I've lived in quite a few places, and one of them was Poland before the wall fell, and you'd be amazed what kind of inventiveness your precious government comes up with when there is an ID requirement.
Just to name a few:
- the draft - turning it into a tracker by requiring it to be used for more and more 'transactions' (see a book called 'this perfect day' by Ira Levin) - instant 'fake' ids for govt operatives that disappear after their single use - requiring you to 'check in' with your id card periodically if you're considered a security risk (and to be able to apprehend you if you do not the first time you have to use your card elsewhere)
and on and on and on.
1984 is really a date in the past you know... and it's us ordinary thinking persons that bringing it on.
It's called the slippery slope, ID cards today, totalitarian police state with absolute control tomorrow (or the day after).
Imagine if our friend from WWII would have had access to technology like this, there would have been no resistance at all.
thank you for correcting my spelling in such a friendly and constructive way.
English not being my first language still shows, but then again I only have about 5 other languages current so I guess I'll just have to work a little harder on being having critics attack the format rather than the message.
The product is doing fine, thank you, my email is 'j@ww.com' and I didn't get that domain with a packet of butter. It's just that when I compare googles claims of clicks sent with our own internal logs of clicks received there is a vast discrepancy, which inflates the value of their traffic to the point where we make about as much as we spend on the ads, which means that effectively we'd be working for Google by continuing to do that. If your margins are much better than ours then you can probably afford it, but for ME it doesn't work at all.
best regards, and good luck with your considerate and articulate responses.
well, after having spent upwards of $10K on adwords I have but one little comment to add: it doens't work. period.
Google systematically overreports the number of people they claim they send you, and there is no arguing with them about this, it's their way or the highway. Since the total traffic from this source is not a very large factor in our overall operation I've decided to simply shut it down instead of trying to get them to reason about this.
Clickfraud, both on the channel and on the big G by your friendly competitors/unscrupulous website owners is rampant, and Google doesn't do a thing about it because it would cut into their business.
It's what killed 24/7, we'll see how Google responds in the long run.
Oh, and 'do no evil', how politically correct, how about 'do good' ?
Re:Slashdot only posts Stuff That Matters!
on
Idle Loop Optimized
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· Score: 1
you know what, I've had it. I'm taking a 30 day break from slashdot in 'return' for all the great stuff that has been posted today.
> Why should I carry on making music, if the public opinion persists that as soon as an album is recorded, it's worthless and everyone should be allowed to freely make copies of it. Why should anyone?
That is an *excellent* question to ask, and the answer appearantly is 'no'. Nobody forces you to be in the music business.
The problem here is that times change, and what was a potential living (even potentially lucrative) may not be a living next year. So, if instead of 'standing up for your rights' (which does not seem to have any tangible effect other than that it lets you blow off steam) you shift along with the changing times then I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get some food back on the table. 'Standing up for your rights' may feel good but it won't feed you and your family, simple as that.
I don't even think that most people sharing your album via peer-to-peer are doing so out of malice, they probably do so because they think the music is nice and have no idea who you are or what your situation is.
One thing I would do if I were a musician is to release the files myself, make sure they're lousy quality and put a url in the filename where you can get the album. That way you use peer to peer for yourself instead of having it use you.
Think of it as free publicity. And sure, there's tons of 'leeches' out there, people that will use your services and do anything to try not to pay for it, and if you're in a line of business where all you really do is produce bits (after all is said and done, the fact that both audio and video are 'information' does not really help here) makes making a living off those bits without a proper control mechanism impossible.
And no laws or anything at all is ever going to change that, to the 'common man' it's just a feeling of getting back at the music companies and the insanely rich (the ones that are in the news all the time) for fleecing them for years.
Sure, nobody forced anybody to buy cd's, but that's the way people are, usually a little less than rational.
Again, if you insist on making money off music then you're fine in doing that but that road right now is full of perils, better dig up some other marketable skill that is less easy to pirate.
For me it meant a switch from licensed software to a service model, the music equivalent would be to go touring and charge for access. But you have to be damn good and have a bit of a 'name' to make that work and I don't know if that's an option.
Also you seem to generalise about 'all' people that would buy your music. Keep in mind that if you sell your music over the internet that you are literally selling it to the people that have the means and opportunity to do that which you fear most (pirate your music). If you were to do mail order and catalogue sales only that chance would be a little smaller.
Most sales in the music world are 'repeat sales' to people that already know you and that you can hit up easier the next time around (provided you can produce something of constant quality). So based on that you can use your existing customer base to get some recurring cash in the knowledge that a few weeks (or days, or sometimes hours) after you do your release it will be on kazaa or whatnot. And if that risk is too large then you will just have to adapt and move on to something else, it happens to almost everybody at least once, and the thing that I have noticed is that the people that eventually make it and those that do not differ in only one respect, they don't whine or bitch, they act and move on.
Cut your losses while you can, cross out the money you have invested, take up that new hobby of yours called 'music' that you may or may not make some money of one day (but probably not any time soon) and get it over with...
you are so incredibly lucky to be born where you were and not a few hundred miles south or you'd likely be singing a different tune.
Yes, your wifes parents came to the states legally, but as you may have noticed it has become a lot harder in recent years to immigrate legally and quite a few people are so desperate that they try the illegal route.
not that that kind of desperation would mean anything to you with your 'spanish wife', as if that's an excuse to be a jerk...
Wished you had to live for a couple of years in Mx or Colombia or so and we'll see what you think about illegal immigration, you just might find yourself on a little boat trying to do just that (or sneaking across a border at night).
Why, yes ! It will take a long long *LONG* time before terrorists have been able to inflict on nation states the same kind of damage that nationstates have been able to inflict on each other, or in some cases on their own citizens (China & Russia come to mind, but there are plenty of other 'good' examples of this behaviour).
9/11 has been used to hijack your country in to a stampede towards a police state that used to have its equivalent only in the baltic region of Europe.
I should know, I've been there and I've been to the USA. It used to be easier to cross the East-West German border at the height of the cold war than it is today to pass through the US/Canadian border for a visit to a friend. I'm not kidding you about this.
Never before have I been so harassed at a border that I have already passed at least 50 times before, if I was a terrorist I'd choose a different route entirely. Which moron terrorist would have any contraband on them when crossing over anyway (and that kind of thing is still possible because they're only spotchecks, not all out checks of every vehicle).
Either get serious about this or stop harassing the common folks that are no threat at all, until then all this is just fear mongering and a way to line some 'priviliged' companies and their CEOs pockets.
I realise that terror is the hardest thing to deal with, but I do not see the same irrational responses that I see in the US in say Spain, which has had a similar experience and in more recent memory.
All of Ireland has had to deal with that problem for the longest time, the same goes for many other places in the world. Nowhere near as much use of the publicity around the incidents to use them for political gain.
"I'm a war president" Yeah right, first *make* the war, then use that war to prolong your reign. It makes no sense to me (and it doesn't seem to make sense to about half the US population, but what with the political system being what it is roughly 2% of the US decides the elections these days).
reality checks are long overdue, and the longer it takes before they are effected the heavier they'll be.
If congress would be as worried about human life as they claim to be then DONT START WARS and stop enacting the death penalty.
And if you can't do that then at least don't be a hypocrite, choose one, pro life or not. (as if being for the right to choose makes one 'against life').
totally slipped my mind, as did those funny fidonet addresses.
This stuff really has evolved. If the rest of the world would evolve at the speed of the net we'd probably be able to fully appreciate one of DNA's characters in the guide that evolves so fast by the time it has reached for the tea it no longer can drink it.
Makes you wonder though if we've reached a point where that progress will slow down a bit, IPV6 seems to be stalled indefinitely wrt large scale deployment, and some other technologies that were supposed to supplant older ones are not deployed as much as was expected (XML'ized html for instance).
Registrant: Aero.com
14881 East Hills Dr.
San Jose, CA 95127
US
Domain Name: AERO.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Voloshin, Paul info@AERO.COM
Aero.Com
14881 E HILLS DR
SAN JOSE, CA 95127-2521
US
408-923-6500 fax: 408-923-7500
I'm sure Boeing, Embraer and Airbus will fall all over themselves to make that happen...
routing tables would be *enormous*, and IPS would have to be locked to certain parties, otherwise it would be impossible to switch from one provider to another for hosting a server...
Recall that in the 'old' days a machine had a fixed IP and stayed there pretty much forever (some university box somewhere or so), and you got a class 'C' for the asking (I had two or so back in '98 still), and those ranges where 'portable', in other words if you switched provider you could take them along with you causing all kinds of routing nightmares.
Now all you do is change your dns entries and you're done... Easy as pie.
So, *YES* DNS *IS* GOOD !
without it the net as you know it would not be possible. Humans like names, not numbers. Hard enough to remember you own phone number, let alone the ips of all the websites whose url you type in to the browser.
Try living without the DNS for a week or so and we'll talk:)
Agreed, music isn't 'easy', but once the dough starts rolling in you don't actually have to go out and do much to get that recurring income.
I know it takes a lot of effort to make good music, everybody that knows me will readily agree I'm a lousy musician:)
Still, music is a *luxury*, and to be able to live off making music a bigger luxury still. For the longest time (pretty much until the advent of the record player) living off your music meant touring and performing. None of that 'steady life' feeling while being able to rake in the dough.
Music does not really count as a marketable skill unless you have tons of connections or are literally able to dedicate your life to it. But even then you can not reasonably expect to have a 'right' to make a living of it.
Look at this whole episode this way: If you have spent 10K and lost it you have gambled a lot of your kids potential food, and the copy cats are not the ones who are to blame, you are. I know that's harsh, but by externalising the blame for the situation you are really trying to sidestep the issue, which is: what are you going to do about it ?
Obviously music as a living is currently not in the cards, so I hope there's other stuff you can do besides that. I commend you for trying, but no harm in failing, 8 out of 10 business ventures fail, and 2 of the 10 will manage to sustain themselves. One in a hundred or so becomes a cash cow.
Another thing is that even though you've lost 10K you should probably count your blessings. If this thing had been moderately successful you might have done it again at the expense of a lot of time, which you could spend better at making back that cash you just lost and moving on to something with more profit.
Music as a hobby ? Great ! Music for a living ? No thanks, too many factors out of your control.
I really wish you good luck, it's not easy to have a kid (and possibly a spouse) and literally no food on the table. But it says more about your planning abilities (as it said a lot about mine when I found myself in that situation) than about the 'meanness' of those who pirate your music.
To them, it's just another song, if they weren't playing yours they'd be playing someone elses, to you it's your life. I can see both sides in perspective, time for you to move on and check your priorities. Unfortunately there is no automatic right to an income from ones hard work.
Come to think of it when I worked hardest I earned the least and vice versa, which is one thing I never really understood.
so now we get to the meat of the matter. It's ok to use the internet as a distribution medium when it suits you, but others can not use the internet as a distribution medium when it suits them...
that's not fair.
Oh, and on the subject of 'rights', as the RIAA where Janis Ian's last royalty check went, she's waiting for it and while not exactly starving I think she has a 'right' to that check, more than you have a 'right' to your sales. You fantasize what your sales would have been in some alternative universe that would have come to pass had those evil peer-to-peer people not shared your album, but in real life you have to admit that you really don't know what sales would have been. Maybe they would have stayed level, maybe they would have gone down, maybe they would have gone up... but you'll never know which. All you really know is that your sales tanked and that you draw inference from the fact that your files where shared on p2p networks at about the same time that you 'lost money', but that's not proof, it's just conjecture.
Maybe the music sucks, maybe the peer to peer thing really did kill it, nobody knows.
But bitching about it is not going to change anything.
I write software for a living, I got burned badly once so I don't do open source. Closed source works for me, makes me good cash, even though my customers can copy the software in a heartbeat.
I also use the internet as a medium for distribution, both to reach my customers as well as a way to run services at a level that I could not dream of if the net would not have been there.
I did have to 'change my approach' because of the net, and am now much more service oriented (and that's still in development, even after 6 years) than I used to be.
Piracy of any 'intangible' is going to be a matter of fact. The hard part for you seems to be investing a good chunk of cash into something that you *hoped* would pan out.
If I only had 10K I surely would not spend it on something as risky as a small time record release, I'd save it for a rainy day and go to work on something that would not involve a gamble of that magnitude. I know that's hindsight, but really enough other people have been there and done that so claiming ignorance about the reality of file sharing on the net after napster hit is really not an option.
There's nothing harder than to have to give up 'easy money' and to go back to working for a living.
Nothing wrong with it either, it happens to almost everybody who had 'easy money' at some point in their life and forgot to plan for what they were going to do if it ever failed to come in.
Sounds like instead of whining here on / you should go out and try to find some employment before your 'kid starves'. I've been there at some point in the past - that almost starving kid -, no housing and so on and fought my way out of it, whining was not an option. Which makes me think that you either don't have a real problem just yet (you'd have no time to whine) or you're out of touch with reality and somehow hope for the gravy train to start up again.
Honest advice: Shut down that computer and go and do something that makes you some money today instead of bitching here.
hehe, that means politicians are pretty much equal to counterfeiters, they are very adept at producing 'a general lack of faith and confidence in the dollar'.
In fact counterfeiting doesn't even come close to the kind of effect a good elected official can achieve in this respect:)
Google goes out of their way to make their 'ad' clicks look like they are really search result clicks,/me thinks this is just another way of pumping up the ad revenue by suggesting that google is causing a lot more traffic than they really do.
I've been doing some advertising on google lately, and have yet to see any significant correlation between what google claims they're sending and what I'm actually receiving.
When contacted about this they come up with all kinds of lame reasons why this is the case...
This 'tactic' will make it look like I'm receiving far more traffic from google than I really do.
don't know which parts of europe you have looked at, but that's a fairly sweeping and in my - large - european experience totally baseless...
I've seen more kids drunk in Canada / US then I have seen in Europe... And I have seen many more kids in Europe. So by the numbers I should have seen more drunk kids in Europe, in case you didn't get it, but I can recall only a few from my schooldays. I've lived in NL, PL and have spent a lot of time in Belgium, Spain and France, less in Italy and Switzerland. Still have to come across my first 12 year old outside of france that I see consuming alcohol, still have to come across my first 15 year old that I've seen drunk there. In Canada and the US where I've spent a lot of time recently minors being drunk is so common it's not even funny.
there's this ancient protocol called 'ftp', and a program called 'ftp.exe'.
Personally I think unbundling is not the way to go, every producer of a 'non-standard' file format should produce either an XML spec of said file format or produce a c version using nothing but the standard library that reads the data into a meaningful data structure.
That would go a very long way towards making applications interoperable. Try opening a DXF file generated by autocad in to Qcad to get my drift, even though autocad is supposedly 'open' because they have some whacky definition available. Not that you'd ever be able to do anything useful with that spec, believe me I've tried.
Better yet, make XML formats *mandatory* for every app sold.
now he'll have to spend the rest of his life
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Book 'Em, Dano
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Get me a working (and I mean REALLY WORKING) speech input device and I'll shower you with dollars, get me more eye candy and I'll just have to switch off more stuff when I configure a new desktop.
All this theming and other bs is just distracting from the real issue, which is can you get some work done with this machine or are you going to sit there tweaking the fluff all day long ?
Way too much attention to form, too little on content.
hell, I hate to break this to you, but consider this:
If our universe had to be so finely tuned to produce life and we live in it doesn't that exactly prove *nothing* ? It would be more surprising if we lived in one of those universes that can not support life:)
theology starts where cosmology ends, and the boundary keeps being pushed back further and further, the smart money is on positioning god *before* the big bang, at least it will be nicely untestable for a long long time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived in quite a few places, and one of them was Poland before the wall fell, and you'd be amazed what kind of inventiveness your precious government comes up with when there is an ID requirement.
Just to name a few:
- the draft
- turning it into a tracker by requiring it to be used for more and more 'transactions' (see a book called 'this perfect day' by Ira Levin)
- instant 'fake' ids for govt operatives that disappear after their single use
- requiring you to 'check in' with your id card periodically if you're considered a security risk (and to be able to apprehend you if you do not the first time you have to use your card elsewhere)
and on and on and on.
1984 is really a date in the past you know... and it's us ordinary thinking persons that bringing it on.
It's called the slippery slope, ID cards today, totalitarian police state with absolute control tomorrow (or the day after).
Imagine if our friend from WWII would have had access to technology like this, there would have been no resistance at all.
in other news, Apple rumoured to have ported OS/X to intel...
thank you for correcting my spelling in such a friendly and constructive way.
English not being my first language still shows, but then again I only have about 5 other languages current so I guess I'll just have to work a little harder on being having critics attack the format rather than the message.
The product is doing fine, thank you, my email is 'j@ww.com' and I didn't get that domain with a packet of butter. It's just that when I compare googles claims of clicks sent with our own internal logs of clicks received there is a vast discrepancy, which inflates the value of their traffic to the point where we make about as much as we spend on the ads, which means that effectively we'd be working for Google by continuing to do that. If your margins are much better than ours then you can probably afford it, but for ME it doesn't work at all.
best regards, and good luck with your considerate and articulate responses.
Jacques Mattheij
CEO ww.com
well, after having spent upwards of $10K on adwords I have but one little comment to add: it doens't work. period.
Google systematically overreports the number of people they claim they send you, and there is no arguing with them about this, it's their way or the highway. Since the total traffic from this source is not a very large factor in our overall operation I've decided to simply shut it down instead of trying to get them to reason about this.
Clickfraud, both on the channel and on the big G by your friendly competitors/unscrupulous website owners is rampant, and Google doesn't do a thing about it because it would cut into their business.
It's what killed 24/7, we'll see how Google responds in the long run.
Oh, and 'do no evil', how politically correct, how about 'do good' ?
you know what, I've had it. I'm taking a 30 day break from slashdot in 'return' for all the great stuff that has been posted today.
ciao guys, see you on May 1st.
> Why should I carry on making music, if the public opinion persists that as soon as an album is recorded, it's worthless and everyone should be allowed to freely make copies of it. Why should anyone?
That is an *excellent* question to ask, and the answer appearantly is 'no'. Nobody forces you to be in the music business.
The problem here is that times change, and what was a potential living (even potentially lucrative) may not be a living next year. So, if instead of 'standing up for your rights' (which does not seem to have any tangible effect other than that it lets you blow off steam) you shift along with the changing times then I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get some food back on the table. 'Standing up for your rights' may feel good but it won't feed you and your family, simple as that.
I don't even think that most people sharing your album via peer-to-peer are doing so out of malice, they probably do so because they think the music is nice and have no idea who you are or what your situation is.
One thing I would do if I were a musician is to release the files myself, make sure they're lousy quality and put a url in the filename where you can get the album. That way you use peer to peer for yourself instead of having it use you.
Think of it as free publicity. And sure, there's tons of 'leeches' out there, people that will use your services and do anything to try not to pay for it, and if you're in a line of business where all you really do is produce bits (after all is said and done, the fact that both audio and video are 'information' does not really help here) makes making a living off those bits without a proper control mechanism impossible.
And no laws or anything at all is ever going to change that, to the 'common man' it's just a feeling of getting back at the music companies and the insanely rich (the ones that are in the news all the time) for fleecing them for years.
Sure, nobody forced anybody to buy cd's, but that's the way people are, usually a little less than rational.
Again, if you insist on making money off music then you're fine in doing that but that road right now is full of perils, better dig up some other marketable skill that is less easy to pirate.
For me it meant a switch from licensed software to a service model, the music equivalent would be to go touring and charge for access. But you have to be damn good and have a bit of a 'name' to make that work and I don't know if that's an option.
Also you seem to generalise about 'all' people that would buy your music. Keep in mind that if you sell your music over the internet that you are literally selling it to the people that have the means and opportunity to do that which you fear most (pirate your music). If you were to do
mail order and catalogue sales only that chance would be a little smaller.
Most sales in the music world are 'repeat sales' to people that already know you and that you can hit up easier the next time around (provided you can produce something of constant quality). So based on that you can use your existing customer base to get some recurring cash in the knowledge that a few weeks (or days, or sometimes hours) after you do your release it will be on kazaa or whatnot. And if that risk is too large then you will just have to adapt and move on to something else, it happens to almost everybody at least once, and the thing that I have noticed is that the people that eventually make it and those that do not differ in only one respect, they don't whine or bitch, they act and move on.
Cut your losses while you can, cross out the money you have invested, take up that new hobby of yours called 'music' that you may or may not make some money of one day (but probably not any time soon) and get it over with...
you are so incredibly lucky to be born where you were and not a few hundred miles south or you'd likely be singing a different tune.
Yes, your wifes parents came to the states legally, but as you may have noticed it has become a lot harder in recent years to immigrate legally and quite a few people are so desperate that they try the illegal route.
not that that kind of desperation would mean anything to you with your 'spanish wife', as if that's an excuse to be a jerk...
Wished you had to live for a couple of years in Mx or Colombia or so and we'll see what you think about illegal immigration, you just might find yourself on a little boat trying to do just that (or sneaking across a border at night).
makes you wonder why they call them anonymous cowards...
is the threat overstated ?
Why, yes ! It will take a long long *LONG* time before terrorists have been able to inflict on nation states the same kind of damage that nationstates have been able to inflict on each other, or in some cases on their own citizens (China & Russia come to mind, but there are plenty of other 'good' examples of this behaviour).
9/11 has been used to hijack your country in to a stampede towards a police state that used to have its equivalent only in the baltic region of Europe.
I should know, I've been there and I've been to the USA. It used to be easier to cross the East-West German border at the height of the cold war than it is today to pass through the US/Canadian border for a visit to a friend. I'm not kidding you about this.
Never before have I been so harassed at a border that I have already passed at least 50 times before, if I was a terrorist I'd choose a different route entirely. Which moron terrorist would have any contraband on them when crossing over anyway (and that kind of thing is still possible because they're only spotchecks, not all out checks of every vehicle).
Either get serious about this or stop harassing the common folks that are no threat at all, until then all this is just fear mongering and a way to line some 'priviliged' companies and their CEOs pockets.
I realise that terror is the hardest thing to deal with, but I do not see the same irrational responses that I see in the US in say Spain, which has had a similar experience and in more recent memory.
All of Ireland has had to deal with that problem for the longest time, the same goes for many other places in the world. Nowhere near as much use of the publicity around the incidents to use them for political gain.
"I'm a war president" Yeah right, first *make* the war, then use that war to prolong your reign. It makes no sense to me (and it doesn't seem to make sense to about half the US population, but what with the political system being what it is roughly 2% of the US decides the elections these days).
reality checks are long overdue, and the longer it takes before they are effected the heavier they'll be.
If congress would be as worried about human life as they claim to be then DONT START WARS and stop enacting the death penalty.
And if you can't do that then at least don't be a hypocrite, choose one, pro life or not. (as if being for the right to choose makes one 'against life').
endrant...
hehe, yes, there's that too :)
totally slipped my mind, as did those funny fidonet addresses.
This stuff really has evolved. If the rest of the world would evolve at the speed of the net we'd probably be able to fully appreciate one of DNA's characters in the guide that evolves so fast by the time it has reached for the tea it no longer can drink it.
Makes you wonder though if we've reached a point where that progress will slow down a bit, IPV6 seems to be stalled indefinitely wrt large scale deployment, and some other technologies that were supposed to supplant older ones are not deployed as much as was expected (XML'ized html for instance).
we sure live in interesting times !
great idea, give these dudes a call:
Registrant:
Aero.com
14881 East Hills Dr.
San Jose, CA 95127
US
Domain Name: AERO.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Voloshin, Paul info@AERO.COM
Aero.Com
14881 E HILLS DR
SAN JOSE, CA 95127-2521
US
408-923-6500 fax: 408-923-7500
I'm sure Boeing, Embraer and Airbus will fall all over themselves to make that happen...
routing tables would be *enormous*, and IPS would have to be locked to certain parties, otherwise it would be impossible to switch from one provider to another for hosting a server...
:)
Recall that in the 'old' days a machine had a fixed IP and stayed there pretty much forever (some university box somewhere or so), and you got a class 'C' for the asking (I had two or so back in '98 still), and those ranges where 'portable', in other words if you switched provider you could take them along with you causing all kinds of routing nightmares.
Now all you do is change your dns entries and you're done... Easy as pie.
So, *YES* DNS *IS* GOOD !
without it the net as you know it would not be possible. Humans like names, not numbers. Hard enough to remember you own phone number, let alone the ips of all the websites whose url you type in to the browser.
Try living without the DNS for a week or so and we'll talk
Agreed, music isn't 'easy', but once the dough starts rolling in you don't actually have to go out and do much to get that recurring income.
:)
I know it takes a lot of effort to make good music, everybody that knows me will readily agree I'm a lousy musician
Still, music is a *luxury*, and to be able to live off making music a bigger luxury still. For the longest time (pretty much until the advent of the record player) living off your music meant touring and performing. None of that 'steady life' feeling while being able to rake in the dough.
Music does not really count as a marketable skill unless you have tons of connections or are literally able to dedicate your life to it. But even then you can not reasonably expect to have a 'right' to make a living of it.
Look at this whole episode this way: If you have spent 10K and lost it you have gambled a lot of your kids potential food, and the copy cats are not the ones who are to blame, you are. I know that's harsh, but by externalising the blame for the situation you are really trying to sidestep the issue, which is: what are you going to do about it ?
Obviously music as a living is currently not in the cards, so I hope there's other stuff you can do besides that. I commend you for trying, but no harm in failing, 8 out of 10 business ventures fail, and 2 of the 10 will manage to sustain themselves. One in a hundred or so becomes a cash cow.
Another thing is that even though you've lost 10K you should probably count your blessings. If this thing had been moderately successful you might have done it again at the expense of a lot of time, which you could spend better at making back that cash you just lost and moving on to something with more profit.
Music as a hobby ? Great ! Music for a living ? No thanks, too many factors out of your control.
I really wish you good luck, it's not easy to have a kid (and possibly a spouse) and literally no food on the table. But it says more about your planning abilities (as it said a lot about mine when I found myself in that situation) than about the 'meanness' of those who pirate your music.
To them, it's just another song, if they weren't playing yours they'd be playing someone elses, to you it's your life. I can see both sides in perspective, time for you to move on and check your priorities. Unfortunately there is no automatic right to an income from ones hard work.
Come to think of it when I worked hardest I earned the least and vice versa, which is one thing I never really understood.
so now we get to the meat of the matter. It's ok to use the internet as a distribution medium when it suits you, but others can not use the internet as a distribution medium when it suits them...
that's not fair.
Oh, and on the subject of 'rights', as the RIAA where Janis Ian's last royalty check went, she's waiting for it and while not exactly starving I think she has a 'right' to that check, more than you have a 'right' to your sales. You fantasize what your sales would have been in some alternative universe that would have come to pass had those evil peer-to-peer people not shared your album, but in real life you have to admit that you really don't know what sales would have been. Maybe they would have stayed level, maybe they would have gone down, maybe they would have gone up... but you'll never know which. All you really know is that your sales tanked and that you draw inference from the fact that your files where shared on p2p networks at about the same time that you 'lost money', but that's not proof, it's just conjecture.
Maybe the music sucks, maybe the peer to peer thing really did kill it, nobody knows.
But bitching about it is not going to change anything.
I write software for a living, I got burned badly once so I don't do open source. Closed source works for me, makes me good cash, even though my customers can copy the software in a heartbeat.
I also use the internet as a medium for distribution, both to reach my customers as well as a way to run services at a level that I could not dream of if the net would not have been there.
I did have to 'change my approach' because of the net, and am now much more service oriented (and that's still in development, even after 6 years) than I used to be.
Piracy of any 'intangible' is going to be a matter of fact. The hard part for you seems to be investing a good chunk of cash into something that you *hoped* would pan out.
If I only had 10K I surely would not spend it on something as risky as a small time record release, I'd save it for a rainy day and go to work on something that would not involve a gamble of that magnitude. I know that's hindsight, but really enough other people have been there and done that so claiming ignorance about the reality of file sharing on the net after napster hit is really not an option.
There's nothing harder than to have to give up 'easy money' and to go back to working for a living.
Nothing wrong with it either, it happens to almost everybody who had 'easy money' at some point in their life and forgot to plan for what they were going to do if it ever failed to come in.
Sounds like instead of whining here on / you should go out and try to find some employment before your 'kid starves'. I've been there at some point in the past - that almost starving kid -, no housing and so on and fought my way out of it, whining was not an option. Which makes me think that you either don't have a real problem just yet (you'd have no time to whine) or you're out of touch with reality and somehow hope for the gravy train to start up again.
Honest advice: Shut down that computer and go and do something that makes you some money today instead of bitching here.
hehe, that means politicians are pretty much equal to counterfeiters, they are very adept at producing 'a general lack of faith and confidence in the dollar'.
:)
In fact counterfeiting doesn't even come close to the kind of effect a good elected official can achieve in this respect
I've been doing some advertising on google lately, and have yet to see any significant correlation between what google claims they're sending and what I'm actually receiving.
When contacted about this they come up with all kinds of lame reasons why this is the case...
This 'tactic' will make it look like I'm receiving far more traffic from google than I really do.
don't know which parts of europe you have looked at, but that's a fairly sweeping and in my - large - european experience totally baseless...
I've seen more kids drunk in Canada / US then I have seen in Europe... And I have seen many more kids in Europe. So by the numbers I should have seen more drunk kids in Europe, in case you didn't get it, but I can recall only a few from my schooldays. I've lived in NL, PL and have spent a lot of time in Belgium, Spain and France, less in Italy and Switzerland. Still have to come across my first 12 year old outside of france that I see consuming alcohol, still have to come across my first 15 year old that I've seen drunk there. In Canada and the US where I've spent a lot of time recently minors being drunk is so common it's not even funny.
there's this ancient protocol called 'ftp', and a program called 'ftp.exe'.
Personally I think unbundling is not the way to go, every producer of a 'non-standard' file format should produce either an XML spec of said file format or produce a c version using nothing but the standard library that reads the data into a meaningful data structure.
That would go a very long way towards making applications interoperable. Try opening a DXF file generated by autocad in to Qcad to get my drift, even though autocad is supposedly 'open' because they have some whacky definition available. Not that you'd ever be able to do anything useful with that spec, believe me I've tried.
Better yet, make XML formats *mandatory* for every app sold.
on the run for the library policemen...
Sorry, but I don't go for eye candy.
I have all the 'fluff' switched off.
Get me a working (and I mean REALLY WORKING) speech input device and I'll shower you with dollars, get me more eye candy and I'll just have to switch off more stuff when I configure a new desktop.
All this theming and other bs is just distracting from the real issue, which is can you get some work done with this machine or are you going to sit there tweaking the fluff all day long ?
Way too much attention to form, too little on content.
trust me on this one, no they're not...
hell, I hate to break this to you, but consider this:
:)
If our universe had to be so finely tuned to produce life and we live in it doesn't that exactly prove *nothing* ? It would be more surprising if we lived in one of those universes that can not support life
theology starts where cosmology ends, and the boundary keeps being pushed back further and further, the smart money is on positioning god *before* the big bang, at least it will be nicely untestable for a long long time.
cuba might put a stamp in your passport
How backward ? Yes, indeed try to travel to Cuba then...