Libraries have always been "censored" - there has never been a library that has carried every single book & periodical in existence, so I don't see any moral mandate for a library to allow for unlimited internet access.
Every time a librarian chooses to purchase or not purchase a book, they're engaging in "censorship". How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?
What is the matter with this proposal: Blocking software is installed in a library, perhaps even one with a high degree of false positives. If a site happens to be blocked, a patron would come up to the librarian and request that the site be enabled. The librarian would check the site from their desk workstation, and if it was deemed appropriate, the block would be lifted. This is essentially the role librarians have always had: organizers & diseminators of information.
The only condition would be that blocking software operates by allowing selective enabling rules to override the built-in rules. I assume most have this feature; not being a user of the software I don't know the details.
You guys are just proving his point. It's almost impossible to come to a consensus on what was the definitive 90's music. The point is that in any given era there will always be good music to be found, but in the 90's it became extremely fragmented, for good & bad, by the rise of so-called Alternative. Maybe we need 10 or 20 years for lists to distill down to the really definitive.
Notice I don't say 'greatest' or 'best' - that's all just taste. I think it's more interesting to look at what songs will identify a era. Once you look at these, see which era had the 'best' songs that were widely recognized & consumed.
For another example: Take a look at Amazon.com's 'essential recordings' list, organized by year. As you go farther back in time, the essential recordings become more well known - the stuff that everyone was listening to back then has turned out to be considered 'essential', at least by Amazon. As you get more & more recent, the artists become more obscure. People aren't all flocking around a common sound like they did in the past, which is good and bad.
These 3D tanks are expensive and bulky. Meanwhile advances continue to be made in putting images directly onto your retina (or brain). How far away do we think a good, portable vr technology is (such as eyeglasses or contacts that create the steroscopic images floating in front of your face)? 15 years? 20?
These technologies are more affordable and will be usable everywhere. 3D viewing tanks will always be more complicated and less portable. By that time, people will be walking around with their 3D displays 'built-in'. The dream of the classic '3D' projector seen in every space opera ever made will probably never come to fruition - there'll be no need.
--------
Events? Attributes? Garbage collection based on copy-by-value?
The similarities to Visual Basic are eerie. It sounds a lot like they looked at the way people were using VB and incorporated those ideas plus improvements people have been asking for into a package that is more 'programmerly'. Anyone want to place any bets that this is the heir apparent to VB?
Either focus on software development/project skills (have the whole class produce a product, from initial idea to requirements to design/tasks to implementation to testing), or focus on individual programming skills. For the former, pick a very small project idea whose end result might be something that would be interesting to the class (a game, some network utility, or maybe an eggdrop chat robot).
For the latter, consider some form of "gladitorial" programming, where the students write software that competes directly against one another. The old-school example of this is CoreWars (http://www.koth.org/index.html). If this is too abstract to get the juices flowing, maybe consider "MindRover: The Europa Project" (http://www.cognitoy.com) reviewed on GamesDomain (http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews /pc/mar00/mindmenu.html). This is a variety of the classic "Robot Wars" design contest and would probably be one of the best ways to introduce beginners to the concepts of programming (caveat: I haven't played MindRover, but it seems to be getting good press).
I'm a strong supporter of intellectual property rights - I've never even made or accepted cassette tape recordings of CDs, and I buy all the software I use. But I have a hard time working up any ire for people distributing the ROM images for old videogames to be played on MAME.
Why? Because, with a very few exceptions, the companies that own these ROMs are making no attempt to distribute, support or even license the games anymore. For all practical purposes, this will be lost technology if it weren't for the MAME 'pirates' out there. It's not like Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro now?) protecting their Monopoly copyrights - they're still selling the game. Nobody's selling or supporting Cyberball or Marble Madness anymore. How 'lost classics' that never made it to the arcades, like Marble Madness II, or great stuff that never hit arcade gold, like Pigskin 1620? With no lost revenue, I find it hard to see the damage.
We have a Cyberball machine here at work, and we play at least 1 four-person game on it every day. We'd gladly pay Atari or whomever a reasonable amount of money to upgrade our motherboard to Cyberball 2084, but it just isn't possible. We're considering building our own board and burning the ROMs with images we can get from MAME sites.
Does it make sense for Atari to support Cyberball for customers like us? No. I don't see how they could cover their costs. But it's a damn shame that some of these great classics are being preserved by 'pirates'. Let Atari keep their license rights to the name & brand & such, in case they ever want to release a Cyberball Millenium or whatever, but the original ROMs are only worth money if they are going to bother to sell them. If they won't, then release them.
As a commercial developer, I know that my product only has a certain lifetime before nobody will pay money for it anymore. I'd love to have users of my work keeping it alive ten years after its lifecycle was over.
> it really that painful to type in a URL? Sure. Who wants to be typing URLs while you're walking around doing other things?
>I don't understand how they're enhanced by the use of a code that allows the computer to read the location itself.
This will become useful when a Palm Pilot sized wireless web browser becomes widely available. Once this happens, every surface suddenly becomes it's own web page: just swipe the Palm XXV over the label & you can have access to as much information as the owner of the label feels the need to give you. You could access operation manuals of equipment, warning information for medicine, product info for consumer goods while shopping, detailed background on exhibits when in museums or whatever - anywhere in the physical world where you need to access information. Who wants to remember URLs all the time? Are you going to print them on the side of everything?
Of course, until this little miracle-browser comes along, it's just a dumb gimmick.
Actually, it's not so different than getting a speeding ticket here in the U.S. If you just pay the ticket, you're essentially agreeing to 'sentencing' of the arresting officer. If you're a fan of the domino theory, the first domino has already been tipped, it's just a matter of how many offenses fall under this auto-sentencing scheme.
My father (a district judge here in the US) has shown me the tables that judges use to ensure that their verdicts fall within the guidelines set by the various laws that have been passed madating minimum & maximum sentences. So the system already exists here.
As for all the obvious jokes about the stability of VB apps: we're not talking about Quake here - it's just a very basic database & the rest of it is UI. VB does cheesy database UI better than anyone out there. If I have no idea who the programmer is, I'd trust a cheesy UI written in VB to a cheesy UI written in C/C++ any day. There are a lot more programmers out there able to write stable VB apps than there are those that can write stable C apps, given that the app is simple in the first place.
He describes the JATO as producing 2500 pounds of thrust, and the car as weighing 1500 pounds (although I'd think an impala with railroad gear would be heavier than that - my Maxima is over 3000). That comes out to around 54 ft/sec^2 of acceleration, max, which brings the car up to 8 mph after 2.2 seconds of acceleration. Big deal.
Hornby's just towing the party line as to not damage box office receipts? Please.
Authors refrain from supporting filmed versions of their works all the time. John Irving didn't say anything nice about "Simon Birch" ('inspired' by his "A Prayer for Owen Meany"). He didn't say anything mean, either, contrary to popular opinion. He simply distanced himself from the movie because he claimed that it was a different story from his own, to be judged on its own merits.
In all liklihood, "High Fidelity" is set in Chicago because John Cusack took the project under his wing, wished to star in in, and decided that that's where he could make the story work. He probably wisely decided that he couldn't pull off the whole british "lad" thing and made it an American story.
Besides, if the book is "quality literature", as you claim (personally, I loved the book & gave it to almost all of my close friends), it should be able to stand up to translocation. Shakespeare's survived far greater mangling. As others have pointed out, it's a pretty universal theme among men living in post-feminized cultures.
This whine reminds me of New Yorkers attitudes towards the rest of the U.S., in particular their claim that people in the rest of the country could never really 'get' Seinfeld, because it was "too New York". Imagine their surprise when they found that most of my friends from Minnesota were far more into the show than they were, and picked up on even more of the humor (and we were Jewish, either - another strike!). Of course, all that exposure to MST3K has honed our comedy physiques.
I don't have the facts on this one - maybe someone else can find them - but personal experience and common sense says that an overwhelming majority of record company revenue comes from people under the age of 20. There's a decent amount to be made on 21-25 year olds, but once you get older than 25, the desire to follow the music scene & buy records drops precipitously. Just looking at the marketing for music tells you this - think of how much teen- and college-oriented music <magazines|promotions|television|commercials|produ ct placement|websites> there is compared to that aimed at the 30+ crowd.
Music marketing is based on this. Record companies produce the albums/artists they do, because they know the revenue can be SCALED, through both exposure to the right consumers and through lifestyle "propaganda", establishing which acts are hot or not. They're not so interested in acts that they can't leverage though these techniques. You can't build a huge business on "quality" acts that sell on their merits, simply because there's no way to predict (especially before the album is made) what the general public is going to go crazy over.
But you can predict returns on investment when you apply marketing over a broad range of music, aimed at a demographic that is easily manipulated through ideas of "popularity" and image ("I am what I listen to" is an almost universal identification badge for 18-15 year olds, at least the ones I know). Record companies are about leveraging the somewhat unpredictable, but nearly universal human behavior of listening to music into a predictable stream of revenue based on marketing.
Now, combine with this the fact that MOST members of the age group in question are a point in their lives where they haven't really developed a strong ethic towards voluntarily giving away their money "just because it's right". Before you all start howling, yeah I know YOU aren't this way and that YOU support the artists and that YOU are happy to pay money for the stuff you think is good, but look around you - teenagers & college students are the prime customers for the record industry, and they're the prime "sharers" of intellectual property. Arguably college students are more motivated to do the right thing, but they also have much less disposable cash. The basic capitalist assumptions of limited resources and unlimited demand probably has no better example.
The music industry knows who pays their bills - a segment of society who, given the chance, would gladly not pay a dime. Sure, people talk about going out & buying CD's after listening to downloaded MP3's, but how long is that behavior going to last? At some point we're going to reach the price/MB level where portable MP3 players like Rio are cheap enough that you will be able to carry days of music inside them, with a virtual Tower Records of material stored on your hard drive. Music will be, in all likelihood, sold through some medium whose end product will resemble a Rio-type device anyway, so what's the incentive to go out & buy the exact same thing you already have. Altruism? Maybe for the loyal 1% of the music listeners out there, but I don't think record companies will settle for a compromise of 1% of their current revenue.
The same thing goes for computer games - I spend a lot of time reading gaming-related message boards, and the only people out there talking about pirating software are teenagers & college students. It's no wonder these industries are worried. But to put it in perspective, when Katz talks about the record _industry_ raking in "15 billion" last year, realize that's pretty puny in the world of consumer markets. Philip Morris alone rakes in about 10 billion a year on domestic revenue of tobacco - 20 billion on international revenue; now add all the revenue for RJ Reynolds, plus all the other tobacco companies around the world (a huge number of them are state-owned enterprises), then add cigar revenue & smokeless tobacco, and it pretty much makes music revenue look like a joke. I'm not making any value judgement on tobacco here - just citing an example of other industry revenue.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the media copiers out there. I'm actually a programmer - I make money for my output, and people who copy my work are not doing me any favors, even if I'm only getting 1/15 of the sale of my work as "profit" (which is a pretty damn high return on investment, when consider how much capital the artist is risking). Let's not forget the artists are receiving a lot more than just money from their record company deals - they're getting fame & exposure (most artists know they could be making better money at day jobs) & the chicks. You hit it big, you get to pick out a runway cutie of your choice).
So what's the real issue?
Ironically, should the existing system go down the tubes, and the whole thing becomes a cottage industry of artists selling directly to their audience, I don't think much will change for people who enjoy listening to music. Unlike the other entertainment industries such as movies & computer games, producing the product in music doesn't require a lot of capital - it can still be done by an individual or small group, and boutique recording studios are everywhere now. Movie studios & software publishers still fulfill the role of financiers for their industries, and an "open source" model would probably wreck them - unless you're all happy consuming "Blair Witch" budgeted films for the rest of your life & playing shareware games (both of which have produced good products, but let's face it, we all like to consume big budget entertainment that can only be made if there's some guarantee of a huge audience seeing it, and if the risk of failed ventures can be distributed over the winners).
But great music can be made & recorded on the cheap. While I was working at Philip Morris, they would periodically jetison product lines that they couldn't leverage anymore - two classic examples were Kraft caramels & Kraft marshmellows. Despite the fact that when people think of caramel cubes, they see the little white Kraft words wrapped around the outside, PM realized that it had become a commodity item, and that their branding could no longer allow them to carry enough premium to make it worthwhile. They sold off that portion of the business (maybe even the brand image) to the generic caramel manufacturers of the world. The media companies are probably going to have to realize that the days of making a billion dollar business out of music marketing will go the way of the buggy whip.
Slashdot Mirror
Libraries have always been "censored" - there has never been a library that has carried every single book & periodical in existence, so I don't see any moral mandate for a library to allow for unlimited internet access.
Every time a librarian chooses to purchase or not purchase a book, they're engaging in "censorship". How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?
What is the matter with this proposal: Blocking software is installed in a library, perhaps even one with a high degree of false positives. If a site happens to be blocked, a patron would come up to the librarian and request that the site be enabled. The librarian would check the site from their desk workstation, and if it was deemed appropriate, the block would be lifted. This is essentially the role librarians have always had: organizers & diseminators of information.
The only condition would be that blocking software operates by allowing selective enabling rules to override the built-in rules. I assume most have this feature; not being a user of the software I don't know the details.
You guys are just proving his point. It's almost impossible to come to a consensus on what was the definitive 90's music. The point is that in any given era there will always be good music to be found, but in the 90's it became extremely fragmented, for good & bad, by the rise of so-called Alternative. Maybe we need 10 or 20 years for lists to distill down to the really definitive.
Notice I don't say 'greatest' or 'best' - that's all just taste. I think it's more interesting to look at what songs will identify a era. Once you look at these, see which era had the 'best' songs that were widely recognized & consumed.
For another example: Take a look at Amazon.com's 'essential recordings' list, organized by year. As you go farther back in time, the essential recordings become more well known - the stuff that everyone was listening to back then has turned out to be considered 'essential', at least by Amazon. As you get more & more recent, the artists become more obscure. People aren't all flocking around a common sound like they did in the past, which is good and bad.
So it goes.
-BbT
These 3D tanks are expensive and bulky. Meanwhile advances continue to be made in putting images directly onto your retina (or brain). How far away do we think a good, portable vr technology is (such as eyeglasses or contacts that create the steroscopic images floating in front of your face)? 15 years? 20?
These technologies are more affordable and will be usable everywhere. 3D viewing tanks will always be more complicated and less portable. By that time, people will be walking around with their 3D displays 'built-in'. The dream of the classic '3D' projector seen in every space opera ever made will probably never come to fruition - there'll be no need.
--------
Events? Attributes? Garbage collection based on copy-by-value?
The similarities to Visual Basic are eerie. It sounds a lot like they looked at the way people were using VB and incorporated those ideas plus improvements people have been asking for into a package that is more 'programmerly'. Anyone want to place any bets that this is the heir apparent to VB?
Either focus on software development/project skills (have the whole class produce a product, from initial idea to requirements to design/tasks to implementation to testing), or focus on individual programming skills. For the former, pick a very small project idea whose end result might be something that would be interesting to the class (a game, some network utility, or maybe an eggdrop chat robot).
s /pc/mar00/mindmenu.html). This is a variety of the classic "Robot Wars" design contest and would probably be one of the best ways to introduce beginners to the concepts of programming (caveat: I haven't played MindRover, but it seems to be getting good press).
For the latter, consider some form of "gladitorial" programming, where the students write software that competes directly against one another. The old-school example of this is CoreWars (http://www.koth.org/index.html). If this is too abstract to get the juices flowing, maybe consider "MindRover: The Europa Project" (http://www.cognitoy.com) reviewed on GamesDomain (http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/review
-BbT
I'm a strong supporter of intellectual property rights - I've never even made or accepted cassette tape recordings of CDs, and I buy all the software I use. But I have a hard time working up any ire for people distributing the ROM images for old videogames to be played on MAME.
Why? Because, with a very few exceptions, the companies that own these ROMs are making no attempt to distribute, support or even license the games anymore. For all practical purposes, this will be lost technology if it weren't for the MAME 'pirates' out there. It's not like Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro now?) protecting their Monopoly copyrights - they're still selling the game. Nobody's selling or supporting Cyberball or Marble Madness anymore. How 'lost classics' that never made it to the arcades, like Marble Madness II, or great stuff that never hit arcade gold, like Pigskin 1620? With no lost revenue, I find it hard to see the damage.
We have a Cyberball machine here at work, and we play at least 1 four-person game on it every day. We'd gladly pay Atari or whomever a reasonable amount of money to upgrade our motherboard to Cyberball 2084, but it just isn't possible. We're considering building our own board and burning the ROMs with images we can get from MAME sites.
Does it make sense for Atari to support Cyberball for customers like us? No. I don't see how they could cover their costs. But it's a damn shame that some of these great classics are being preserved by 'pirates'. Let Atari keep their license rights to the name & brand & such, in case they ever want to release a Cyberball Millenium or whatever, but the original ROMs are only worth money if they are going to bother to sell them. If they won't, then release them.
As a commercial developer, I know that my product only has a certain lifetime before nobody will pay money for it anymore. I'd love to have users of my work keeping it alive ten years after its lifecycle was over.
-BbT
> it really that painful to type in a URL?
Sure. Who wants to be typing URLs while you're walking around doing other things?
>I don't understand how they're enhanced by the use of a code that allows the computer to read the location itself.
This will become useful when a Palm Pilot sized wireless web browser becomes widely available. Once this happens, every surface suddenly becomes it's own web page: just swipe the Palm XXV over the label & you can have access to as much information as the owner of the label feels the need to give you. You could access operation manuals of equipment, warning information for medicine, product info for consumer goods while shopping, detailed background on exhibits when in museums or whatever - anywhere in the physical world where you need to access information. Who wants to remember URLs all the time? Are you going to print them on the side of everything?
Of course, until this little miracle-browser comes along, it's just a dumb gimmick.
Actually, it's not so different than getting a speeding ticket here in the U.S. If you just pay the ticket, you're essentially agreeing to 'sentencing' of the arresting officer. If you're a fan of the domino theory, the first domino has already been tipped, it's just a matter of how many offenses fall under this auto-sentencing scheme.
My father (a district judge here in the US) has shown me the tables that judges use to ensure that their verdicts fall within the guidelines set by the various laws that have been passed madating minimum & maximum sentences. So the system already exists here.
As for all the obvious jokes about the stability of VB apps: we're not talking about Quake here - it's just a very basic database & the rest of it is UI. VB does cheesy database UI better than anyone out there. If I have no idea who the programmer is, I'd trust a cheesy UI written in VB to a cheesy UI written in C/C++ any day. There are a lot more programmers out there able to write stable VB apps than there are those that can write stable C apps, given that the app is simple in the first place.
Grr. That speed should read 80 mph, not 8.
He describes the JATO as producing 2500 pounds of thrust, and the car as weighing 1500 pounds (although I'd think an impala with railroad gear would be heavier than that - my Maxima is over 3000). That comes out to around 54 ft/sec^2 of acceleration, max, which brings the car up to 8 mph after 2.2 seconds of acceleration. Big deal.
Hornby's just towing the party line as to not damage box office receipts? Please.
Authors refrain from supporting filmed versions of their works all the time. John Irving didn't say anything nice about "Simon Birch" ('inspired' by his "A Prayer for Owen Meany"). He didn't say anything mean, either, contrary to popular opinion. He simply distanced himself from the movie because he claimed that it was a different story from his own, to be judged on its own merits.
In all liklihood, "High Fidelity" is set in Chicago because John Cusack took the project under his wing, wished to star in in, and decided that that's where he could make the story work. He probably wisely decided that he couldn't pull off the whole british "lad" thing and made it an American story.
Besides, if the book is "quality literature", as you claim (personally, I loved the book & gave it to almost all of my close friends), it should be able to stand up to translocation. Shakespeare's survived far greater mangling. As others have pointed out, it's a pretty universal theme among men living in post-feminized cultures.
This whine reminds me of New Yorkers attitudes towards the rest of the U.S., in particular their claim that people in the rest of the country could never really 'get' Seinfeld, because it was "too New York". Imagine their surprise when they found that most of my friends from Minnesota were far more into the show than they were, and picked up on even more of the humor (and we were Jewish, either - another strike!). Of course, all that exposure to MST3K has honed our comedy physiques.
-BbT
===========
Let's be realistic.
u ct placement|websites> there is compared to that aimed at the 30+ crowd.
I don't have the facts on this one - maybe someone else can find them - but personal experience and common sense says that an overwhelming majority of record company revenue comes from people under the age of 20. There's a decent amount to be made on 21-25 year olds, but once you get older than 25, the desire to follow the music scene & buy records drops precipitously. Just looking at the marketing for music tells you this - think of how much teen- and college-oriented music <magazines|promotions|television|commercials|prod
Music marketing is based on this. Record companies produce the albums/artists they do, because they know the revenue can be SCALED, through both exposure to the right consumers and through lifestyle "propaganda", establishing which acts are hot or not. They're not so interested in acts that they can't leverage though these techniques. You can't build a huge business on "quality" acts that sell on their merits, simply because there's no way to predict (especially before the album is made) what the general public is going to go crazy over.
But you can predict returns on investment when you apply marketing over a broad range of music, aimed at a demographic that is easily manipulated through ideas of "popularity" and image ("I am what I listen to" is an almost universal identification badge for 18-15 year olds, at least the ones I know). Record companies are about leveraging the somewhat unpredictable, but nearly universal human behavior of listening to music into a predictable stream of revenue based on marketing.
Now, combine with this the fact that MOST members of the age group in question are a point in their lives where they haven't really developed a strong ethic towards voluntarily giving away their money "just because it's right". Before you all start howling, yeah I know YOU aren't this way and that YOU support the artists and that YOU are happy to pay money for the stuff you think is good, but look around you - teenagers & college students are the prime customers for the record industry, and they're the prime "sharers" of intellectual property. Arguably college students are more motivated to do the right thing, but they also have much less disposable cash. The basic capitalist assumptions of limited resources and unlimited demand probably has no better example.
The music industry knows who pays their bills - a segment of society who, given the chance, would gladly not pay a dime. Sure, people talk about going out & buying CD's after listening to downloaded MP3's, but how long is that behavior going to last? At some point we're going to reach the price/MB level where portable MP3 players like Rio are cheap enough that you will be able to carry days of music inside them, with a virtual Tower Records of material stored on your hard drive. Music will be, in all likelihood, sold through some medium whose end product will resemble a Rio-type device anyway, so what's the incentive to go out & buy the exact same thing you already have. Altruism? Maybe for the loyal 1% of the music listeners out there, but I don't think record companies will settle for a compromise of 1% of their current revenue.
The same thing goes for computer games - I spend a lot of time reading gaming-related message boards, and the only people out there talking about pirating software are teenagers & college students. It's no wonder these industries are worried. But to put it in perspective, when Katz talks about the record _industry_ raking in "15 billion" last year, realize that's pretty puny in the world of consumer markets. Philip Morris alone rakes in about 10 billion a year on domestic revenue of tobacco - 20 billion on international revenue; now add all the revenue for RJ Reynolds, plus all the other tobacco companies around the world (a huge number of them are state-owned enterprises), then add cigar revenue & smokeless tobacco, and it pretty much makes music revenue look like a joke. I'm not making any value judgement on tobacco here - just citing an example of other industry revenue.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the media copiers out there. I'm actually a programmer - I make money for my output, and people who copy my work are not doing me any favors, even if I'm only getting 1/15 of the sale of my work as "profit" (which is a pretty damn high return on investment, when consider how much capital the artist is risking). Let's not forget the artists are receiving a lot more than just money from their record company deals - they're getting fame & exposure (most artists know they could be making better money at day jobs) & the chicks. You hit it big, you get to pick out a runway cutie of your choice).
So what's the real issue?
Ironically, should the existing system go down the tubes, and the whole thing becomes a cottage industry of artists selling directly to their audience, I don't think much will change for people who enjoy listening to music. Unlike the other entertainment industries such as movies & computer games, producing the product in music doesn't require a lot of capital - it can still be done by an individual or small group, and boutique recording studios are everywhere now. Movie studios & software publishers still fulfill the role of financiers for their industries, and an "open source" model would probably wreck them - unless you're all happy consuming "Blair Witch" budgeted films for the rest of your life & playing shareware games (both of which have produced good products, but let's face it, we all like to consume big budget entertainment that can only be made if there's some guarantee of a huge audience seeing it, and if the risk of failed ventures can be distributed over the winners).
But great music can be made & recorded on the cheap. While I was working at Philip Morris, they would periodically jetison product lines that they couldn't leverage anymore - two classic examples were Kraft caramels & Kraft marshmellows. Despite the fact that when people think of caramel cubes, they see the little white Kraft words wrapped around the outside, PM realized that it had become a commodity item, and that their branding could no longer allow them to carry enough premium to make it worthwhile. They sold off that portion of the business (maybe even the brand image) to the generic caramel manufacturers of the world. The media companies are probably going to have to realize that the days of making a billion dollar business out of music marketing will go the way of the buggy whip.