I think their current culture is toxic for both. Their hardware is polished but IMHO has prioritized form over function at an extreme level, and seems to be developed in complete isolation from the user base.
Thanks - well I can still use all the performance bumps from the add-ons even if I stay in 10.7, but I'll let you know how it goes with 10.8 to start with.
The Mac Pro is a beast - I am still running a first gen MacPro1,1 - it's got an IDE drive installed in the second optical bay, four 3.5 SATA drives in the main bays and 2 2.5 SATA drives connected to the extra SATA connectors hidden under the front fan. At various times it has a hardware RAID card, extra FW+USB card, extra video card, video capture card, etc. I'm just about to grab a pair of 4 core xeons, extra ram, a Radeon hd5770 and some SSD drives - flash it to a MacPro2,1 and I can run Mavericks on it, with a Geekbench of about 10k. US$400 for the upgrades not including the SSDs.
I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro - it is like the Cube, it looks cool but the Mac Pro is not a machine that requires form over function - people buy them to upgrade them, swap things in and out, stick them in racks, etc. Thunderbolt is not a replacement for pro use expandability - it just means a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit.
A good excuse for Apple to discontinue the Pro line eventually though - "hey we made this great new machine, but nobody bought it, so sorry"
70 cents * # of downloads is how lots of artists make money nowadays.
I don't think many people are going to sign a legal agreement and then purposely claim other people's songs. The legal and financial liability from that is huge and much more direct.
You are incorrect - a music "track" consists of two separate copyright - one is the copyright in the sound recording (the audio that you hear), the other is the copyright in the underlying composition embodied in the sound recording (in other words the lyrics, the arrangement, the composition of the music).
There is no compulsory license for sound recordings in any territory for downloads or interactive streaming. You have to explicit permission from the copyright owner to make the recording available for download or interactive streaming, i.e. you can choose when to listen to it.
There is a compulsory license in most territories for the composition side, under certain specific conditions, in which an entity like Grooveshark would obtain a mechanical license for the composition from the copyright holder of the composition (usually music publishers) in advance of its public availability, and then account and pay royalties for its use. This requires Grooveshark to know the songwriters, publishers, and splits of each work, which is not something that comes from the user uploads. It may be the case that their terms of use pass this responsibility to the uploader.
In short, however, you need sets of permission (sound recording and composition) to legally distribute music for download or interactive streaming.
By "directly assigned" I mean the case where Grooveshark and a third party rightsholder (record label, artist, etc.) have a deal in place covering the respective track.
Here's a suggestion to help artists - for every track downloaded which is not directly assigned to a copyright holder, put an amount equal to the industry average for US DPDs, say 70 cents, into escrow, along with 9.1 cents for the US mechanical license, and hold it there for three years or until the copyright holders come calling for it. In addition, supply the copyright holders with the specific details of the uploader. That would help artists.
You might be curious to know that the Burger King in Half Way Tree (a major crossroads in Kingston for those who don't know) had something like the largest grossing grand opening of any BK in the world when they opened on New Year's Eve in 1988. Funny place Jamaica - Pepsi, Blackberry and Burger King instead of Coke, iPhone and McDonalds.
Except that you would have to pipe giga/terabytes of data to/from the cloud - that is why lots of in house rendering and catalogue systems use Fibre Channel and similar technologies - one of the bottlenecks is I/O from the workstation
Audio professionals editing large surround sessions with lots of plugins and lots of tracks for one (plus you need 3-4 or more PCIe slots to stick Pro Tools or similar DSP cards in). These need as much horsepower as you can throw at them.
Video professionals doing rendering or compositing, ditto.
Not to mention the video cards available, plus being able to throw four full size drives directly on the SATA bus.
Instead of Beluga, how about launching a nice tool that with one click lets content owners remove all of their unlicensed content from Grooveshark, block all of it from being re-uploaded ever again, and send us a cheque for any revenues earned when it was there.