That's just in the USA. And that's just GDP. If you look at per capita GDP you may come out with not such good numbers.
Also, last I heard unemployment is still over 10% in many parts of Europe. I think it's around 14% in France and it's close to 10% here in Israel. Europe is responsible for a lot of that CD purchasing and they are still not out of the woods economically.
Of course there has been a certain effect by file sharing, but not on the scope that the record companies try to claim.
The music business's travails -- the top 10 albums sold 33 million units in 2002, down from 60 million in 2000 -- are attributed to Napster, which arrived just as the first "Harry" novel did, and its current successors, led by KaZaA. The recording industry has tried litigation, legislation, education and invective to end file-sharing piracy, all to little avail.
Anyone else getting tired of this? I mean, can't reporters make the connection? When was the economy at it's peek? In 2000. What has it been doing since 2000? Going into deeper and deeper recession. What does that mean? People are spending less money on goods and services.
What?! The entertainment industry saw a drop in sales during a worldwide economic recession? It must be the pirates fault!
I'm sure the creationists will pitch a fit if chimps are
reclassified.
First let's get this out of the way, I'm agnostic and a
non-christian. With that said, I can't stand most people's attitude
toward evolution. Most people's belief in evolution is just as
irrational as xtian's belief in creationism. , and this harms the
science of researching the origins of life.
Let's get it out in the open: the theory of evolution as
currently formulated is a piss poor theory. Under the current model
it would have been impossible for life to have originated on earth,
which led numerous scientists in the 70's to propose the idea you've
probably heard of life on earth being seeded from another planet. There
are also no explanations for important issues such as the development
of highly specialized organs, bi-sexual species, how one species turns
into a new species, etc, etc. The only thing evolution currently
explains well is extreme deviation within a single species, i.e.
selective breeding - what we've been doing with dogs and other
domesticated animals for thousands of years.
The point is, the scientific process of questioning and refinement
seems to have broken down because of most peoples nearly religious
adherence to a poorly formulated theory, and their fear of being labeled
religious fanatics or intellectual deviants for questioning it.
Roxio Grabbing at Straws to Save Themselves
on
PressPlay + Roxio?
·
· Score: 1
It seems like Roxio is grabbing at straws trying to save themselves. Their stock peaked at around $25.00 per share in April of last year, and hit a low of $2.25 per share near the end of this last October. Take a look at this report:
Roxio Acquires Pressplay
As The Foundation For The Re-Launch Of Napster(R)
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Roxio Inc. (ROXI) acquired
online music service Pressplay, which it expects to be the basis for a
new service under the Napster brand.
Roxio acquired substantially all of Pressplay, a joint
venture owned by music units of Vivendi Universal SA (V) and Sony Corp.
(SNE), for $12.5 million cash and about 3.9 million common shares. Based
on Roxio's closing stock price on Friday, the deal is valued at about
$39.5 million, excluding about $1 million in transaction costs.
Also, Sony Music Entertainment and Vivendi's Universal
Music Group will each have the right to earn up to $6.25 million, based
on cash flows from the new Napster service, Roxio said in a press
release Monday.
The company plans to invest about $20 million to fund
the relaunch of Napster, but expects the new business to produce
negative cash flows until it is widely adopted.
As a result of the deal, Roxio said it acquires a
legal digital music distribution infrastructure and catalog rights with
all five major music labels.
Roxio said the deal significantly accelerates the
development of its online music business, which is central to its
strategic development.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment
will each name a representative to Roxio's board. Pressplay President
Michael Bebel will report to Roxio Chairman and Chief Executive
Christopher Gorog, and its senior management will remain in place.
Pressplay will also maintain its offices in Los Angeles and New York.
As reported in Monday's Wall Street Journal, the deal
results in a major irony for Vivendi and Sony, who launched Pressplay as
a legitimate alternative to illicit free song-swapping and who will
wind up as shareholders in a new service bearing the Napster name. The
old version of Napster was shut down in the summer of 2001, as a result
of a copyright suit filed by the music companies.
Pressplay currently is a subscription service that
requires users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited, but temporary, access
to songs from the five major music companies. Customers can also pay to
permanently download songs. Roxio is expected to make significant
changes to the service, The Journal reported.
Digital media company Roxio, which is best known for
its software that allows users to create their own compact discs, paid
$5 million last November to acquire the name and intellectual property
of Napster.
The company expects to discuss the impact of the deal
on its fiscal first quarter ending June 30 during its fourth-quarter
conference call scheduled for Wednesday.
A survey of five analysts by Thomson First Call
yielded a consensus first-quarter earnings estimate of 11 cents a share
for Roxio, which reported pro forma earnings of 3 cents a share in the
year-earlier period.
Roxio's shares recently traded at $7.54, up 9.3%, on
Nasdaq composite volume of 1.5 million shares, well above average daily
volume of 323,078 shares.
Get a grip, people. If you wanna use windows, keep using windows2000 or xp
I would love to sell computers with 2000 on them and not XP or whatever the next boatware is gonig to be - but I can't since M$ no longer sells licenses to old OS's. Sure, individuals can buy old licenses 2nd hand and install themselves, but that's an extremely small percentage of people. 95% of people buy their machine with a pre-installed OS, and that is going to be the latest M$ bloatware because you can't run a PC business scavanging old licenses here and there. You have to have a reliable supply of licenses.
As a seller I'm forced to put whatever the latest Winbloze is on the machines I sell. Actually, forcing people to buy something they don't want or need is illegal. It's called racketeering and it's what the auto companies got smacked down on for in the 60's/70's. They were required to publish the specs for any car they no longer sell/service. M$ should be forced to publish the source for old OS's it no longer supports. M$ also shouldn't be allowed to prevent the use of such old OS's. To do so and force people to buy a newer version is racketeering.
I've been burnt by their false advertising. On their SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 they claim the card does AC3 and DTS decoding. So I took an old 166Mhz Pentium box, stuck in a DVD, an old real magic I had laying around and a SB Live! 5.1 in order to make a cheap multiregion DVD player. What happens when I pass off the AC3 stream from the real magic to the SB Live! 5.1? The movie starts skipping. So I start searching for answers over at their open source linux driver forum, and what do I find? The SB Live! 5.1 doesn't do AC3/DTS decoding. The decoding is done by the driver, completely in software!
I had to upgrade the memory from EDO to PC66 SDRAMs and the CPU to a 233 in order to get the damn thing to play smoothly. Which kinda killed the whole idea of being able to build something cheap with an old puter.
if its a constant purple its a lens or prism, or even a mirror thats doing it. these units have polarised lenses in them that like to burn, for some reason. usually that shows as a blotch or spot in the image, tho.
It's a purplish blotchy spot in the upper right part of the image. It's there constantly from startup. So that sounds like I just need to replace the lens? Is that difficult/expensive?
On a similar note, if bandwidth can ever outgrow demand
Bandwidth has outgrown demand. Sounds odd, but it's the truth, and it's part of what caused the high tech bust. There is literal 10's of thousand of miles of dark fiber that was laid during the late 90's and never lit up because the high bandwidth applications like video phones and movies never really came on line. The companies that laid all that fiber in anticipation of those high bandwidth apps driving up demand are mostly bankrupt now.
...why the US Army rejected Windows XP. Under NO--repeat, NO--circumstances are they willing to enter a situation where a vendor can shut them down. If push comes to shove because of file-format issues, Microsoft can look forward to selling *ONE* XP computer to the Army until they can convert anything involved into open formats. Period. End of story. (yes, I am somewhat in the know on this)
Similar situation with the Israeli army. I heard that the Israeli gov is funding a translation of OpenOffice to Hebrew, probably for similar reasons.
P.S. Yes, I did read the article. This sounds like Midbar's scheme, in which (when it works properly!) the computer still cannot access the real audio tracks, but the special software allows access to lower-quality compressed versions--which can only be played, not copied to the hard drive. So even if the boss had allowed the software to be installed, the station would have probably found that this didn't do any good.
Something that I found a little funny here is that depriving radio stations of the ability to play music is like keeping water from someone in the desert, they just won't surivive. Midbar is an Israeli company and the word Midbar means "desert" in Hebrew. Kinda like BaMidbar, "In the desert", which is the original Hebrew name for the book of Exodus. And the open source community is kinda like Moses cracking the rock in the desert to bring forth water for the people.
Unfortunately, back here in reality-land, it's not so simple....and I've heard from several personal sources, that the people who are over in the Middle East right now are being told that the Anti-war protests are against them. Personally. That's a problem!
Sounds just like another war. My father was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnom war. When he came back stateside, together with troops from various parts of the world, there were protesters there to great them - calling them baby killers and spitting on them. I wouldn't be suprised if some of these extreme leftist assholes like chomsky do the same.
I'm Jewish, It was a joke dipshit! Or couldn't you see the link to www.landofisrael.info right under my handle?
In other news:
IST 20:45 US cruise missiles slam into Baghdad, start fires Thursday night. Heavy anti-aircraft fire lights the skies as city rocked by explosions. Wave of 10 F-15 and F-16 warplanes took off from US military base in Qatar. 1st Marine Expeditionary unit crosses into Iraq from Kuwait.
It really is an Evil Jewish Conspiracy (tm)
on
Updates on War in Iraq
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
A Palestinian man from the West Bank city of Jenin was said to have
been killed in the US missile strikes on Baghdad early Thursday
morning.
The family of Ahmed Raed Elbaz received a phone call from relatives
in the Iraqi capital to say that Elbaz had been killed in the
bombardment that targeted Iraqi leaders.
The family set up a mourning tent and said that Elbaz was a bus
driver in Baghdad.
Both Iraq and the International Red Cross said that one civilian had
been killed and 14 wounded in the air strikes.
How do you manually download these patches? I'm not running windows update (it only works with IE) and so the page just sent me to ms download center. The last patch listed there is from the March 17.
Well, gosh. Here I thought that an XML-aware database that would allow you to sync your XMMS playlists and things in addition to using it as a removable drive would be a useful feature. Seems people agree with me on this one.
I'm sorry, but the
press release linked to in the article only mentioned a sync manager, not anything else. The press release didn't say anything about being able to mount the player as a drive or anything else you just mentioned. Traditionally in the Win/Mac MP3 portable world having a "sync manager" typically means you can't mount the player drive or read/write it directly. Your above comment should have been part of the press release in order to avoid this type of confusion.
Positron will be the Linux synchronization manager
Synchronization manager? Why the fuck would we want something like that? This gives me flashbacks to the pre-NexII days of the Rio sync manager! Why the hell not to just mount it as a removable drive and be done with it?
Did anyone else read that first sentance as " The Recording Industry Assasins of America," or is it just that I haven't had my coffee yet this morning?
The Israeli Ilan Rimon, may his memory be blessed, carried a number of objects from Holocaust survivors into space with him. One was a Torah (bible) scroll and the other was a picture of the moon drawn by a 14 year old who was later murdered in the camp and burnt up in the crematorium.
To have those things survive the fires of the Holocaust and make it into space, only to be burnt up along with our first astronaut...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)--Israel's first astronaut held
up a tiny Torah scroll aboard space shuttle
Columbia on Tuesday, fulfilling a promise made by a Holocaust survivor 59
years ago.
Astronaut Ilan Ramon showed the Torah to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon,
during a televised conference.
Watching with emotion from a NASA control center in Greenbelt,
Md., was the Torah's owner, Joachim Joseph, a 71-year-old atmospheric physicist
at Tel Aviv University who is overseeing an Israeli experiment aboard the
shuttle.
The scientist received the Torah
from a rabbi while both were imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany
in 1944. Joseph had just turned 13, and the rabbi secretly arranged a 4 a.m.
bar mitzvah ceremony in the prisoners' barracks.
"After the ceremony, he said, `You take this, this scroll
that you just read from, because I will not leave here alive. But you must
promise me that if you get out, you'll tell the story,"' Joseph recalled.
The rabbi was killed two months later.
Joseph was freed from the Bergen-Belsen camp in a prisoner
exchange in 1945, one month before it was liberated by the Americans and British.
Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz
death camp, visited the scientist's home two years ago and saw the Torah. "He was deeply affected. He almost cried,"
Joseph said. The astronaut asked if he could take the Torah with him into space.
"This represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish
people to survive despite everything from horrible periods, black days, to
reach periods of hope and belief in the future," Ramon told Sharon and other
Israeli government officials in Jerusalem.
Joseph said: "I feel now that I finally was able to fulfill
my promise to Rabbi Dasberg 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, and then
on a grand scale, and I'm very grateful to Ilan for making it possible."
^___=
On the Net:
Tel Aviv University: www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX.home.htm
By
NICK WINGFIELD
Staff
Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A half-dozen major music retailers, reeling from a
slowdown in CD sales, have formed a new company that plans to offer
songs for downloading from the Internet.
Best Buy Co., Hastings Entertainment Inc., MTS Inc.'s
Tower Records, Trans World Entertainment Corp., Virgin Entertainment
Group Inc. and Wherehouse Music Inc. said they have founded Echo Inc.,
a consortium developing a service that will let each of the retailers
distribute music on the Internet under their respective brand names.
Echo will immediately seek to negotiate music licenses from major and
independent record labels, according to the company's chief executive,
Dan Hart.
The consortium represents an effort to answer the
explosion of music piracy through Internet file-sharing services and
compact-disc copying that retailers and music companies blame for an
estimated 9% drop in CD sales last year. Retailers also are seeing
competition from the major recording companies that release most
popular music, which have formed separate ventures, MusicNet and
pressplay, for downloading music.
In forming their own consortium from scratch, the
retailers are effectively betting that they can get better terms by
collectively licensing music from recording companies, rather than
cutting deals individually with the labels. Executives involved with
Echo, which is majority-owned by the retailers, said they hoped to have
more control over their relationship with consumers than they would by
obtaining music through MusicNet or pressplay.
"It's clear that retail stores are threatened by
digital distribution," says P.J. McNealy, a digital-media analyst at
research firm Gartner Inc. The thinking behind the consortium "may be
there's strength in numbers."
It isn't clear whether Echo can begin to remedy the
retailers' troubles, though. Wherehouse, for instance, filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, while Best Buy has said it
will close more than 100 of its Musicland stores.
Echo will need to license music from the recording
companies, a process likely to take months. Once they begin offering
music to consumers for a fee, Echo must still compete against free
Internet services like KaZaA and Morpheus. Commercial music services on
the Internet have been hobbled by spotty song selection and early
limits on CD recording, though the services have improved gradually in
both regards.
The industry is littered with startup music services
that failed: In fact, Echo's predecessor, Echo Networks Inc., folded
early last year, when it decided it couldn't obtain music licenses on
favorable enough terms to support a business. Mr. Hart says he believes
the new Echo can be more successful by piggybacking on the existing
marketing muscle of retailers.
"The marginal cost of putting digital advertisements
in circulars is so much lower than for an independent company that
wanted to go out and purchase those partnerships," says Mr. Hart, who
declined to say how much the retailers invested in the company.
In a similar effort, Anderson Merchandisers LP, one of
the leading distributors of music and other media, said Friday that it
would pay $3.2 million to acquire the assets of software company Liquid
Audio Inc., in a bid to help retailers establish downloading services.
Pushing their own Internet services may not help
retailers build more foot-traffic in stores. But Kevin Ertell, senior
vice president of Tower Records' online operations, says the store
hopes to offer its version of the Echo service through kiosks in retail
locations. "I think the in-store experience is going to be really
important," Mr. Ertell says.
I'm really curious how you got your figure, since there is only $340,000 of positive income listed in his numbers. Please explain it. I'm thinking you must be counting something as income that is not.
The guy's numbers are a little confusing. It took me some time to straighten it all out.
/.'s not supporting tables makes this a little difficult. Could I just e-mail you the spreadsheet? I'm using OpenOffice, but I could export to excel, lotus or whatever. If you don't want your addy up on here you can just e-mail me at sailorbob74133.at.yahoo.com and then I'll mail you back with the spreadsheet in your prefered format.
Dump the numbers into a spreadsheet and see what you get. If you run Albini's own numbers, you'll find that the band is $10,875 in the hole, but that's after pocketing the $250k and paying for all of the recording, video, etc. Which means if they were to just go ahead and pay of that $10k they would have grossed ~$239k, split among the band members.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, last I heard unemployment is still over 10% in many parts of Europe. I think it's around 14% in France and it's close to 10% here in Israel. Europe is responsible for a lot of that CD purchasing and they are still not out of the woods economically.
Of course there has been a certain effect by file sharing, but not on the scope that the record companies try to claim.
Anyone else getting tired of this? I mean, can't reporters make the connection? When was the economy at it's peek? In 2000. What has it been doing since 2000? Going into deeper and deeper recession. What does that mean? People are spending less money on goods and services.
What?! The entertainment industry saw a drop in sales during a worldwide economic recession? It must be the pirates fault!
MS Page for Product Life Cycle
First let's get this out of the way, I'm agnostic and a non-christian. With that said, I can't stand most people's attitude toward evolution. Most people's belief in evolution is just as irrational as xtian's belief in creationism. , and this harms the science of researching the origins of life.
Let's get it out in the open: the theory of evolution as currently formulated is a piss poor theory. Under the current model it would have been impossible for life to have originated on earth, which led numerous scientists in the 70's to propose the idea you've probably heard of life on earth being seeded from another planet. There are also no explanations for important issues such as the development of highly specialized organs, bi-sexual species, how one species turns into a new species, etc, etc. The only thing evolution currently explains well is extreme deviation within a single species, i.e. selective breeding - what we've been doing with dogs and other domesticated animals for thousands of years.
The point is, the scientific process of questioning and refinement seems to have broken down because of most peoples nearly religious adherence to a poorly formulated theory, and their fear of being labeled religious fanatics or intellectual deviants for questioning it.
Roxio Acquires Pressplay As The Foundation For The Re-Launch Of Napster(R)
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Roxio Inc. (ROXI) acquired online music service Pressplay, which it expects to be the basis for a new service under the Napster brand.
Roxio acquired substantially all of Pressplay, a joint venture owned by music units of Vivendi Universal SA (V) and Sony Corp. (SNE), for $12.5 million cash and about 3.9 million common shares. Based on Roxio's closing stock price on Friday, the deal is valued at about $39.5 million, excluding about $1 million in transaction costs.
Also, Sony Music Entertainment and Vivendi's Universal Music Group will each have the right to earn up to $6.25 million, based on cash flows from the new Napster service, Roxio said in a press release Monday.
The company plans to invest about $20 million to fund the relaunch of Napster, but expects the new business to produce negative cash flows until it is widely adopted.
As a result of the deal, Roxio said it acquires a legal digital music distribution infrastructure and catalog rights with all five major music labels.
Roxio said the deal significantly accelerates the development of its online music business, which is central to its strategic development.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment will each name a representative to Roxio's board. Pressplay President Michael Bebel will report to Roxio Chairman and Chief Executive Christopher Gorog, and its senior management will remain in place. Pressplay will also maintain its offices in Los Angeles and New York.
As reported in Monday's Wall Street Journal, the deal results in a major irony for Vivendi and Sony, who launched Pressplay as a legitimate alternative to illicit free song-swapping and who will wind up as shareholders in a new service bearing the Napster name. The old version of Napster was shut down in the summer of 2001, as a result of a copyright suit filed by the music companies.
Pressplay currently is a subscription service that requires users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited, but temporary, access to songs from the five major music companies. Customers can also pay to permanently download songs. Roxio is expected to make significant changes to the service, The Journal reported.
Digital media company Roxio, which is best known for its software that allows users to create their own compact discs, paid $5 million last November to acquire the name and intellectual property of Napster.
The company expects to discuss the impact of the deal on its fiscal first quarter ending June 30 during its fourth-quarter conference call scheduled for Wednesday.
A survey of five analysts by Thomson First Call yielded a consensus first-quarter earnings estimate of 11 cents a share for Roxio, which reported pro forma earnings of 3 cents a share in the year-earlier period.
Roxio's shares recently traded at $7.54, up 9.3%, on Nasdaq composite volume of 1.5 million shares, well above average daily volume of 323,078 shares.
I would love to sell computers with 2000 on them and not XP or whatever the next boatware is gonig to be - but I can't since M$ no longer sells licenses to old OS's. Sure, individuals can buy old licenses 2nd hand and install themselves, but that's an extremely small percentage of people. 95% of people buy their machine with a pre-installed OS, and that is going to be the latest M$ bloatware because you can't run a PC business scavanging old licenses here and there. You have to have a reliable supply of licenses.
As a seller I'm forced to put whatever the latest Winbloze is on the machines I sell. Actually, forcing people to buy something they don't want or need is illegal. It's called racketeering and it's what the auto companies got smacked down on for in the 60's/70's. They were required to publish the specs for any car they no longer sell/service. M$ should be forced to publish the source for old OS's it no longer supports. M$ also shouldn't be allowed to prevent the use of such old OS's. To do so and force people to buy a newer version is racketeering.
I had to upgrade the memory from EDO to PC66 SDRAMs and the CPU to a 233 in order to get the damn thing to play smoothly. Which kinda killed the whole idea of being able to build something cheap with an old puter.
It's a purplish blotchy spot in the upper right part of the image. It's there constantly from startup. So that sounds like I just need to replace the lens? Is that difficult/expensive?
Would you happen to know why part of the picture from my lcd projector is turning purple? Just bought a second hand one that is about two years old.
Bandwidth has outgrown demand. Sounds odd, but it's the truth, and it's part of what caused the high tech bust. There is literal 10's of thousand of miles of dark fiber that was laid during the late 90's and never lit up because the high bandwidth applications like video phones and movies never really came on line. The companies that laid all that fiber in anticipation of those high bandwidth apps driving up demand are mostly bankrupt now.
Similar situation with the Israeli army. I heard that the Israeli gov is funding a translation of OpenOffice to Hebrew, probably for similar reasons.
Something that I found a little funny here is that depriving radio stations of the ability to play music is like keeping water from someone in the desert, they just won't surivive. Midbar is an Israeli company and the word Midbar means "desert" in Hebrew. Kinda like BaMidbar, "In the desert", which is the original Hebrew name for the book of Exodus. And the open source community is kinda like Moses cracking the rock in the desert to bring forth water for the people.
Ok, anyway, enough silliness for now ;-)
The best golfer is black,
France accuses the US of arrogance,
and Germany doesn't want to go to war!
Sounds just like another war. My father was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnom war. When he came back stateside, together with troops from various parts of the world, there were protesters there to great them - calling them baby killers and spitting on them. I wouldn't be suprised if some of these extreme leftist assholes like chomsky do the same.
I'm Jewish, It was a joke dipshit! Or couldn't you see the link to www.landofisrael.info right under my handle?
In other news:
IST 20:45 US cruise missiles slam into Baghdad, start fires Thursday night. Heavy anti-aircraft fire lights the skies as city rocked by explosions. Wave of 10 F-15 and F-16 warplanes took off from US military base in Qatar. 1st Marine Expeditionary unit crosses into Iraq from Kuwait.
By THE JERUSALEM POST INTERNET STAFF
A Palestinian man from the West Bank city of Jenin was said to have been killed in the US missile strikes on Baghdad early Thursday morning.
The family of Ahmed Raed Elbaz received a phone call from relatives in the Iraqi capital to say that Elbaz had been killed in the bombardment that targeted Iraqi leaders.
The family set up a mourning tent and said that Elbaz was a bus driver in Baghdad.
Both Iraq and the International Red Cross said that one civilian had been killed and 14 wounded in the air strikes.
How do you manually download these patches? I'm not running windows update (it only works with IE) and so the page just sent me to ms download center. The last patch listed there is from the March 17.
I'm sorry, but the press release linked to in the article only mentioned a sync manager, not anything else. The press release didn't say anything about being able to mount the player as a drive or anything else you just mentioned. Traditionally in the Win/Mac MP3 portable world having a "sync manager" typically means you can't mount the player drive or read/write it directly. Your above comment should have been part of the press release in order to avoid this type of confusion.
Synchronization manager? Why the fuck would we want something like that? This gives me flashbacks to the pre-NexII days of the Rio sync manager! Why the hell not to just mount it as a removable drive and be done with it?
Did anyone else read that first sentance as " The Recording Industry Assasins of America," or is it just that I haven't had my coffee yet this morning?
To have those things survive the fires of the Holocaust and make it into space, only to be burnt up along with our first astronaut...
From the Wall Street Journal's site:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)--Israel's first astronaut held up a tiny Torah scroll aboard space shuttle Columbia on Tuesday, fulfilling a promise made by a Holocaust survivor 59 years ago.
Astronaut Ilan Ramon showed the Torah to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, during a televised conference.
Watching with emotion from a NASA control center in Greenbelt, Md., was the Torah's owner, Joachim Joseph, a 71-year-old atmospheric physicist at Tel Aviv University who is overseeing an Israeli experiment aboard the shuttle.
The scientist received the Torah from a rabbi while both were imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1944. Joseph had just turned 13, and the rabbi secretly arranged a 4 a.m. bar mitzvah ceremony in the prisoners' barracks.
"After the ceremony, he said, `You take this, this scroll that you just read from, because I will not leave here alive. But you must promise me that if you get out, you'll tell the story,"' Joseph recalled.
The rabbi was killed two months later.
Joseph was freed from the Bergen-Belsen camp in a prisoner exchange in 1945, one month before it was liberated by the Americans and British.
Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, visited the scientist's home two years ago and saw the Torah. "He was deeply affected. He almost cried," Joseph said. The astronaut asked if he could take the Torah with him into space.
"This represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive despite everything from horrible periods, black days, to reach periods of hope and belief in the future," Ramon told Sharon and other Israeli government officials in Jerusalem.
Joseph said: "I feel now that I finally was able to fulfill my promise to Rabbi Dasberg 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, and then on a grand scale, and I'm very grateful to Ilan for making it possible."
^___=
On the Net:
Tel Aviv University: www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX.home.htm
Music Retailers Team Up
To Form Internet Venture
By NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A half-dozen major music retailers, reeling from a slowdown in CD sales, have formed a new company that plans to offer songs for downloading from the Internet.
Best Buy Co., Hastings Entertainment Inc., MTS Inc.'s Tower Records, Trans World Entertainment Corp., Virgin Entertainment Group Inc. and Wherehouse Music Inc. said they have founded Echo Inc., a consortium developing a service that will let each of the retailers distribute music on the Internet under their respective brand names. Echo will immediately seek to negotiate music licenses from major and independent record labels, according to the company's chief executive, Dan Hart.
The consortium represents an effort to answer the explosion of music piracy through Internet file-sharing services and compact-disc copying that retailers and music companies blame for an estimated 9% drop in CD sales last year. Retailers also are seeing competition from the major recording companies that release most popular music, which have formed separate ventures, MusicNet and pressplay, for downloading music.
In forming their own consortium from scratch, the retailers are effectively betting that they can get better terms by collectively licensing music from recording companies, rather than cutting deals individually with the labels. Executives involved with Echo, which is majority-owned by the retailers, said they hoped to have more control over their relationship with consumers than they would by obtaining music through MusicNet or pressplay.
"It's clear that retail stores are threatened by digital distribution," says P.J. McNealy, a digital-media analyst at research firm Gartner Inc. The thinking behind the consortium "may be there's strength in numbers."
It isn't clear whether Echo can begin to remedy the retailers' troubles, though. Wherehouse, for instance, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, while Best Buy has said it will close more than 100 of its Musicland stores.
Echo will need to license music from the recording companies, a process likely to take months. Once they begin offering music to consumers for a fee, Echo must still compete against free Internet services like KaZaA and Morpheus. Commercial music services on the Internet have been hobbled by spotty song selection and early limits on CD recording, though the services have improved gradually in both regards.
The industry is littered with startup music services that failed: In fact, Echo's predecessor, Echo Networks Inc., folded early last year, when it decided it couldn't obtain music licenses on favorable enough terms to support a business. Mr. Hart says he believes the new Echo can be more successful by piggybacking on the existing marketing muscle of retailers.
"The marginal cost of putting digital advertisements in circulars is so much lower than for an independent company that wanted to go out and purchase those partnerships," says Mr. Hart, who declined to say how much the retailers invested in the company.
In a similar effort, Anderson Merchandisers LP, one of the leading distributors of music and other media, said Friday that it would pay $3.2 million to acquire the assets of software company Liquid Audio Inc., in a bid to help retailers establish downloading services.
Pushing their own Internet services may not help retailers build more foot-traffic in stores. But Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of Tower Records' online operations, says the store hopes to offer its version of the Echo service through kiosks in retail locations. "I think the in-store experience is going to be really important," Mr. Ertell says.
Write to Nick Wingfield at <address removed>
Updated January 27, 2003 12:19 a.m. EST
The guy's numbers are a little confusing. It took me some time to straighten it all out.
/.'s not supporting tables makes this a little difficult. Could I just e-mail you the spreadsheet? I'm using OpenOffice, but I could export to excel, lotus or whatever. If you don't want your addy up on here you can just e-mail me at sailorbob74133.at.yahoo.com and then I'll mail you back with the spreadsheet in your prefered format.
Dump the numbers into a spreadsheet and see what you get. If you run Albini's own numbers, you'll find that the band is $10,875 in the hole, but that's after pocketing the $250k and paying for all of the recording, video, etc. Which means if they were to just go ahead and pay of that $10k they would have grossed ~$239k, split among the band members.
Can you do math? Do YOU know anything about the recording industry? Other than what you've read here on /.?
All I can say is take the time to drop the numbers into a spreadsheet and see for yourself. Numbers are the only thing that matters.