Nobody (except for teenage girls who don't know there's a world outside the mall and slashdot posers who just want to have an excuse to bitch about high prices) pays $20 for a CD.
As a record store employee, I can confidently report this opinion to be nonsense. Many people can and do buy CDs at about $20. I spend all day selling them. But yes, I look forward to selling them for less.
One thing that I would eagerly recommend for jazz newbies is the series of CDs put out in connection with Ken Burns's "Jazz" TV series a few years back. While the show had its weaknesses (it wouldn't have been much different if the world had been destroyed by a comet in 1970, and not everyone things Wynton Marsalis is God), the series of CDs are excellent introductions to the artists.
Hmm... putting together a top 10 of my fave jazz albums off the top of my head right now, I get...
Modern Jazz Quartet: The Complete Last Concert
John Coltrane: A Love Supreme
Miles Davis: Pangaea
Ornette Coleman: Ken Burns Jazz
Herbie Hancock: Sextant
John Zorn: Any Masada album
Dave Brubeck: Time Out
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Urban Bushmen
Weather Report: Heavy Weather
Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays: As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
Note that these are heavily weighted toward the more modern stuff, and others could give more useful hints to jazz pre-1960 or so.
While Tim is spot-on about most of what he says, part of it is based on an aging paradigm, where all books are printed in bulk and mostly sit in a warehouse until remaindered.
A huge number of publishers are now using print-on-demand technologies. With these, books are printed one at a time, when someone orders one. There's no warehousing or storage involved -- it's close to the Star Trek food dispensers, but for books. These are close to indistinguishable from conventionally printed books (and I say this having published books both ways, and having subjected print-on-demand books to some serious torture tests to be sure that the print, binding, etc, would hold up well under harsh conditions).
I have more on the process in my article "Creating Surprise Me with Beauty: How to publish books easily, inexpensively, and beautifully".
I'm going to scan in and OCR all of the OReilly books and put them online so that people don't have to go through all the hassle of going to a bookstore and paying the exhorbitant cost of the books. And they can swap books with their friends.
Let's see how Tim feels about that.
Quite seriously, from what I read from his article, I think he'd just shrug.
Why? Because he knows (or at least believes) that:
Only a tiny percentage of people would have the knowledge to do so in a useful way
His books are easier to use on hardcopy than online, at least with current online technologies
There would be a long-term gain in terms of turning people on to future O'Reilly books
There's still a hump, both technological and societal, to be overcome before people will find most online books to be effective replacements for hardcopy. This may be right around the corner -- but it has remained "right around the corner" for a very long time now.
The rich (not exactly sure who this really classifies anymore) will end up paying more in real dollars than a "poor" person.
It seems that the common definition of "the rich", when people are arguing that they should be taxed more heavily, etc, is "anyone with more money than me."
Asimov got a kick out of this when we were slinging limericks back and forth at a science fiction convention many years ago:
As the Good Doctor once told our class
To a human harm can't come to pass
And you must obey
Everything he might say
Only then may you save your own ass.
One area in which inexpensive CDs are making a huge dent is in classical music. There are a lot of quite good new recordings coming out on, for example, the Naxos label, which sells for $6-$8 or so, depending on the store. Sure, they don't get the huge stars recording for them, but the music is solid, and the selection is surprisingly adventurous. (I don't know anything about their financial arrangements with composers and performers.)
OTOH, knowing the way that conventional record companies mess around with bookkeeping, I have little-to-no hope that making the list price of conventional CDs cheaper would do anything at all to get a single additional penny into the hands of the artists. If anything, they would probably find a way to charge the loss in revenue per disc against the artist's take, making the average artist's on-paper revenue be even further sub-zero.
Though. . . Since Joss withdrew from directly working on Buffy, the show has turned into exactly the kind of high-gloss 90210 teen-shine crud it originally launched in sharp contrast with. --You know? With wisdom, compassion and actual human insight rather than a 'Pretty Kids' club house full of 'Oh So Meaningful' self-centered drama. Stopped watching about two episodes in last season, right around the time I decided to Never Watch Television Again.
You stopped watching the show two episodes in and state an opinion on how the rest of the season went? There's a telepathy port on your TiVo?
King Crimson did the same with their label, Discipline Global Mobile. (They're not just King Crimson any more, either. I believe that John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin has signed up with them, too.)
Uhh, yeah, but DGM has effectively tanked. Not sure how they'd define themselves now, but they aren't much like a label anymore. They don't carry any acts outside of the closely-Crim-connected.
There are successful small labels out there, but DGM is not quite the success story, as it stands now, that many of us wished that it would be.
A look at their business aims is quite instructive as it sums up what they think is wrong with the rest of the industry.
Laudable, yes. And I hope the aims are able to be implemented in a viable company.
Having grown up in Camden, I thought the idea of covering the city in black blobs was a distinct improvement.
Now if this were New York City, the goverment would have immediately cut off funding to the city's museums. But this being Camden, it would require finding government officials who weren't currently in jail.
My solution, get Tux his own sing along coding cd. From what I've seen of friends with kids, their offspring will have listened to the thing so many times the parents will be singing "a is for array", hacking the kernel, and writing scrabble games before we know it.
Dunno if anyone else remembers this, but I useta have a cassette, "Songs for CompuKids", that I picked up in the mid-70s. The only song that I remember at all was the perky "Bit by Bit on the Serial Bus."
In addition to (or rather than) a digital camera: bring a minidisc recorder and a good microphone. You have more sense organs than just your eyes: every so often, get out of the car, close your eyes, and listen to your environment. (I would suggest smelling your environment, but I live in New Jersey:-] )
Right now we've got Habib Koite, Vaartinaa (sp?), Baaba Maal and sundry other artists in the CD changer. Not a one has a major label deal. All are on indies of various sorts.
The Baaba Maal CD currently in my changer is on the Island label, owned by one of the hugest megalabels, Universal.
According to their discography, Varttina has recorded for the humongous companies Warner and BMG.
Major labels are nothing more than a scheme to spoonfeed pablum to people who are too lazy to actually have any taste.
"Indie" labels nowadays are too often nothing more than a scheme to convince the gullible that they're outwitting the majors. Guess what you've been buying?
Who ever decided that you needed to press a thousand copies of an album before you even begin selling?
Those of us who have actually looked into producing CDs know that 1000 copies is a practical minimum for pressed CDs. (CD-Rs are a whole different matter, and somewhat of a different economy.) If you have less than 1000 CDs pressed, the cost per disc is much higher. In fact, many plants are geared to 1000 discs as a minumum run, due to their own economics -- if you order a smaller run, many actually press 1000 and throw the excess away.
Nobody I know listens to a classic rock song in the background of a Ford or Chevy truck commercial and thinks "Wow - those car dealers sure have a snappy tune there." People only like it because of the memories the song brings up in their heads.
You're forgetting perhaps, the recent revival of Nick Drake after his "Pink Moon" was heard by many for the first time in a car commercial? Or the many others whose careers have had bumps in the same way? Or one of the biggest selling albums of recent years, Moby's Play, which was primarily disseminated via its use in commercials?
Nowadays, the commercials are the memories. Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of taste.
By the same doctrine, computerized systems can be booted on the day before the sabbath and then put on an autmatic mode during the sabbath. During that time, a sysadmin can address important issues as they creep up, just like he would add a log to the fire he started before the sabbath.
IANAR (I am not a Rabbi), and it's been a long time since I was in Yeshiva, but...
There are actually a whole class of non-allowed form of "work" (there are a few different words for work in Hebrew; the relevant one here is "Melakhah"), derived from work done in building the temple. One of them is "writing", which probably rules out anything involving a keyboard. Since most admin tasks, as I see them, involve either typing or power-cycling something (and many other involve speaking on the telephone or carrying a pager), it looks like the sysadmin has the day off.
I'm pretty sure that you can program a Linux system to do pretty much everything it can do non-interactively, and let it run on the Sabbath. Heck, you could have a whole Mister House thingie happening -- as long as you weren't triggering events.
OTOH, IMHO, (YMMV, IIRC, MOUSE), there's an odd amount of emphasis put on this stuff by people who have only a rhetorical interest in it. If you're honestly interested in following these guidelines, there are lots of very good places where you can learn about them (either on line or, for example, the Chabad house at most universities). Before sweating the details, someone who is that interested can try keeping kosher, attending services, or keeping the Sabbath or holidays in more general ways. I don't anymore, but there are groups that will welcome your interest and answer honestly asked questions sincerely.
Re:You Have got to be joking.
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 1
This is not music.
... for you.
Music is not a way of making sound. Music is a way of perceiving sound. What you choose to listen to as music is music for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody (except for teenage girls who don't know there's a world outside the mall and slashdot posers who just want to have an excuse to bitch about high prices) pays $20 for a CD.
As a record store employee, I can confidently report this opinion to be nonsense. Many people can and do buy CDs at about $20. I spend all day selling them. But yes, I look forward to selling them for less.
Hilary: And now back to the newsroom.
Viewer 1: What did she say?
Viewer 2: "And now back to the newsroom."
Hilary: Gotcha!
A crazed Aibo springs from a hidden panel on the TV and subdues Viewer 1 until the cops arrive...
Hmm... putting together a top 10 of my fave jazz albums off the top of my head right now, I get...
Note that these are heavily weighted toward the more modern stuff, and others could give more useful hints to jazz pre-1960 or so.
While Tim is spot-on about most of what he says, part of it is based on an aging paradigm, where all books are printed in bulk and mostly sit in a warehouse until remaindered.
A huge number of publishers are now using print-on-demand technologies. With these, books are printed one at a time, when someone orders one. There's no warehousing or storage involved -- it's close to the Star Trek food dispensers, but for books. These are close to indistinguishable from conventionally printed books (and I say this having published books both ways, and having subjected print-on-demand books to some serious torture tests to be sure that the print, binding, etc, would hold up well under harsh conditions).
I have more on the process in my article "Creating Surprise Me with Beauty:
How to publish books easily, inexpensively, and beautifully".
I'm going to scan in and OCR all of the OReilly books and put them online so that people don't have to go through all the hassle of going to a bookstore and paying the exhorbitant cost of the books. And they can swap books with their friends.
Let's see how Tim feels about that.
Quite seriously, from what I read from his article, I think he'd just shrug.
Why? Because he knows (or at least believes) that:
There's still a hump, both technological and societal, to be overcome before people will find most online books to be effective replacements for hardcopy. This may be right around the corner -- but it has remained "right around the corner" for a very long time now.
The rich (not exactly sure who this really classifies anymore) will end up paying more in real dollars than a "poor" person.
It seems that the common definition of "the rich", when people are arguing that they should be taxed more heavily, etc, is "anyone with more money than me."
She's supposed to be plain, cold, arrogant and inflexible. I don't know of any American actress who matches this description.
This would seem tailor-made for Kate Mulgrew.
One area in which inexpensive CDs are making a huge dent is in classical music. There are a lot of quite good new recordings coming out on, for example, the Naxos label, which sells for $6-$8 or so, depending on the store. Sure, they don't get the huge stars recording for them, but the music is solid, and the selection is surprisingly adventurous. (I don't know anything about their financial arrangements with composers and performers.)
OTOH, knowing the way that conventional record companies mess around with bookkeeping, I have little-to-no hope that making the list price of conventional CDs cheaper would do anything at all to get a single additional penny into the hands of the artists. If anything, they would probably find a way to charge the loss in revenue per disc against the artist's take, making the average artist's on-paper revenue be even further sub-zero.
...the first "religious" ceremony in virtual reality?
Far from it: a quick Web search turns up, for example, Mark Pesce's CyberSamhain in 1994.
Though. . . Since Joss withdrew from directly working on Buffy, the show has turned into exactly the kind of high-gloss 90210 teen-shine crud it originally launched in sharp contrast with. --You know? With wisdom, compassion and actual human insight rather than a 'Pretty Kids' club house full of 'Oh So Meaningful' self-centered drama. Stopped watching about two episodes in last season, right around the time I decided to Never Watch Television Again.
You stopped watching the show two episodes in and state an opinion on how the rest of the season went? There's a telepathy port on your TiVo?
King Crimson did the same with their label, Discipline Global Mobile. (They're not just King Crimson any more, either. I believe that John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin has signed up with them, too.)
Uhh, yeah, but DGM has effectively tanked. Not sure how they'd define themselves now, but they aren't much like a label anymore. They don't carry any acts outside of the closely-Crim-connected.
There are successful small labels out there, but DGM is not quite the success story, as it stands now, that many of us wished that it would be.
A look at their business aims is quite instructive as it sums up what they think is wrong with the rest of the industry.
Laudable, yes. And I hope the aims are able to be implemented in a viable company.
But they haven't explained why they seem to suddenly disintegrate over Camden, NJ.
Having grown up in Camden, I thought the idea of covering the city in black blobs was a distinct improvement.
Now if this were New York City, the goverment would have immediately cut off funding to the city's museums. But this being Camden, it would require finding government officials who weren't currently in jail.
My solution, get Tux his own sing along coding cd. From what I've seen of friends with kids, their offspring will have listened to the thing so many times the parents will be singing "a is for array", hacking the kernel, and writing scrabble games before we know it.
Dunno if anyone else remembers this, but I useta have a cassette, "Songs for CompuKids", that I picked up in the mid-70s. The only song that I remember at all was the perky "Bit by Bit on the Serial Bus."
No, I'm not kidding....
In addition to (or rather than) a digital camera: bring a minidisc recorder and a good microphone. You have more sense organs than just your eyes: every so often, get out of the car, close your eyes, and listen to your environment. (I would suggest smelling your environment, but I live in New Jersey :-] )
See phonography.org for more on field recording.
Right now we've got Habib Koite, Vaartinaa (sp?), Baaba Maal and sundry other artists in the CD changer. Not a one has a major label deal. All are on indies of various sorts.
The Baaba Maal CD currently in my changer is on the Island label, owned by one of the hugest megalabels, Universal.According to their discography, Varttina has recorded for the humongous companies Warner and BMG.
Major labels are nothing more than a scheme to spoonfeed pablum to people who are too lazy to actually have any taste.
"Indie" labels nowadays are too often nothing more than a scheme to convince the gullible that they're outwitting the majors. Guess what you've been buying?
Who ever decided that you needed to press a thousand copies of an album before you even begin selling?
Those of us who have actually looked into producing CDs know that 1000 copies is a practical minimum for pressed CDs. (CD-Rs are a whole different matter, and somewhat of a different economy.) If you have less than 1000 CDs pressed, the cost per disc is much higher. In fact, many plants are geared to 1000 discs as a minumum run, due to their own economics -- if you order a smaller run, many actually press 1000 and throw the excess away.
Nobody I know listens to a classic rock song in the background of a Ford or Chevy truck commercial and thinks "Wow - those car dealers sure have a snappy tune there." People only like it because of the memories the song brings up in their heads.
You're forgetting perhaps, the recent revival of Nick Drake after his "Pink Moon" was heard by many for the first time in a car commercial? Or the many others whose careers have had bumps in the same way? Or one of the biggest selling albums of recent years, Moby's Play, which was primarily disseminated via its use in commercials?
Nowadays, the commercials are the memories. Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of taste.
I've already mentioned the Street Performer Protocol.
Yes, several people have waved that herring about.
Have there been any documented, real world examples of anyone making a living via this protocol? If not, it's effectively vaporware.
Who knows what Lewis Carroll's day job was?
Um, People who read?
By the same doctrine, computerized systems can be booted on the day before the sabbath and then put on an autmatic mode during the sabbath. During that time, a sysadmin can address important issues as they creep up, just like he would add a log to the fire he started before the sabbath.
IANAR (I am not a Rabbi), and it's been a long time since I was in Yeshiva, but...
There are actually a whole class of non-allowed form of "work" (there are a few different words for work in Hebrew; the relevant one here is "Melakhah"), derived from work done in building the temple. One of them is "writing", which probably rules out anything involving a keyboard. Since most admin tasks, as I see them, involve either typing or power-cycling something (and many other involve speaking on the telephone or carrying a pager), it looks like the sysadmin has the day off.
I'm pretty sure that you can program a Linux system to do pretty much everything it can do non-interactively, and let it run on the Sabbath. Heck, you could have a whole Mister House thingie happening -- as long as you weren't triggering events.
OTOH, IMHO, (YMMV, IIRC, MOUSE), there's an odd amount of emphasis put on this stuff by people who have only a rhetorical interest in it. If you're honestly interested in following these guidelines, there are lots of very good places where you can learn about them (either on line or, for example, the Chabad house at most universities). Before sweating the details, someone who is that interested can try keeping kosher, attending services, or keeping the Sabbath or holidays in more general ways. I don't anymore, but there are groups that will welcome your interest and answer honestly asked questions sincerely.
This is not music.
Music is not a way of making sound. Music is a way of perceiving sound. What you choose to listen to as music is music for you.
It'll be great until some smartass makes a track that's 45 minutes of near-silence followed by A LOUD BANG!
Granted that these were before most readers here were born, but this trick (with somewhat less silence) was done with King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969, and Haydn's Surprise Symphony somewhat earlier.
Re-read the article and determine whether it was written to draw some attention to a music genre, or as advertising for DigiDesign and Apple.
Reread the article and notice that it was posted in the Cult of Mac area of the site, hence the Mac focus.
Duh.