"By that measure Budweiser is the most profitable beer, which it is."
FTFY
Until recently, I worked for the UK firm that designs Budweiser's packaging. It was an eye-opening insight into exactly what drives profitability and it has very little to do with actual product quality - it's the perceived quality when it's sitting on the shelf that drives sales. Compare that to my local micro-brewery. Their bar is rammed to the gunnels every second it's open. Have you ever seen someone elbowed out of the way at the shelves for a six-pack of Budweiser? Happens at the bar every 10 seconds on a Friday night in Hackney Wick.
Music can't be looked at in the same way. Beer is a produced commodity while music is freely duplicated without consuming resources. However, the same forces are at work deciding which acts will make it big as to whose recipe of beer will see the shelf space - marketing has the power and while we remain in it's thrall quality will play second fiddle to the projected image associated with the product. Niches may develop in which smaller products can exist, but they are just - niches. They either become mainstream (and thus marketed themselves), they stay small markets worthy of little marketing attention, or they collapse and disappear.
tl;dr - the only place quality really does make for success is away from the mainstream and expensive pervasive marketing.
If you look back through history, you'll see that only the good musicians are remembered through the ages and a lot of them relied heavily on their patrons while selling music and doing performances to raise a little money on the side - e.g. Beethoven. The cost of listening to music has decreased dramatically over the centuries - live performances are the exception rather than the norm for the majority of western culture and those recordings proliferate for virtually no material cost over the data infrastructures we have built. As the cost of generating those recordings drops too, the amount of available music has exploded and the per-piece value has plummeted.
MC Frontalot (and MC Lars) sang about how their music is funded in the track "Captains of Industry" and I don't think side-channels are a long-term solution to the problem. Spotify (et al) may be the music distribution industry's answer to torrenting, but it's pushing the value of it's catalog down even further and will only hasten their demise/complete reincarnation as newcomers completely ignore them. What I think we'll see is a push towards the reinvented music meritocracy - how many great musical acts have you seen a one-off from in the last year from a Youtube link? Would you have ever heard of them any other way?
Nokia are doing much better than you give them credit for. Asha is doing great in emerging markets and Lumia is performing well in mid/low range battlefield markets. It's also sliding nicely into the niche Blackberry is currently vacating. That's a position Microsoft can build on - they need to keep the Nokia brands going and itterate the OS like hell until they catch up with iOS and the high-end Android set. It's a question of whether they decide to aim for the high end or consolidate and gobble up the low/mid range.
You know that thing about lies and damn lies? *points up the thread*
It's far more arguable that his actions are circumventing the Lenovo rules on worker compensation by direct redistribution. That could be seen as anti-corporate or socialist, considering it a form of greed by reverse osmosis is... stretching reality*.
As his stock is currently supporting the same company of which he just gave that bonus to the workers, it's value is irrelevant in this discussion. What percentage of his actual liquid wealth did he just give away? That's the really important figure.
These are peanuts for monkeys. It is less than 1% of the 500 millions of profit Lenovo did.
Next time you give some change to the poor, remind me to flame you because it's less than 1% of the hundreds of thousands your family makes (or whatever).
I seem to recall a recent ill-concieved socio-economic political movement asking for laws to be passed to make this sort of thing compulsory. Kudos to Yang for taking the initiative here - maybe others will follow his lead and we'll end up with a Rockefeller/Carnegie philanthropy competition going on. You may think of it as "cheap" PR, but examples like this stand far more of a chance of causing change than Occupy ever did. We've already got a Bill Gates at the top, we need someone like Yang in the "middle" as well.
Lenovo didn't do this because they had to, Yang did it because he wanted to. Kudos!
I'm torn on this issue. On one hand you have people who view it as their moral duty to pass on confidential / classified information that clearly shows breaches of the law to the proper authorities. On the other hand, you have the current scatter-gun approach where huge swathes of data is released, some of it unrelated, with the likelihood that at some point in the future something unrelated to the original subject of the disclosure is going to get into enemy hands with very real and devastating consequences.
However, both of these things are trumped by something Mr Blair just doesn't seem to get - if you ask people to keep secrets they find unconscionable, they won't stay secret for very much longer. I'm also greatly concerned that Mr Blair considers insider whistleblowers to be a "new" threat.
While it's sad that children now have to start dealing with a lifetime of the effects thyroid cancer causes, especially when the whole situation was preventable, here's how I expect this to be reported on in some sectors of the press:
"ONOZ! WTF!? Kiddies haz cansur! Newclear powah is bad! Reactorz, what r u doin? Shhhtap!"...or something along that kind of intelligence level. I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take before things started getting out of control. The consequences of that are still a miniscule fraction of the damage to both the environment and human / animal health that the facility's equivalent in coal-based electricity production over it's life-time would have caused.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation due to the uranium content of coal - did that stand up to scrutiny?
I believe the word "unauthorised" is being taken as read in the article, summary, and most people's brains. Also, I couldn't find mention of exactly who the new law was targeting - the stream provider or the stream audience.
The third party thing can help moderate the extreme tendencies of the two big hitters when the numbers are close enough, but that third party needs a leader with some serious political savvy and nous to actually veto anything worthwhile. (Source: current UK coalition government)
Don't forget real live sports events on Pay-per-View - one person pulls the Superbowl from their cable company's TV service, then re-streams it live over their cable company's Internet service. Cable sharing.
This means that streaming a movie from an unauthorised source will be considered a more serious offense than vandalism, trespassing, simple assault and prostitution. Tag this one "overreaction, provoked, lobbyist, bad".
So the guy who hasn't got the faintest idea how autocompletions are generated is now the self-appointed policeman trying to save us all from it's evil clutches. The US legal system that allows prosecutors to decide you're guilty of something that's not even illegal and then side-step, tap-dance and threaten their convoluted way through the court system to make sure you get punished for it while leaving a trail of collateral damage longer and wider than Godzilla's last walk to the park to exercise his Labradoodle is about to be fired up for yet another nuclear strike against a nut that has the audacity not to leap out of it's shell upon psychic command. I do hope Google figure out how to limit the inevitable fall-out on a national level, I don't want 'Murica's laws imposed on my UK web habits.
end rambling rant
Oh, BTW, ability to manipulate != manually approving every combination
"The contention it [PRISM] is not subject to any internal or external oversights is simply not correct. It's subject to an extensive oversight regime from executive, legislative and judicial branches and Congress is made aware of these activities."
What they neglected to say was, because phones are very tightly tied to a paid service, criminals would focus on it as soon as they realised it was worth their time to do so. Few systems have stood up to financially motivated professional crackers for very long. I would go as far as to say that promoting Android on it's Linux security aspects has probably been counter-productive with users assuming it's safe to take fewer precautions, if any at all (although I would qualify that by saying anti-virus on smartphones is still a fairly obscure concept for the general public anyway).
The Compuworld article uses the term without revealing it's definition as stated in the EU draft law. Is this because it's loosely defined by the EU itself to act as a catch-all act in the future? That idea chills my bones.
Slashdot Mirror
"By that measure Budweiser is the most profitable beer, which it is."
FTFY
Until recently, I worked for the UK firm that designs Budweiser's packaging. It was an eye-opening insight into exactly what drives profitability and it has very little to do with actual product quality - it's the perceived quality when it's sitting on the shelf that drives sales. Compare that to my local micro-brewery. Their bar is rammed to the gunnels every second it's open. Have you ever seen someone elbowed out of the way at the shelves for a six-pack of Budweiser? Happens at the bar every 10 seconds on a Friday night in Hackney Wick.
Music can't be looked at in the same way. Beer is a produced commodity while music is freely duplicated without consuming resources. However, the same forces are at work deciding which acts will make it big as to whose recipe of beer will see the shelf space - marketing has the power and while we remain in it's thrall quality will play second fiddle to the projected image associated with the product. Niches may develop in which smaller products can exist, but they are just - niches. They either become mainstream (and thus marketed themselves), they stay small markets worthy of little marketing attention, or they collapse and disappear.
tl;dr - the only place quality really does make for success is away from the mainstream and expensive pervasive marketing.
Recording good-sounding music requires decent mics, monitoring, mixing & production skills./p
No, good sounding music requires talent. That's it. True talent finds a way around any other requirements.
If you look back through history, you'll see that only the good musicians are remembered through the ages and a lot of them relied heavily on their patrons while selling music and doing performances to raise a little money on the side - e.g. Beethoven. The cost of listening to music has decreased dramatically over the centuries - live performances are the exception rather than the norm for the majority of western culture and those recordings proliferate for virtually no material cost over the data infrastructures we have built. As the cost of generating those recordings drops too, the amount of available music has exploded and the per-piece value has plummeted.
MC Frontalot (and MC Lars) sang about how their music is funded in the track "Captains of Industry" and I don't think side-channels are a long-term solution to the problem. Spotify (et al) may be the music distribution industry's answer to torrenting, but it's pushing the value of it's catalog down even further and will only hasten their demise/complete reincarnation as newcomers completely ignore them. What I think we'll see is a push towards the reinvented music meritocracy - how many great musical acts have you seen a one-off from in the last year from a Youtube link? Would you have ever heard of them any other way?
The day they come out with a guaranteed one-shot cure for AIDS, there will be f***ing in the streets.
"IT'S OVEEEEERRRRR!"
"WHOOOOOHOOOO!"
"Who are you? C'mere!"
"No, it's over! YEAH!"
And if you can't get laid that day, just cut it off!
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-phone-outsells-iphone-in-seven-markets-blackberry-in-26-7000013236/
Nokia are doing much better than you give them credit for. Asha is doing great in emerging markets and Lumia is performing well in mid/low range battlefield markets. It's also sliding nicely into the niche Blackberry is currently vacating. That's a position Microsoft can build on - they need to keep the Nokia brands going and itterate the OS like hell until they catch up with iOS and the high-end Android set. It's a question of whether they decide to aim for the high end or consolidate and gobble up the low/mid range.
You know that thing about lies and damn lies? *points up the thread*
It's far more arguable that his actions are circumventing the Lenovo rules on worker compensation by direct redistribution. That could be seen as anti-corporate or socialist, considering it a form of greed by reverse osmosis is... stretching reality*.
*or bullsh*t, if you prefer.
As his stock is currently supporting the same company of which he just gave that bonus to the workers, it's value is irrelevant in this discussion. What percentage of his actual liquid wealth did he just give away? That's the really important figure.
These are peanuts for monkeys. It is less than 1% of the 500 millions of profit Lenovo did.
Next time you give some change to the poor, remind me to flame you because it's less than 1% of the hundreds of thousands your family makes (or whatever).
I seem to recall a recent ill-concieved socio-economic political movement asking for laws to be passed to make this sort of thing compulsory. Kudos to Yang for taking the initiative here - maybe others will follow his lead and we'll end up with a Rockefeller/Carnegie philanthropy competition going on. You may think of it as "cheap" PR, but examples like this stand far more of a chance of causing change than Occupy ever did. We've already got a Bill Gates at the top, we need someone like Yang in the "middle" as well.
Lenovo didn't do this because they had to, Yang did it because he wanted to. Kudos!
Closed my Facebook account mere minutes ago. Side note: a friend of mine closed his a while ago and the captcha he had to type was "Treachery"
I'm torn on this issue. On one hand you have people who view it as their moral duty to pass on confidential / classified information that clearly shows breaches of the law to the proper authorities. On the other hand, you have the current scatter-gun approach where huge swathes of data is released, some of it unrelated, with the likelihood that at some point in the future something unrelated to the original subject of the disclosure is going to get into enemy hands with very real and devastating consequences.
However, both of these things are trumped by something Mr Blair just doesn't seem to get - if you ask people to keep secrets they find unconscionable, they won't stay secret for very much longer. I'm also greatly concerned that Mr Blair considers insider whistleblowers to be a "new" threat.
While it's sad that children now have to start dealing with a lifetime of the effects thyroid cancer causes, especially when the whole situation was preventable, here's how I expect this to be reported on in some sectors of the press:
"ONOZ! WTF!? Kiddies haz cansur! Newclear powah is bad! Reactorz, what r u doin? Shhhtap!" ...or something along that kind of intelligence level. I'm still pretty impressed by the level of punishment a badly designed,badly sited, badly maintained nuclear reactor complex could take before things started getting out of control. The consequences of that are still a miniscule fraction of the damage to both the environment and human / animal health that the facility's equivalent in coal-based electricity production over it's life-time would have caused.
I heard a thing a while ago about coal-burning plants emitting more hard radiation from their smoke stacks than nuclear plants leak in real-life operation due to the uranium content of coal - did that stand up to scrutiny?
Where's Montgomery Brewster when you need him?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXEglx-or6k
Proposal for new version of the phrase:
"There are lies, damn lies and opinion polls."
I believe the word "unauthorised" is being taken as read in the article, summary, and most people's brains. Also, I couldn't find mention of exactly who the new law was targeting - the stream provider or the stream audience.
The third party thing can help moderate the extreme tendencies of the two big hitters when the numbers are close enough, but that third party needs a leader with some serious political savvy and nous to actually veto anything worthwhile. (Source: current UK coalition government)
Thought: could the primary target of this new law be cable sharers re-distributing live pay-per-view sports events?
Don't forget real live sports events on Pay-per-View - one person pulls the Superbowl from their cable company's TV service, then re-streams it live over their cable company's Internet service. Cable sharing.
This means that streaming a movie from an unauthorised source will be considered a more serious offense than vandalism, trespassing, simple assault and prostitution. Tag this one "overreaction, provoked, lobbyist, bad".
...we get closer to the world of Shadowrun every day, with a little Judge Dread thrown in.
So the guy who hasn't got the faintest idea how autocompletions are generated is now the self-appointed policeman trying to save us all from it's evil clutches. The US legal system that allows prosecutors to decide you're guilty of something that's not even illegal and then side-step, tap-dance and threaten their convoluted way through the court system to make sure you get punished for it while leaving a trail of collateral damage longer and wider than Godzilla's last walk to the park to exercise his Labradoodle is about to be fired up for yet another nuclear strike against a nut that has the audacity not to leap out of it's shell upon psychic command. I do hope Google figure out how to limit the inevitable fall-out on a national level, I don't want 'Murica's laws imposed on my UK web habits.
end rambling rant
Oh, BTW, ability to manipulate != manually approving every combination
Did somebody say something?
"The contention it [PRISM] is not subject to any internal or external oversights is simply not correct. It's subject to an extensive oversight regime from executive, legislative and judicial branches and Congress is made aware of these activities."
International != External
America! Fuck yeah!
Personal political agendas being contradicted by scientific fact have made a quite few high-profile government folks look very bad. Can't have that.
What they neglected to say was, because phones are very tightly tied to a paid service, criminals would focus on it as soon as they realised it was worth their time to do so. Few systems have stood up to financially motivated professional crackers for very long. I would go as far as to say that promoting Android on it's Linux security aspects has probably been counter-productive with users assuming it's safe to take fewer precautions, if any at all (although I would qualify that by saying anti-virus on smartphones is still a fairly obscure concept for the general public anyway).
The Compuworld article uses the term without revealing it's definition as stated in the EU draft law. Is this because it's loosely defined by the EU itself to act as a catch-all act in the future? That idea chills my bones.