That's nothing. My CD, through a frickin' vanity effort, costs me...
(...goes to books to make sure it's the right number...)
$2.20 per CD for 100 shrink-wrapped, color-printed pressed CDs,
about $0.85 per CD in shop setup costs, amortized over the current production run of 100 CDs,
$0.085x2 = $0.17 per CD in artist royalties for cover songs,
a whopping $2 per CD to the artist for artwork (I was being generous since I knew I wouldn't sell many)
CD Baby's cut of $2 per CD
...for a grand total of $7.22 per CD, for a vanity run of just 100 CDs. If I don't bother with an artist for the cover art, and if I sell them myself out of the back of my station wagon, it'd be only $2.37! (Take away $2 for the artist, $2 for the store, and $0.85 per for shop setup costs.) For a small-time vanity run! That includes digital distribution through Connect, iTunes, and three dozen groups I haven't even heard of, and real CDs -- not cheesy CD-R's with cheap CD Stomper labels. Plus, I have these CDs, and can sell them myself without going through CD Baby -- the agreement with CD Baby is non-exclusive. Even with iTunes, where a big label artist gets pennies per song, I get like $0.67 per $0.99 download.
And that's with my shoddy economies of scale. I can't even imagine where the RIAA gets this kind of thinking, but I guess they gotta do what they gotta do to keep up with the price of cocaine, right? Can't imagine the weak dollar has helped them with their fine imported Columbian stuff.
Austin's about as red as the Santa Fe sky on a clear afternoon, or Australia's Coral Coast. Add to that a bunch of tech industry, a huge university and about 2000 miles between it and Redmond, and this is hardly surprising.
Austin's where I first heard about Linux... in January of 1992. Slackware was on sale in the University co-op a year or so later. And it's where I first used USENET, IRC and internet e-mail, way back in 1991.
On top of what you say, Microsoft has a huge cash war chest, while Sony is hanging by a thread financially. Microsoft has more than enough money to tell developers: We'll give you the money to make it profitable to be exclusive to us!
Once Sony is thus destroyed, Microsoft gets the high-end "game/media box" market pretty much to themselves.
Microsoft really has an opportunity to pound Sony into oblivion here. This is something Microsoft has been good at, historically.
I'd like to apologize for my countryman, to whom you responded. It seems a large number of folks around here have taken a liking to higher taxes, largely because G. W. Bush, whom many of us detest, lowered them.
They forget, of course, the effect higher taxes had on Bush Sr's presidency and the 1970s, versus the policies of Clinton, Kennedy and Reagan, who lowered taxes and improved both the economy and -- ironically, after a brief lag -- government tax receipts.
In fact, they'll argue til they're blue in the face about this, because for them, the facts are not as important as proving to you that everything GWB has done was wrong, and thus must be un-done regardless of the evidence or consequences.
I'm not implying that GWB has done anything right.
None of them broke the encryption in the first place.
You know, this is probably the core reason why Apple's FairPlay has come under such strong attack recently: People are getting impatient with waiting for the encryption to get cracked.
Of course, this could just be a bluff to drive Sony insane with the idea that they aren't even relevant to us anymore.
...or a deliberate attempt to bury the last nail in the PS3's coffin.
Remember the "Cola Wars" back in the 80's? OK, maybe you're not old enough, but there was a vicious campaign -- starting with The Pepsi Challenge -- between Coke and Pepsi. In the end, sales of both shot sky-high, and competing products -- Dr. Pepper, Shasta, Tab, RC, etc -- got drowned out in all the noise. Both companies benefitted; all companies not involved in the attack disappeared.
Notice how, the more viciously the Democrats and Republicans attack each other, the less likely people are to vote for a third party?
Microsoft recognizes that the PS3's struggling. They also recognize that the Wii isn't really competing that much with the PS3 -- and is . I would be surprised if Microsoft doesn't follow through with an ad campaign comparing the Wii's graphics, net support and game quantity to the Xbox360's. The obvious purpose is to sell more 360's to the millions who are captivated by the Wii (riding its hype machine as The Pepsi Challenge did); the subtext is "The PS3 is such a non-event we're not even bothering to mention it anywhere." People will recognize that the 360 isn't bothering to compare itself to the PS3, and coupled with the negative (free) publicity the PS3 is getting, people will understand the message: "The PS3 is not worth mentioning any more; it is already dead."
It clearly is a little early to declare the PS3 dead, but with all of the negative publicity out there, the time is right for an attempt to bury it further. It may not kill the PS3 for good, but it will succeed in making things harder for Sony. As hard as things are for Sony now, this could be the cut that bleeds Sony dry.
There's a story about Art Rooney, long-time owner of an American football franchise in Pittsburgh -- the Steelers. He had to fire his quarterback, who wasn't getting the job done. As the QB was leaving, Rooney saw him from his limo and shouted at him: "I hope you become the greatest QB who ever lived!"
If I've learned nothing else in life, it's that building good relationships with people will get you further than anything else. I've also learned that it's important to serve as a mentor to people.
If you tell them in a kindly manner that they're not applying for a job they're qualified for, and that they should modify their job searches to meet their existing skill sets, you saved them tons of job-hunting trouble. (If you express it well and they still don't pay you any heed, it's their own damned fault.)
Having been on both sides of that interview table, I know how much it matters to that individual. And both your personal success and your company's success depend on the relationships you build.
The key thing about building relationships is that you have to have that function activated all the time; you can't just turn it on selectively. If you're selective, you become a two-faced suck-up, and people will know that's what you are -- to say nothing of the opportunities you'll miss when you treat someone like shit and they one day turn out to be big-time.
Every person who ever succeeded faced rejection at some point by someone else. Be damned sure that they remember those things. They remember who gave them assistance along the way, and those who did not.
Moreover, when that one rejectee does succeed, and tells all his admirers and fans about that time you shot him down for a job, is he going to talk about how you helped steer him in the right direction, or how you were an asshole?
Don't be that asshole. Be like Art Rooney. Help the candidate out.
People who expect a stock price to drop "sell it short;" that is, they sell shares they don't yet own, with a promise to buy later. Later, when the price (hopefully) drops, they actually pay for the shares they sold -- covering their sale. If they do enough of it, the price actually goes up a bit with all of the demand to buy the shares.
Most stock price day-to-day/week-to-week/month-to-month movement comes from this kind of game-playing, not from actual value-minded investors.
Actually, the split came in the early days of the Christian church, when the inescapable influence of Greek Philosophy altered an essentially Sumerian religion to be more palatable to European tastes. For example, the idea that God is distant from humanity and resides "in Heaven" comes from Plato, and has no basis in any Jewish or Christian writing prior to ~100 A.D.; the doctrine of the Trinity essentially came from this conflict between these two very different concepts of the divine.
What happens if everyone who isn't planning on running Windows goes through this process?
It ends up costing Dell money. What's more, the time it takes to go through the process lowers their customer service quality, as others looking for customer service are left on hold longer and longer.
Notice that it costs them money whether they give the refund or not. In fact, it will lead to higher costs if they deny the refund.
Dell's not stupid. They want to make money, and the only way to do that is by pleasing as many customers as possible. They'd sell PC's without an OS gladly if they could do so and get the per-seat license deal from Microsoft they have now; otherwise, the cost in lost customers doesn't justify it. But there's nothing in their contract about offering a refund.
So Dell's only move, then, is to streamline the process of providing a Windows refund.
But in order for that to happen, enough of us have to go after our $52 in principle that it's worth Dell's time to streamline the process for the rest.
And if that happens, of course, more people will ask for refunds. Dell will fight tooth and nail not to alter the terms of the deal with Microsoft to prevent refunds, because if Dell has to deny the refunds, that means that this much-larger mass of requests will generate a tremendous mass of customer service expenses.
Don't need to borrow a Mac, I own four (one of which, due to a careless incident involving irreplacable single-malt scotch, is defunct). So now you're wondering, "Dude, you've got... Macs... up the wazoo... whyyyyy?"
The reason is, building a music workstation is a massive money and time investment. Money, because buying the proper cabling, software and gizmos is expensive. Time, because learning how to use that equipment properly doesn't happen overnight.
Since I really just do music production for a hobby (and the occasional vanity CD), that means I invest in new software and hardware once every, oh, ten or twelve years.
We're in year 6 for the old system.
Because of the need for an entire industry to work together, audio interfaces change even less often than that. MIDI is still the only way to get control data to and from legacy equipment, and is thus a required portion of any setup. S/PDIF will be around for a long time because it's more than good enough for pro recording quality and it's a standard.
What's ironic is that DirectX had become such a terrific multimedia I/O system that Windows was becoming a much more capable system for music development than Mac (and it pains me to admit that). And both are light years beyond what Linux can do. Good LORD is sound ever a mess under Linux.
So the point is not just that I won't be buying Vista to replace XP on my music machine anytime soon; the point is that 4 years from now, when it comes time to replace my existing music machine, I will be effectively locked out of any Windows-based solution.
Of course, a lot can happen in 4 years. Maybe Microsoft will realize their error and un-gimp their OS by then. Maybe Linux will have a sound architecture w... I can't even finish that sentence, let's stick to reality. Yeah, the next machine pretty much has to be an Apple, provided Apple doesn't do anything goofy like this.
I hope you can understand that I am wary of editing the document after 2973 people have already signed it.
It's a matter of the phrasing, more than anything else. It's just a matter of restating the beginning so that the letter doesn't begin by implying, "You're doing something for your own benefit! You assholes!"
It's perfectly natural for someone to do something that's in his or her own best interests; if what Novell has done is truly the best for their company, then what hope do we have of convincing them that they've made a mistake?
That's not what's happened, of course. Novell's created for themselves a huge amount of ill will. That will impact their bottom line, now or later. And that's the first thing that should be brought to their attention.
It's not a very big change, and it's not changing the spirit or intent of the letter, to which nearly 3000 people (so far) agree. Just a few words removed a few added so that Novell understands that we don't really believe that this is for their benefit at all.
If I were a Novell executive, upon reading your second sentence, I would immediately think: "That's correct. This is in our best interests financially!" I would stop reading beyond that point; you just made my point for me, so any disagreement expressed would not be in my interests to investigate.
Novell doesn't care about betrayal, unless it affects their bottom line. Now, you and I both know that Novell's decision will affect their bottom line. So instead of patting Novell on the back for their wise financial judgment in the first paragraph of this letter, let's start the letter with a sentence that connects the dots for them?
I would recommend the following first paragraph:
The Open Source community would find little to criticize in your agreement with Microsoft, had it remained a strictly technical agreement. As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for a potential short-term gain that will lead to a certain long-term loss, as betrayed authors and users discard Novell's products and services in favor of those provided by Novell's competitors and partners.
That last sentence could be broken up, as it's a bit wordy, but you hopefully see my point. We have to get their attention, and that means showing them the money. Telling them that their agreement is for their own financial benefit will just steel their resolve.
Slashdot Mirror
(...goes to books to make sure it's the right number...)
And that's with my shoddy economies of scale. I can't even imagine where the RIAA gets this kind of thinking, but I guess they gotta do what they gotta do to keep up with the price of cocaine, right? Can't imagine the weak dollar has helped them with their fine imported Columbian stuff.
Or Austin, for that matter.
Austin's about as red as the Santa Fe sky on a clear afternoon, or Australia's Coral Coast. Add to that a bunch of tech industry, a huge university and about 2000 miles between it and Redmond, and this is hardly surprising.
Austin's where I first heard about Linux... in January of 1992. Slackware was on sale in the University co-op a year or so later. And it's where I first used USENET, IRC and internet e-mail, way back in 1991.
On top of what you say, Microsoft has a huge cash war chest, while Sony is hanging by a thread financially. Microsoft has more than enough money to tell developers: We'll give you the money to make it profitable to be exclusive to us!
Once Sony is thus destroyed, Microsoft gets the high-end "game/media box" market pretty much to themselves.
Microsoft really has an opportunity to pound Sony into oblivion here. This is something Microsoft has been good at, historically.
if kenya were to physically as well as metaphorically urinate over norway, the dotted line would indicate the best trajectory
I'd like to apologize for my countryman, to whom you responded. It seems a large number of folks around here have taken a liking to higher taxes, largely because G. W. Bush, whom many of us detest, lowered them.
They forget, of course, the effect higher taxes had on Bush Sr's presidency and the 1970s, versus the policies of Clinton, Kennedy and Reagan, who lowered taxes and improved both the economy and -- ironically, after a brief lag -- government tax receipts.
In fact, they'll argue til they're blue in the face about this, because for them, the facts are not as important as proving to you that everything GWB has done was wrong, and thus must be un-done regardless of the evidence or consequences.
I'm not implying that GWB has done anything right.
Now that Blu-Ray can be pirated, there's a chance the format might take off. This could have a positive benefit for PS3 sales.
You know, this is probably the core reason why Apple's FairPlay has come under such strong attack recently: People are getting impatient with waiting for the encryption to get cracked.
Yes, and people like me, who missed the event when it happened last (or just plain forgot), just got reminded of it.
So... hooray! For our side.
Oh, you want a physical CD?
:)
Oh, shoot, well then you have to go here instead.
Silly me.
Interesting note: I tried offering the CD -- uncompressed, full-quality -- over Bittorrent for free, but couldn't get the Bittorrent tracker to work.
It's pretty darned open to third-party (even third-rate) artists. Even I have a CD available on iTMS...
Sony? Shooting themselves in the foot? That's unpossible!
Thank you very much for the kind words.
You know what a market survey is? It's a collection of anecdotes.
Despite what you may have read on a blog/message board, the plural of anecdote is data.
Remember the "Cola Wars" back in the 80's? OK, maybe you're not old enough, but there was a vicious campaign -- starting with The Pepsi Challenge -- between Coke and Pepsi. In the end, sales of both shot sky-high, and competing products -- Dr. Pepper, Shasta, Tab, RC, etc -- got drowned out in all the noise. Both companies benefitted; all companies not involved in the attack disappeared.
Notice how, the more viciously the Democrats and Republicans attack each other, the less likely people are to vote for a third party?
Microsoft recognizes that the PS3's struggling. They also recognize that the Wii isn't really competing that much with the PS3 -- and is . I would be surprised if Microsoft doesn't follow through with an ad campaign comparing the Wii's graphics, net support and game quantity to the Xbox360's. The obvious purpose is to sell more 360's to the millions who are captivated by the Wii (riding its hype machine as The Pepsi Challenge did); the subtext is "The PS3 is such a non-event we're not even bothering to mention it anywhere." People will recognize that the 360 isn't bothering to compare itself to the PS3, and coupled with the negative (free) publicity the PS3 is getting, people will understand the message: "The PS3 is not worth mentioning any more; it is already dead."
It clearly is a little early to declare the PS3 dead, but with all of the negative publicity out there, the time is right for an attempt to bury it further. It may not kill the PS3 for good, but it will succeed in making things harder for Sony. As hard as things are for Sony now, this could be the cut that bleeds Sony dry.
There's a story about Art Rooney, long-time owner of an American football franchise in Pittsburgh -- the Steelers. He had to fire his quarterback, who wasn't getting the job done. As the QB was leaving, Rooney saw him from his limo and shouted at him: "I hope you become the greatest QB who ever lived!"
The QB's name? Johnny Unitas.
If I've learned nothing else in life, it's that building good relationships with people will get you further than anything else. I've also learned that it's important to serve as a mentor to people.
If you tell them in a kindly manner that they're not applying for a job they're qualified for, and that they should modify their job searches to meet their existing skill sets, you saved them tons of job-hunting trouble. (If you express it well and they still don't pay you any heed, it's their own damned fault.)
Having been on both sides of that interview table, I know how much it matters to that individual. And both your personal success and your company's success depend on the relationships you build.
The key thing about building relationships is that you have to have that function activated all the time; you can't just turn it on selectively. If you're selective, you become a two-faced suck-up, and people will know that's what you are -- to say nothing of the opportunities you'll miss when you treat someone like shit and they one day turn out to be big-time.
Every person who ever succeeded faced rejection at some point by someone else. Be damned sure that they remember those things. They remember who gave them assistance along the way, and those who did not.
Moreover, when that one rejectee does succeed, and tells all his admirers and fans about that time you shot him down for a job, is he going to talk about how you helped steer him in the right direction, or how you were an asshole?
Don't be that asshole. Be like Art Rooney. Help the candidate out.
Such a beast already exists, as the iTunes store.
What you're seeing might be short covering.
People who expect a stock price to drop "sell it short;" that is, they sell shares they don't yet own, with a promise to buy later. Later, when the price (hopefully) drops, they actually pay for the shares they sold -- covering their sale. If they do enough of it, the price actually goes up a bit with all of the demand to buy the shares.
Most stock price day-to-day/week-to-week/month-to-month movement comes from this kind of game-playing, not from actual value-minded investors.
Actually, the split came in the early days of the Christian church, when the inescapable influence of Greek Philosophy altered an essentially Sumerian religion to be more palatable to European tastes. For example, the idea that God is distant from humanity and resides "in Heaven" comes from Plato, and has no basis in any Jewish or Christian writing prior to ~100 A.D.; the doctrine of the Trinity essentially came from this conflict between these two very different concepts of the divine.
Bingo!
What happens if everyone who isn't planning on running Windows goes through this process?
It ends up costing Dell money. What's more, the time it takes to go through the process lowers their customer service quality, as others looking for customer service are left on hold longer and longer.
Notice that it costs them money whether they give the refund or not. In fact, it will lead to higher costs if they deny the refund.
Dell's not stupid. They want to make money, and the only way to do that is by pleasing as many customers as possible. They'd sell PC's without an OS gladly if they could do so and get the per-seat license deal from Microsoft they have now; otherwise, the cost in lost customers doesn't justify it. But there's nothing in their contract about offering a refund.
So Dell's only move, then, is to streamline the process of providing a Windows refund.
But in order for that to happen, enough of us have to go after our $52 in principle that it's worth Dell's time to streamline the process for the rest.
And if that happens, of course, more people will ask for refunds. Dell will fight tooth and nail not to alter the terms of the deal with Microsoft to prevent refunds, because if Dell has to deny the refunds, that means that this much-larger mass of requests will generate a tremendous mass of customer service expenses.
...and puppies?
...tfa doesn't really spend much time talking about the benefits, supposed or actual, of giving kids games to keep themselves entertained.
Don't need to borrow a Mac, I own four (one of which, due to a careless incident involving irreplacable single-malt scotch, is defunct). So now you're wondering, "Dude, you've got... Macs... up the wazoo... whyyyyy?"
The reason is, building a music workstation is a massive money and time investment. Money, because buying the proper cabling, software and gizmos is expensive. Time, because learning how to use that equipment properly doesn't happen overnight.
Since I really just do music production for a hobby (and the occasional vanity CD), that means I invest in new software and hardware once every, oh, ten or twelve years.
We're in year 6 for the old system.
Because of the need for an entire industry to work together, audio interfaces change even less often than that. MIDI is still the only way to get control data to and from legacy equipment, and is thus a required portion of any setup. S/PDIF will be around for a long time because it's more than good enough for pro recording quality and it's a standard.
What's ironic is that DirectX had become such a terrific multimedia I/O system that Windows was becoming a much more capable system for music development than Mac (and it pains me to admit that). And both are light years beyond what Linux can do. Good LORD is sound ever a mess under Linux.
So the point is not just that I won't be buying Vista to replace XP on my music machine anytime soon; the point is that 4 years from now, when it comes time to replace my existing music machine, I will be effectively locked out of any Windows-based solution.
Of course, a lot can happen in 4 years. Maybe Microsoft will realize their error and un-gimp their OS by then. Maybe Linux will have a sound architecture w... I can't even finish that sentence, let's stick to reality. Yeah, the next machine pretty much has to be an Apple, provided Apple doesn't do anything goofy like this.
You had me at "Hello."
First thing he mentions is disabling S/PDIF. Since I use Windows for audio production, Vista's gone. Bye-bye. See-yah.
I look forward to seeing what Cakewalk will do about that one.
It's a matter of the phrasing, more than anything else. It's just a matter of restating the beginning so that the letter doesn't begin by implying, "You're doing something for your own benefit! You assholes!"
It's perfectly natural for someone to do something that's in his or her own best interests; if what Novell has done is truly the best for their company, then what hope do we have of convincing them that they've made a mistake?
That's not what's happened, of course. Novell's created for themselves a huge amount of ill will. That will impact their bottom line, now or later. And that's the first thing that should be brought to their attention.
It's not a very big change, and it's not changing the spirit or intent of the letter, to which nearly 3000 people (so far) agree. Just a few words removed a few added so that Novell understands that we don't really believe that this is for their benefit at all.
If I were a Novell executive, upon reading your second sentence, I would immediately think: "That's correct. This is in our best interests financially!" I would stop reading beyond that point; you just made my point for me, so any disagreement expressed would not be in my interests to investigate.
Novell doesn't care about betrayal, unless it affects their bottom line. Now, you and I both know that Novell's decision will affect their bottom line. So instead of patting Novell on the back for their wise financial judgment in the first paragraph of this letter, let's start the letter with a sentence that connects the dots for them?
I would recommend the following first paragraph:
That last sentence could be broken up, as it's a bit wordy, but you hopefully see my point. We have to get their attention, and that means showing them the money. Telling them that their agreement is for their own financial benefit will just steel their resolve.
Make that change, and I'll sign your letter.