It makes much more sense to buy the CD, rip it (at higher bitrates than Apple provides) and resell it, for a per-song price closer to $0.25.
You could save even more money by torrenting it, both of these are copyright violations. Format shifting is OK, but "making a backup" and then selling it is not.
The problem with your reasoning, is that just a little bit of the cost is actually paper. Sure, you get rid of one middleman, but you replace it with another who want their cut (30% seems to be the going rate).
The "lack of value" you see doesn't show up as a saved cost for the publisher and author, and most of the work is done anyway. And AFAIK, publishing isn't a business making money hands over fist. A few authors do - J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are not exactly median earners - and publishing them is very profitable too. But for most books, this does not seem to be the case.
So taking pictures of yourself is more important than having a prevew of what you are taking a picture of so it will come out level and properly framed? I fear for the future of photos...
A front facing camera - in addition to the normal one on the back - has been common on other phones for many years. They were part of one of the launching features of 3G - video calls. Unfortunately for the phone companies hoping that this would increase traffic and revenue, noone liked holding their phones half a meter in front of them to do a call and the technology is still unused.
Personally, I hope Apple doesn't add one. It's pointless, and takes space/cost that could be used for other things. I had one on my Nokia N95, and used it once.
But will it include minor expectations like a choice in carriers,
It does have a choice in carriers outside the US. The US is special, with much more carrier lock-in - a big reason being that the carriers use different standards. So I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to choose Verizon is far off - the mobile phone market just doesn't work as well in the US as elsewhere.
If OS X is a unix operating system, does that mean Mac games will work on Linux too?
No. There isn't usually not compatibility among Unices. Mac is also only using Unix underpinnings, it has plenty of other APIs that a game may be using - e.g. Cocoa and OpenCL. That said, porting to e.g. Linux after porting to Mac is a lot easier as you'll already had to port away from DirectX.
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms. Anyone is free to do what the GPL allows for the GPL'd licensed source but for the non-GPL'd you follow the proprietary license.
Only for the code you own yourself. If others contributed, you have no right to relicense that part of the code - you need their agreement that you can do that.
What they need to learn is that we don't have, or need, propaganda machines
Sure, you do. The biggest example would be Fox News. It might not be a government propaganda machine (at least not since Bush left), but it still is a very politicized, extreme (at least for us Europeans) news outlet reporting news the way Murdoch wants.
Italy is even worse off, with the prime minister owning all the major private TV channels and now influencing the state run ones too...
Didn't the Chinese call Tibet a dictatorial theocracy before they invaded^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hliberated it ?
Calling for China to cease their occupation and Chinesification of Tibet doesn't make the above claim untrue. Religious rule and serfdom doesn't exactly make it good place even before the occupation. That the current situation is bad, doesn't make the past good.
Seriously. You show me someone who says that a Mouton Rothschild is twice as good as a Grange, and 100 times as good as a poets corner, and I'll show you a person that likes to pretend he knows wine.
The first obstacle in your path, is defining what "twice as good" is...
Exactly, there's Sony, B&N and others. I think par tof Amazon's success is that the press talks about no one else
I think Amazon's success is based on how easy it is to use, and get books on it. The Apple mantra, "it just works", sure applies there. Go to Amazon, purchase and a minute or two later, it's on your Kindle. Many others providing this hardware don't have as integrated a solution as Amazon does - other than B&N, probably none. Also, their hardware is good.
Now we have Apple who has, imo, a very half-assed device and they're unfortunately getting more attention then superior competition which means they'll probably get more sales than they deserve.
"Half-assed"? Apple does a lot of things, but "half-assing" is not one of them. They do, however, have evil lockdown schemes - even to the point of trying to censure publications in app form. Europe doesn't have the weird American "violence good, boobies very bad" attitude, so there have been cases of German magazines being censured by Apple. Other than the worrysome censoring and lockdown, I'm sure it's going to be a very good general purpose device.
The Kindle is a specialized device - with e-ink, it'll last a lot longer and be a lot better when reading text books.
Apple's DRM: My computer, containing all my downloaded iTunes TV series and movies is destroyed in a fire. I can call Apple and beg them to let me re-download them, but this is described "as more a favor then a policy."
That's a result of not having a backup. If you want to compare the DRM aspect of it, the scenario would be:
Apple's DRM: You restore your backup, enter your username and password and your DRM files work just fine. If you now, with the new replacement, is over your five computer limit, you login into your apple account and reset the list of authorized computers (which you can do once a year).
True random shuffle will give you songs and orders you've already heard --- just as likely as any other song and order combination.
Yes, but people forget most of the sequence... they just notice the times when it is the same artist in a row. Thus, the part of the elections evaluated when thinking "this isn't random" is extremely biased. Humans are good at seeing patterns.
I don't think the "overreached" was about the contributor agreements, but rather the MySQL claim that the protocol for talking to the database (sending SQL queries) was GPL. Thus non-GPL software was not allowed to use the database, and you should buy the commercial versions.
While I'm certain it would explain part of the difference, there are hardly enough black people in the US to explain the difference. It would probably explain more if you dropped the race angle, and just looked at other characteristics - income level, participation in the job market, education level etc.
I've no doubt the top tier is about the same as it is in e.g. Norway and Japan, but large parts of the population don't have that coverage. And having seen what getting a stroke that kills in 7 months, rather than immediately, can do to a family if you don't have public health care, this is one of the few things I think should have be a public responsibility. The cost level, vs. the results, in the US doesn't exactly contradict this.
It's hard to avoid thinking that the government somehow "asked" the press to downplay this, and the press is complying.
There has been a significant coverage of this. That said, downplaying it - and the message he was trying to send - is good. You don't want to encourage more extremist nuts to do violent acts to get attention for their strange versions of reality. I doubt the government has anything to do with it, but an editor with a conscience should.
Hardly. The public school system is not a free market, where for more money you can attract higher levels of talent (and sanity). Paying more means paying the same people higher salaries, depending not on demonstrated ability, but rather the number of years they have been in the system.
If the salary level in the schools is lowered to minimum wage, there wouldn't be any qualified teachers left. If you agree on that, we agree that the salary level does indeed have an effect. Now, I agree that significantly increasing salary wouldn't have as an immediate effect as decreasing it - there is a significant lag when improving conditions. However, increased pay would retain many of the good teachers who move away from teaching, and make teaching a more attractive career for students looking at different career paths. Thus, the average would slowly improve.
Another problem is, what is a good teacher? A teacher in the best areas of Silicon Valley has a very different set of pupils and parents than a teacher in a poor inner city district somewhere - I expect the results on standardized tests would be very different, even if the latter teacher knew his subjects better and was better at motivating and coaching. I even expect that the skill sets needed would be very different.
FWIW, in Norway it doesn't matter what the patient believe on that matter. All antibiotics are prescription only. Also, ads are not allowed for prescription drugs.
As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown (....)
First of all, the author doesn't make that assumption. With that said - I think everyone realizes that 100 000 downloads do not equal 100 000 lost sales. However, I think everyone also realizes that some of these are lost sales. 100? 1000? 10 000? Noone will ever know for sure. And I do not believe that the "this will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown" will apply at all... it is just someone trying to justify their illegal downloads. The reasons I believe this are:
Dan Brown doesn't sell other products, so one can't say that he'll sell concert tickets, t-shirts etc instead
Dan Brown doesn't need extra exposure. He's not an unknown, struggling band/artist/writer noone has heard of.
For unknown bands, bands on tour (not the top ones, as everything will be sol out anyway) etc, some illegal downloads might help. But for the top artists, movies, authors etc, this is nothing but a loss (the size of which is not "X illegal copies times RRP")
Christians are not a persecuted minority. Get over it. You have no idea what actual persecution is like.
In some areas of the world (mostly, the Islamic part) they are persecuted. Worst case - converting to Christianity from Islam - can get you killed in many countries. Officially or unofficially.
In the Western world, of course, they're not discriminated even though some occasionally like to think so. Not giving equal footing in school to one interpretation of a myth vs science doesn't exactly equal discrimination.
That is not going to work. Really, that is not going to work. I've got more than a decade of professional development experience, approx. half of that doing agile development. Developer, scrum master, project manager (PMP certified) - been there, done that, still doing it. Agile is not a magic wand which solves all problems.
Agile's forte is adjusting scope in a flexible way - to allow continuous input on priorities and features, to decrease cost of change, and to avoid schedule surprises by only scheduling well defined parts (if you don't know what you'll be doing, you schedule a timeboxed investigation instead). One good scenario is product development - you have a pile of potential features, and a rough release schedule. Another good fit is a scenario where the team is working directly with the customer, and the customer gets to select what gets done and changed (adjust scope) within the schedule.
In your scenario, scope and schedule are set. Several staples of agile methodologies may come in very useful, like quick daily status meetings, continuous integration etc... but you aren't doing agile development. You need to do the project the traditional way - break down the deliverables, estimate, schedule, do risk management and see if this is at all realistic. PERT is probably a better fit for your situtation.
As heard on the news about a year ago, "I think we can all agree that there are too many abortions".
But other than that, opinions vary a lot.
The people who are pro choice, would typically talk about the importance of sexual education in school, the importance of condoms and other contraceptives.
Those who want to make the choice for the woman based on their own values, usually also wants to minimize sexual education (as it should only be done in the context of marriage) and minimize access to contraceptives.
Actually, Apple doesn't have the right to determine what it is you do with the product after you buy it, so long as you don't produce more copies of it than you've bought.
But you can't buy a standalone versions of it. They're all upgrades. They might not enforce it, but that doesn't change it. The pricing varies too (e.g. look at Snow Leopard pricing), but even that doesn't change the fact that they're all upgrades and part of a total package.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes much more sense to buy the CD, rip it (at higher bitrates than Apple provides) and resell it, for a per-song price closer to $0.25.
You could save even more money by torrenting it, both of these are copyright violations. Format shifting is OK, but "making a backup" and then selling it is not.
The problem with your reasoning, is that just a little bit of the cost is actually paper. Sure, you get rid of one middleman, but you replace it with another who want their cut (30% seems to be the going rate).
The "lack of value" you see doesn't show up as a saved cost for the publisher and author, and most of the work is done anyway. And AFAIK, publishing isn't a business making money hands over fist. A few authors do - J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are not exactly median earners - and publishing them is very profitable too. But for most books, this does not seem to be the case.
So taking pictures of yourself is more important than having a prevew of what you are taking a picture of so it will come out level and properly framed? I fear for the future of photos...
A front facing camera - in addition to the normal one on the back - has been common on other phones for many years. They were part of one of the launching features of 3G - video calls. Unfortunately for the phone companies hoping that this would increase traffic and revenue, noone liked holding their phones half a meter in front of them to do a call and the technology is still unused.
Personally, I hope Apple doesn't add one. It's pointless, and takes space/cost that could be used for other things. I had one on my Nokia N95, and used it once.
But will it include minor expectations like a choice in carriers,
It does have a choice in carriers outside the US. The US is special, with much more carrier lock-in - a big reason being that the carriers use different standards. So I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to choose Verizon is far off - the mobile phone market just doesn't work as well in the US as elsewhere.
If OS X is a unix operating system, does that mean Mac games will work on Linux too?
No. There isn't usually not compatibility among Unices. Mac is also only using Unix underpinnings, it has plenty of other APIs that a game may be using - e.g. Cocoa and OpenCL. That said, porting to e.g. Linux after porting to Mac is a lot easier as you'll already had to port away from DirectX.
How? It is just like if someone gave away popcorn for free and they are now charging them ten cents. They were the producers, they can change the licensing terms. Anyone is free to do what the GPL allows for the GPL'd licensed source but for the non-GPL'd you follow the proprietary license.
Only for the code you own yourself. If others contributed, you have no right to relicense that part of the code - you need their agreement that you can do that.
What they need to learn is that we don't have, or need, propaganda machines
Sure, you do. The biggest example would be Fox News. It might not be a government propaganda machine (at least not since Bush left), but it still is a very politicized, extreme (at least for us Europeans) news outlet reporting news the way Murdoch wants.
Italy is even worse off, with the prime minister owning all the major private TV channels and now influencing the state run ones too...
Didn't the Chinese call Tibet a dictatorial theocracy before they invaded^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hliberated it ?
Calling for China to cease their occupation and Chinesification of Tibet doesn't make the above claim untrue. Religious rule and serfdom doesn't exactly make it good place even before the occupation. That the current situation is bad, doesn't make the past good.
Seriously. You show me someone who says that a Mouton Rothschild is twice as good as a Grange, and 100 times as good as a poets corner, and I'll show you a person that likes to pretend he knows wine.
The first obstacle in your path, is defining what "twice as good" is...
Exactly, there's Sony, B&N and others. I think par tof Amazon's success is that the press talks about no one else
I think Amazon's success is based on how easy it is to use, and get books on it. The Apple mantra, "it just works", sure applies there. Go to Amazon, purchase and a minute or two later, it's on your Kindle. Many others providing this hardware don't have as integrated a solution as Amazon does - other than B&N, probably none. Also, their hardware is good.
Now we have Apple who has, imo, a very half-assed device and they're unfortunately getting more attention then superior competition which means they'll probably get more sales than they deserve.
"Half-assed"? Apple does a lot of things, but "half-assing" is not one of them. They do, however, have evil lockdown schemes - even to the point of trying to censure publications in app form. Europe doesn't have the weird American "violence good, boobies very bad" attitude, so there have been cases of German magazines being censured by Apple. Other than the worrysome censoring and lockdown, I'm sure it's going to be a very good general purpose device. The Kindle is a specialized device - with e-ink, it'll last a lot longer and be a lot better when reading text books.
Apple's DRM: My computer, containing all my downloaded iTunes TV series and movies is destroyed in a fire. I can call Apple and beg them to let me re-download them, but this is described "as more a favor then a policy."
That's a result of not having a backup. If you want to compare the DRM aspect of it, the scenario would be:
Apple's DRM: You restore your backup, enter your username and password and your DRM files work just fine. If you now, with the new replacement, is over your five computer limit, you login into your apple account and reset the list of authorized computers (which you can do once a year).
Firefox with flashblock and image.animation_mode=None (see about:config) fixes most of this, without killing every single ad.
True random shuffle will give you songs and orders you've already heard --- just as likely as any other song and order combination.
Yes, but people forget most of the sequence... they just notice the times when it is the same artist in a row. Thus, the part of the elections evaluated when thinking "this isn't random" is extremely biased. Humans are good at seeing patterns.
I don't think the "overreached" was about the contributor agreements, but rather the MySQL claim that the protocol for talking to the database (sending SQL queries) was GPL. Thus non-GPL software was not allowed to use the database, and you should buy the commercial versions.
While I'm certain it would explain part of the difference, there are hardly enough black people in the US to explain the difference. It would probably explain more if you dropped the race angle, and just looked at other characteristics - income level, participation in the job market, education level etc.
I've no doubt the top tier is about the same as it is in e.g. Norway and Japan, but large parts of the population don't have that coverage. And having seen what getting a stroke that kills in 7 months, rather than immediately, can do to a family if you don't have public health care, this is one of the few things I think should have be a public responsibility. The cost level, vs. the results, in the US doesn't exactly contradict this.
It's hard to avoid thinking that the government somehow "asked" the press to downplay this, and the press is complying.
There has been a significant coverage of this. That said, downplaying it - and the message he was trying to send - is good. You don't want to encourage more extremist nuts to do violent acts to get attention for their strange versions of reality. I doubt the government has anything to do with it, but an editor with a conscience should.
I'm not sure what your trying to say here could you use a car analogy?
Ferrari vs volvo Truck? Straight out speed, vs. load capacity.
So why didn't you wait till next week to publish a verified fact?
Hardly. The public school system is not a free market, where for more money you can attract higher levels of talent (and sanity). Paying more means paying the same people higher salaries, depending not on demonstrated ability, but rather the number of years they have been in the system.
If the salary level in the schools is lowered to minimum wage, there wouldn't be any qualified teachers left. If you agree on that, we agree that the salary level does indeed have an effect. Now, I agree that significantly increasing salary wouldn't have as an immediate effect as decreasing it - there is a significant lag when improving conditions. However, increased pay would retain many of the good teachers who move away from teaching, and make teaching a more attractive career for students looking at different career paths. Thus, the average would slowly improve.
Another problem is, what is a good teacher? A teacher in the best areas of Silicon Valley has a very different set of pupils and parents than a teacher in a poor inner city district somewhere - I expect the results on standardized tests would be very different, even if the latter teacher knew his subjects better and was better at motivating and coaching. I even expect that the skill sets needed would be very different.
FWIW, in Norway it doesn't matter what the patient believe on that matter. All antibiotics are prescription only. Also, ads are not allowed for prescription drugs.
As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown (....)
First of all, the author doesn't make that assumption. With that said - I think everyone realizes that 100 000 downloads do not equal 100 000 lost sales. However, I think everyone also realizes that some of these are lost sales. 100? 1000? 10 000? Noone will ever know for sure. And I do not believe that the "this will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown" will apply at all... it is just someone trying to justify their illegal downloads. The reasons I believe this are:
For unknown bands, bands on tour (not the top ones, as everything will be sol out anyway) etc, some illegal downloads might help. But for the top artists, movies, authors etc, this is nothing but a loss (the size of which is not "X illegal copies times RRP")
Christians are not a persecuted minority. Get over it. You have no idea what actual persecution is like.
In some areas of the world (mostly, the Islamic part) they are persecuted. Worst case - converting to Christianity from Islam - can get you killed in many countries. Officially or unofficially.
In the Western world, of course, they're not discriminated even though some occasionally like to think so. Not giving equal footing in school to one interpretation of a myth vs science doesn't exactly equal discrimination.
That is not going to work. Really, that is not going to work. I've got more than a decade of professional development experience, approx. half of that doing agile development. Developer, scrum master, project manager (PMP certified) - been there, done that, still doing it. Agile is not a magic wand which solves all problems.
Agile's forte is adjusting scope in a flexible way - to allow continuous input on priorities and features, to decrease cost of change, and to avoid schedule surprises by only scheduling well defined parts (if you don't know what you'll be doing, you schedule a timeboxed investigation instead). One good scenario is product development - you have a pile of potential features, and a rough release schedule. Another good fit is a scenario where the team is working directly with the customer, and the customer gets to select what gets done and changed (adjust scope) within the schedule.
In your scenario, scope and schedule are set. Several staples of agile methodologies may come in very useful, like quick daily status meetings, continuous integration etc... but you aren't doing agile development. You need to do the project the traditional way - break down the deliverables, estimate, schedule, do risk management and see if this is at all realistic. PERT is probably a better fit for your situtation.
As heard on the news about a year ago, "I think we can all agree that there are too many abortions".
But other than that, opinions vary a lot.
The people who are pro choice, would typically talk about the importance of sexual education in school, the importance of condoms and other contraceptives.
Those who want to make the choice for the woman based on their own values, usually also wants to minimize sexual education (as it should only be done in the context of marriage) and minimize access to contraceptives.
Actually, Apple doesn't have the right to determine what it is you do with the product after you buy it, so long as you don't produce more copies of it than you've bought.
But you can't buy a standalone versions of it. They're all upgrades. They might not enforce it, but that doesn't change it. The pricing varies too (e.g. look at Snow Leopard pricing), but even that doesn't change the fact that they're all upgrades and part of a total package.