The non-standard selling method itself probably generated them a ton of publicity that they wouldn't otherwise have had.
Exactly. What Radiohead did wasn't a business model - it was a publicity stunt. It worked out really well for them, too. Got a lot of people to buy their album on principle; even got a lot of people who would have never even gone out of their way to listen to it to "give it a spin" - brilliant strategy.
But, a model for the future? No.
One thing people REALLY need to consider: it's easy to talk about this "new business model that's going to emerge" - but you really should think about what that might be. I hear LOTS of people bandying that phrase about, yet virtually none of them seem to have a clue as to an alternative, in concrete terms, that specify how that money is to be made.
It's easy to talk about T-shirts & playing live shows - but the profit margin on shirts isn't that great (they're really supposed to be a promotional tool), and how many of you have any idea how little most bands get paid to play live these days? Half the time, it's a losing proposition. Once you factor in all the expenses, you make less than a burger-flipper, if you make anything at all.
Yes, the current model is messed up; yes, the RIAA is acting INCREDIBLY stupid; and yes, the changes in the landscape have real possibilities for things to change for the better - maybe. But please, people - do your homework before you simply jump on the bandwagon for unspecified change.
Here's one example: One day our newsroom reported that they could not reach several news sites, and others were painfully slow, and it was keeping them from doing their jobs. Upon investigating, I found that the problem was because a major ad server was not reachable, but the consequence of that was that the pages wouldn't load properly, if at all. (Most likely the result of crappy coding, yes, but still...)
I pulled them up in Firefox with Adblock installed, and they all came up within a matter of seconds. I installed that combination on every newsroom machine that day.
Err...just because you have no use for it doesn't mean that's the case for everyone. We have a lot of brand-new hardware that uses serial ports for control interfacing. Adding in a converter only makes the system more complicated & less reliable.
I haven't exactly noticed a big real-estate problem with motherboards, either. I have newer boards that manages to squeeze in several USB, FireWire, and SATA ports, and even has room for digital audio ports, while still providing all the "old" ports too.
Of course, this begs the question: if they were hunting for illegal diesel, why would they check a vehicle advertising itself as running on vegetable oil...?
Err...back in the early '80s, when I was a hardcore video game player, we had exactly that: tabletop games with a computer inside & 2 sets of controls. When you played 2-Player games, the screen would switch around to face the other side.
Hmm...I wonder what happens when you put your drink on the MS table?
Anyway, it's nice to see the wheel getting invented...again.
Seriously - "they already don't care what they do" - ? What utter bullshit. Women most certainly do care about what they do, as much as men if not more. And I know plenty of men who would drop their jobs in a heartbeat if it meant more money & fewer expectations - hell, show me where that job is & I'll heartily recommend you to my employer.
Yeah, but when was the last time anyone had to edit a text file in order to get their monitor working in either Windows OR OSX?
That has been a long-standing issue with Linux in general - its ability to adapt to a monitor change. I moved a machine running a fairly recent version of Fedora to a different LCD, just to have it try to use a rate higher than what that particular (crappy) LCD would accept. But with just a black screen...there's no way to even fix the text file.
Now if this was a Windows machine, if all else failed it would fall over to 640x480 low-color VGA, and you could at least stumble through finding a farking driver.
Seriously, if you expect home users to adopt Linux, they have to at least be able to point & click their way to a solution. Auto-adjusting the display to something usable is a pretty basic requirement, IMHO.
Still, it causes a lot of hassle for not much benefit. For instance, our radio automation systems are strictly time-based - so twice a year I get to come in to work at 2AM simply to observe that the time change happened OK. Add to that the benefit of having to run around & manually update all these machines (we keep them away from the Internet) because of the mandated change this year - not the biggest job in the world, but still work that causes me to have to put off other pressing issues.
On a personal note, this time of year is the 19-day Baha'i Fast. We have to rise before sunrise to eat, because we then abstain from all food & drink during the daylight hours. In years past, DST didn't occur until after the Fast. This change means that we get to sleep in a bit later (sort of), but then we also can't have dinner until after about 7:15 PM. (It gets later as time goes on.)
This is a hassle for Baha'i parents, because small kids should have dinner earlier than this. We usually feed them between 6 & 6:30, so we can get them into bed at a decent hour. This throws a monkey wrench into that whole schedule - even if we feed them early (we feed them during the day anyway), now our dinner falls in the middle of their bath time - so either we delay dinner or baths, both of which are additional difficulties.
Later in the summer is a pain too. As the days get longer, the sun stays up later & later. Try convincing a toddler that it's night time when the sun is still up, just because you've set the clock an hour ahead.
I'm with the folks who think that DST is a silly, outdated practice that should be given up. It's the societal equivalent of setting your clock 15 minutes fast so you aren't late to work. Better to be honest with yourself, and take responsibility for your own time management, than to pretend you can leave home later than you should.
One thing - they wouldn't have gmail.com addresses. Google already offers custom domain email accounts. FTA:
Companies can customize the Gmail accounts to reflect their workers and firms (worker@firm.com).
Many of your other stated concerns are somewhat generic to any change in mail services - I encountered several of them by moving our employees to an in-house mail server from a myriad of outside services. IMHO:
1. Always a problem with changes in service. Users have to decide what's important in their mail, and you get to figure out how to keep it for them, either via migration or having them download a copy locally & make backups of that.
2. That's a question for Google, that I bet they'd answer if you asked them. However, if you get your emails via POP3 & leave a copy on the server, you're covered locally even if Google goes belly-up.
3. Common problem. Users basically have to get with the changes - although, if you're already managing your email addys, there's no reason you can't arrange for Google to "step in" on your domain & then no one has to change.
4. Without internet, there is no email anyway, unless you have only intranet communications. See which one your company would rather do without (I can always use the intercom in-house).
5. Another Google question. I assume that you would have the option to not have your mail screened.
6. Any large number of emails would be a pain to set up manually. However, my mail server allows the importation of a text file to create accounts - I'd be very surprised if there was no such facility available through Google, if you were going to pay them for a large number of accounts.
7. That does suck. Perhaps a relay machine could work as an intermediary?
8. Public folders as a share, that would be a good question. If it's just a matter of a shared account, though, then...share the password.;-)
While I agree with most of your points, your post portrays a huge lack of understanding copyright laws. Specifically:
1) The amount of the song used is irrelevant - sampling must be licensed, or it is in violation. Personal mix tapes may a bit of a gray area legally, but not when it crosses over into creating them as a business. Even if they're using only snippets of other peoples' works, it still qualifies as sampling - and the legal status of that has been pretty clearly laid out.
2) Purchasing an album doesn't give you the right to play it publicly - you have to pay performance licensing to do that.
3) 'What a DJ does' covers a broad range of activities by people who call themselves DJs, who mainly play other peoples' creations, regardless of what they may or may not do to them in the process.
Your concession is basically the end of the argument - if he was making money from copyrighted music that he didn't pay to license for that purpose, he's in violation. Period.
Nothing in this post should be construed as support of the RIAA's bullshit tactics - but still, the law is what it is, and wishing it was different while screaming about The Man isn't helpful. You have to change the parameters within which you operate.
Now, I haven't seen his other stuff: but judging from this video his skills are not what I'd call "awesome".
Synchronized cut & paste editing is music video 101 - I did the same type of stuff in 1991 using Betacam tapes of Gulf War footage against a Jane's Addiction track, just for the practice. The video came out cool, but my editing skills are FAR from awesome, trust me - I've seen awesome video skills, and I don't have 'em.
Wow - so virtually ALL the mysteries of life have been unlocked? Huh - so what are all those scientists going to do next year? Open the first lunar Starbucks?
Truth be told, every great mystery that is unlocked spawns several others. For instance, Newtonian physics had all the answers...until we got to the sub-atomic level & discovered that it wasn't that cut and dried.
I'm not defending silly superstitions begotten by (usually misinterpreted) religion - but we don't have a fraction of all the answers yet. The biggest question of all regarding our existence is "Why?" When a child turns a light on, science can tell us why - completion of the circuit, the flow of electrons - but it does not address the Big Why - why does this happen in the first place?
Uhh...yeah, that's it. They're not really dismantling the systems that have served us for +200 years, they're just 'putting aside' the really inconvenient bits for a moment, while we fight the OMFGWTFT3RR1STZ!!! by dumping billions of dollars into an ill-conceived & poorly executed war that was planned before they took office...oh, but that was just some papers they signed, they didn't really mean anything, I forgot...besides, what would we possibly use that money for anyways? Homeland security?
What was I thinking? After all, they just love all us 'little guys'...I'm sure they'll give us our rights back after we overthrow Terroristastan.
Damn...I don't know how I ended up modding you +1 for this, so let me respond instead: Your statement sounds like it came from a trained parrot. Law enforcement does not need tools to bypass the protection of American citizens, more of whom should be using the tools at their disposal to see what sort of shams are being foisted upon them using pseudo-logic such as you are repeating here.
It's also too bad that you've missed that the title was originally taken from a book "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count", written by Steve Freeman & sourced by Kennedy for the original article, which Salon later re-used for the Manjoo piece. Otherwise, you'd realize that the plagarism charge is bovine excrement.
And about the 3-day thing...if you get a full track, then you have 3 whole days to hook up the player to your PC, play the track to a file, delete the time-crippled version & re-load the new one! Wow! What a feature! I bet the RIAA is gonna love that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft will find a way to make them pay - with copies of Windows Vista! Fixed that again for ya!
Exactly. What Radiohead did wasn't a business model - it was a publicity stunt. It worked out really well for them, too. Got a lot of people to buy their album on principle; even got a lot of people who would have never even gone out of their way to listen to it to "give it a spin" - brilliant strategy.
But, a model for the future? No.
One thing people REALLY need to consider: it's easy to talk about this "new business model that's going to emerge" - but you really should think about what that might be. I hear LOTS of people bandying that phrase about, yet virtually none of them seem to have a clue as to an alternative, in concrete terms, that specify how that money is to be made.
It's easy to talk about T-shirts & playing live shows - but the profit margin on shirts isn't that great (they're really supposed to be a promotional tool), and how many of you have any idea how little most bands get paid to play live these days? Half the time, it's a losing proposition. Once you factor in all the expenses, you make less than a burger-flipper, if you make anything at all.
Yes, the current model is messed up; yes, the RIAA is acting INCREDIBLY stupid; and yes, the changes in the landscape have real possibilities for things to change for the better - maybe. But please, people - do your homework before you simply jump on the bandwagon for unspecified change.
Here's one example: One day our newsroom reported that they could not reach several news sites, and others were painfully slow, and it was keeping them from doing their jobs. Upon investigating, I found that the problem was because a major ad server was not reachable, but the consequence of that was that the pages wouldn't load properly, if at all. (Most likely the result of crappy coding, yes, but still...)
I pulled them up in Firefox with Adblock installed, and they all came up within a matter of seconds. I installed that combination on every newsroom machine that day.
Err...just because you have no use for it doesn't mean that's the case for everyone. We have a lot of brand-new hardware that uses serial ports for control interfacing. Adding in a converter only makes the system more complicated & less reliable.
I haven't exactly noticed a big real-estate problem with motherboards, either. I have newer boards that manages to squeeze in several USB, FireWire, and SATA ports, and even has room for digital audio ports, while still providing all the "old" ports too.
Of course, this begs the question: if they were hunting for illegal diesel, why would they check a vehicle advertising itself as running on vegetable oil...?
Err...back in the early '80s, when I was a hardcore video game player, we had exactly that: tabletop games with a computer inside & 2 sets of controls. When you played 2-Player games, the screen would switch around to face the other side.
Hmm...I wonder what happens when you put your drink on the MS table?
Anyway, it's nice to see the wheel getting invented...again.
...and now has an asshole that's about 3 bore sizes larger than it was last week. Yikes. Reachable at customerservice@goatse.cx, no doubt!
I didn't expect that...
A Drummer. With soap.
You can't blame the cops for wondering what he was going to do with it...
You need to meet more women.
Seriously - "they already don't care what they do" - ? What utter bullshit. Women most certainly do care about what they do, as much as men if not more. And I know plenty of men who would drop their jobs in a heartbeat if it meant more money & fewer expectations - hell, show me where that job is & I'll heartily recommend you to my employer.
Show me a basket that doesn't have holes, and I'll show you a bowl.
Yeah, but when was the last time anyone had to edit a text file in order to get their monitor working in either Windows OR OSX?
That has been a long-standing issue with Linux in general - its ability to adapt to a monitor change. I moved a machine running a fairly recent version of Fedora to a different LCD, just to have it try to use a rate higher than what that particular (crappy) LCD would accept. But with just a black screen...there's no way to even fix the text file.
Now if this was a Windows machine, if all else failed it would fall over to 640x480 low-color VGA, and you could at least stumble through finding a farking driver.
Seriously, if you expect home users to adopt Linux, they have to at least be able to point & click their way to a solution. Auto-adjusting the display to something usable is a pretty basic requirement, IMHO.
Still, it causes a lot of hassle for not much benefit. For instance, our radio automation systems are strictly time-based - so twice a year I get to come in to work at 2AM simply to observe that the time change happened OK. Add to that the benefit of having to run around & manually update all these machines (we keep them away from the Internet) because of the mandated change this year - not the biggest job in the world, but still work that causes me to have to put off other pressing issues.
On a personal note, this time of year is the 19-day Baha'i Fast. We have to rise before sunrise to eat, because we then abstain from all food & drink during the daylight hours. In years past, DST didn't occur until after the Fast. This change means that we get to sleep in a bit later (sort of), but then we also can't have dinner until after about 7:15 PM. (It gets later as time goes on.)
This is a hassle for Baha'i parents, because small kids should have dinner earlier than this. We usually feed them between 6 & 6:30, so we can get them into bed at a decent hour. This throws a monkey wrench into that whole schedule - even if we feed them early (we feed them during the day anyway), now our dinner falls in the middle of their bath time - so either we delay dinner or baths, both of which are additional difficulties.
Later in the summer is a pain too. As the days get longer, the sun stays up later & later. Try convincing a toddler that it's night time when the sun is still up, just because you've set the clock an hour ahead.
I'm with the folks who think that DST is a silly, outdated practice that should be given up. It's the societal equivalent of setting your clock 15 minutes fast so you aren't late to work. Better to be honest with yourself, and take responsibility for your own time management, than to pretend you can leave home later than you should.
Companies can customize the Gmail accounts to reflect their workers and firms (worker@firm.com).
Many of your other stated concerns are somewhat generic to any change in mail services - I encountered several of them by moving our employees to an in-house mail server from a myriad of outside services. IMHO:
1. Always a problem with changes in service. Users have to decide what's important in their mail, and you get to figure out how to keep it for them, either via migration or having them download a copy locally & make backups of that.
2. That's a question for Google, that I bet they'd answer if you asked them. However, if you get your emails via POP3 & leave a copy on the server, you're covered locally even if Google goes belly-up.
3. Common problem. Users basically have to get with the changes - although, if you're already managing your email addys, there's no reason you can't arrange for Google to "step in" on your domain & then no one has to change.
4. Without internet, there is no email anyway, unless you have only intranet communications. See which one your company would rather do without (I can always use the intercom in-house).
5. Another Google question. I assume that you would have the option to not have your mail screened.
6. Any large number of emails would be a pain to set up manually. However, my mail server allows the importation of a text file to create accounts - I'd be very surprised if there was no such facility available through Google, if you were going to pay them for a large number of accounts.
7. That does suck. Perhaps a relay machine could work as an intermediary?
8. Public folders as a share, that would be a good question. If it's just a matter of a shared account, though, then...share the password. ;-)
I just clicked Yes, and nothing bad happe
And the data center is operating on generator because a tornado knocked out the power.
Right...because Windows runs much better on generator power than that free stuff...
While I agree with most of your points, your post portrays a huge lack of understanding copyright laws. Specifically:
1) The amount of the song used is irrelevant - sampling must be licensed, or it is in violation. Personal mix tapes may a bit of a gray area legally, but not when it crosses over into creating them as a business. Even if they're using only snippets of other peoples' works, it still qualifies as sampling - and the legal status of that has been pretty clearly laid out.
2) Purchasing an album doesn't give you the right to play it publicly - you have to pay performance licensing to do that.
3) 'What a DJ does' covers a broad range of activities by people who call themselves DJs, who mainly play other peoples' creations, regardless of what they may or may not do to them in the process.
Your concession is basically the end of the argument - if he was making money from copyrighted music that he didn't pay to license for that purpose, he's in violation. Period.
Nothing in this post should be construed as support of the RIAA's bullshit tactics - but still, the law is what it is, and wishing it was different while screaming about The Man isn't helpful. You have to change the parameters within which you operate.
Actually, it's a floor wax and a dessert topping!
Now, I haven't seen his other stuff: but judging from this video his skills are not what I'd call "awesome".
Synchronized cut & paste editing is music video 101 - I did the same type of stuff in 1991 using Betacam tapes of Gulf War footage against a Jane's Addiction track, just for the practice. The video came out cool, but my editing skills are FAR from awesome, trust me - I've seen awesome video skills, and I don't have 'em.
Wow - so virtually ALL the mysteries of life have been unlocked? Huh - so what are all those scientists going to do next year? Open the first lunar Starbucks?
Truth be told, every great mystery that is unlocked spawns several others. For instance, Newtonian physics had all the answers...until we got to the sub-atomic level & discovered that it wasn't that cut and dried.
I'm not defending silly superstitions begotten by (usually misinterpreted) religion - but we don't have a fraction of all the answers yet. The biggest question of all regarding our existence is "Why?" When a child turns a light on, science can tell us why - completion
of the circuit, the flow of electrons - but it does not address the Big Why - why does this happen in the first place?
Maybe not, but it seems relevant that the new "safe & secure" browser is still broken in the same manner as the old one.
Uhh...yeah, that's it. They're not really dismantling the systems that have served us for +200 years, they're just 'putting aside' the really inconvenient bits for a moment, while we fight the OMFGWTFT3RR1STZ!!! by dumping billions of dollars into an ill-conceived & poorly executed war that was planned before they took office...oh, but that was just some papers they signed, they didn't really mean anything, I forgot...besides, what would we possibly use that money for anyways? Homeland security? What was I thinking? After all, they just love all us 'little guys'...I'm sure they'll give us our rights back after we overthrow Terroristastan.
Damn...I don't know how I ended up modding you +1 for this, so let me respond instead: Your statement sounds like it came from a trained parrot. Law enforcement does not need tools to bypass the protection of American citizens, more of whom should be using the tools at their disposal to see what sort of shams are being foisted upon them using pseudo-logic such as you are repeating here.
It's also too bad that you've missed that the title was originally taken from a book "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count", written by Steve Freeman & sourced by Kennedy for the original article, which Salon later re-used for the Manjoo piece. Otherwise, you'd realize that the plagarism charge is bovine excrement.
And about the 3-day thing...if you get a full track, then you have 3 whole days to hook up the player to your PC, play the track to a file, delete the time-crippled version & re-load the new one! Wow! What a feature! I bet the RIAA is gonna love that. :)