All customers of everything are purely a source of profit, and the correct price to charge for anything is whatever the market will bear. That is how capitalism works. If you want me to either give something to you or do something for you, you must pay me what I ask in exchange.
Reminds me a bit of this classic strip:
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Before DVD's arrived, most people thought it was WEIRD to own a physical copy of a movie.
After all, the vast majority of people do not watch the vast majority of movies more than once. Only the most dedicated of nerds and cinemaphiles maintained large libraries of VHS tapes and/or Laser Disks.
DVD's became cheap enough that people started to feel that they "might as well" go ahead in buy them, especially when $35 at Best Buy allowed you the opportunity to watch stuff like all the episodes of Season 2 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in sequence. But that only recently has been how the market has behaved, and if streaming continues to get better and cheaper, I can see people not caring about owning disks anymore.
Heck, I used to line a wall with disks just like every other movie/TV junkie... but I don't believe I've purchased a new DVD since Spiderman 3, and now I'm wondering why I bothered.
If I want to watch a new release, I can add it to my NetFlix queue and wait a couple days with pretty much no cost beyond what I'm already paying for the service, or I suppose I could shell out a couple bucks to "rent" it off iTunes if I'm in some kind of a hurry. For most old movies (and a growing library of TV shows), I can stream them immediately off NetFlix and/or Hulu.
So it's unlikely that I'll buy another DVD ever, and buying a player for a new format is out of the question.
As more and more stuff shows up on NetFlix, I've been carting more and more of my disks to the used CD store down the block and getting rid of them, as well as dumping files off my hard drives. Why store all that shit when I can watch them whenever I want anyway?
The day just might arrive that NetFlix, Blockbuster, Apple and maybe Amazon will all be in the arena, offering "unlimited" streaming of every DVD ever made.
You'll know that day is about 2 years away when Apple releases some kind of Mac for the home with no optical drive whatsoever.
I also have an older computer hooked up to the TV that records television off of the analog cable channels (I haven't gotten a digital tuner card yet). The Mac can't do that without yet another box (EyeTV).
If by "another box" you mean "an HD tuner that's about the size of my thumb", then yes that's true.
I've been DVR-ing free over-the-air HDTV on a mini for years now. It works great.
I have guests over watching 420p sources scaled up to a 720p projector on a 119" screen all the time. Most of those who even give a second thought to video specs simply ASSUME they are watching Blu-Ray disks on a 1080p screen until I inform them otherwise, because they don't notice any pixelation.
And a lot h.264 files out on the Internet are only 360p, and even THOSE look perfectly watchable on my ridiculously-large screen. I seriously doubt anybody watching on their 50" plasma set can even tell the difference without doing a direct A/B comparison test.
I have visited NYC a few times now and I sincerely hope you don't consider the native speech there to be representative of proper American English. It's a weird and extremely grating nasal abomination punctuated by such erudite phrases as "you douchebag, ya scumbag".
Picking that region and main newspaper for some "lesson" in proper speech is weird. It's completely alien to the rest of the nation. It really should be its own city state, I would be thrilled if they removed themselves from the US actually, or they were asked to just leave, and take their newspapers and so called financial "industry"-the white shoe boys gangster mafia-with them.
The New York Times does not publish in the dialect(s) of the common citizens of that New York City. It has been regarded as a "paper of record" for most of its existence and is more formal about adhering to an academic writing style than most other newspapers.
It's very easy to mistake any critical question for raw snark when it's written in text on a forum full of strangers, especially a place like Slashdot. I find that it's *usually* worth the effort to resist that impulse.
You use an iPad in the music studio? I wasn't aware that there were apps that made it useful there.
I think you meant the Mac, which I have seen used extensively in studios due to the high quality of Logic Pro, and I've even seen iPods used as pocket drives, but the form factor of an iPad makes me suspect you got something wrong.
Using an iPad in a music studio feels like mixing paint with a phillips screwdriver: sure, you can do it, but it's not the intended use of the tool and there are other solutions that are much better.
I don't record on the iPad. It's more like a Swiss-Army peripheral device than anything else. When recording, it's a control surface. When rehearsing and learning new material, it saves me the trouble of printing charts on paper. When performing, it runs the board wirelessly, saving me the trouble of a cable snake and allowing the sound tech to sit ANYWHERE while having total control over our road rig. These are just a few of the uses I've found for it, and it seems like every week I find more.
Except for the story we're commenting on, you mean.
Good thinking, but a Mac mini is even safer from spear attacks than a PC tower, especially if you rack-mount it, leaving only a 2" by 5" target made of hard metal.
Although if your machine is at all in danger of getting hit by a fisherman's spear, you probably have even bigger problems due to water damage.
This old myth has never been true.
Apache is more popular than the Windows web server, yet gets hacked less, which completely debunks the idea that being a market leader is the only reason Microsoft products are so shockingly vulnerable to attacks.
OS X is a GUI shell on a BSD layer on a Mach engine. Like any flavor of *nix, it was designed from the ground up to live safely in networked, multi-user environments.
It's an order of magnitude harder to hack than a Windows box, because of superior design. This has been demonstrated over and over for nearly a decade now, yet the MS fanboys continue with the silly drumbeat that Macs are only enjoying security via obscurity.
Really? I find it EXTREMELY useful in the music studio. I guess I missed the memo that this is not supposed to be the case.
Yeah, he's from the country that the "pawns" played Chess with for over half a century.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
