>I'm exposed to more groups that I wouldnt' have heard of, and I'm much more likely to hear a song or two and like it, then go out and buy the album
Aha! Here is the problem... you aren't buying the music they want you to! You don't think they actually care about you buying a CD from some band that few have ever heard of, do you (despite the fact that their music is really good, afterall).
Nope, they would be perfectly happy if you just ran out and bought CD's of music you hear on the radio. After all, the recording industry has gone to great pains over the years to bring the 'free' radio airplay market under their own control, so they can decide which artists' music you hear and then are likely to go out and buy.
Napster interferes with the RIAA's 'try before you buy' mechanism, the corporately-controlled audio broadcast industry.
Ever wonder why no-talent, interchangeable, over-produced 'artists' like n-Sync and Back Street Boys and Britney Spears and the like get played to death 500 times a day on a million radio stations across the country and their crap CD with one or two popular singles zoom to #1 on the charts with little or no concert tour support or any other visible means of promoting the work? Kids are basically told what music they should like and buy by nationally programmed top 40 radio shows broadcast identically in each and every market by the huge media conglomerates who have bought out all the local stations.
This struck me the other day as I was flipping channels and came across the 'Britney Spears Story' on VH1 or something, and I stopped just long engough to catch the soundbite from one of Sony's executives talking about what a great artist she was because of the x million "units" that she sold in the first few months of her new album.
He didn't talk about her talent, or how she was able to reach her fans, or anything else that I would think defines a "great artist." She is "great" because they are able to make a huge profit off a single artist and sell millions of copies of the CD.
They would rather have 5-10 artists who collectively sell 100 million "units" than 500 who also collectively sell as many CD's. Overhead and economies of scale. Today, it seems its all about maximizing profit margin, growing revenue and cutting expenses. Why put the energy into signing, developing, producing, promoting and distributing the works of hundreds of artists when there is a higher return to be earned by concentrating efforts on much fewer?
I'm sure this has been observed before, but Napster undermines the control that the Recording Industry has over the making ans selling of music. If CD sales are up partially because of Napster, the RIAA sure doesn't care, because record sales lost to piracy isn't the real issue, after all, is it?
It is the erosion of their stranglehold on the production and distribution of recorded music that has them locked in a life and death strugle with Napster.
Yep, same pronunciation as the special components in an aircraft engine that you shouldn't mess with in flight-sim unless you know what you're doing.:-)
(although I would contradict your phonetic spelling: mag-NEE-toh whould probably be correct )
Noticed he slipped "post-Columbine" in there as well... didn't dissapoint me by just rendering a review of the movie on it's merits without miring it in a bunch of geek-cluture rambling.:-)
BTW, is it "Magneto", or "Magento"? I'm not a comic book reader and I haven't seen the movie... Magneto sounds cool, like some kind of scientific artifact or something, Magento sounds like an interior decorator.;-)
He didn't say it _was_ Napster )at lease reading it over a couple times, I don't see it) He did say "the Napster model" which isn't the same thing at all as saying this is Napster.
Boy, I don't see how this can but end up a bunch of disputes, no matter how they set up the restrictions. I mean, are they going to limit what copyrighted names can be registered in the TLD's at all? If so, it will be a bureaucratic nightmare, I would think.
Something tells me that Chrysler Motor Company is going to get all in a lather about me registering chrysler.xxx (assuming that 'chrysler' happened to be the legit name of my online porno company I names after myself). If they block use of existing trademarked names even though there is clearly a different business, what is the point of having a new TLD space?
I didn't see too much detail , sounds like a lot is still up in the air:
>The resolution, however, was notable for what it did not spell out: How many new suffixes would be approved, whether they would be specific - such as being only for travel agencies - or would be available to anyone, and how trademark infringement would be avoided.
Sounds like this could start way more trouble than it's worth.
>This said though, you are always going to get some customers that are just plain awkward and a pain in the butt, but at least you have something clear to fall back on.
Also you often have the gung-ho salesman who promises the moon to the customer and forgets to tell any of what he's promised to the developers. Seen it a million times.
I'd like to know a lot more about this situation.
Did RazorFish have a decent understanding of the requirements _before_ they made date commitments, or did sales give a date, then a painful process of 'scope discovery/creep' take place as the customer started in with the 'oh by the way's and the 'didn't Sal tell you we wanted xyz?'
Defining requirements and managing scope is crucial to delivering a timely product that meets the customer's needs. Too many times I've seen vendors all too eager to get business and jump in and give dates without fully realizing (or caring) what it is the customer really wants.
The customer is not blameless either. You need to make sure your contractor has a good handle on what you want from the start. In the end, you may be able to sue the vendor for delivering late crap and win, but you are still without whatever it was you needed in the first place.
K, so after skimming the article, IAM got a website dropped on their doorstep, late, which they say has major funtional problems. Man, I don't know... I'm curious about this. At what point did they realize the work that was delivered to them sucked? When it went up live?
If that's the case, not sure if I really have any sympathy. When you set up something as important as your web presence, seems like you should be involved a little more early on in QC.
According to the filing, Razorfish's contract requires the customer to accept or reject deliverables within five days
Gotta read the fine print in those contracts _before_ you make a down-payment. This is BS. I would think if this thing is of any significant size, you would insist on a period of _weeks_ for acceptance test. Chalk this up to inexperience on the part of the customer, I guess?
(ok, I didn't read the article yet, maybe they did user acceptance testing and razorfish refused to make corrections and that's why they're suing?)
I'm not in the web design business, but most of the time when you contract work from someone, you spell out a process for acceptance testing. This is your one and only chance to get things right before they go 'live'. If you find bugs, design errors, or any other 'defects' you have a formal process for recording and tracking them through resolution. If your contractor is not able to correct these defects to your satisfaction, then they may be in breach of contract. (ok, I'll go read it now).
Ah, this was a '70 1/2 Camaro RS that was driven pretty hard!
>in practice those engines were not designed to todays tolerances and so they wouldn't have gone as many miles before the next rebuild anyway.
Probably very true. This was a small block (327) with a 4-bolt main (out of a '69 vette, IIRC) and after it had some 60K+ hard miles on it, it needed a good rebuild (which we certainly gave it!) Man I miss that Car!
>I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and was simply not refined out.
meant to say:
I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and it wasn't simply a matter of it not being refined out, it was added for mechanical reasons for earlier cars.
Oh, I was going to fall back on the 'lead is added as a lubricant' theory. I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and was simply not refined out. I thought it was deliberately added for mechanical reasons.
I once owned a pre-cayalytic converter chevy that ran on leaded gas. When leaded gas became scarce, I didn't think anything about fueling with unleaded. Thought you just couldn't do the other way around (burn lead in a catalytic converter-equipped vehicle).
My friend who saw me using unleaded shreiked at me, something about my valve guides not being brass and that I needed to add lead to keep from burning out my valve guides. Indeed, my local speed shop sold 104+ additive that contained lead and the sales guy told me that unless I replacesd the valve guides with brass, I needed to add lead to keep from burning them out. Don't know if this was really true.
I ended up porting the heads and replacing the valves, guides, rods and rockers and all that later and the guy who did the work did ask me if I wanted brass guides so I could run unleaded.
>I'll bet a dollar on a lark to win 100 Million dollars
Yeah, but it's not you I'm talking about. It's the morons who line up in the local convenience store each week to by 20 or 50 tickets. Those people are the ones who are apparently unable to comprehend the odds. Buying a ticket when the pot is $100 million, I've done that. What does it hurt - I've gotten a bit more than $1 worth of entertainment just from the idle daydreaming about how I'd spend the money and flip off my boss.
Buying 20 tickets, you are giving $20 a week to the government because you are stupid.
Interesting, you can word anything anyway you want:
Q: Is it true that the odds of winning the lottery are worse than being struck by lightning?
A: No, even if we just consider the awarding of large jackpots. In 1996 1,136 people won $1,000,000 or more playing North American lotteries. An additional 4,520 won $100,000 or more. By contrast, 91 people were killed by lightning. In addition, there's no second prize in a lightning strike. In a lottery, you win lesser amounts of money by coming close to the winning numbers. On many games odds of 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 are not uncommon. Lotteries award over $50 million in prizes in North America every day. Lightning isn't nearly that productive.
There are several problems with this defense of the odds of winning the big lottery jackpot vs being struck by lightning.
91 people being killed is not the same as the number of people being struck.
4,250 winning at least $100k isn't the same as winning the big Lotto jackpot of $10 million or more.
Bottom line, playing $10 or more a week on lottery in lieu of saving for retirement demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics.
People who buy a ticket every once in a while when the jackpot is $32 million because it gives them a thrill... I don't see a problem.
People who line up every week and play their numbers and are pissed when they don't win...
> but the biggest problem with Zvezda is the acoustical environment.
Yeah, heard this on Discovery last night as well. They are sending the first crew up there with earplugs to avoid damaging their hearing. They are going to try to fit some noise-reducing things like fan muffles to try and reduce the noise level, but they said that they basically missed the operating noise-level targets. It was likend to being on a busy freeway 24/7. Not an ideal environment for an extended misson.
The other thing I saw they were lacking was micro-meteroid sheilding. I would think this is a far more severe problem? Imagine that sparc station getting hit with an object the size of a b-b travelling at, what, about 30,000 mph? (yeah, I know... I need more coffee, ok?)
He said more or less none. If I were to count Skylab, it would probably be in the "more" category (as in more than 0) but "less" is a close option (as in so far less than Russia as to almost count for nothing?)
or something to the effect that the state is taking advantage of prople who don't grasp the concept of a 1 in 10,000,000,000 chance at $40 million. (you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting the Lotto)
K, that makes sense, I guess. Still, someone pointed out that you still rely on the BIOS to faithfully report the manufacturer's rated speed. Not sure how you ever get past that anyway.
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>I'm exposed to more groups that I wouldnt' have heard of, and I'm much more likely to hear a song or two and like it, then go out and buy the album
Aha! Here is the problem... you aren't buying the music they want you to! You don't think they actually care about you buying a CD from some band that few have ever heard of, do you (despite the fact that their music is really good, afterall).
Nope, they would be perfectly happy if you just ran out and bought CD's of music you hear on the radio. After all, the recording industry has gone to great pains over the years to bring the 'free' radio airplay market under their own control, so they can decide which artists' music you hear and then are likely to go out and buy.
Napster interferes with the RIAA's 'try before you buy' mechanism, the corporately-controlled audio broadcast industry.
Ever wonder why no-talent, interchangeable, over-produced 'artists' like n-Sync and Back Street Boys and Britney Spears and the like get played to death 500 times a day on a million radio stations across the country and their crap CD with one or two popular singles zoom to #1 on the charts with little or no concert tour support or any other visible means of promoting the work? Kids are basically told what music they should like and buy by nationally programmed top 40 radio shows broadcast identically in each and every market by the huge media conglomerates who have bought out all the local stations.
This struck me the other day as I was flipping channels and came across the 'Britney Spears Story' on VH1 or something, and I stopped just long engough to catch the soundbite from one of Sony's executives talking about what a great artist she was because of the x million "units" that she sold in the first few months of her new album.
He didn't talk about her talent, or how she was able to reach her fans, or anything else that I would think defines a "great artist." She is "great" because they are able to make a huge profit off a single artist and sell millions of copies of the CD.
They would rather have 5-10 artists who collectively sell 100 million "units" than 500 who also collectively sell as many CD's. Overhead and economies of scale. Today, it seems its all about maximizing profit margin, growing revenue and cutting expenses. Why put the energy into signing, developing, producing, promoting and distributing the works of hundreds of artists when there is a higher return to be earned by concentrating efforts on much fewer?
I'm sure this has been observed before, but Napster undermines the control that the Recording Industry has over the making ans selling of music. If CD sales are up partially because of Napster, the RIAA sure doesn't care, because record sales lost to piracy isn't the real issue, after all, is it?
It is the erosion of their stranglehold on the production and distribution of recorded music that has them locked in a life and death strugle with Napster.
Yep, same pronunciation as the special components in an aircraft engine that you shouldn't mess with in flight-sim unless you know what you're doing. :-)
(although I would contradict your phonetic spelling: mag-NEE-toh whould probably be correct )
Noticed he slipped "post-Columbine" in there as well... didn't dissapoint me by just rendering a review of the movie on it's merits without miring it in a bunch of geek-cluture rambling. :-)
;-)
BTW, is it "Magneto", or "Magento"? I'm not a comic book reader and I haven't seen the movie... Magneto sounds cool, like some kind of scientific artifact or something, Magento sounds like an interior decorator.
He didn't say it _was_ Napster )at lease reading it over a couple times, I don't see it) He did say "the Napster model" which isn't the same thing at all as saying this is Napster.
Boy, I don't see how this can but end up a bunch of disputes, no matter how they set up the restrictions. I mean, are they going to limit what copyrighted names can be registered in the TLD's at all? If so, it will be a bureaucratic nightmare, I would think.
Something tells me that Chrysler Motor Company is going to get all in a lather about me registering chrysler.xxx (assuming that 'chrysler' happened to be the legit name of my online porno company I names after myself). If they block use of existing trademarked names even though there is clearly a different business, what is the point of having a new TLD space?
I didn't see too much detail , sounds like a lot is still up in the air:
>The resolution, however, was notable for what it did not spell out: How many new suffixes would be approved, whether they would be specific - such as being only for travel agencies - or would be available to anyone, and how trademark infringement would be avoided.
Sounds like this could start way more trouble than it's worth.
I would recommend like this
...and it needs to br about 20 paragraphs longer. This is more like an 'executive summary' of a Katz article.
:)
nice job, though. made me smile on a saturday morning
I agree on the whole...
>This said though, you are always going to get some customers that are just plain awkward and a pain in the butt, but at least you have something clear to fall back on.
Also you often have the gung-ho salesman who promises the moon to the customer and forgets to tell any of what he's promised to the developers. Seen it a million times.
I'd like to know a lot more about this situation.
Did RazorFish have a decent understanding of the requirements _before_ they made date commitments, or did sales give a date, then a painful process of 'scope discovery/creep' take place as the customer started in with the 'oh by the way's and the 'didn't Sal tell you we wanted xyz?'
Defining requirements and managing scope is crucial to delivering a timely product that meets the customer's needs. Too many times I've seen vendors all too eager to get business and jump in and give dates without fully realizing (or caring) what it is the customer really wants.
The customer is not blameless either. You need to make sure your contractor has a good handle on what you want from the start. In the end, you may be able to sue the vendor for delivering late crap and win, but you are still without whatever it was you needed in the first place.
If that's the case, not sure if I really have any sympathy. When you set up something as important as your web presence, seems like you should be involved a little more early on in QC.
According to the filing, Razorfish's contract requires the customer to accept or reject deliverables within five days
Gotta read the fine print in those contracts _before_ you make a down-payment. This is BS. I would think if this thing is of any significant size, you would insist on a period of _weeks_ for acceptance test. Chalk this up to inexperience on the part of the customer, I guess?
U. A. T.
(ok, I didn't read the article yet, maybe they did user acceptance testing and razorfish refused to make corrections and that's why they're suing?)
I'm not in the web design business, but most of the time when you contract work from someone, you spell out a process for acceptance testing. This is your one and only chance to get things right before they go 'live'. If you find bugs, design errors, or any other 'defects' you have a formal process for recording and tracking them through resolution. If your contractor is not able to correct these defects to your satisfaction, then they may be in breach of contract. (ok, I'll go read it now).
>The ones that had problems were driven hard.
Ah, this was a '70 1/2 Camaro RS that was driven pretty hard!
>in practice those engines were not designed to todays tolerances and so they wouldn't have gone as many miles before the next rebuild anyway.
Probably very true. This was a small block (327) with a 4-bolt main (out of a '69 vette, IIRC) and after it had some 60K+ hard miles on it, it needed a good rebuild (which we certainly gave it!) Man I miss that Car!
>I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and was simply not refined out.
meant to say:
I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and it wasn't simply a matter of it not being refined out, it was added for mechanical reasons for earlier cars.
Oh, I was going to fall back on the 'lead is added as a lubricant' theory. I didn't think lead was naturally occuring in petrol and was simply not refined out. I thought it was deliberately added for mechanical reasons.
I once owned a pre-cayalytic converter chevy that ran on leaded gas. When leaded gas became scarce, I didn't think anything about fueling with unleaded. Thought you just couldn't do the other way around (burn lead in a catalytic converter-equipped vehicle).
My friend who saw me using unleaded shreiked at me, something about my valve guides not being brass and that I needed to add lead to keep from burning out my valve guides. Indeed, my local speed shop sold 104+ additive that contained lead and the sales guy told me that unless I replacesd the valve guides with brass, I needed to add lead to keep from burning them out. Don't know if this was really true.
I ended up porting the heads and replacing the valves, guides, rods and rockers and all that later and the guy who did the work did ask me if I wanted brass guides so I could run unleaded.
*shrug*
>one of the captains who charted its cost
really? how interesting! and how much did it cost?
I'll give you a topic...
British Columbia... is neither British, nor Columbian...
Talk amongst yourselves...
OT: Nick is going to start airing the original R&S episodes again soon. Keep the kids away from the TV! :-)
"get your discount lotto tickets right here, 1/2 price and only 1/100,000,000% less chance of winning than full-fare tickets"
"I'll take one!"
"here"
"Hey, wait, these are from yesteday's drawing!"
(apologies to Scott Adams as I no doubtedly mangles a very funny comic)
>I'll bet a dollar on a lark to win 100 Million dollars
Yeah, but it's not you I'm talking about. It's the morons who line up in the local convenience store each week to by 20 or 50 tickets. Those people are the ones who are apparently unable to comprehend the odds. Buying a ticket when the pot is $100 million, I've done that. What does it hurt - I've gotten a bit more than $1 worth of entertainment just from the idle daydreaming about how I'd spend the money and flip off my boss.
Buying 20 tickets, you are giving $20 a week to the government because you are stupid.
Q: Is it true that the odds of winning the lottery are worse than being struck by lightning?
A: No, even if we just consider the awarding of large jackpots. In 1996 1,136 people won $1,000,000 or more playing North American lotteries. An additional 4,520 won $100,000 or more. By contrast, 91 people were killed by lightning. In addition, there's no second prize in a lightning strike. In a lottery, you win lesser amounts of money by coming close to the winning numbers. On many games odds of 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 are not uncommon. Lotteries award over $50 million in prizes in North America every day. Lightning isn't nearly that productive.
There are several problems with this defense of the odds of winning the big lottery jackpot vs being struck by lightning.
91 people being killed is not the same as the number of people being struck.
4,250 winning at least $100k isn't the same as winning the big Lotto jackpot of $10 million or more.
Bottom line, playing $10 or more a week on lottery in lieu of saving for retirement demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics.
People who buy a ticket every once in a while when the jackpot is $32 million because it gives them a thrill... I don't see a problem.
People who line up every week and play their numbers and are pissed when they don't win...
k, thanks for clearing that up. So, you are saying the old B-man was a flamer then, eh? :-)
> but the biggest problem with Zvezda is the acoustical environment.
Yeah, heard this on Discovery last night as well. They are sending the first crew up there with earplugs to avoid damaging their hearing. They are going to try to fit some noise-reducing things like fan muffles to try and reduce the noise level, but they said that they basically missed the operating noise-level targets. It was likend to being on a busy freeway 24/7. Not an ideal environment for an extended misson.
The other thing I saw they were lacking was micro-meteroid sheilding. I would think this is a far more severe problem? Imagine that sparc station getting hit with an object the size of a b-b travelling at, what, about 30,000 mph? (yeah, I know... I need more coffee, ok?)
He said more or less none. If I were to count Skylab, it would probably be in the "more" category (as in more than 0) but "less" is a close option (as in so far less than Russia as to almost count for nothing?)
I thought a state-run lottery was
"A tax on people who are really bad at math."
or something to the effect that the state is taking advantage of prople who don't grasp the concept of a 1 in 10,000,000,000 chance at $40 million. (you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting the Lotto)
>He just never slept with.. Erm.. Hm..
Really? Thought he had a one-nighter with Vicki Vail (or what was her name... newspaper reporter that Michael Keaton banged in the first movie?)
K, that makes sense, I guess. Still, someone pointed out that you still rely on the BIOS to faithfully report the manufacturer's rated speed. Not sure how you ever get past that anyway.