On further reflection, I don't honestly know whether the early DeskStars were truly//designed// as media-only drives, or whether IBM decided to call them "media drives" when they realised that the drives had a tendency to damage data if you subjected them to the sort of intense local activity that you'd expect if you tried to use them to host an active OS filesystem or a swapfile.
I remember running a diskcheck on a DeskStar, and noticing that you could make out where the partitions were, because there were a clump of red damaged sectors showing up at the locations of each partition's file allocation table. I suspect that when there was a lot of continuous "seeking" going on, warpage due to the heat buildup plus the abrupt deceleration at the end of a seek might have resulting in the heads occasionally hitting the disk surface, dunno.
Since then I've gotten quite fond of using 2.5" laptop drives in desktop PCs. They're slower and more expensive, but they also run cooler, and you can fit more of them into a confined space, even with heatsinking and space for air circulation.
If your RAM requirements go up, and its difficult to upgrade a machine, you might also try the compromise solution of plugging in a fast external memory card, and using that external volume for a fixed-size swapfile.
First thing I do on any machine that's going to have a pagefile is give the nasty thing its own partition, which the user is forbidden to use for anything else.
Excellent advice! Another step to boost performance is to have that partition on a separate physical disk drive. Sod's Law says that the pagefile will often be most active when you're loading and saving conventional files (or launching apps), because that tends to be when things are moving into and out of memory, or when a document's edit history is being wiped. So a problem that happens is that the harddrive is being asked to read and write files to one part of the disc, while the pagefile changes are demanding that it reads and writes to a different part of the disc.
So even if the two sets of files are individually nice and contiguous, in practice the poor HD heads spend ages scooting back and forth between one region of the disc and another, and since those seek operations are pretty slow compared to the actual data transfer, the result can be a noticeable slowdown and a noisy HD desperately thrashing the heads between the two r/w areas.
OTOH, if both sets of data are on their own separate physical drives, then you have two independent sets of heads each smoothly doing their own thing. Potentially much faster, and you notice a marked reduction in rattly noises.
I wouldn't be surprised if it reduced HD wear, too -- do you remember the old IBM "DeathStar" drives that could expire after a matter of months when you ran an OS on them, because they were originally designed as "streaming" media drives and couldn't cope with the heads being continually wrenched about by a constant stream of seek requests?
So the Windows user is supposed to "know better" than to use the terminology defined in the Microsoft dialogs, the Microsoft help system, the Microsoft online help, the Microsoft technical support website, the MSDN developer network technical support materials and books, and the MS Windows technical definitions???
Technical terms sometimes have different meanings in different contexts. Most grown-ups can deal with this. A "turtle" in the US isn't always the same as a "turtle" in the UK, and a UK "fanny" is not the same as a US "fanny". These little linguistic inconsistencies are just part of life, and anyone who's done any tinkering at all with Windows should have come across this piece of MS terminology (virtual memory, not turtles).
And if someone doesn't have at least a passing acquaintance with the Windows settings, or with the Windows literature or technical materials (in other words, if they haven't used the product in any depth, or RTFM), then they probably oughtn't be giving out technical advice on it.
Then I guess that you've never had a job in tech support that dealt with Windows systems?
Windows uses the term "virtual memory" to refer to memory held in paging files on a hard-drive (the distinction being between physical RAM (the actual memory chips installed in your machine), and "virtual" RAM (the additional swapfile contents on HD).
On XP, and as far back as I can remember on earlier versions of Windows (in other words back to Win3.1), these have always been referred to as the Windows "Virtual memory" settings, and on the current XP system settings dialog box, "Advanced" tab, the "Virtual memory" pane helpfully explains that the settings affect, ".. an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as RAM".
Since the OP was specifically talking about Windows, his use of the Windows terminology was appropriate. The OP seemed to know what he was talking about. The first responder (rated +5) was the one that was actually confused by the terminology, and didn't understand the question.
Florence Nightingale was famous (still is), and got a good career out of it. If she didn't get to be surgeon general... well, can most people recite the names of surgeon generals from the period without looking them up? FN was bigger than that.
Florence Nightingale wasn't overlooked, she was regarded as a popular hero of the time, and when I was a kid, she was on the back of the UK Ten Pound Note! If anything, her fame probably unfairly eclipsed that of a number of other people who also deserve to be remembered.
Yeah, there's a classic little book by Darrell Huff called "How To Lie With Statistics", and it credits FN with being a pioneer in the art of the misleading graph.:)
FN wanted the Crimean statistics to look as horrifying as possible.
The little Huff book is excellent, and very well known (and inexpensive!), so I think that most people who've read a bit about statistics probably already know the Florence Nightingale story.
I looked through the PDF, and saw the sample photograph of a welded joint (on p.33 of the.pdf file)
The thought that occurred was: how do they make those indented numbers in the copper stabiliser near the weld?
Presumably those ID marks are already there on the copper before the joint is assembled and welded? Is there an onlne document that lists the order of procedures to be carried out when assembling these connections?
(Yes, I know that it's a really dumb question, but someone here has to ask it).
the safe will roll down the incline, bursting through the wall and landing safely in the yard,
"Daddy! The house is on fire!"
"Okay kids, evacuate in an orderly manner, and assemble at the fire point, in the yard. Your Mother and I will join you there in a minute..."
Another reason why record companies were so slow to embrace MP3 (other than ignorance, incompetence, and an unwillingness to risk and invest) was something in the terms and conditions of many "standard" artist contracts.
A lot of outsiders don't realise this, but the dreaded "standard contract" tended to have a clause saying that when a new format was launched, the artist wouldn't get any royalties for any works released on that format for a certain number of years. The justification behind the clause was that if a new format was launched, there would be a certain degree of additional investment required by the record companies, but no additional work by the artist - so the artist's "contribution" to the new format launch was to forego royalties for a while. For for the first couple of years of a new format's life, output in that format would be regarded as something akin to royalty-free "promotional" product.
You saw a similar clause operating in the film industry, and this was part of the reason for the recent Writers Strike. The writers realised that the movie industry was gearing up for a possible surge in sales from Blu-Ray, as people bought duplicate copies of their favourite movies in the new format, but thanks to their contracts, the writers would get zero royalties for the period of that expected initial surge.
The "suspension of royalties" clause is supposed to help distrbution companies embrace new formats, but in the case of the record industry and MP3 it did the opposite. See, the record industry realised that the MP3 market was emerging and growing and developing on its own while they did absolutely nothing. If they got in early, then the golden "no royalties" period would start while online sales were still low. In order to maximise the proportion of sales income that went to the record companies (rather than to the artists), the trick was to wait until the formats were already starting to take off, and then start the clock, so that as much as possible of the initial surge in sales would coincide with the "golden" period in which they could keep all the income for themselves and not pay the artists anything.
So there was an argument, from the record companies' point of view, for sitting on their arses and doing nothing whle the "piracy" sector grew the MP3 market to the point where it became attractive for the record companies to step in and take over. The artists would get screwed twice - once by losing income from piracy as the record companies initially refused to release tracks in the new format, stopping people who wanted to buy the tracks online from having a legitimate way to get them, and again, while the record companies jumped into the developed MP3 market, but kept all the cash themselves. This'd give the record companies maximum return on minimum investment and minimum risk.
Where the strategy failed was that if you sit back and let other people develop a market for you, when you then decide to enter that market yourself, you find that you don't have the in-house skills or expertise or experience or presence. The smart guys who now really know the new market inside-out don't work for you, and may not want to work for you. They either want to start their own companies, or work for a business that has already shown itself to be a leader in the new format. It's more difficult to assert ownership of a developed market sector if that sector has been entirely built by other people.
The "golden period" argument obviously isn't the only reason why most record companies didn't embrace MP3 early on - but in an accounting-heavy industry where "new media" expertise was low, and it was important for individuals to avoid being associated with costly project failures, the "golden period" accounting argument was probably a useful argument for executives to do what they were already inclined to do... nothing.
Do big record companies even deserve to benefit from the growth of the new-technology sectors? Where was their investment in those sectors?
The technology for "cloud" media distribution was developed and bug-fixed by the likes of Napster, not them. the whole MP3 infrastructure seems to have been put together by independent companies, research institutions and computer companies, with a notable absence of any record companies being obviously involved. Online music stores seem to be mostly developed by external companies. I'm not aware of any record companies behind the growth of the ringtone market. If you want to access databases of what's on your CDs, you don't go to the record company, you go to a database run by an independent company where the information is entered and corrected and maintained by volunteer end-users. Hell, Microsoft probably run a more reliable public back-catalogue for BMG than BMG do.
When's the last time that any of us visited a record company website to find out a major artists back-catalogue? These guys are no good at websites. They'll pay someone big money to do a glitzy "promo" site that doesn't contain any useful reference information, and pull the plug on it a couple of years later.
The big record companies say that they need to make big profits in order to find and invest in the next generation of talent, but the artists being found and nurtured by "the industry" seem to be supported by other industry "players". The big development recently has been TV talent shows, where there's a lot of money being made from tv broadcasting and pay-per-vote... but the big record companies missed out on that money because it wasn't them that did it.
What they are trying to do now, is to have contracts that give them a slice of things like tour money. They're trying to grab someone else's historic market share to supplement their income, by awarding themselves those rights in the recording contract. Again, this is a market where the big record companies haven't invested in the past - the gigging circuit has been kept alive by bands and promoters who recognised that gigging was essential to keep part of the customer-base interested in music. The big record companies essentially left big live venues to die, leaving it to others, like the mobile phone companies, to sponsor them.
So if they're asking for a "fair slice" of the profits from music, they should be careful what they ask for. A lot of people think that their current profits represent way more than a fair slice.
You don't want the world listening in to a conversation between a bunch of macho guys who've just realised that they're all alone in a sealed capsule with nothing to lose, no chance of escape and a few hours left to live.
Mission Control:
"And so, the world waits and listens, as the brave astronauts consider how to spend their last few hours of precious life. We can no longer communicate with the heroic crew, but we have one last audio feed still working. We can hear them, but tragically, they can't hear us... "
Audio feed:
"Chuck?"
"Yeah, Tony?"
"We're gonna die, ain't we?"
"Yeah, Tony. We are."
"Is there anything you really wished you'd tried, just once, when you had the chance?"
"A few things, Tony. Yeah. A few."
"Have you ever wondered what, like, it'd be like to 'do it' with another guy? Because..."
Mission Control:
"Aaargh! Aargh! Noooooo! Turn it OFF!"
Velcro is wonderful stuff for zero-gee, but do remember that it was partly blamed by some for the death of three astronauts in Apollo 1, so it's tactful not to refer to it as "safe".
Story goes, the Apollo missions were supposed to run on reduced cabin pressure. 80% of air is just fairly useless nitrogen, so they figured, we can get away with a lower pressure but still have the astronauts breathing the same amount of oxygen, if we use a lower pressure but "up" the oxygen content to compensate.
So the Apollo 1 training exercise used a 100% oxygen environment. But since it was done on the ground, they were using pure oxygen at atmospheric-pressure. Now as anyone who's read the regs on bus driving licences knows, pure oxygen is potentially very dangerous stuff. Velcro is deliberately made of soft flexible plastics, and has a very high surface area, and it's been suggested that hot velcro in 1-atmosphere pure oxygen might be somewhat prone to bursting into flames.
Probably perfectly safe in the context of anchoring things in a vacuum, but... triggers some uncomfortable memories of incinerated astronauts.
The trailer doesn't play on my PC running VLC, even after VLC spotted the problem and downloaded an update.
Did you notice that clever thing that Apple did with overlays, to trip up other people's video players? Hmm.
Apple want Quicktime to be the default video player, so they're using their industry influence to get video content that people want to watch (like this trailer) rejigged to include recent features that "choke" competing players.
If video playback works reliably for everyone and is a "generic" task, then it's more difficult for Apple to persuade people to use their particular video player (especially if it comes with unwanted "extra features" like site-tracking). So what they're doing is trying to "spoil" the generic market, and induce new customer uncertainty over whether a given file can actually be played on a given player. If the main company encouraging the release of "spoiler" files is Apple, and "problem" files are more likely to run successfully on Apple software than the competition, then this gives Apple the advantage they want.
Apple are using old Microsoft tactics - break consumer confidence in competing products by generating content that customers might expect to run everywhere, but in practice, won't work reliably on non-MS er, non-Apple platforms.
If video playback "simply works" on everybody's systems without any wrinkles, then Apple have no competitive advantage. In order to get a reputation for being more compatible with content, they have to find clever ways of engineering incompatibilities into popular content, and that seems to be what they're doing with this trailer-hosting scheme.
Yeah, it's like your boss turning up fifteen minutes late every morning to open the office, and then docking everyone's wages for the time wasted every morning.
If the employer is paying someone an hourly rate to do certain work, and has set agreed hours, then it's normally the employer's responsibility to make sure that they are providing adequate facilities that allow employees to carry out that work. Doors unlocked, lights on, phones working. If call-centre staff can't do their "proper" work for fifteen minutes because the provided computer system isn't working, then that's not the call centre staff's fault. If the staff members each have to spend fifteen minutes setting up, because the employer is too incompetent to get a boot script installed, or because the managers are too bloody-minded to turn up fifteen minutes early to "manage" the start of shift by pressing everyone's "on" button, then the staff shouldn't have wages docked for their employers not having their act together.
It's a management failure.
If they don't want to pay the staff their minimum rate wages for getting their computers running in the morning, then would they rather be paying the staff IT wages for those fifteen minutes?
It might still be possible to do something interesting with Wonder Woman if they cast Rosario Dawson.
Star Trek, Year One: Starfleet briefing
on
New Star Trek Trailer
·
· Score: 5, Funny
" Is everyone comfortable? I've called you all to this emergency "Starfleet Ultra" meeting to resolve a number of crises. This meeting is, of course, not taking place. Standard security measures have been taken, and I encourage you all to speak freely during the discussion period. Let me explain the purpose of this meeting, and the crises in question.
First we have the unfortunate case of James T. Kirk. As we all know, Kirk is the youngest ever graduate of Starfleet, and has been used, intensively, in all our promotional materials for the last three months. Unfortunately, it seems that our Mr Kirk was not all that he seemed. As you know, Kirk managed a perfect score in what was supposed to be an unwinnable simulation, by hacking the computer. What you don't know is that a subsequent investigation revealed that Mr Kirk also passed all his other assessments, including his psychological assessments, the same way. His actual scores show Kirk to be emotionally unstable, over-excitable, prone to megalomania and paranoia, and he appears to have an obsession with knives and "fucking green pontang". He even lied about his name, his middle name isn't Tiberius, it's Timothy. He's a fraud, and a complete liability to Starfleet.
This brings us to problem number two. Spock.
As we all know, Mr's Spock's mixed-blood heritage is regarded as an affront both to conservative Vulcan society and to right-wing Earthers. He doesn't "fit in" in either society, which is why his father decided to put him into Starfleet in the first place. Spock has limited social skills that make him a liability as a crew member. He was befriended by Kirk for his computer expertise, and now he ought to be facing criminal charges alongside Kirk. Needless to say, the prosecution of the "mixed-species" son of the Vulcan Ambassador would be deeply embarrassing, and would play into the hands of separatist elements on both sides. We can't afford to let this happen.
This brings us to problem number three, the USS Enterprise.
Four weeks ago, in EarthDock, in a standard post-mission checkup, a pile of... detritus was discovered at the bottom of a Jeffries tube. Broken glassware. Specifically, broken whisky bottles. It now appears that the Supervising Engineer originally in charge of the Enterprise's construction, Scott, was suffering from intermittent alcoholic blackouts during construction, and was systematically falsifying the engineering certification paperwork. I'm afraid that the Enterprise cannot now be considered safe for further deployment.
Along with these three disasters, we also have a number of more minor personnel problems, for example, one Doctor McCoy, who killed fourteen people in Starfleet Medical last year. McCoy had a breakdown a few weeks after disconnecting his father's life-support systems, and ran amok in the intensive care ward, screaming "I'm a murderer not a doctor!", and pulled twenty plugs before someone stopped him. Only six survived. Do I see some murmurs of recognition? Yes, we managed to keep the "Killer McCoy" episode out of the press, but I see that some rumours have managed to spread through the ranks, nevertheless. McCoy has responded to therapy, and is declared fully rehabilitated, but he still has a tendency to repeat his psychologist's assigned mantra "I'm a doctor, not a murderer" under times of stress, and we don't quite know where to put him. Too many people have heard the rumours. We also have a certain Officer Uhura, who... I see some of us around the table are blushing... seems to have taken her training as "communications specialist" rather too much to heart, and seems to have been "communicating" with rather too many higher members of the command structure, with the obvious attendant security implications. We've also scraped together a list of other minor "problem" personnel. You each have a copy in the folder in front of you. None of those folders will leave this room.
I thought that the film's ---GO BACK--- slogan and logo (with the "zing" through it) was intriguing - but then I realised that it was just a site navigation button.
(1) Contact the company headquarters, and tell them that you need to pass a message to the Chairman as a matter of urgency, and need his address.
Send a registered letter.
"... Toyota's competition may be bribing people within the company to act in such a way as to discredit Toyota with their most loyal US customers. Clearly industrial sabotage. Nobody at wonderful Toyota could behave this stupidly by accident. Obviously malicious. Insiders trying to discredit Toyota? Perhaps share manipulation scam?
"... Feel that it is a matter of urgency that Chairman notified ASAP in order to mount full investigation of extent of sabotage being carried out within company, before more damage done.
"... As loyal Toyota owner and Toyota fanclub website maintainer, feel the reponsibility to bring this matter to your attention with urgency, prospective customers being alienated en masse, Internet discussions castigating Toyota as bad company, people swearing never to buy Toyota again, all over the internet, etc. Yours Sincerely, yadda yadda yadda. "
(2) Wait for grovelling apology written on behalf of the Chairman's office.
(3) If the legal guys get back to you meanwhile, explain that you didn't want to bring this up, but that you're currently discussing about the dispute's resolution with their CEO. Don't give any preliminary details of what the discussion is about. Let them guess.
1. Problem: Happy customers, promoting your product for free, and enthusiastically telling other prospective customers about them. Woe. How could things have gone so wrong?
2. Pay expensive lawyers to threaten and harass said influential customers, with legally inept notices that make the company look (a) stupid, (b) nasty, (c) incompetent, (d) anti-customer.
3. Angry customers now hate your guts, and no longer spread nice messages around the web about your products. Fan-base destroyed. Bad press.
If someone says,
"You are my rock, and I shall call you Petra, and upon your rock shall my church be built"
then that's not necessarily humor.
Okay, if you say it in a funny voice and pull faces and make hand gestures and grab your crotch on "rock" (or pronounce it "wok") then it might be funny, but that's down to the the delivery, not the material. With the right delivery and timing, reciting the Ten Commandments could probably have people crying with laughter, but that doesn't mean that the TC is an example of intentionally humorous writing.
Metaphor is not automatically funny. It's not necessarily meant to be funny. It's often simply meant to make a reference to something having properties normally associated with something else.
Hypothetical:
Lets suppose that someone in 400BC had written a play in which a hard-bitten soldier snarls at someone, "You're an arsehole and you stink of shit". It might be written as a totally cold, venomous line. But put that same play on in 2008, with a director who is determined to prove that the Greeks knew how to write jokes, and the same line get delivered with a theatrical flourish and an arch pause in the middle that turns the ending into a punchline: "you sir are an arsehole... [pause for effect]... andyoustinkofshit!". The actor delivers it as a joke, the audience accepts the heavy theatrical cues that signal that it's supposed to be a joke, and they laugh.
Frankly, if someone back in 400BC had written the screenplay for "The Godfather", and we dug up the text now, then university drama groups would be delivering the play with nudges and winks to get laughs, professors would be saying how the whole thing was full of obvious sexual allusions to kissing rings and sleeping with fishes, and the thing would end up being presented as a timeless example of bawdy comedy.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember running a diskcheck on a DeskStar, and noticing that you could make out where the partitions were, because there were a clump of red damaged sectors showing up at the locations of each partition's file allocation table. I suspect that when there was a lot of continuous "seeking" going on, warpage due to the heat buildup plus the abrupt deceleration at the end of a seek might have resulting in the heads occasionally hitting the disk surface, dunno.
Since then I've gotten quite fond of using 2.5" laptop drives in desktop PCs. They're slower and more expensive, but they also run cooler, and you can fit more of them into a confined space, even with heatsinking and space for air circulation.
If your RAM requirements go up, and its difficult to upgrade a machine, you might also try the compromise solution of plugging in a fast external memory card, and using that external volume for a fixed-size swapfile.
Excellent advice! Another step to boost performance is to have that partition on a separate physical disk drive. Sod's Law says that the pagefile will often be most active when you're loading and saving conventional files (or launching apps), because that tends to be when things are moving into and out of memory, or when a document's edit history is being wiped. So a problem that happens is that the harddrive is being asked to read and write files to one part of the disc, while the pagefile changes are demanding that it reads and writes to a different part of the disc.
So even if the two sets of files are individually nice and contiguous, in practice the poor HD heads spend ages scooting back and forth between one region of the disc and another, and since those seek operations are pretty slow compared to the actual data transfer, the result can be a noticeable slowdown and a noisy HD desperately thrashing the heads between the two r/w areas.
OTOH, if both sets of data are on their own separate physical drives, then you have two independent sets of heads each smoothly doing their own thing. Potentially much faster, and you notice a marked reduction in rattly noises.
I wouldn't be surprised if it reduced HD wear, too -- do you remember the old IBM "DeathStar" drives that could expire after a matter of months when you ran an OS on them, because they were originally designed as "streaming" media drives and couldn't cope with the heads being continually wrenched about by a constant stream of seek requests?
Technical terms sometimes have different meanings in different contexts. Most grown-ups can deal with this. A "turtle" in the US isn't always the same as a "turtle" in the UK, and a UK "fanny" is not the same as a US "fanny". These little linguistic inconsistencies are just part of life, and anyone who's done any tinkering at all with Windows should have come across this piece of MS terminology (virtual memory, not turtles).
And if someone doesn't have at least a passing acquaintance with the Windows settings, or with the Windows literature or technical materials (in other words, if they haven't used the product in any depth, or RTFM), then they probably oughtn't be giving out technical advice on it.
Windows uses the term "virtual memory" to refer to memory held in paging files on a hard-drive (the distinction being between physical RAM (the actual memory chips installed in your machine), and "virtual" RAM (the additional swapfile contents on HD).
On XP, and as far back as I can remember on earlier versions of Windows (in other words back to Win3.1), these have always been referred to as the Windows "Virtual memory" settings, and on the current XP system settings dialog box, "Advanced" tab, the "Virtual memory" pane helpfully explains that the settings affect, ".. an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as RAM".
Since the OP was specifically talking about Windows, his use of the Windows terminology was appropriate. The OP seemed to know what he was talking about. The first responder (rated +5) was the one that was actually confused by the terminology, and didn't understand the question.
When I was growing up, the two historic people everyone knew from UK banknotes were Isaac Newton and Florence Nightingale.
How much more credit would it be possible for one person to get?
Florence Nightingale wasn't overlooked, she was regarded as a popular hero of the time, and when I was a kid, she was on the back of the UK Ten Pound Note! If anything, her fame probably unfairly eclipsed that of a number of other people who also deserve to be remembered.
Mary Seacole, for one.
FN wanted the Crimean statistics to look as horrifying as possible.
The little Huff book is excellent, and very well known (and inexpensive!), so I think that most people who've read a bit about statistics probably already know the Florence Nightingale story.
The thought that occurred was: how do they make those indented numbers in the copper stabiliser near the weld?
Presumably those ID marks are already there on the copper before the joint is assembled and welded? Is there an onlne document that lists the order of procedures to be carried out when assembling these connections?
(Yes, I know that it's a really dumb question, but someone here has to ask it).
"Daddy! The house is on fire!" ..."
"Okay kids, evacuate in an orderly manner, and assemble at the fire point, in the yard. Your Mother and I will join you there in a minute
A lot of outsiders don't realise this, but the dreaded "standard contract" tended to have a clause saying that when a new format was launched, the artist wouldn't get any royalties for any works released on that format for a certain number of years. The justification behind the clause was that if a new format was launched, there would be a certain degree of additional investment required by the record companies, but no additional work by the artist - so the artist's "contribution" to the new format launch was to forego royalties for a while. For for the first couple of years of a new format's life, output in that format would be regarded as something akin to royalty-free "promotional" product.
You saw a similar clause operating in the film industry, and this was part of the reason for the recent Writers Strike. The writers realised that the movie industry was gearing up for a possible surge in sales from Blu-Ray, as people bought duplicate copies of their favourite movies in the new format, but thanks to their contracts, the writers would get zero royalties for the period of that expected initial surge.
The "suspension of royalties" clause is supposed to help distrbution companies embrace new formats, but in the case of the record industry and MP3 it did the opposite. See, the record industry realised that the MP3 market was emerging and growing and developing on its own while they did absolutely nothing. If they got in early, then the golden "no royalties" period would start while online sales were still low. In order to maximise the proportion of sales income that went to the record companies (rather than to the artists), the trick was to wait until the formats were already starting to take off, and then start the clock, so that as much as possible of the initial surge in sales would coincide with the "golden" period in which they could keep all the income for themselves and not pay the artists anything.
So there was an argument, from the record companies' point of view, for sitting on their arses and doing nothing whle the "piracy" sector grew the MP3 market to the point where it became attractive for the record companies to step in and take over. The artists would get screwed twice - once by losing income from piracy as the record companies initially refused to release tracks in the new format, stopping people who wanted to buy the tracks online from having a legitimate way to get them, and again, while the record companies jumped into the developed MP3 market, but kept all the cash themselves. This'd give the record companies maximum return on minimum investment and minimum risk.
Where the strategy failed was that if you sit back and let other people develop a market for you, when you then decide to enter that market yourself, you find that you don't have the in-house skills or expertise or experience or presence. The smart guys who now really know the new market inside-out don't work for you, and may not want to work for you. They either want to start their own companies, or work for a business that has already shown itself to be a leader in the new format. It's more difficult to assert ownership of a developed market sector if that sector has been entirely built by other people.
The "golden period" argument obviously isn't the only reason why most record companies didn't embrace MP3 early on - but in an accounting-heavy industry where "new media" expertise was low, and it was important for individuals to avoid being associated with costly project failures, the "golden period" accounting argument was probably a useful argument for executives to do what they were already inclined to do ... nothing.
The technology for "cloud" media distribution was developed and bug-fixed by the likes of Napster, not them. the whole MP3 infrastructure seems to have been put together by independent companies, research institutions and computer companies, with a notable absence of any record companies being obviously involved. Online music stores seem to be mostly developed by external companies. I'm not aware of any record companies behind the growth of the ringtone market. If you want to access databases of what's on your CDs, you don't go to the record company, you go to a database run by an independent company where the information is entered and corrected and maintained by volunteer end-users. Hell, Microsoft probably run a more reliable public back-catalogue for BMG than BMG do.
When's the last time that any of us visited a record company website to find out a major artists back-catalogue? These guys are no good at websites. They'll pay someone big money to do a glitzy "promo" site that doesn't contain any useful reference information, and pull the plug on it a couple of years later.
The big record companies say that they need to make big profits in order to find and invest in the next generation of talent, but the artists being found and nurtured by "the industry" seem to be supported by other industry "players". The big development recently has been TV talent shows, where there's a lot of money being made from tv broadcasting and pay-per-vote ... but the big record companies missed out on that money because it wasn't them that did it.
What they are trying to do now, is to have contracts that give them a slice of things like tour money. They're trying to grab someone else's historic market share to supplement their income, by awarding themselves those rights in the recording contract. Again, this is a market where the big record companies haven't invested in the past - the gigging circuit has been kept alive by bands and promoters who recognised that gigging was essential to keep part of the customer-base interested in music. The big record companies essentially left big live venues to die, leaving it to others, like the mobile phone companies, to sponsor them.
So if they're asking for a "fair slice" of the profits from music, they should be careful what they ask for. A lot of people think that their current profits represent way more than a fair slice.
Don't forget Giordano_Bruno
It looks as though ~350,000 other people had the same idea.
Mission Control: ... "
"And so, the world waits and listens, as the brave astronauts consider how to spend their last few hours of precious life. We can no longer communicate with the heroic crew, but we have one last audio feed still working. We can hear them, but tragically, they can't hear us
Audio feed: ..."
"Chuck?"
"Yeah, Tony?"
"We're gonna die, ain't we?"
"Yeah, Tony. We are."
"Is there anything you really wished you'd tried, just once, when you had the chance?"
"A few things, Tony. Yeah. A few."
"Have you ever wondered what, like, it'd be like to 'do it' with another guy? Because
Mission Control:
"Aaargh! Aargh! Noooooo! Turn it OFF!"
Story goes, the Apollo missions were supposed to run on reduced cabin pressure. 80% of air is just fairly useless nitrogen, so they figured, we can get away with a lower pressure but still have the astronauts breathing the same amount of oxygen, if we use a lower pressure but "up" the oxygen content to compensate.
So the Apollo 1 training exercise used a 100% oxygen environment. But since it was done on the ground, they were using pure oxygen at atmospheric-pressure. Now as anyone who's read the regs on bus driving licences knows, pure oxygen is potentially very dangerous stuff. Velcro is deliberately made of soft flexible plastics, and has a very high surface area, and it's been suggested that hot velcro in 1-atmosphere pure oxygen might be somewhat prone to bursting into flames.
Probably perfectly safe in the context of anchoring things in a vacuum, but ... triggers some uncomfortable memories of incinerated astronauts.
Did you notice that clever thing that Apple did with overlays, to trip up other people's video players? Hmm.
Apple want Quicktime to be the default video player, so they're using their industry influence to get video content that people want to watch (like this trailer) rejigged to include recent features that "choke" competing players.
If video playback works reliably for everyone and is a "generic" task, then it's more difficult for Apple to persuade people to use their particular video player (especially if it comes with unwanted "extra features" like site-tracking). So what they're doing is trying to "spoil" the generic market, and induce new customer uncertainty over whether a given file can actually be played on a given player. If the main company encouraging the release of "spoiler" files is Apple, and "problem" files are more likely to run successfully on Apple software than the competition, then this gives Apple the advantage they want.
Apple are using old Microsoft tactics - break consumer confidence in competing products by generating content that customers might expect to run everywhere, but in practice, won't work reliably on non-MS er, non-Apple platforms.
If video playback "simply works" on everybody's systems without any wrinkles, then Apple have no competitive advantage. In order to get a reputation for being more compatible with content, they have to find clever ways of engineering incompatibilities into popular content, and that seems to be what they're doing with this trailer-hosting scheme.
Yeah, it's like your boss turning up fifteen minutes late every morning to open the office, and then docking everyone's wages for the time wasted every morning.
It's a management failure.
If they don't want to pay the staff their minimum rate wages for getting their computers running in the morning, then would they rather be paying the staff IT wages for those fifteen minutes?
It might still be possible to do something interesting with Wonder Woman if they cast Rosario Dawson.
First we have the unfortunate case of James T. Kirk. As we all know, Kirk is the youngest ever graduate of Starfleet, and has been used, intensively, in all our promotional materials for the last three months. Unfortunately, it seems that our Mr Kirk was not all that he seemed. As you know, Kirk managed a perfect score in what was supposed to be an unwinnable simulation, by hacking the computer. What you don't know is that a subsequent investigation revealed that Mr Kirk also passed all his other assessments, including his psychological assessments, the same way. His actual scores show Kirk to be emotionally unstable, over-excitable, prone to megalomania and paranoia, and he appears to have an obsession with knives and "fucking green pontang". He even lied about his name, his middle name isn't Tiberius, it's Timothy. He's a fraud, and a complete liability to Starfleet.
This brings us to problem number two. Spock. As we all know, Mr's Spock's mixed-blood heritage is regarded as an affront both to conservative Vulcan society and to right-wing Earthers. He doesn't "fit in" in either society, which is why his father decided to put him into Starfleet in the first place. Spock has limited social skills that make him a liability as a crew member. He was befriended by Kirk for his computer expertise, and now he ought to be facing criminal charges alongside Kirk. Needless to say, the prosecution of the "mixed-species" son of the Vulcan Ambassador would be deeply embarrassing, and would play into the hands of separatist elements on both sides. We can't afford to let this happen.
This brings us to problem number three, the USS Enterprise. ... detritus was discovered at the bottom of a Jeffries tube. Broken glassware. Specifically, broken whisky bottles. It now appears that the Supervising Engineer originally in charge of the Enterprise's construction, Scott, was suffering from intermittent alcoholic blackouts during construction, and was systematically falsifying the engineering certification paperwork. I'm afraid that the Enterprise cannot now be considered safe for further deployment.
Four weeks ago, in EarthDock, in a standard post-mission checkup, a pile of
Along with these three disasters, we also have a number of more minor personnel problems, for example, one Doctor McCoy, who killed fourteen people in Starfleet Medical last year. McCoy had a breakdown a few weeks after disconnecting his father's life-support systems, and ran amok in the intensive care ward, screaming "I'm a murderer not a doctor!", and pulled twenty plugs before someone stopped him. Only six survived. Do I see some murmurs of recognition? Yes, we managed to keep the "Killer McCoy" episode out of the press, but I see that some rumours have managed to spread through the ranks, nevertheless. McCoy has responded to therapy, and is declared fully rehabilitated, but he still has a tendency to repeat his psychologist's assigned mantra "I'm a doctor, not a murderer" under times of stress, and we don't quite know where to put him. Too many people have heard the rumours. We also have a certain Officer Uhura, who ... I see some of us around the table are blushing ... seems to have taken her training as "communications specialist" rather too much to heart, and seems to have been "communicating" with rather too many higher members of the command structure, with the obvious attendant security implications. We've also scraped together a list of other minor "problem" personnel. You each have a copy in the folder in front of you. None of those folders will leave this room.
Now, my proposed solution is to solve all these
I thought that the film's ---GO BACK--- slogan and logo (with the "zing" through it) was intriguing - but then I realised that it was just a site navigation button.
Send a registered letter.
"... Toyota's competition may be bribing people within the company to act in such a way as to discredit Toyota with their most loyal US customers. Clearly industrial sabotage. Nobody at wonderful Toyota could behave this stupidly by accident. Obviously malicious. Insiders trying to discredit Toyota? Perhaps share manipulation scam?
" ... Feel that it is a matter of urgency that Chairman notified ASAP in order to mount full investigation of extent of sabotage being carried out within company, before more damage done.
" ... As loyal Toyota owner and Toyota fanclub website maintainer, feel the reponsibility to bring this matter to your attention with urgency, prospective customers being alienated en masse, Internet discussions castigating Toyota as bad company, people swearing never to buy Toyota again, all over the internet, etc. Yours Sincerely, yadda yadda yadda. "
(2) Wait for grovelling apology written on behalf of the Chairman's office.
(3) If the legal guys get back to you meanwhile, explain that you didn't want to bring this up, but that you're currently discussing about the dispute's resolution with their CEO. Don't give any preliminary details of what the discussion is about. Let them guess.
2. Pay expensive lawyers to threaten and harass said influential customers, with legally inept notices that make the company look (a) stupid, (b) nasty, (c) incompetent, (d) anti-customer.
3. Angry customers now hate your guts, and no longer spread nice messages around the web about your products. Fan-base destroyed. Bad press.
4. Problem solved!
Okay, if you say it in a funny voice and pull faces and make hand gestures and grab your crotch on "rock" (or pronounce it "wok") then it might be funny, but that's down to the the delivery, not the material. With the right delivery and timing, reciting the Ten Commandments could probably have people crying with laughter, but that doesn't mean that the TC is an example of intentionally humorous writing.
Metaphor is not automatically funny. It's not necessarily meant to be funny. It's often simply meant to make a reference to something having properties normally associated with something else.
Hypothetical: ... [pause for effect] ... andyoustinkofshit!". The actor delivers it as a joke, the audience accepts the heavy theatrical cues that signal that it's supposed to be a joke, and they laugh.
Lets suppose that someone in 400BC had written a play in which a hard-bitten soldier snarls at someone, "You're an arsehole and you stink of shit". It might be written as a totally cold, venomous line. But put that same play on in 2008, with a director who is determined to prove that the Greeks knew how to write jokes, and the same line get delivered with a theatrical flourish and an arch pause in the middle that turns the ending into a punchline: "you sir are an arsehole
Frankly, if someone back in 400BC had written the screenplay for "The Godfather", and we dug up the text now, then university drama groups would be delivering the play with nudges and winks to get laughs, professors would be saying how the whole thing was full of obvious sexual allusions to kissing rings and sleeping with fishes, and the thing would end up being presented as a timeless example of bawdy comedy.
(sigh)