Sure you can make a movie on your MacBook, but you can't yet make someone who'll watch it:)
The hardest part really is just trying to reach people. It can be damn near impossible, actually. Unfortunately, the big studios and labels will have the edge here for as long as the general buying public allow them to.
Ah, but you'd be surprised how far a sex tape or some nude photos goes a long way though...Who needs agents?
I wish I was joking, I really do. Pretty much everyone you see on TV & in the magazines these days got there via some "accidentally leaked" home movies.
I agree with your sentiment but the numbers are a bit off. My band's record cost $1000 to record and another $1000 to press a few hundred copies. This is still cheap though, compared to what it would have taken 20 years ago. Pro Tools has changed a lot of things, but it's still generally very expensive to record a CD's worth of (good) music. Expensive enough to make record labels a very useful thing (evil though they may be).
I don't think it makes sense to place so much importance on the quality of the audio. I know very few people who can even hear the artifacts in a 128kbps MP3 file. I don't mean that the quality loss is subtle. To me, it's glaring. But most people don't have the ears for it. Instead, the benefits of musical file sharing come down to speed, convenience, and price. Put simply: you can rip and burn a CD at 20x. A tape cassette you could copy at 2x, but only if you didn't mind it sounding like garbage.
I'd love to see your no-middleman vision come to pass. But for that to happen, the average person would have to decide that music is important enough to actually figure out what they want to hear without being told. And the average person does not care that much about music beyond its mere existence. Ask someone what they like. 9 times out of 10 they respond with "everything". This translates as, "I treat all genres of music (out of the few I have any experience with) with an equal amount of apathy."
Real music lovers will continue to support the artists whose music moves them. They will continue to relish the act of searching out new artists and records. They will make time in their life for it, and feel the rewards of doing so. Everyone else will *want* someone to tell them what to listen to, so that they're not hit with something unfamiliar the next time they hit play. You don't see a TiVo in every house for the same reasons. Most people don't mind watching the commercials...unless you're really engaged, TV watching is passive enough that it really doesn't matter what's on, as long as it's over quick. I think most people approach music the same way. It saddens me, but doesn't make somebody a bad person or anything. We've all got our priorities. I'm a musician, so mine are fairly predictable.
There's at least 4 classic rock stations in my area. People can't be bothered to listen to something they haven't already heard a million times *going back 30 years*.
I can't judge such people. How could I? It's everyone I know. I have to just accept that, yes, I'm the oddball. My point is...there will always be a middleman. The hit model is a natural consequence of recording technology and its economics.
The dysgenics camp might be able to prove a negative correlation between vocabulary, or completed level of school, or even standardized test scores, and fertility. But for that correlation to become a doomsday prediction, someone would have to prove that those test scores are a decent measure of intelligence. This is an impossible task (mostly because they are not a good measure of intelligence). Diploma: I hear George Bush has one, from Yale no less. That alone should be enough to discredit them as an objective measure of smarts.
Vocabulary: my grandmother, who is mostly illiterate and was a subsistence farmer in Southern Italy until she came to the US, is one of the smartest people I know. I guess you'd just have to take my word on that. IQ tests: designed to determine if a child is mentally retarded. Scores over 100 don't tell you much besides "this person is not mentally retarded".
The print industry is lucky...books take longer to rip AND to burn:D
My guess is that the old model will probably thrive for as long as the old technology stays around.
Good writers write because they love to write, and musicians are the same. The get-rich-quick-ers exist in both industries, as well as every other industry. Both musicians and writers have it tough because there isn't a large enough middle ground between selling 0 copies and millions to support everybody, and book & record sales aren't related to quality. Rather than accuse the musicians (or writers) of greed, I'd rather look to the throngs of people who haven't realized that there's better stuff out there than the likes of James Patterson or Linkin Park.
I'm in much the same boat you are. I live in both worlds, but just never could use the GIMP for very long, despite appreciating its overall usefulness.
Maybe it's crazy, but I feel like a lot of the GIMP's (at least visual) UI problems stem from the fact that the GTK is not cut out for apps as complex as the GIMP. All the widgets in Photoshop are tiny/compact, many without explanatory text. That's bad for some but for getting things done quickly it's a godsend...It means that on the same monitor, I can have more space for the canvas and more tool windows that can stay open.
No, it doesn't blend in with the rest of my apps. No, I can't skin it. Probably most of it's hard-coded, and would be tough for people who need special settings for accessibility reasons. But for most users, Adobe's UI works. It's not perfect...those who've used Freehand will point out how much easier it was to do certain things in it rather than in Illustrator.
Inkscape has the same problems as GIMP, imo. It's a great program in terms of features, but still unwieldy.
I'd love it if someone would at least try to implement a completely different UI scheme for the GIMP, and rather than use PS as a template, just go way out of the box. Some of the stuff in the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog is pretty out there, and very interesting. GIMP's not a Photoshop killer, which is fine by me.
Like you say, GIMP lacks a lot of (not really) advanced things like fine control over color space and separations, which is necessary for print work. So even if the GIMP had a UI so beautiful and intuitive that it made people weep on the spot, it still would not be suitable for pros. But screw the pros. And I say that as someone who gets paid doing print work. Or maybe spin off into different modes, like a prepress mode, a photo retouch mode, a paint mode, a design mode. I dunno how well that would work, I'm just trying to come up with something different.
I don't think you completely get how UAC works. It's not warning you, it's forcing the program that wants to do something "root-ish" to wait for your OK. If you're on a user account, you have to enter an admin password. On an admin account, you just give it the go-ahead. But I agree completely that it gets very annoying, and I wish there was a way to disable it in certain instances but not others. Hopefully they'll come out with something like that in the future. Until then, it might be best to disable while you're still customizing your machine or on those week-long tweak benders. I know that at least with me, I'll go long periods of time without doing anything on the computer besides web browsing (& trolling forums) and having UAC on wouldn't be bad then. Disclaimer: don't own Vista, but have worked with it a little bit.
Well, by blocking the ad I'm not using that bandwidth. So it's still win-win, except I'm winning even more.
People (and I include myself here) shouldn't serve things over HTTP if they want really granular control over how it's accessed. Yeah, it'd be nice if naive advertisers paid for everyone's hosting, but that doesn't extend to a moral obligation for the visitor.
I have a similar setup and experience similar thrashing. I'd be more likely to blame it on FF than XP. I love the 'fox, but it's memory requirements should be measured in GDCs (google-data-centers). A web browser that needs its own garbage collector (soon, anyway)...there's your bloat. Not that MS is innocent, but XP with a lot of the cruftier services is pretty reasonable for requirements IMO.
The little bit of time you save, you did on the backs of everyone around you. The system only works if people vote. The less people vote, the less our elected representatives feel the need to do their jobs correctly. Your "stance" isn't heroic, it's just harmful, and it's basically what the Ds & Rs want you to do. They want their diehards to support them, they want everyone who thinks critically to get out of the way. If everyone who felt like voting doesn't do anything voted for a third party candidate, or wrote someone in, it'd put the fear of God into these guys. I guess it just isn't gonna happen, though.
There are at least three huge problems with your statement. Here's one: in the US at least, your right to complain is just that...a right. It's not given to you, nor can it be taken away. And if there was any ambiguity concerning that, the First Amendment specifically says you can air your grievances both to others (free speech) and to the government (petition).
Once more, note that the Amendment doesn't even say that you have these rights. It's a GIVEN. Otherwise, they wouldn't be rights. All it says is that the government does not have the power to abridge them.
If there are enough people who love wow but hate this new security feature, they will have to do exactly that, organize. However, I don't think it's out of the question for people to point out the "stop paying for it" method since, you have a lot more control over what computer games you own than what country you're born in.
The "love it or leave it" statement is terrible when it comes to country (US in this case), because it's a lot like saying: "Don't feel like your elected representatives are doing a good job? Why not just quit whining and be a man...by abandoning your family, career, home, and everything you love."
But if a product causes you dissatisfaction, saying "why not stop buying it then" makes a lot of sense to me.
yeah my comment was a little thin...what i meant to say is that, there needs to be evidence if we use deterrence to justify the death penalty.
with almost everything else, if you screw up, if a bad law is passed or a bad sentence rendered, it's not completely irreversible. but we're giving the state the right to take life, and leaving out my own feelings on that, at the very least we should be 100% rational about it. the deterrence argument is not a purely philosophical kind of argument, it's the kind where you can say, "here's the evidence". we should demand such evidence, given that the stakes are so high (human life).
actually, in this case i think that it's much more easily to say that, someone receiving a death penalty deserved it due to the nature of their crime, and leave it at that. but then you have to deal with a few other things: (a) the courts are not 100% perfect, but a dead person is 100% dead (b) what if, by setting a bad example, the state shares (albeit in a pretty small way) the guilt for a murder that someone committs?
what i don't understand is how, if there's tribal land in MA, there's even a debate as to whether or not a casino can be built. this is happening all over the country, and i just don't get it. which is it? are the tribal nations sovereign, or aren't they? the doublespeak in this area kills me.
i would hope so...the opportunities for plagiarism within wikipedia are much greater than anywhere else, and they stand to gain more from it than most.
"We try hard to keep copyright violations out of Wikipedia, but we don't always succeed." That's the standard they hold themselves to. It's realistic and practical, sure. But still a lot lower than the standards a regular person or a publishing company is held to.
it gets better...they're making millions in donations because people are reading your content, whereas your site is either paid for out of pocket or via advertising.
tons of wikipedia articles were written using "the CTRL+V method."
don't feel bad about doing something about it just because everyone loves little old wikipedia. it's a very large organization, with a very large operating budget, with large connections to lots of for-profit companies. would you be complacent if it was microsoft, or cnn?
send the bastards a C&D, you owe it to yourself and everyone else who's getting ripped off and their copyright "overridden", many of whom don't even know it.
another difference here is the fact that work was (not really given the circumstances here, but hopythetically speaking) claimed as being done by someone who didn't do it. that's different than copying a cd or dvd. it doesn't become a double standard unless the guy making the bootleg says "by the way i produced this album"...
microsoft is free to create a slimmer & cheaper version of their os, if it turns out that there is a large enough market for that.
really what this says to me is that walmart placed too small of an order for these. they could have sold out of 50, or 50,000, but we don't know until someone shows up with some numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can make a movie on your MacBook, but you can't yet make someone who'll watch it :)
The hardest part really is just trying to reach people. It can be damn near impossible, actually. Unfortunately, the big studios and labels will have the edge here for as long as the general buying public allow them to.
No artist could possibly create the hype.
Ah, but you'd be surprised how far a sex tape or some nude photos goes a long way though...Who needs agents?
I wish I was joking, I really do. Pretty much everyone you see on TV & in the magazines these days got there via some "accidentally leaked" home movies.
I agree with your sentiment but the numbers are a bit off. My band's record cost $1000 to record and another $1000 to press a few hundred copies. This is still cheap though, compared to what it would have taken 20 years ago. Pro Tools has changed a lot of things, but it's still generally very expensive to record a CD's worth of (good) music. Expensive enough to make record labels a very useful thing (evil though they may be).
I don't think it makes sense to place so much importance on the quality of the audio. I know very few people who can even hear the artifacts in a 128kbps MP3 file. I don't mean that the quality loss is subtle. To me, it's glaring. But most people don't have the ears for it. Instead, the benefits of musical file sharing come down to speed, convenience, and price. Put simply: you can rip and burn a CD at 20x. A tape cassette you could copy at 2x, but only if you didn't mind it sounding like garbage.
I'd love to see your no-middleman vision come to pass. But for that to happen, the average person would have to decide that music is important enough to actually figure out what they want to hear without being told. And the average person does not care that much about music beyond its mere existence. Ask someone what they like. 9 times out of 10 they respond with "everything". This translates as, "I treat all genres of music (out of the few I have any experience with) with an equal amount of apathy."
Real music lovers will continue to support the artists whose music moves them. They will continue to relish the act of searching out new artists and records. They will make time in their life for it, and feel the rewards of doing so. Everyone else will *want* someone to tell them what to listen to, so that they're not hit with something unfamiliar the next time they hit play. You don't see a TiVo in every house for the same reasons. Most people don't mind watching the commercials...unless you're really engaged, TV watching is passive enough that it really doesn't matter what's on, as long as it's over quick. I think most people approach music the same way. It saddens me, but doesn't make somebody a bad person or anything. We've all got our priorities. I'm a musician, so mine are fairly predictable.
There's at least 4 classic rock stations in my area. People can't be bothered to listen to something they haven't already heard a million times *going back 30 years*.
I can't judge such people. How could I? It's everyone I know. I have to just accept that, yes, I'm the oddball. My point is...there will always be a middleman. The hit model is a natural consequence of recording technology and its economics.
So what does that make people who are stupid enough to mistake Internet Explorer for Windows Explorer?
The Windows Team, circa 1998.
The dysgenics camp might be able to prove a negative correlation between vocabulary, or completed level of school, or even standardized test scores, and fertility. But for that correlation to become a doomsday prediction, someone would have to prove that those test scores are a decent measure of intelligence. This is an impossible task (mostly because they are not a good measure of intelligence). Diploma: I hear George Bush has one, from Yale no less. That alone should be enough to discredit them as an objective measure of smarts.
Vocabulary: my grandmother, who is mostly illiterate and was a subsistence farmer in Southern Italy until she came to the US, is one of the smartest people I know. I guess you'd just have to take my word on that. IQ tests: designed to determine if a child is mentally retarded. Scores over 100 don't tell you much besides "this person is not mentally retarded".
The print industry is lucky...books take longer to rip AND to burn :D
My guess is that the old model will probably thrive for as long as the old technology stays around.
Good writers write because they love to write, and musicians are the same. The get-rich-quick-ers exist in both industries, as well as every other industry. Both musicians and writers have it tough because there isn't a large enough middle ground between selling 0 copies and millions to support everybody, and book & record sales aren't related to quality. Rather than accuse the musicians (or writers) of greed, I'd rather look to the throngs of people who haven't realized that there's better stuff out there than the likes of James Patterson or Linkin Park.
I'm in much the same boat you are. I live in both worlds, but just never could use the GIMP for very long, despite appreciating its overall usefulness.
Maybe it's crazy, but I feel like a lot of the GIMP's (at least visual) UI problems stem from the fact that the GTK is not cut out for apps as complex as the GIMP. All the widgets in Photoshop are tiny/compact, many without explanatory text. That's bad for some but for getting things done quickly it's a godsend...It means that on the same monitor, I can have more space for the canvas and more tool windows that can stay open.
No, it doesn't blend in with the rest of my apps. No, I can't skin it. Probably most of it's hard-coded, and would be tough for people who need special settings for accessibility reasons. But for most users, Adobe's UI works. It's not perfect...those who've used Freehand will point out how much easier it was to do certain things in it rather than in Illustrator.
Inkscape has the same problems as GIMP, imo. It's a great program in terms of features, but still unwieldy.
I'd love it if someone would at least try to implement a completely different UI scheme for the GIMP, and rather than use PS as a template, just go way out of the box. Some of the stuff in the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog is pretty out there, and very interesting. GIMP's not a Photoshop killer, which is fine by me. Like you say, GIMP lacks a lot of (not really) advanced things like fine control over color space and separations, which is necessary for print work. So even if the GIMP had a UI so beautiful and intuitive that it made people weep on the spot, it still would not be suitable for pros. But screw the pros. And I say that as someone who gets paid doing print work. Or maybe spin off into different modes, like a prepress mode, a photo retouch mode, a paint mode, a design mode. I dunno how well that would work, I'm just trying to come up with something different.
I don't think you completely get how UAC works. It's not warning you, it's forcing the program that wants to do something "root-ish" to wait for your OK. If you're on a user account, you have to enter an admin password. On an admin account, you just give it the go-ahead. But I agree completely that it gets very annoying, and I wish there was a way to disable it in certain instances but not others. Hopefully they'll come out with something like that in the future. Until then, it might be best to disable while you're still customizing your machine or on those week-long tweak benders. I know that at least with me, I'll go long periods of time without doing anything on the computer besides web browsing (& trolling forums) and having UAC on wouldn't be bad then. Disclaimer: don't own Vista, but have worked with it a little bit.
unless you're eating liberty cabbage, you're letting the terrorists win.
The great thing about Thompson is that he manages to combine the two seamlessly. Not that he's really innovative there.
I think that was EuroTrip. "We do not sell Hash brownies here, we are simple Dutch bakery. Now put your clothes back on, white boy!"
Well, by blocking the ad I'm not using that bandwidth. So it's still win-win, except I'm winning even more. People (and I include myself here) shouldn't serve things over HTTP if they want really granular control over how it's accessed. Yeah, it'd be nice if naive advertisers paid for everyone's hosting, but that doesn't extend to a moral obligation for the visitor.
I have a similar setup and experience similar thrashing. I'd be more likely to blame it on FF than XP. I love the 'fox, but it's memory requirements should be measured in GDCs (google-data-centers). A web browser that needs its own garbage collector (soon, anyway)...there's your bloat. Not that MS is innocent, but XP with a lot of the cruftier services is pretty reasonable for requirements IMO.
Well I'm suprised to see someone use the term "MiB", apart from discussing the Will Smith movie.
The little bit of time you save, you did on the backs of everyone around you. The system only works if people vote. The less people vote, the less our elected representatives feel the need to do their jobs correctly. Your "stance" isn't heroic, it's just harmful, and it's basically what the Ds & Rs want you to do. They want their diehards to support them, they want everyone who thinks critically to get out of the way. If everyone who felt like voting doesn't do anything voted for a third party candidate, or wrote someone in, it'd put the fear of God into these guys. I guess it just isn't gonna happen, though.
There are at least three huge problems with your statement. Here's one: in the US at least, your right to complain is just that...a right. It's not given to you, nor can it be taken away. And if there was any ambiguity concerning that, the First Amendment specifically says you can air your grievances both to others (free speech) and to the government (petition).
Once more, note that the Amendment doesn't even say that you have these rights. It's a GIVEN. Otherwise, they wouldn't be rights. All it says is that the government does not have the power to abridge them.
If there are enough people who love wow but hate this new security feature, they will have to do exactly that, organize. However, I don't think it's out of the question for people to point out the "stop paying for it" method since, you have a lot more control over what computer games you own than what country you're born in.
The "love it or leave it" statement is terrible when it comes to country (US in this case), because it's a lot like saying: "Don't feel like your elected representatives are doing a good job? Why not just quit whining and be a man...by abandoning your family, career, home, and everything you love."
But if a product causes you dissatisfaction, saying "why not stop buying it then" makes a lot of sense to me.
yeah my comment was a little thin...what i meant to say is that, there needs to be evidence if we use deterrence to justify the death penalty.
with almost everything else, if you screw up, if a bad law is passed or a bad sentence rendered, it's not completely irreversible. but we're giving the state the right to take life, and leaving out my own feelings on that, at the very least we should be 100% rational about it. the deterrence argument is not a purely philosophical kind of argument, it's the kind where you can say, "here's the evidence". we should demand such evidence, given that the stakes are so high (human life).
actually, in this case i think that it's much more easily to say that, someone receiving a death penalty deserved it due to the nature of their crime, and leave it at that. but then you have to deal with a few other things: (a) the courts are not 100% perfect, but a dead person is 100% dead (b) what if, by setting a bad example, the state shares (albeit in a pretty small way) the guilt for a murder that someone committs?
what i don't understand is how, if there's tribal land in MA, there's even a debate as to whether or not a casino can be built. this is happening all over the country, and i just don't get it. which is it? are the tribal nations sovereign, or aren't they? the doublespeak in this area kills me.
i would hope so...the opportunities for plagiarism within wikipedia are much greater than anywhere else, and they stand to gain more from it than most. "We try hard to keep copyright violations out of Wikipedia, but we don't always succeed." That's the standard they hold themselves to. It's realistic and practical, sure. But still a lot lower than the standards a regular person or a publishing company is held to.
it gets better...they're making millions in donations because people are reading your content, whereas your site is either paid for out of pocket or via advertising.
tons of wikipedia articles were written using "the CTRL+V method."
don't feel bad about doing something about it just because everyone loves little old wikipedia. it's a very large organization, with a very large operating budget, with large connections to lots of for-profit companies. would you be complacent if it was microsoft, or cnn? send the bastards a C&D, you owe it to yourself and everyone else who's getting ripped off and their copyright "overridden", many of whom don't even know it.
another difference here is the fact that work was (not really given the circumstances here, but hopythetically speaking) claimed as being done by someone who didn't do it. that's different than copying a cd or dvd. it doesn't become a double standard unless the guy making the bootleg says "by the way i produced this album"...
99% of tv censorship is done by the networks to keep the sponsors happy, not the fcc.
grandparent is laying the fud on thick here.
microsoft is free to create a slimmer & cheaper version of their os, if it turns out that there is a large enough market for that. really what this says to me is that walmart placed too small of an order for these. they could have sold out of 50, or 50,000, but we don't know until someone shows up with some numbers.