If it's worth nothing ($0.00) to you, don't download it, because it's worth nothing to you and therefore you have no need of it.
This is the first major label major band defection that I can recall since Trent Reznor, and this will be sizably more influential as Radiohead still has a career left.
The real problem with getting rid of major labels is how artists will handle promotion. Radiohead would not have become this big without mass-media coverage, radio station payola, and other forms of promotion. Independent artists have more freedom and make more money, but how do they promote outside a local area?
I like to read the obituary page, and see what people actually did in their lives. Attending a job and going to wal-mart is not living, but what you create and who you touch is life. Real life.
I have used Slashdot off and on from 1998 to the present, mainly as a reader who lurks and does not post. Here is why I like Slashdot:
* It collects people based on the idea of what is cool in technology for technology's sake, not with a pure business focus.
* It gets people from opposite "sides" in any debate talking with each other.
* Many of its cooler features, like the social networking sides, are barely yet being exploited.
There are downsides:
* Community-based moderation empowers the same fearful crowd reactions we see when the words "terrorism" and "illegal drugs" are bandied about.
* The jokes about CowboyNeal, Soviet Russia and basement-dwelling are so aged that it is too late to bury them. They must go to a dusty museum somewhere (in Hell).
I think that's not a bad balance. I've learned a lot on Slashdot and enjoyed quite a bit of "wasted" time. I hope to see other Houston Slashdotters and meet interesting people.
"Are business needs trumping consumer and technological interests?"
Of course they are. Business needs are what bring profit to individuals so they can afford to live apart from the herd. Business needs drive everything.
If as a worker, I want to succeed, I pick the company that succeeds according to business needs and grow with it. When buying stocks, I pick the company with closest attention to business needs.
Technological and consumer interests have nothing to do with it except as means to the end of business needs. That's how it is.
These games are fantasy. People will use them for prurient ends, but that's the nature of most people. Trying to make these games like reality is probably appealing to those of you selling "virtual objects," but upon inspection, is probably a really bad idea.
A good process is important. Of course I agree with that! But at some point, for any area where decisions must be made, you will need a person. Or a HAL 9000. But either way, the individual is what determines what will occur. Bad leaders are doom, good leaders are bliss. There is no way to from a distance or with a policy escape this fact. You need to make sure the people in power are good people you can trust, because power does not corrupt that kind of person, at least not in important ways. I'd rather have a good leader who splurges on a BMW with taxpayer funds than a bad leader who drives a Honda.
In the case of WordPress, it's advantageous for them to be able to get diagnostic and statistical information. They will learn more about their users's needs, and will be able to see where bugs crop up and eliminate them more quickly. I have no problem with people I trust having this kind of information about my servers, especially if I trust them to keep it securely. But I don't know the WordPress team, so it could be a problem.
There are no solutions you can implement from the couch for this issue. People keep looking for from the couch solutions like "no one should retain any information about us" or "trust the government, no more 911s." But these are not realistic answers. You will have to trust some leader and there will always be both good and bad leaders, and the only way to remove the bad ones is with a sword. Oh well. Life is struggle, get used to it.
Problem: 1.34% market share, and the remaining 98.66% of software is represented on Windows or Macintosh.
Current solution: make clones of existing software (Open Office, GIMPshop).
Future solution: either using virtualization or crafty API emulation, make Linux be able to transparently run Windows games and software.
It's a different approach, but you'd have more people using Linux, because since Windows is the de facto standard, it's the standard the software they need requires.
Over years of experience, I've come to see this. Unreasonable, helpless, clueless and stupid people provide an opportunity for those selling the product known as Control. When the controllers find a healthy group of people, they have no entrypoint, like a disease facing unbroken skin.
But even one weak person who can be convinced that they can't run their own lives and need a controller means that soon, the controller gives the incompetent person an advantage over others. Then more people declare incompetence and seek shelter under Control. The controllers get powerful.
They may take the guise of religion, politics, business or indie rock bands, for all I know, but they prey on weakness by using it as a weapon against normal people, for the purpose of more control.
A different branch of distros for the desktop makes sense, but I'm not sure the kernel is what needs addressing.
It makes sense for Linux to fork into two branches: one, a conservative one, aimed at upkeeping what already works, and the second, a wild-ass anarchist, aimed at forging new and innovative technologies.
I think what the original author was saying was that he/she would like the Linux community to fork into two branches, one thinking like desktop software (Windows XP is the best example) and another thinking like big iron, where Linux already has a presence but could learn a thing or two from *BSD.
When people act like idiots, authority steps in. When enough people act like idiots, other people imitate them, and soon you have a population that needs the Nanny State or Police State, which seem to be the same thing.
Clearly tasering him was excessive, but shooting him might have made life better for the rest of us.
I'm proud of Slashdot users for seeing through his attention-grabbing drama. The guy wanted to tell authority to fsck off, and wanted to get some people riled up so he would get his name in the newspapers, and voila! it's there, at the price of only a few thousand volts of nerve-rattling electricity.
Major label payout at 10% Wholesale price: $9 / 90 cents per CD = $90,000.00
Selling as independent artist and Amazon(tm) Partner Staff member to mail packages: $30,000 per year Cost per CD, printing: $1 Cost per CD, packaging and mailing: $4 Cost per year: $530,000 on revenues of ($15 CD) $1.5m
Net: $1m
Going indie is not just more trendy, it's more profitable, once you've already got that mega-media marketing machine convincing 100,000 people they need to buy your (mediocre) music.
Any moron can see that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, like Windows isn't ready for the server market. This is because most people want technology to just work. They are not technology workers and they don't care how it works because they have their own fields to learn, or are unskilled labor and can't learn.
I think what we as those who produce code should focus on is the generally low quality of software and hardware. In efficiency, capabilities and interface, our software and hardware today generally is mediocre but rarely better.
If Linux improves in these areas, it will be adopted, because the price is right and its hipness factor is higher than that of Windows or Mac OS (Windows is corporate, and the Mac is associated with smug trendsters talking loudly at Starbucks).
Let's be honest about the issues facing Linux.
1. Installation sucks. Hardware support is lacking, the process is ambiguous and confusing for most users. Included in this is "Your documentation generally sucks because it's done by non-professionals."
2. Much familiar, high quality Windows software is missing. Yes, Photoshop really is better than GIMP. And Office is better than OpenOffice. Quark is better than Scribus (or inDesign).
3. People want clear, simple, fast answers to common problems, not a "fiddle with it and come back to our mailing list so we can call you stupid again."
4. Someone to call in case of emergency who can give definite answers. It's 3 AM and your taxes are due, and there's some odd problem you don't understand. You can call Microsoft and for $200 they'll fix it. For Linux?
Knowing that software generally sucks helps us stop resting on our (or Linus's) laurels and lets us realize we have a lot to do. Software is still in its infancy. It is bloated and inefficient, it often lacks capabilities for common tasks and is unreliable, and its interfaces are generally awkward and seemingly created with no understanding of how the end user works. And interoperability is still in its infancy.
What I'm saying here is that to beat Windows, you have to be better at the game of being an operating system for people who are not obsessed with computers. Tech geeks don't understand that there are other ways of earning a living that are equally as if not more legitimate (and difficult) than typing in code patterns. These people want to focus on their specialty, not yours.
As long as we are content to scorn others for not being geeks, we will not meet their needs, and so Windows will continue to triumph over us as it is doing now. We need to stop thinking everyone out there is a tech geek. Think outside of the box? Think outside of your solipsistic skulls, and realize you haven't met the needs of the average or exceptional person out there.
It may be time for Linux development to split. One fork will focus on stable code that works like a UNIX, and the other in forging new boundaries. I think the FreeBSD developers did something simple.
There is a good reason for this. When you want to make something stable, you want to take proven ideas and refine them so you can make guarantees.
But for our hacker souls, and our inner adventurers, we also need something that is determined to break new ground and make no guarantees. The CFS is being justified by performance, or administrative reasons, but why not focus instead on the real reason we'd like to see it happen?
It's a cool idea to play with.
We're primates. Play is how we learn and invent. Keep pushing upward, making the code do new things and taking on new challenges, because the hacker spirit is play. That playfulness has brought us most of our thinking outside the box, good inventions. Keep it up. Aim for the stars.
I have no pity for commercial spammers, phishers, profit-driven crackers, and other slightly techno-savvy common criminals.
But, can we also take computers away from the people who endlessly fall for these scams and make work for the rest of us? I understand that Grandmaw wants to email, but no operating system on earth can keep her safe from running corrupt executables. Maybe she needs a blackberry instead.
Apparently, it has done this all along, and it's a legitimate feature to keep the updater software itself up to date. It's a question not of "Who watches the watchers?" but "who updates the updaters?"
"Business ethics" is an oxymoron. You're either there to earn money and out-compete everyone else, or there to act ethically. The two don't mix. If you try, someone else will cut that ethics corner and out-compete you, and then the people who own your stock will sue you.
Better than FUD, if you have a strong enemy, sew division amongst his ranks and turn his principal actors against one another. Microsoft must be chuckling with a sound like swamp gas escaping a funereal bog.
I've noticed many of the same things about OO and refuse to it because I consider it incompetent, but I know some competent writers who use it. A good writer can adapt to any tool, I guess.
I agree that Microsoft Office on Linux would radically improve Linux's chances in the real world. For most daily tasks, Microsoft Office is the right tool, and we're talking on the order of 95% of what people do in business and home use.
I'm not certain I think Windows is as bad as you seem to think it is. For a desktop operating system, it seems to do what most people need quite well, and even us freaks can adapt to it sometimes. I prefer Linux or FreeBSD in a hosting environment, but if I were creating enterprise web applications and needed to do it quickly as in.NET, that might change.
Thanks to other posters on this thread, I'll be checking out Scribus and TextEdit and whatever Inscape is.
I'm a technical writer, and for doing long documents, I would not use either of these products. Open Office, while prized by some of my colleagues, seems to have too many mission critical failures or half-baked features. Microsoft Office, while good for both the home and small business market, becomes a hindrance when you use it for larger projects with more diverse requirements. I can make either one do what it must, but I would prefer Adobe FrameMaker or its open source clone, Lyx.
Advertisers do better with subtle text advertising that matches the user's interests than they do with big spammy rollovers, pop-ups and other advertising that has only succeeded at all because of the steady flow of inexperienced users to the internet.
Let the kids say whatever they want, even if you or I don't agree with it. This applies to the so-called obscenity as much as the derision for Islam. Humanity will someday grow up and realize we'll never all agree, and then we can stop being offended by our disagreement, including wanting each other dead.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's worth nothing ($0.00) to you, don't download it, because it's worth nothing to you and therefore you have no need of it.
This is the first major label major band defection that I can recall since Trent Reznor, and this will be sizably more influential as Radiohead still has a career left.
The real problem with getting rid of major labels is how artists will handle promotion. Radiohead would not have become this big without mass-media coverage, radio station payola, and other forms of promotion. Independent artists have more freedom and make more money, but how do they promote outside a local area?
I like to read the obituary page, and see what people actually did in their lives. Attending a job and going to wal-mart is not living, but what you create and who you touch is life. Real life.
I have used Slashdot off and on from 1998 to the present, mainly as a reader who lurks and does not post. Here is why I like Slashdot:
* It collects people based on the idea of what is cool in technology for technology's sake, not with a pure business focus.
* It gets people from opposite "sides" in any debate talking with each other.
* Many of its cooler features, like the social networking sides, are barely yet being exploited.
There are downsides:
* Community-based moderation empowers the same fearful crowd reactions we see when the words "terrorism" and "illegal drugs" are bandied about.
* The jokes about CowboyNeal, Soviet Russia and basement-dwelling are so aged that it is too late to bury them. They must go to a dusty museum somewhere (in Hell).
I think that's not a bad balance. I've learned a lot on Slashdot and enjoyed quite a bit of "wasted" time. I hope to see other Houston Slashdotters and meet interesting people.
"Are business needs trumping consumer and technological interests?"
Of course they are. Business needs are what bring profit to individuals so they can afford to live apart from the herd. Business needs drive everything.
If as a worker, I want to succeed, I pick the company that succeeds according to business needs and grow with it. When buying stocks, I pick the company with closest attention to business needs.
Technological and consumer interests have nothing to do with it except as means to the end of business needs. That's how it is.
http://wiki.policeact.govt.nz/pmwiki.php/MarijuanaLegalization/MarijuanaLegalization?action=edit When the 400,000th edit to this page must be reverted, they'll see why this was a Bad Idea.
These games are fantasy. People will use them for prurient ends, but that's the nature of most people. Trying to make these games like reality is probably appealing to those of you selling "virtual objects," but upon inspection, is probably a really bad idea.
You mean the GPL3 is the Microsoft Vista of the open source licensing world?
A good process is important. Of course I agree with that! But at some point, for any area where decisions must be made, you will need a person. Or a HAL 9000. But either way, the individual is what determines what will occur. Bad leaders are doom, good leaders are bliss. There is no way to from a distance or with a policy escape this fact. You need to make sure the people in power are good people you can trust, because power does not corrupt that kind of person, at least not in important ways. I'd rather have a good leader who splurges on a BMW with taxpayer funds than a bad leader who drives a Honda.
In the case of WordPress, it's advantageous for them to be able to get diagnostic and statistical information. They will learn more about their users's needs, and will be able to see where bugs crop up and eliminate them more quickly. I have no problem with people I trust having this kind of information about my servers, especially if I trust them to keep it securely. But I don't know the WordPress team, so it could be a problem.
There are no solutions you can implement from the couch for this issue. People keep looking for from the couch solutions like "no one should retain any information about us" or "trust the government, no more 911s." But these are not realistic answers. You will have to trust some leader and there will always be both good and bad leaders, and the only way to remove the bad ones is with a sword. Oh well. Life is struggle, get used to it.
Problem: 1.34% market share, and the remaining 98.66% of software is represented on Windows or Macintosh.
Current solution: make clones of existing software (Open Office, GIMPshop).
Future solution: either using virtualization or crafty API emulation, make Linux be able to transparently run Windows games and software.
It's a different approach, but you'd have more people using Linux, because since Windows is the de facto standard, it's the standard the software they need requires.
Moving beyond the proprietary system unique to a single game, there's new initiatives like metaplace.
http://www.metaplace.org/
I think this is more likely than expansion of one world from its custom, proprietary software.
Over years of experience, I've come to see this. Unreasonable, helpless, clueless and stupid people provide an opportunity for those selling the product known as Control. When the controllers find a healthy group of people, they have no entrypoint, like a disease facing unbroken skin.
But even one weak person who can be convinced that they can't run their own lives and need a controller means that soon, the controller gives the incompetent person an advantage over others. Then more people declare incompetence and seek shelter under Control. The controllers get powerful.
They may take the guise of religion, politics, business or indie rock bands, for all I know, but they prey on weakness by using it as a weapon against normal people, for the purpose of more control.
A different branch of distros for the desktop makes sense, but I'm not sure the kernel is what needs addressing.
It makes sense for Linux to fork into two branches: one, a conservative one, aimed at upkeeping what already works, and the second, a wild-ass anarchist, aimed at forging new and innovative technologies.
I think what the original author was saying was that he/she would like the Linux community to fork into two branches, one thinking like desktop software (Windows XP is the best example) and another thinking like big iron, where Linux already has a presence but could learn a thing or two from *BSD.
When people act like idiots, authority steps in. When enough people act like idiots, other people imitate them, and soon you have a population that needs the Nanny State or Police State, which seem to be the same thing.
Clearly tasering him was excessive, but shooting him might have made life better for the rest of us.
I'm proud of Slashdot users for seeing through his attention-grabbing drama. The guy wanted to tell authority to fsck off, and wanted to get some people riled up so he would get his name in the newspapers, and voila! it's there, at the price of only a few thousand volts of nerve-rattling electricity.
Major label payout at 10%
Wholesale price: $9 / 90 cents per CD = $90,000.00
Selling as independent artist and Amazon(tm) Partner
Staff member to mail packages: $30,000 per year
Cost per CD, printing: $1
Cost per CD, packaging and mailing: $4
Cost per year: $530,000 on revenues of ($15 CD) $1.5m
Net: $1m
Going indie is not just more trendy, it's more profitable, once you've already got that mega-media marketing machine convincing 100,000 people they need to buy your (mediocre) music.
Any moron can see that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, like Windows isn't ready for the server market. This is because most people want technology to just work. They are not technology workers and they don't care how it works because they have their own fields to learn, or are unskilled labor and can't learn.
I think what we as those who produce code should focus on is the generally low quality of software and hardware. In efficiency, capabilities and interface, our software and hardware today generally is mediocre but rarely better.
If Linux improves in these areas, it will be adopted, because the price is right and its hipness factor is higher than that of Windows or Mac OS (Windows is corporate, and the Mac is associated with smug trendsters talking loudly at Starbucks).
Let's be honest about the issues facing Linux.
1. Installation sucks. Hardware support is lacking, the process is ambiguous and confusing for most users. Included in this is "Your documentation generally sucks because it's done by non-professionals."
2. Much familiar, high quality Windows software is missing. Yes, Photoshop really is better than GIMP. And Office is better than OpenOffice. Quark is better than Scribus (or inDesign).
3. People want clear, simple, fast answers to common problems, not a "fiddle with it and come back to our mailing list so we can call you stupid again."
4. Someone to call in case of emergency who can give definite answers. It's 3 AM and your taxes are due, and there's some odd problem you don't understand. You can call Microsoft and for $200 they'll fix it. For Linux?
Knowing that software generally sucks helps us stop resting on our (or Linus's) laurels and lets us realize we have a lot to do. Software is still in its infancy. It is bloated and inefficient, it often lacks capabilities for common tasks and is unreliable, and its interfaces are generally awkward and seemingly created with no understanding of how the end user works. And interoperability is still in its infancy.
What I'm saying here is that to beat Windows, you have to be better at the game of being an operating system for people who are not obsessed with computers. Tech geeks don't understand that there are other ways of earning a living that are equally as if not more legitimate (and difficult) than typing in code patterns. These people want to focus on their specialty, not yours.
As long as we are content to scorn others for not being geeks, we will not meet their needs, and so Windows will continue to triumph over us as it is doing now. We need to stop thinking everyone out there is a tech geek. Think outside of the box? Think outside of your solipsistic skulls, and realize you haven't met the needs of the average or exceptional person out there.
Macintosh computer, $2900 ...six months later...
Apple laser printer, $2400
Upgrade to the new Macintosh, which is now entry level
$1100 + tax
Attack of the brain-eating Google zombies, film at 11
It may be time for Linux development to split. One fork will focus on stable code that works like a UNIX, and the other in forging new boundaries. I think the FreeBSD developers did something simple.
There is a good reason for this. When you want to make something stable, you want to take proven ideas and refine them so you can make guarantees.
But for our hacker souls, and our inner adventurers, we also need something that is determined to break new ground and make no guarantees. The CFS is being justified by performance, or administrative reasons, but why not focus instead on the real reason we'd like to see it happen?
It's a cool idea to play with.
We're primates. Play is how we learn and invent. Keep pushing upward, making the code do new things and taking on new challenges, because the hacker spirit is play. That playfulness has brought us most of our thinking outside the box, good inventions. Keep it up. Aim for the stars.
I have no pity for commercial spammers, phishers, profit-driven crackers, and other slightly techno-savvy common criminals.
But, can we also take computers away from the people who endlessly fall for these scams and make work for the rest of us? I understand that Grandmaw wants to email, but no operating system on earth can keep her safe from running corrupt executables. Maybe she needs a blackberry instead.
http://blogs.technet.com/mu/archive/2007/09/13/how-windows-update-keeps-itself-up-to-date.aspx
Apparently, it has done this all along, and it's a legitimate feature to keep the updater software itself up to date. It's a question not of "Who watches the watchers?" but "who updates the updaters?"
"Business ethics" is an oxymoron. You're either there to earn money and out-compete everyone else, or there to act ethically. The two don't mix. If you try, someone else will cut that ethics corner and out-compete you, and then the people who own your stock will sue you.
Better than FUD, if you have a strong enemy, sew division amongst his ranks and turn his principal actors against one another. Microsoft must be chuckling with a sound like swamp gas escaping a funereal bog.
I've noticed many of the same things about OO and refuse to it because I consider it incompetent, but I know some competent writers who use it. A good writer can adapt to any tool, I guess.
.NET, that might change.
I agree that Microsoft Office on Linux would radically improve Linux's chances in the real world. For most daily tasks, Microsoft Office is the right tool, and we're talking on the order of 95% of what people do in business and home use.
I'm not certain I think Windows is as bad as you seem to think it is. For a desktop operating system, it seems to do what most people need quite well, and even us freaks can adapt to it sometimes. I prefer Linux or FreeBSD in a hosting environment, but if I were creating enterprise web applications and needed to do it quickly as in
Thanks to other posters on this thread, I'll be checking out Scribus and TextEdit and whatever Inscape is.
I'm a technical writer, and for doing long documents, I would not use either of these products. Open Office, while prized by some of my colleagues, seems to have too many mission critical failures or half-baked features. Microsoft Office, while good for both the home and small business market, becomes a hindrance when you use it for larger projects with more diverse requirements. I can make either one do what it must, but I would prefer Adobe FrameMaker or its open source clone, Lyx.
As the eye-tracking studies done by Jakob Nielsen indicate, Users ignore anything that looks like an ad, quite effectively.
Advertisers do better with subtle text advertising that matches the user's interests than they do with big spammy rollovers, pop-ups and other advertising that has only succeeded at all because of the steady flow of inexperienced users to the internet.
Let the kids say whatever they want, even if you or I don't agree with it. This applies to the so-called obscenity as much as the derision for Islam. Humanity will someday grow up and realize we'll never all agree, and then we can stop being offended by our disagreement, including wanting each other dead.