Slashdot Mirror

The necessary post full of other links....

Salon article
"End of the tech world" piece from AnchorDesk
a "So What?" peice from E-Commerce Times
Forbes says sell the stock...
...but StarTribune say keep it
MS and hardware
And last, but certainly not least, Ballmer says if they're broken up, prices will rise.

Sometimes, it really baffles me that people get paid to write some of this stuff.

I remember being thoroughly excited when David Bowie released a single exclusively online through N2K Inc., aka owners of Music Boulevard that merged with CDnow in 1999. I thought, this is it, the prices of CD burners are going to come down and soon I'm going to be able to buy music off of the internet directly from the artists and say bye-bye to record company price monopolies that maintain exorbitant CD prices when CDs are actually cheaper to produce than cassette tapes. Yet, that day is still not here because the record companies are making sure it doesn't happen.

I stopped working as a contract Audio Producer for a big company once I discovered the horrifying draconian contracts they were having the artists whose work we recorded and used online sign - the artists had to completely give up all rights to their own work. I mean, all of them as in the company holds all exclusive rights.

Part of the justification for this was because the company didn't want to have to deal with figuring out the royalties of music being accessed online. What if the user doesn't have a sound card or doesn't have their speakers turned up? How do you determine how many people really listened to the music on that page? So the company just followed the lead of the record industry - when in doubt, leave the artist out. Foolishly, I even did some composition work for the company before fully realizing what I had given up. Random note: my manager at the company was incredibly conscientious about seeing that contract artists received proper payment and credit for their work and was constantly struggling to have the contracts changed.

My point, (do I have one?), is that the record companies are not going to give up their monopoly. Furthermore, artists know that record companies have the marketing muscle and radio station influence to get them known and their music heard. And the record companies require that they pay for that influence, dearly. The only real solution is for artists to not go through the major record companies at all and either use smaller labels, like Sub Pop and Peerless Music, or do it themselves.

- tokengeekgrrl
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions

I think the 3rd world adoption of GNU/Linux and *BSD will have a huge effect eventually. There are no real downsides any more, since sufficient applications to do ordinary but important daily work have become available. This should snowball even more irresistibly than Windows snowballed from its start, given the great price :)

We just have to figure out better ways for open source contributors to pay their rent than having day jobs in the Windows world ;-/

But that's starting to happen too.

Not be a complete paranoid, but fatbrain (I think) will never support open-source software. In light of their agreement with Microsoft ( offsite link ... ) it would be very unlikely for them to appear open-source friendly. They probably are more concerned about the MSDN traffic than Slashdot traffic.