the purpose of having an alarm system if I have to be within 2-3 ft of the computer at all times.
That's great. I was just making a correction/clarification to someone who was talking about videos and burning.
The academia usually doesn't get censored very often in the West. During Chairman Mao's rule, Chinese professors were criticised for being "anti-revolutionaries." Smart people who know shit and know what's going on are liable to expose the administration's lie.
A Microsoft solution that requires you to buy more Microsoft to get it working. Who would have expected that.
It's Microsoft's strategy. Develop a video DRM solution, then make it playable only on their OS. I've visited a company that streams DRMed video, and streaming DRMed Windows Media pretty much requires all the servers to be Windows.
iTunes Music Store already has video downloads, and they don't permit burning video to a format playable on generic DVD players. So, iTMS is not better but the same.
What about people who had only enough money to buy 1 PC, felt they needed Windows, and was interested in OS X... If a dual-bootable Mac was offered, they might give it a try. (Although judging from the past dual-boot article discussions, I'm sure there are a lot of divided opinions on the merit of this.)
I think companies get pissed when a potential business opportunity is missed due to trademark infringement, even if it's unlikely that Apple Corp. will come close to ever reaching the level of iTMS success, or even if they would have never even bothered to think about entering an iTMS-like online music store business model had there not been a trademark conflict. To avoid conflict, maybe Apple Computer should use a different name for their music store -- for example, instead of calling it Apple Music Store, they could call it the iTunes Music Store. Oh, wait...
Speaking of Apple, I bet that's one company MS will deny the Vista ready sticker. Apple probably knows this and wouldn't try hard to get it.
There's only one format that's important for enticing potential buyers: MP3. That's because people don't have most of the original CDs for their $1,000,000.00 music collection to re-rip into a new format. AAC is added into the supported formats mainly in the interests of Apple's business strategy. Since not many competitors' players support AAC, an iTunes user with their AAC files will feel less inclined to buy a player that doesn't support that format.
I don't think it's worth supporting an artist who can only produce 1 good song.
Well, I even give money to homeless people sometimes, even though he hasn't made a single hit. If a penny or two goes to the artists for my song purchase, it can't be such a bad thing. She/he's got more talent than me.
Also, most the the CD's i've bought recently have been $15. You can often find old stuff for even cheapter, $10. I find that the quality and freedom are well worth the extra cash
Used CDs can be cheap, but I hate scratches more than quality loss that comes from transcoding. $15.00 per CD is a good deal, but such good deals aren't always common in every country. I found a double CD album being sold for $25 on iTMS, $13 on Amazon.com. And guess what, I chose the album from Amazon.com.
... no record company, in their right mind, would agree to selling media without it.
Only until recently, all record companies sold digital, lossless, DRM-free music. All CDs that I buy are DRM-free, not because I have been avoiding DRM CDs (although I would), I just haven't encountered them from the artists that I am interested in. I doubt that the CD DRMs are hard to crack (just disable autorun?), but with their warnings stickers, that it may break my CD player, my CD drive, or my PC, and that nobody will refund me the CD or the damaged hardware if that happened, makes me not want to buy it at all even if I didn't mind the copy restrictions. So yeah, 100% of the CDs that I buy come from record companies that didn't add DRM.
For me it's cost over quality. Buying one song at $0.99 USD makes more economic sense than buying the $17.00 CD. However, sometimes the real CD sold at online stores can be cheaper than what iTunes downloads offer. And for me, my ears don't care about quality loss from burn & rip transcoding, but make sure to tag it as such. Sometimes I care about quality, and for those I buy the real CD. Online downloads complement my CD purchases, not replace it.
Have battery lives that match vendors claims.
Apple traditionally has had understated their iPod battery life. If you look at companies like iriver on the other hand, they market their storage capacity in hours of music at 64kbps and hide this fact, while Apple is more honest by measuring theirs at 128kbps.
Yeah, there was once a video made by an iPod owner who was complaining about battery life, but he didn't give a full view of the situation, plus alot has changed since then (like battery life quadrupling).
Yes, that seems about right, since last week we already had fusion power and artificial gravity.
"If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone." -- Jack Handy
by Apple Corps this time.
The article reads: "This week the Apple Corps goes to the High Court seeking multimillion-pound damages..."
and it's dated March 27, so yeah.
Update: there was also a baby boom during '71-'74. Also in the early 20th cent, quite a large labor population went to Brazil, but that was before WWII so I guess it is not of our concern.
Any country with a labor shortage problem has some sort of immigration policy that is stricter than free-for-all. The fact that Japan gets picked upon as being xenophobic is based more on stereotype than not. I'm not sure if the US is a good example to compare against, especially after 9-11, with their eye-scanning or fingerprinting or whatever, for all visitors. You can't even fly domestic in the US without a passport now.
Yeah, the US has dual citizenship and stuff, but what about other Asian countries? China, Indonesia, et al. don't allow dual citizenship either. The countries with people who want to migrate to Japan tend to have stricter immigration laws. And the US also has porous borders with Mexico and Canada, which means their policy should also have to reflect these geographical realities. Maybe comparing Japan with Australia or the UK (no continental borders) could be more interesting, although I don't think such comparisons can change the public view of Japan much. Even US immigration policy is always being criticised by Mexican politicians. It seems that if country A is a popular destination for migrants, there will continuously be a background radiation of immigration policy complaints.
I think Japan is susceptible to being seen as a 'weird' country, and that people often hyperbolate, over-emphasise, or misunderstand differences. The reason being that after WWII, the occupying powers were tasked with the process of eliminating militarism and ultra-nationalism. In order to do this, they had to psycho-analyse "the Japanese mind" - how can we change the way they think? what's wrong with them? And this sort of attitude still lingers overseas as well as within Japan, since nobody liked the war and it was a big concern for the entire world. In this environment, even somewhat inaccurate or exaggerated theories about Japan tend to be popular.
You say "near constant labor shortage" since World War II in Japan: however, there was a baby boom during '47-'50 which became a large laber pool for the country. This labor pool is currently in the process of retiring, which is why Japan has a growing elderly population, which only worsens the situation caused by a shrinking child population.
Maybe you are an elderly in Japan and can better speak for them than anyone else here. Many of them want to continue their lives in remote villages instead of changing their environment by moving to a nursing home. Frankly, not many people are interested in helping these people even at nursing homes, much less at remote villages. Depending on what comes out of this research, the elderlies may also prefer robots over people for financial and privacy reasons. It may be that this technology will eventually find its ways into fields that are different from its original intended purpose, or it maybe just pork barrel spending. They see a future need, and spending money in research is one of the ways they figured how to spend money today for it. Why spend money into researching anything (i.e. RFID tags) if immigrants can be employed at lower wages? That sounds like a luddite way of thinking. To dismiss this research as simply "xenophobia" is rather delusional.
I agree that there is xenophobia in any large enough population. If you look at any large enough population, you'll see people with all sorts of personalities, including xenophobia - it wouldn't make much sense to disagree with that.
Equally, it doesn't make any sense to assign a single negative personality (e.g. xenophobia) to a population as large as Japan (127 million+ people). Not only is that woefully inaccurate but in many ways irrational. It's also a very biased perspective to say technological innovation is a sign of social illness.
Speaking of whether race will merge into one, that may not happen. Just as there are only 4 blood types (A, B, AB, O), there are only 6 shades of skin color. No matter how much the human race has interracial offsprings, unless 5 skin colors somehow go extinct, there will always be a variety. But what is a "race" anyway? Scientists nowadays shy away from racial classification of peoples because of its an inherently inaccurate nature. Instead they describe people by genetic analysis to determine their anthropological roots.
They Say IC, But I Don't See...
You compare the US and Japan, and wonder why the US isn't spending as much money in research for the elderly. Japan has one of the slowest population growth rates, while the US has a healthy, relatively normal population growth rate. Japan's problem is an increasing elderly population and and a shrinking young population. Given these facts, is the only explanation that you can give why Japan is spending more money in elderly care, is anti-Japanese stereotype? The Korean Japanese are not banned from receiving citizenship. Quite the opposite - often times the government wants them to choose Japanese citizenship, but they want to keep their Korean citizenship for various personal reasons.