This morning I accepted an invitation — mediated through Kevin — to talk to a reporter about Apple’s new music-downloading service. I wish I’d read Tom’s posting before I opened my mouth, and now I’m hoping that the reporter in question will lose her notes to our conversation.
Not that I’d materially change much of what I said; I really don’t mind paying for bits, if they’re the bits I want, at a fair price, and if I may then do what I want with them. I think Apple’s done a creditable job of making those bits attractively available. (One of the points I keep making in this context is that the mediators make customers pay for packaging and distribution, not product. Apple’ doing a very good job with packaging and distribution, with the reservations I’ve stipulated before: the price is too high, the selection too limited, and the DRM annoying — though I trust that some Slash-dot hero will circumvent it.)
Tom cuts loose at Steve Jobs for selling for a dollar what Napster made it possible to share without charge. I’m a firm theological advocate sharing in ’most every case, but I don’t mind paying for something if I’m satisfied with the deal. I borrow Frank’s lawn mower (or wait around, culpably, for him to mow the lawn) because I just can’t make sense of the expenditure for a mower. I share my books with people who don’t feel the urgency of owning a copy of some semi-obscure tome by a forgotten theologian. I buy those books in the first place because it’s worth the expense for me to have a copy at hand (or an extra to give away) — even books that are conveniently available in the seminary library. I don’t in the least mind paying $1.98 for the Firesign Theater’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, and the $10 Jimi Hendrix albums that Apple’s offering appeal to me.
At the same time, Tom’s outrage that file-sharing has been so effectively quashed strikes a sympathetic note with me. Perhaps I’m (half-full glasswise) appreciating the distance that the Apple Music Store brings us from the “Recording Industry as Fortress of Music” model, with the hope that once the bits start flowing, then they’ll erode the grotesquely, artificially high prices; once someone grasps the Janis Ian/Cory Doctorow principle that giving away one [digital] form of the music (or book) actually enhances the value of the physical form of the book (or music), The Industry may realize that they’ll make more money by selling everyone a copy of “Purple Haze” for a dime (and not fretting about the peer-to-peer file sharers) than by selling a thousand people copies for a dollar. . . .
Posted by AKMA at May 2, 2003 12:09 AM | TrackBackSome of us a most thankfull you keep extra copies of forgotten theologians and do your part to spread the wealth...Thank you.
Posted by: Jeff Reich at May 2, 2003 10:24 AMI don't think file-sharing has been quashed -- I don't know if that is even possible. But what some people would be willing to pay for (I would, if I had also shelled out for an Apple rather than the cheap Linux box that I run) is the convenience of finding things there, the fast download, and the certainty that they'll be getting good copies of what the titles claim that the files are. The rest of us can still root around for truffles in the bogs of Morpheus. As with so many things, it depends on where people are situated at the moment on the time/money axes of their lives.
Posted by: Joseph Zitt at May 2, 2003 02:22 PMI realize, in part thanks to your comment, that my intended target had slipped, as these things will tend to do. The service and its attendant details is of less import than the docile acceptance of it by those so inured to consuming that anything more adventurous is simply not to be conceived. A follow up, fwiw:
http://tom.weblogs.com/2003/05/02
The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Ellis at January 13, 2004 11:08 AMInside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
Posted by: Simon at January 13, 2004 11:08 AMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Valentine at January 13, 2004 11:08 AM