Yeah, but the tighter the ISP-level filtering and the tighter the bounce filters on intermediary computers, the less likely you are to get real emails too. I'm a small business owner, and unfortunately, some of my clients' first contacts are over email. Some don't give their phone number.
I always shudder when I have to reply to an MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL account because it's a constant crapshoot of whether or not my stuff will get through. Worst of all, not many of those inform you that you were direct-to-junk or bounced altogether.
What we really need to do is educate people in plain English about how stuff like email, IM, the Internet and basic computer stuff actually works.
It would seem to me that Office Max just got a whole bunch of people to flock to their stores to see what could be had 'rebate-free'. I'm betting that for one clever reason or another, most of the big ticket items are still pretty heavily reliant on mail-ins.
I'll also bet that at least some of the mindless shopping masses walking into OfficeMax will quickly forget what they went in for, and will walk out with one or a few items they otherwise wouldn'tve purchased.
PR mission accomplished.
I don't think people are as interested in having the highest quality anymore. They want something acceptable to them.
Back before CD burners were available/commonly affordable, how many of us were happy to get a tape made of the same disc? The loss in digital to analogue conversion wasn't enough to keep people from doing it.
Today, people will happily take pretty high resolution (DVD or TV content) and resize/compress the heck out of it for playback on an iPod or other portable device.
I think for most of us, if we're paying for a product, we want it to work at its fullest potential. Whereas if we're not plunking down hard currency for an item that typically costs money, we don't care so much about quality.
DRM may temporarily or even permanently prevent people from making full-res copies of music and movies, but how many of us will really care about the nearly imperceptible loss of quality in a ripped/copied/pirated movie or music album?
Hell, if I were a movie or music label, I'd gladly GIVE away (over t'IntarWeb) acceptable, but lower quality digital copies of movies and music; while at the same time SELLING high resolution or best-quality versions of the same content. Use the freebies to discover the markets that will pay for the added features of the 'paid-for' version (such as liner notes, director commentary, reliable media, quality packaging, etc.).
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In my humble opinion, this is probably the most intelligent statement I've seen about MySpace in a very long time.
I always shudder when I have to reply to an MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL account because it's a constant crapshoot of whether or not my stuff will get through. Worst of all, not many of those inform you that you were direct-to-junk or bounced altogether.
What we really need to do is educate people in plain English about how stuff like email, IM, the Internet and basic computer stuff actually works.
It would seem to me that Office Max just got a whole bunch of people to flock to their stores to see what could be had 'rebate-free'. I'm betting that for one clever reason or another, most of the big ticket items are still pretty heavily reliant on mail-ins. I'll also bet that at least some of the mindless shopping masses walking into OfficeMax will quickly forget what they went in for, and will walk out with one or a few items they otherwise wouldn'tve purchased. PR mission accomplished.
Back before CD burners were available/commonly affordable, how many of us were happy to get a tape made of the same disc? The loss in digital to analogue conversion wasn't enough to keep people from doing it.
Today, people will happily take pretty high resolution (DVD or TV content) and resize/compress the heck out of it for playback on an iPod or other portable device.
I think for most of us, if we're paying for a product, we want it to work at its fullest potential. Whereas if we're not plunking down hard currency for an item that typically costs money, we don't care so much about quality.
DRM may temporarily or even permanently prevent people from making full-res copies of music and movies, but how many of us will really care about the nearly imperceptible loss of quality in a ripped/copied/pirated movie or music album?
Hell, if I were a movie or music label, I'd gladly GIVE away (over t'IntarWeb) acceptable, but lower quality digital copies of movies and music; while at the same time SELLING high resolution or best-quality versions of the same content. Use the freebies to discover the markets that will pay for the added features of the 'paid-for' version (such as liner notes, director commentary, reliable media, quality packaging, etc.).