Well right. Point is, if you're strapped for cash and reasonably clever, you can make it work. Laptops can be borrowed, monitors can be rigged from PAs, etc. Bottom line is the studios don't provide nearly as much value as they did even ten years ago.
I always think of David Gray's Babylon album. Nice album is you like the singer songwriter thing, did pretty well. He recorded the entire album in a friend's living room. I saw a picture of the setup - looked like everything fit on a coffee table. Which, to me, is how music aught to work.
> a controlled acoustic environment is still necessary to capture a clear record of the sound.
Like suburban basement full of mattresses and carpet samples? Check. What else you got?
A new band wouldn't turn this profit, but that doesn't mean the model can't scale down. I played in several bands for years, got put on a couple of ska complilations and our total record industry provided cut was under $500 bucks. Never got signed to a full album contract. If we'd skipped all that, put our music on a website and pushed a fan base to chip in, I suspect we'd have done more. Could we get 100 people to chip in $5 for a free download? I think so - we played show to that many people twice a month for years.
In the process, we would have gotten our music in front of more people and generated goodwill in the fan base. So there's a better growth potential, as buyers become, in a way, backers.
Number of album sales * Average Retail price * 0.1 = artist's take.
Labels, retailers middlemen and RIAA lawers generally take a 90% cut. Traditionally, the label pays for production and advertising, which was considerable pre-internet. Those costs have plunged now that the internet can hype anything and production costs can be trimmed to 2 or 3 good mics, some software and a laptop.
But all you really need to know is that the old way got them ~$2 an album, and this way got them $5 or more (estimated), while building considerable goodwill with fans. Sounds like a pretty good model to me.
> My users at least are lazy. They'll just save it in whatever format the software defaults to.
I love how "focused on the work they're doing instead of arcane software issues" translates into "lazy" in IT land. If someone's building your house, would you rather have them paying attention to the design and construction, or tweaking the settings on their hammers? Software is not an end unto itself.
Exactly. How this is going to improve anyone's gaming experience is beyond me. If you were the elusive female gamer, would you advertise that with a female character? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Pish. There's plenty of good science writing today. Ignoring the bulk of journalism in the 1950s, sure you'll find some good stuff. But I suspect there was just as much sloppy paranoia-as-news reporting as today. Bomb-scare anyone? That said, I think the quality of material is highest with either journalists or scientists writing popular science books. Deadline journalism is tough.
My 'best of' contributions:
Genome, Matt Ridley.
Anything by Robert Sapolsky.
All 4 of your examples are illegal and carry both civil and criminal penalties. Why does that have anything to do with school?
Those carry penalties IN LAW. In practice, it takes an informed victim to exercise that legal protection. Does that sound like a middle-schooler to you? I don't expect every parent to understand that, but I think it's reasonable for teachers to be aware of the rules of the game and step in as defenders of kids they see getting attacked online.
What penalties they set is debatable, but the basic charge of the article: 'we're teaching kids that they're being supervised online' misses the point. They're teaching kids that online behavior has consequences, some of them unpleasant, just like the real world. Sounds like a useful lesson to me.
I'd like to point out the person who posted "fatbittervirgins" as an article tag, while presumably trying to ridicule the story, is leaving a pretty good example of the barely concealed viciousness that Berners-Lee is talking about. This attitude is undefendable and an embarrassment to the community. Grow up.
In the late 1990s, military contractors (I forget which one) supplied the source code to the F16 to Saudi Arabia, which had purchased around 150 of them. This was a minor scandal at the time, but the government's position was essentially, 'Aw, what's the worst that could happen?'
Agreed! I saw a demo of the OLPC and I was pretty damned impressed. Ignore the price and freak out about the potential of it to transform developing nations, in the same way that mobile phones have. Some of the technology in it, like the mesh networking node (which can run while the machine's turned off on ridiculously little power), and the sunlight-readable screen are going to pop on all kinds of expensive phones and gadgets pretty soon. It's also a featherwieght and very thrifty with battery power, which I really don't associate with cheap-laptop at all.
OK, call me no fun at all, but why the hell is anyone committing major resources to getting to the moon? As far as I understand, we're pretty confident it's a big lump of sand. No real advantage of being there vs being in orbit. Nice place for telescopes maybe, but so is high Earth orbit or a Legrange point. Other than a playpen for new technology, what's the draw? Mars at least has some interesting geology and the whole maybe-there's-microbes thing. But the moon? Lunacy!
Why doesn't Google give an X-prize for orbiting a next-generation Hubble? Same industry-boosting tech trickle down, more or less, and then we get some science from it. A 10-pound rover with a Nikon on it doesn't really light my fire.
I work with an international governance watchdog, Global Integrity ( http://www.globalintegrity.org/ ), and anecdotally we're seeing a marked increase in online censorship being reported, under democracies and dictators both, even since we started looking at this in 2004. It's like the anti-democracy elements of the world just now figured out how to do this in earnest. We've just begun tracking the issue rigorously this year - we'll let Slashdot know when that report comes out.
Mod up parent. I wanted 'just a phone' and the Nokia 1100 is exactly that. It's better than that really - it's elegantly intuitive, and while I don't use everything (there's a "voice" feature I've never even looked at) the navigation and layout is simple enough to find everything that matters. It's solid. I got mine bundled from Verizon for "free" with a two-year contract, and Verizon's been a decent carrier for me. The phone cost $100 to replace out of pocket after it went swimming.
Also, it has a flashlight. As gimmicks go, this has been pretty useful, and doesn't distract from the 'just a phone' bliss.
I just looked, and it looks like Verizon no longer carries the Nokia 1100. I does have a Nokia 2366i. I've never used it, but it looks similar in spec, except now with Bluetooth. LINKY
>> "The game managers have a huge incentive (and plenty of tools) to maintain the 'game economy' and keep players happy."
> Government micromanaged economies always end in disaster, though I shouldn't be surprised that you suggested it.
We just went through the looking glass, my friend: you started suggesting that gold farming (ie real world commerce) is bad bad bad for the online economy, implying pretty strongly that someone, somewhere should DO something about it. I'm saying you can't tame a market that way. Gold farming ain't going away. Low wage click-shops (which, again, already exist) kind of suck, and it'd be cool if there were ways to empower people to own their own gold farms, if they wanted to, instead of working for someone else.
The game managers have a huge incentive (and plenty of tools) to maintain the 'game economy' and keep players happy. They tacitly approve of farming (which encourages play for a certain population) by not aggressively restricting high volume item transfers. I'm not an expert on this, so perhaps some games have gone this route.
So don't worry - those pesky poor people won't interrupt your gaming.
Not a criticism, but an observation: somewhere in there you'll have to find a way to supply the farmer with a machine capable of running WoW, a connection to WoW, and a WoW account.
This can be done - I work with locals in Sudan, Congo, Vietnam etc over the net. There is president for public library-style tech centers. Room to Read is an NGO that has been aggressively dropping public technology centers into Southeast Asia. If these were replicated or even piggybacked directly, and paired with a micro-finance system (many options here, such as Namaste Direct) to cover software and hardware start up costs.
This idea appeals to me because it could allow for home-grown, small scale entrepreneurship, which is generally the most powerful -- and most elusive -- economic development.
Sure, but the term 'wizard' can be used to describe all sort of fantasy characters. The phrase "Night Elf wizard" may have been bumped to "Night Elf Wizard" by a copyeditor. Not exactly a damning error in my book.
Here's a challenge to all of Slashdot: Cut out the middlemen.
Gold-farming isn't going away, but at least it could be a positive social force, fighting global inequality while building IT capacity in the developing world. As it is, most of the money is going to middlemen. But the product is virtual, and we can bring farmers to markets at potentially no cost. If 100 gold (or whatever the unit) retails for $20 in the west, then let's transfer that money into technology cooperatives in developing countries, who use their non-gaming hours to provide email, web access and other vital resources to their communities. Wouldn't you rather buy 'gold' from a fair trade source? Given the enormous markup, it might even lower prices. And here's the kicker: A community center could have kids playing for free in exchange for donating "gold" to pay the bills. Along the way, maybe they take attend a class on HTML programming, and start thinking more like IT professionals than farmers. Suddenly buying "gold" starts feeling a lot less exploitive.
So have at it: 1) We need a web portal to connect buyers and sellers directly. Can ebay do it? If not, how? 2) We need to explore a certification model, such as TransFair USA's fair trade certified produce. 3) We need a start-up information kit with instruction on how to open a community technology center (such as Room to Read's), but financed by gold farming. 4) We need a micro-credit source to pay for hardware and software. 5) We need a marketing movement within the gaming community.
Except you didn't file a police report, because it wasn't stolen - you left an ipod on the crosstown bus. You've got nothing - you probably don't even know that the lost-ipod was the vector for the distributed files. You just know that you got hit with a lawsuit because you're stuff is being used to commit crimes. Bummer.
Of course, you might win the suit, but the more relevant question is, why would you want to deal with this to begin with? Yet another disincentive to buy music.
Slashdot Mirror
Well right. Point is, if you're strapped for cash and reasonably clever, you can make it work. Laptops can be borrowed, monitors can be rigged from PAs, etc. Bottom line is the studios don't provide nearly as much value as they did even ten years ago.
I always think of David Gray's Babylon album. Nice album is you like the singer songwriter thing, did pretty well. He recorded the entire album in a friend's living room. I saw a picture of the setup - looked like everything fit on a coffee table. Which, to me, is how music aught to work.
> a controlled acoustic environment is still necessary to capture a clear record of the sound. Like suburban basement full of mattresses and carpet samples? Check. What else you got?
A new band wouldn't turn this profit, but that doesn't mean the model can't scale down. I played in several bands for years, got put on a couple of ska complilations and our total record industry provided cut was under $500 bucks. Never got signed to a full album contract. If we'd skipped all that, put our music on a website and pushed a fan base to chip in, I suspect we'd have done more. Could we get 100 people to chip in $5 for a free download? I think so - we played show to that many people twice a month for years.
In the process, we would have gotten our music in front of more people and generated goodwill in the fan base. So there's a better growth potential, as buyers become, in a way, backers.
Use this:
Number of album sales * Average Retail price * 0.1 = artist's take.
Labels, retailers middlemen and RIAA lawers generally take a 90% cut. Traditionally, the label pays for production and advertising, which was considerable pre-internet. Those costs have plunged now that the internet can hype anything and production costs can be trimmed to 2 or 3 good mics, some software and a laptop.
But all you really need to know is that the old way got them ~$2 an album, and this way got them $5 or more (estimated), while building considerable goodwill with fans. Sounds like a pretty good model to me.
> My users at least are lazy. They'll just save it in whatever format the software defaults to.
I love how "focused on the work they're doing instead of arcane software issues" translates into "lazy" in IT land. If someone's building your house, would you rather have them paying attention to the design and construction, or tweaking the settings on their hammers? Software is not an end unto itself.
You can't fight in here - this is the War Room!
Exactly. How this is going to improve anyone's gaming experience is beyond me. If you were the elusive female gamer, would you advertise that with a female character? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Pish. There's plenty of good science writing today. Ignoring the bulk of journalism in the 1950s, sure you'll find some good stuff. But I suspect there was just as much sloppy paranoia-as-news reporting as today. Bomb-scare anyone? That said, I think the quality of material is highest with either journalists or scientists writing popular science books. Deadline journalism is tough. My 'best of' contributions: Genome, Matt Ridley. Anything by Robert Sapolsky.
All 4 of your examples are illegal and carry both civil and criminal penalties. Why does that have anything to do with school?
Those carry penalties IN LAW. In practice, it takes an informed victim to exercise that legal protection. Does that sound like a middle-schooler to you? I don't expect every parent to understand that, but I think it's reasonable for teachers to be aware of the rules of the game and step in as defenders of kids they see getting attacked online.
What penalties they set is debatable, but the basic charge of the article: 'we're teaching kids that they're being supervised online' misses the point. They're teaching kids that online behavior has consequences, some of them unpleasant, just like the real world. Sounds like a useful lesson to me.
This is no cave.
I'd like to point out the person who posted "fatbittervirgins" as an article tag, while presumably trying to ridicule the story, is leaving a pretty good example of the barely concealed viciousness that Berners-Lee is talking about. This attitude is undefendable and an embarrassment to the community. Grow up.
In the late 1990s, military contractors (I forget which one) supplied the source code to the F16 to Saudi Arabia, which had purchased around 150 of them. This was a minor scandal at the time, but the government's position was essentially, 'Aw, what's the worst that could happen?'
Agreed! I saw a demo of the OLPC and I was pretty damned impressed. Ignore the price and freak out about the potential of it to transform developing nations, in the same way that mobile phones have. Some of the technology in it, like the mesh networking node (which can run while the machine's turned off on ridiculously little power), and the sunlight-readable screen are going to pop on all kinds of expensive phones and gadgets pretty soon. It's also a featherwieght and very thrifty with battery power, which I really don't associate with cheap-laptop at all.
OK, call me no fun at all, but why the hell is anyone committing major resources to getting to the moon? As far as I understand, we're pretty confident it's a big lump of sand. No real advantage of being there vs being in orbit. Nice place for telescopes maybe, but so is high Earth orbit or a Legrange point. Other than a playpen for new technology, what's the draw? Mars at least has some interesting geology and the whole maybe-there's-microbes thing. But the moon? Lunacy! Why doesn't Google give an X-prize for orbiting a next-generation Hubble? Same industry-boosting tech trickle down, more or less, and then we get some science from it. A 10-pound rover with a Nikon on it doesn't really light my fire.
I work with an international governance watchdog, Global Integrity ( http://www.globalintegrity.org/ ), and anecdotally we're seeing a marked increase in online censorship being reported, under democracies and dictators both, even since we started looking at this in 2004. It's like the anti-democracy elements of the world just now figured out how to do this in earnest. We've just begun tracking the issue rigorously this year - we'll let Slashdot know when that report comes out.
Also, it has a flashlight. As gimmicks go, this has been pretty useful, and doesn't distract from the 'just a phone' bliss.
I just looked, and it looks like Verizon no longer carries the Nokia 1100. I does have a Nokia 2366i. I've never used it, but it looks similar in spec, except now with Bluetooth. LINKY
> Government micromanaged economies always end in disaster, though I shouldn't be surprised that you suggested it.
We just went through the looking glass, my friend: you started suggesting that gold farming (ie real world commerce) is bad bad bad for the online economy, implying pretty strongly that someone, somewhere should DO something about it. I'm saying you can't tame a market that way. Gold farming ain't going away. Low wage click-shops (which, again, already exist) kind of suck, and it'd be cool if there were ways to empower people to own their own gold farms, if they wanted to, instead of working for someone else.
Who exactly is the socialist here?
The game managers have a huge incentive (and plenty of tools) to maintain the 'game economy' and keep players happy. They tacitly approve of farming (which encourages play for a certain population) by not aggressively restricting high volume item transfers. I'm not an expert on this, so perhaps some games have gone this route. So don't worry - those pesky poor people won't interrupt your gaming.
This can be done - I work with locals in Sudan, Congo, Vietnam etc over the net. There is president for public library-style tech centers. Room to Read is an NGO that has been aggressively dropping public technology centers into Southeast Asia. If these were replicated or even piggybacked directly, and paired with a micro-finance system (many options here, such as Namaste Direct) to cover software and hardware start up costs.
This idea appeals to me because it could allow for home-grown, small scale entrepreneurship, which is generally the most powerful -- and most elusive -- economic development.
Sure, but the term 'wizard' can be used to describe all sort of fantasy characters. The phrase "Night Elf wizard" may have been bumped to "Night Elf Wizard" by a copyeditor. Not exactly a damning error in my book.
I play, and did not know that Night Elves could not be wizards.
Here's a challenge to all of Slashdot: Cut out the middlemen.
Gold-farming isn't going away, but at least it could be a positive social force, fighting global inequality while building IT capacity in the developing world. As it is, most of the money is going to middlemen. But the product is virtual, and we can bring farmers to markets at potentially no cost. If 100 gold (or whatever the unit) retails for $20 in the west, then let's transfer that money into technology cooperatives in developing countries, who use their non-gaming hours to provide email, web access and other vital resources to their communities. Wouldn't you rather buy 'gold' from a fair trade source? Given the enormous markup, it might even lower prices. And here's the kicker: A community center could have kids playing for free in exchange for donating "gold" to pay the bills. Along the way, maybe they take attend a class on HTML programming, and start thinking more like IT professionals than farmers. Suddenly buying "gold" starts feeling a lot less exploitive.
So have at it:
1) We need a web portal to connect buyers and sellers directly. Can ebay do it? If not, how?
2) We need to explore a certification model, such as TransFair USA's fair trade certified produce.
3) We need a start-up information kit with instruction on how to open a community technology center (such as Room to Read's), but financed by gold farming.
4) We need a micro-credit source to pay for hardware and software.
5) We need a marketing movement within the gaming community.
Is this really how you spend your time?
File a police report stating that your mp3 player or laptop was stolen Unless you left it somewhere. No paper trail there.
Except you didn't file a police report, because it wasn't stolen - you left an ipod on the crosstown bus. You've got nothing - you probably don't even know that the lost-ipod was the vector for the distributed files. You just know that you got hit with a lawsuit because you're stuff is being used to commit crimes. Bummer. Of course, you might win the suit, but the more relevant question is, why would you want to deal with this to begin with? Yet another disincentive to buy music.