About 7 months after I got my mac mini, the nasty slot-loading pioneer DVD drive could no longer detect that a disk was loaded. Replaced it with an external. So I'm not too impressed with the hardware quality. About equal to the PC I owned that I didn't build.
The first site's address to be "discovered" by fans was given in highlighted letters on a tour t-shirt. From there, further "codes" were solved and those lead to other sites, all related to NIN and the album.
I was reading about this the other day, and it's pretty cool. Usually when a company makes one of these fictional promo websites, it's lame, but somehow Trent and friends have caught the rabid fan interest. The clues are involved and difficult (running an MP3 from a USB drive through a spectrograph, WTH), and if anyone else had done it, no one would have even noticed that the promo campaign existed.
All for what seems to be a concept album (normally derided by everyone but progrock fans) (but not me, I like them).
Here is the site I came across that describes it, gives links to the various sites, and shows how the sites were discovered: http://ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Research.
And some of the sites are pretty neat timecuberrific web design.
I suppose the US Military *could* stop using Doom etc for training (as has been reported) and instead try Pacman or something.
You say that Pacman isn't violent? And the angel of the lord said unto me, "These are the cries of the pellets, the cries of the pellets! You see, Reverend Eaerth, tomorrow is Pac Man Fever, and to them, it is the holocaust!"
Waterfall Carnival - Frogg Cafe All This Time - Frogg Cafe Full Moon - Chrome Shift
Mindawn may be very limited, but the top list at mindawn has two excellent bands (Frogg Cafe is great progrock with an occasional Zappa influence, and Chromeshift is very catchy metal), while the top list at iTunes has all crap.
To admit, this isn't music that makes a difference to your typical college student, and also to admit, no top ten list of songs should have multiple tracks by a single artist, unless that artist is that unbelievably popular. But this type of music, neglected in the popular circles, is a basic requirement if I am ever going to sign up for any music service. It is not the only requirement, because well-known music is also necessary, but the requirement is still absolute.
Right now, this service can't reduce piracy at all. But on the other hand, if they are able to continue and improve, they might do something just as important: sell better music.
Distribution companies get a free, zero-effort focus group for nearly every anime that comes out.
Not quite. A lot of shows get distributed, and people become huge fans. Naruto, obvious. Fullmetal Alchemist also was pretty darn popular before it made it to the USA (and that's for one of the fastest official releases I can think of).
But for every Naruto, there are a ton of shows that get a few eps, and then are dropped and forgotten, not popular enough or whatever (fansub version of Firefly) and even more that never show up. Some of the first group, at least, have been better shows than Naruto (I don't hate it but... come on). So you don't really get accurate stats. You get more information about what shows are popular among fansubbers than what are popular among the public.
You'd probably figure out that Naruto is freaking amazingly popular torrent or no torrent. That said, it builds a fanbase like hell.
"It is plausible and realistic to imagine that in five or 10 years time, people with a cockroach infestation will be buying robots to get rid of them," Professor Deneubourg said.
My first thought... good idea, but we don't want robots that look like cockroaches to get rid of cockroaches. That's *icky.* It won't sell.
Techno? Ok, sure I like some of it, but 4/4 isn't much of a challenge when you're used to Dream Theater, King Crimson, Zappa, Ozrics, and the like. Difficult, but some of it is pretty groovy and danceable. Especially the Ozrics.
DDR "Advanced Version." Not only would it be educational, challenging, train your coordination, but it would also be a great spectator sport. I hear it's fun to watch hippies try to dance to "Almost 12" by the Flecktones (it's in 11, so every three bars... you can guess).
If you happen to be on Windows, and you might not, Media Player Classic plays these. Just download the swf file and grab the slider and scroll to after the "Loading" screen.
Reminds me of the obligatory Lewis Black quote, talking about citizens of Alabama suing the state for being last in education.
That means the people of Alabama... sued themselves. They said, 'I'm taking your ass to court. I'm gonna get me a lawyer and I'm gonna squeeze your nuts, Bubba!'
I recall reading a story awhile ago about a Coke employee who was fired for drinking Pepsi while working.... In the Coke/Pepsi deal the worker had to sign something saying he wouldn't publicly endorse another product (by drinking it) while working. I imagine MS might have a similar deal.
Except that in this case, the person wrote the blog at home and hosted it at home. This situation is akin to a Coke employee being fired for drinking Pepsi at home.
Not that I'm surprised. Corporations believe that they own human lives, and to be honest, they do.
So what one branch of the government giveth, another takes away. Unfortunately, there are checks and balances to keep any one part of the US government from harming corporations.
Even though the law itself would not have affected my life much -- 90% of my telemarketing calls are autodialed recordings, which are illegal already -- this is saddening. The Do-Not-Call List was the first good thing I remember the US government doing in my life.
I view Homestar Runner in Media Player Classic, which has the ability to display Flash. I use the Google to find the files, since the links are obfuscated by the flash interface.
Works for me. I don't miss flash in web browsers at all.
Heheh, this girl will have her income garnished for the rest of her life. The RIAA has gained a lifetime slave. I predict further targeting of children. Waiting for them to reach college age is inefficient, because the RIAA misses out on all those wages from summer jobs, paper routes, and Christmas gifts from grandparents.
The RIAA really is taking its cues from Zappa's JOE'S GARAGE.
But what happens when two people, both using such a service, decide to send an e-mail for the first time? Couldn't such a setup create a endless loop of authentication requests?
I think the way it is usually done is that, if you send an email to someone, then replies from that address are automatically accepted. So it goes like...
1) Unknown user 1 sends message to unknown 2. 2) Unknown 2 sends challenge. 3) Challenge is automatically received by unknown 1.
I for one have issues with it simply because the value is just not there.
You sum it up right there. Most sites that offer content for money have crap content at high prices. Like I'd pay $10 for a magazine subscription. If I want to read interesting non-fiction, there's more on the Web and the text newsgroups that I monitor than I COULD read, and it's free. A magazine subscription is competing with free, and often better, content.
I'm an anime fan. Freak, really. I've paid a thousand dollars over the last year in the pursuit of anime online. Illegally, of course, because legal anime just isn't on the net, but it's a lot of money that this Internet user has paid for content.
If a bunch of Japanese television stations got together and offered their shows for download, with softsubs, they'd get a steady $10 or $15 from me. (If I had net for $21 like they do in that country, I could afford $20 more a month, but that's not going to happen.) It would be far superior to paying for usenet, because 1) it would be legal and supported, 2) quality would be good, and 3) http/ftp is a far better protocol for file transfer.
Now this article almost has a point, but misses it. He talks about 'co-branding' being the key to success. Almost there. The customer doesn't care about co-branding content, he cares about cooperation. I don't want to pay for content from only one studio, one TV station, or one conglomerate. I want to see companies competing on price and quality, but if they all have different content, I'm not paying them all $10. I wouldn't pay one. It's all or nothing.
Even Discipline Global Mobile, which used to be one of the better independent labels, dedicated to supporting artist rights over a recording industry whose practicses are "immoral" and "indefensible," is RIAA, which means King Crimson, California Guitar Trio, Trey Gunn, John Paul Jones, and Earthworks are off-limits.
Labels which I'd thought were independents, like Inside Out, Shrapnel, and Mellotronen (Mellotronen! An obscure Swedish label that gave me expensive imports of Anglagard's albums) are RIAA. The amount of music I can morally buy is much less than I thought it was.
I used to think it was pretty safe sticking with indy and artist-run labels found on artist-shop.com, but I guess that is no longer the case.
Copyright things like these always have two questions.
The first is "Is it illegal?" You bet. Copyright protects Harry Potter and translating it without permission violates both US and their countries' laws. It's as illegal as every fansub.
The second is "Is it wrong?" Well, my answer has two parts. The first part is "Hell." The second part is "No." Of course you must take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt, but amateurs, people with a love of the story, beating professionals, people who do the work for money, doesn't mean that the amateurs are evil people simply because no money has changed hands.
Czechs beating the professionals by eight months is EMBARRASSING. One might ask is if it's right to sue someone for embarrassing you. Illegal as the translations might be, Jamie's comment, which many here are taking issue with, is on the money.
Of course, the real reason I made this post was for the subject line. 10 geek points to anyone who can identify it w/o Google.
Slashdot Mirror
About 7 months after I got my mac mini, the nasty slot-loading pioneer DVD drive could no longer detect that a disk was loaded. Replaced it with an external. So I'm not too impressed with the hardware quality. About equal to the PC I owned that I didn't build.
The first site's address to be "discovered" by fans was given in highlighted letters on a tour t-shirt. From there, further "codes" were solved and those lead to other sites, all related to NIN and the album.
I was reading about this the other day, and it's pretty cool. Usually when a company makes one of these fictional promo websites, it's lame, but somehow Trent and friends have caught the rabid fan interest. The clues are involved and difficult (running an MP3 from a USB drive through a spectrograph, WTH), and if anyone else had done it, no one would have even noticed that the promo campaign existed.
All for what seems to be a concept album (normally derided by everyone but progrock fans) (but not me, I like them).
Here is the site I came across that describes it, gives links to the various sites, and shows how the sites were discovered: http://ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Research.
And some of the sites are pretty neat timecuberrific web design.
I suppose the US Military *could* stop using Doom etc for training (as has been reported) and instead try Pacman or something.
You say that Pacman isn't violent? And the angel of the lord said unto me, "These are the cries of the pellets, the cries of the pellets! You see, Reverend Eaerth, tomorrow is Pac Man Fever, and to them, it is the holocaust!"
Or something.
I tried that once and couldn't find the volume control. Have they fixed that? Is it a plug?
w topic=28665
This is what I use:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?sho
You need to use columns UI, but that's not a problem because columns UI is nicer than the default UI. Very configurable.
Waterfall Carnival - Frogg Cafe
All This Time - Frogg Cafe
Full Moon - Chrome Shift
Mindawn may be very limited, but the top list at mindawn has two excellent bands (Frogg Cafe is great progrock with an occasional Zappa influence, and Chromeshift is very catchy metal), while the top list at iTunes has all crap.
To admit, this isn't music that makes a difference to your typical college student, and also to admit, no top ten list of songs should have multiple tracks by a single artist, unless that artist is that unbelievably popular. But this type of music, neglected in the popular circles, is a basic requirement if I am ever going to sign up for any music service. It is not the only requirement, because well-known music is also necessary, but the requirement is still absolute.
Right now, this service can't reduce piracy at all. But on the other hand, if they are able to continue and improve, they might do something just as important: sell better music.
Distribution companies get a free, zero-effort focus group for nearly every anime that comes out.
Not quite. A lot of shows get distributed, and people become huge fans. Naruto, obvious. Fullmetal Alchemist also was pretty darn popular before it made it to the USA (and that's for one of the fastest official releases I can think of).
But for every Naruto, there are a ton of shows that get a few eps, and then are dropped and forgotten, not popular enough or whatever (fansub version of Firefly) and even more that never show up. Some of the first group, at least, have been better shows than Naruto (I don't hate it but... come on). So you don't really get accurate stats. You get more information about what shows are popular among fansubbers than what are popular among the public.
You'd probably figure out that Naruto is freaking amazingly popular torrent or no torrent. That said, it builds a fanbase like hell.
From OSI's "Office of Strategic Influence." Fitting. Just proves that all you ever needed to know was predicted in a song lyric.
- eaerth (the creator has a mastertape)
Excellent! .5%! That means 5 cents more an hour. Hooray for my ramen budget!
thats because it's just random noise - half a conversation. You will be intrigued despite yourself to know what the replies are.
"If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."
"It is plausible and realistic to imagine that in five or 10 years time, people with a cockroach infestation will be buying robots to get rid of them," Professor Deneubourg said.
... good idea, but we don't want robots that look like cockroaches to get rid of cockroaches. That's *icky.* It won't sell.
My first thought
What we want is bug-killing robots that look like cute little dolls. Now that's marketable.
That's because "hypocricy" doesn't have legal standing.
It's a thorny legal issue all right; I'll need to refer to the case, "Goose vs. Gander."
Puppets, eh? I hope they do the right thing and hire the best puppeteer in the world, John Malkovich.
Techno? Ok, sure I like some of it, but 4/4 isn't much of a challenge when you're used to Dream Theater, King Crimson, Zappa, Ozrics, and the like. Difficult, but some of it is pretty groovy and danceable. Especially the Ozrics.
DDR "Advanced Version." Not only would it be educational, challenging, train your coordination, but it would also be a great spectator sport. I hear it's fun to watch hippies try to dance to "Almost 12" by the Flecktones (it's in 11, so every three bars... you can guess).
"...making $19,700 a year and living in luxury in Bangalaore."
Do 6/7 Indians actually make more than I do? I feel so low.
If you happen to be on Windows, and you might not, Media Player Classic plays these. Just download the swf file and grab the slider and scroll to after the "Loading" screen.
I recall reading a story awhile ago about a Coke employee who was fired for drinking Pepsi while working.... In the Coke/Pepsi deal the worker had to sign something saying he wouldn't publicly endorse another product (by drinking it) while working. I imagine MS might have a similar deal.
Except that in this case, the person wrote the blog at home and hosted it at home. This situation is akin to a Coke employee being fired for drinking Pepsi at home.
Not that I'm surprised. Corporations believe that they own human lives, and to be honest, they do.
So what one branch of the government giveth, another takes away. Unfortunately, there are checks and balances to keep any one part of the US government from harming corporations.
Even though the law itself would not have affected my life much -- 90% of my telemarketing calls are autodialed recordings, which are illegal already -- this is saddening. The Do-Not-Call List was the first good thing I remember the US government doing in my life.
I view Homestar Runner in Media Player Classic, which has the ability to display Flash. I use the Google to find the files, since the links are obfuscated by the flash interface.
Works for me. I don't miss flash in web browsers at all.
Heheh, this girl will have her income garnished for the rest of her life. The RIAA has gained a lifetime slave. I predict further targeting of children. Waiting for them to reach college age is inefficient, because the RIAA misses out on all those wages from summer jobs, paper routes, and Christmas gifts from grandparents.
The RIAA really is taking its cues from Zappa's JOE'S GARAGE.
But what happens when two people, both using such a service, decide to send an e-mail for the first time? Couldn't such a setup create a endless loop of authentication requests?
I think the way it is usually done is that, if you send an email to someone, then replies from that address are automatically accepted. So it goes like...
1) Unknown user 1 sends message to unknown 2.
2) Unknown 2 sends challenge.
3) Challenge is automatically received by unknown 1.
I for one have issues with it simply because the value is just not there.
You sum it up right there. Most sites that offer content for money have crap content at high prices. Like I'd pay $10 for a magazine subscription. If I want to read interesting non-fiction, there's more on the Web and the text newsgroups that I monitor than I COULD read, and it's free. A magazine subscription is competing with free, and often better, content.
I'm an anime fan. Freak, really. I've paid a thousand dollars over the last year in the pursuit of anime online. Illegally, of course, because legal anime just isn't on the net, but it's a lot of money that this Internet user has paid for content.
If a bunch of Japanese television stations got together and offered their shows for download, with softsubs, they'd get a steady $10 or $15 from me. (If I had net for $21 like they do in that country, I could afford $20 more a month, but that's not going to happen.) It would be far superior to paying for usenet, because 1) it would be legal and supported, 2) quality would be good, and 3) http/ftp is a far better protocol for file transfer.
Now this article almost has a point, but misses it. He talks about 'co-branding' being the key to success. Almost there. The customer doesn't care about co-branding content, he cares about cooperation. I don't want to pay for content from only one studio, one TV station, or one conglomerate. I want to see companies competing on price and quality, but if they all have different content, I'm not paying them all $10. I wouldn't pay one. It's all or nothing.
That long, huh? That takes a load off my mind. I thought I was in trouble for a while there.
Whew,
Tony Zzugman, Esq.
Thanks for the link. I'm saddened.
Even Discipline Global Mobile, which used to be one of the better independent labels, dedicated to supporting artist rights over a recording industry whose practicses are "immoral" and "indefensible," is RIAA, which means King Crimson, California Guitar Trio, Trey Gunn, John Paul Jones, and Earthworks are off-limits.
Labels which I'd thought were independents, like Inside Out, Shrapnel, and Mellotronen (Mellotronen! An obscure Swedish label that gave me expensive imports of Anglagard's albums) are RIAA. The amount of music I can morally buy is much less than I thought it was.
I used to think it was pretty safe sticking with indy and artist-run labels found on artist-shop.com, but I guess that is no longer the case.
It is very sad.
Copyright things like these always have two questions.
The first is "Is it illegal?" You bet. Copyright protects Harry Potter and translating it without permission violates both US and their countries' laws. It's as illegal as every fansub.
The second is "Is it wrong?" Well, my answer has two parts. The first part is "Hell." The second part is "No." Of course you must take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt, but amateurs, people with a love of the story, beating professionals, people who do the work for money, doesn't mean that the amateurs are evil people simply because no money has changed hands.
Czechs beating the professionals by eight months is EMBARRASSING. One might ask is if it's right to sue someone for embarrassing you. Illegal as the translations might be, Jamie's comment, which many here are taking issue with, is on the money.
Of course, the real reason I made this post was for the subject line. 10 geek points to anyone who can identify it w/o Google.