I like how the new iTunes tiered pricing the major music labels have been calling for exposes them as the greedy gougers they are. It’s not like the cost of distributing one digital song is any more for them so the only rationale for raising the price to US$1.29 for a popular song is that they think they’re going to make more money. This is called price gouging. The cost of distribution, the cost of manufacturing and packaging, the cost of advertising & promotion, are all completely decoupled in the digital music world from the only cost that is real which is the cost of recording. And this has been plummeting for years now.
Music say they can make money with more flexible prices and possibly help make music retail a profitable enterprise again.
“If we can gain traction with $1.29 that will be good for greater margin,” said another label executive, also involved in discussions, but who did want to identify the record label.
…because that’s a really healthy thing for the market and what consumers want.
Honestly, the thing I love about this story is that it’s a bunch of rich villagers running Google out of town. Finally, the victimized, well-to-do of the world are standing up for themselves.
This whole kerfuffle about Google Street View being a burglars’ aid is ridiculous. You don’t need a map to tell who’s loaded or not, just a car. Or a bike. Or a pair of legs and eyes.
“We’ve already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
By this logic, Chicago, San Francisco and London and all the other (rich) cities that have Street View should have been looted and burnt to the ground by now. What this statement actually tells us is that statistically their crime rate has had a small bump – they’re not out of their norm yet, as in the past 7 years recorded crime in that area (the borough of Milton-Keynes) has hovered around 10-13 reported burglaries per year, and 6 out of 52 weeks is a very small sample period.
Similarly, the terrorist-tool argument is nonsense: if your really a terrorist, you’ll launch at high visibility targets…or better yet, just into populated areas. I don’t need to point out current events in Israel and Gaza to make the case. Clearly, that’s exactly what both sides are doing. And all the claims that the Mumbai attackers used Google Earth to coordinate their activities is speciously anecdotal, being trotted out by hysterical right-wingers. Seriously: I haven’t found a single report that hasn’t been out of the mouth of somebody with the agenda to censor Google’s activities. If you find one, please tell me.
A few weeks back I was thinking about converting a Facebook Group I have into a Page. So I was looking through the Facebook “Help” pages and wondering if there was a mechanism for doing this. There was.
In fact, Facebook would do it for you. I put a request in for them to do this. I waited and having not heard back from them in these weeks, I thought I’d check up on it.
Turns out, now:
We’re no longer able to convert Facebook Groups into Pages. You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.
It’s pretty obvious that a Group admin would especially be looking into an automated option if the Group had a lot of members. It’s doubly irking that there’s no indication as to what motivated their change of heart. Was it technical? Or was it sociological?
Anyway, I’m now wondering if I should bother since apparently there’s no way to invite “Fans” to your Page whereas there still is with Groups.
Intro: this is a brief account, excerpted from the original which was much longer and had more detailed forensic information. I decided not to publish it since it might be under investigation but several traces of it are still publicly available if you know where to look.
I have to admit, I am often amused by the level of deviousness that goes into scamming, fraud, etc. Email phishing is particularly interesting because it is a specialized form of social engineering fraud which is filtered through technology and preys on the naïve and their understanding of technology.
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One of those instances where you thank your stars you did an Archive & Install.
Final Cut’s Compressor needs Qmaster to be running in the background to arbitrate rendering jobs – even if you’re the only machine on the network. Lots of babies get thrown out with the bathwater when you do a operating system upgrade (including some X11 essentials like xinit and startx – more on that later), and migrating your big cat from Tiger to Leopard is no different. Compressor is one of the casualties. There are 4 files in /usr/sbin/ that get tossed: qmastera, qmasterd, qmasterprefs and qmasterqd.
If you did an Archive & Install, you can fish those babies out from /Previous Systems/<YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX>/usr/sbin, but you’ll probably need some Terminal skills.
Strangely enough, the startup launch scripts in /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster will probably still be there, so you can either reboot or again in the Terminal, “sudo /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster start” should get it running again.
Also, perhaps this works but I haven’t tried it. Anyone?
