Sorry, no, iTunes didn't rename the MP3s. They were already like that. Blame yourself for a) not naming all your files properly to begin with and b) not checking the preferences or the Read Me to know that the auto-sorting by artist and album can be turned on or off.
Not a useful review
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Reviews at Amazon are more helpful than this crappy plug, which amounts to the nth installment of Jorn's thick-headed perspective on his vague, shallow little world, in which he is a God, and anything he likes is cool and desireable.
Anything Jorn endorses, I avoid. He did this book disfavor by even mentioning it.
Well, I'm not bragging about working 50 to 70 hours a week. I'm just pointing out that those are the hours it takes.
Realize, of course, that about a third of that time is spent in transit (which I count as working, since I am clearly not playing) or at home writing proposals, writing reports, putting together and sending bills, answering non-emergency email, making notes for my own use, reading the tech sites and discussion forums, and keeping my updaters/patches/service packs up to date.
The way this person writes tells me that he doesn't know much more about computers than his 'clients'.
I don't have to point it out to you that I am indeed technically qualified, but I will. How do you think I've run the tech for entire 65-person offices? My good looks? Do you want references, or what?
If it sounds like I'm writing about people who don't know what they're doing, that's because I'm talking about the beginning stages, where I was about ten years ago. I know plenty now.
I thought this article is very depressing until I realized that this guy is NOT qualified for anything else.
Hey, you know what? I've worked as an IT Director of a 65-person ad agency. I've run a noncommercial radio station and two newspapers. My client list is filled with high-profile, well-paying clients because I'm *good*. I gave more than $90K of business away in the last 18 months because I had more than I could handle. I cherry-pick from the best clients in my niche.
I don't freelance because I'm bad: I do it because I can. It's a luxury not everyone has, because not everyone has my skill set. In my market niche--small creative businesses in New York City--I'll gladly pit myself against anyone out there, from David Pogue on down.
I'm not trying to be snobby, but I know for sure that good talents are still high in demand.
Of course they are. But as anyone with have a brain cell knows, and as I said in my entry, there are more qualified candidates than there are jobs. So that means some perfectly good candidates have to find some other way to pay the bills.
I'm a single guy, with only student loans as debts, and I pay $600 a month as my part of a two-bedroom share in Greenpoint. So right away your calculations make you look like an NYC-newbie who doesn't know how to live here.
You *can* live decently in New York City for $52K a year, or even less. I did it for $24K ten years ago. It only requires that you know where to shop, where to live, and that you not have unreasonable expectations for yourself. If you see commerce and shopping as a pastime, you're doomed here.
This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.
I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.
The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.
...
Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be PocketedBy Grant Barrett @ World New York
This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.
I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.
The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.
...
Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed
Last year, at a Christmas party held by a client of mine at a very nice restaurant in Manhattan, I ran into a friend of a friend. I don't know him well, but we've socialized once or twice, and have had solid geek conversations in the past. He does Active Directory management for big corporations.
I should say, he used to do that. He's been unemployed now for more than a year.
After we shook hands I could see his face change from a friendly howdy-do. He dropped down into commiseration mode: the corners of his mouth drooped, his head ducked, he took a Hapsburg stance--his feet angled, his left foot perpendicular to his right, heel against arch, his torso yawed a few degrees off center, his hands lightly on his hips--and waited expectantly.
I knew what he wanted. I make my living with private computer consulting: client-site tech support, mostly, but pretty much any of the little computer-related tasks small businesses have. I knew he wanted to talk about the tech business. And he wanted me to start, so I complied. "How's business?" I asked.
He jumped in according to the script. "Oh, it's not been going well at all. Awful. I've been out of work. I can't find anything. How're you doing?" He anticipated a long bitch session of headhunter mistreatment, interview mishaps, finicky clients, resume failure. He relished the chance.
"It's great," I said. "I've got more business than I can handle. I'm giving it away. I've probably handed off or turned down enough business in the last six months to employ another person full-time. In fact, I've just turned over a second $30,000-a-year piece of business to another tech so I could concentrate on other clients."
He looked at me in amazement. His eyes bugged out. I saw doubt, then self-doubt, there, and eventually he just walked away.
My theory: If you are reasonably adept at using or setting up a computer, there's no good reason to be unemployed.
Forget the boom-time Nineties. They're gone. I'm sorry.
I've been try to sell a color LaserJet. I'm not even sure I could give it away. It's a stalwart machine, but yet people can only see the lower up-front cost of an inkjet printer, rather thant the long-term costs and the reliability issues. Resolution is one issue where the older printers fall short, of course, but it's like processor speed: People just don't realize they don't *need* 2400 by 2400 resolution to print colored text.
Re:Some words it needs to attract the slashdot cro
on
A Word a Day
·
· Score: 2, Informative
After much thinking and weighing the benefits, I decided I was better off spending ten dollars a month supporting my local public radio station, WNYC. My music needs are minimal, I get the BBC and Radio France International off the Internet as well as from local radio (WNYC broadcasts the BBC during early morning hours, and a station owned by the board of education broadcasts RFI), and so there's just not much room in my life for subscription-based digital radio.
Listen, the only Mac users who buy directly from the Apple sites are those who already get discounts, or those who are very uninformed (like you, apparently).
Long-time Mac users DON'T buy directly from Apple. First, we don't want to pay sales tax. If I order from Warehouse.com, I don't. Second, we don't necessarily insist on having an Apple-branded LCD or RAM. We save hundreds there. Third, we like to get the freebies from the online vendors: extra ram, the floppy drive, the low-end inkjet printer.
Now it is true that some of the very high-end specifications are only available on the Apple site, but I believe those high-end machines are only marginally better. The savings of not buying directly from Apple are a better choice.
Plus you would be surprised how often the line "Is that the best price you can give me?" cuts the price even just a little bit more when you're on the telephone with a mail order or online vendor. Apple does no such thing.
The reason your other hand is using other modifier keys so often is that you don't have enough mouse buttons.
So you have a mouse button for shift, caps lock, control, alt and command? Interesting.
Fink, Fink, Fink, Fink: A Package Manager
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 5, Informative
How many times does this have to be pointed out for OS X newbies? There is an open-source, community-driven package manager for the Unix underpinnings of OS X: It's called Fink. It's a port of the Debian tools, including apt. It currently has 1452 packages at various levels of stability, including many of the major applications required for development. It works very, very well, from a command line or via happy little Aqua app called Fink Commander. If you do use Fink, use the CVS tree: the maintainers are very conservative about adding apps to the stable tree, so most of the interesting action is in unstable.
The point: they should try to make a few more people happy. I would have switched long ago if they had a full size laptop keyboard (every key full size) and a three button trackpoint pointer.
You mean they should make *you* happy.
It's a different computer: use it differently. As a long time trackpad user, you'd have to squeeze my testicles in a vise to get me to use a laptop with the orange knob right in the middle of the keyboard. I've tried it, repeatedly, and it sucks. It's an infuriatingly useless device. I onced worked in an office where Thinkpads with such idiotic cursor-manipulating devices were standard. Everyone there was a Windows user, not converted Mac users, and a majority of users had mice. They couldn't stand the stupid thing.
Same goes for the two- and three-button trackpoint pointers. Again, I've used them, and repeatedly. It almost requires two hands to use! In fact, that's how most people do it: with two hands. What a logistical and tactical waste of effort. But a one-button trackpad, it's a one-handed device. And you can keep your other hand on the keyboard to control-click, which is natural since that hand is often using other modifier keys, as well.
Part of the reason Windows and Unix users have problems with the Mac's one button (and whine incessantly about it, to such a degree that you want to put *their* testicles in a vise), is because they tend to be unused to the click-and-hold action. On a modern Mac, this will get you the exact same action as the right-click menu. What in God's name you need a third button for, besides having another part to break, beats the hell out of me.
Re:Earliest *online* smiley maybe, not first ever
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2
I'd like to retract my comment above about the possible earliest use of a smiley, or emoticon, in print.
Etymologist Barry Popik, who found the advertisement I mention, was in China, Tibet and Mongolia (and is still there, I think), but I sent him a message asking him to confirm that it *was* a punctuation-based smiley and not a yellow-faced-Harvey-Ball-type smiley. In his original message, he used ":)" to desginate a smiley that appeared in the ad--but he now confirms (from the airport at Ulaan Baatar, no less) that it *was not* the emoticon. He was merely using the emoticon to render the Harvey Ball-type smiley, the yellow round one. Therefore, my comment was misinformed, and the 1953 advertisement should *not* be considered an early appearance of the now-familiar ":)".
I am Grant Barrett, and I can confirm the LinguistList message.
Barry Popik was in China, Tibet and Mongolia (and is still there, I think), but I sent him a message asking him to confirm that it *was* a punctuation-based smiley and not a yellow-faced-Harvey-Ball-type smiley. In his original message, he used ":)" to desginate a smiley that appeared in the ad--but he confirms (from the airport at Ulaan Baatar, no less) that it *was not* the emoticon. It was the Harvey Ball-type smiley, the yellow round one. Therefore, my message to Timothy was misinformed, and the 1953 advertisement should *not* be considered an early appearance of the now-familiar ":)".
While many of the Apple rumors sites are filled with made-up information and idiotic speculation, if you sample a good cross-section, you'll find that in terms of predicting *when* new models are released, but not the *specs* of new models, those sites are pretty much right on. Things to look for: models beign listed as "end of life," vendors having low stock of certainmodels, new model numbers showing up. Macrumors does a pretty good job of collating the more substantiated rumors: http://www.macrumors.com/
Earliest *online* smiley maybe, not first ever
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The earliest (not first: you can never precisely say which was first) recorded smiley in print discovered so far was found by etymologist and word researcher Barry Popik who posted this message to the email list of the American Dialect Society:
This continues discussion of the pictograph known as the "smiley." It's authorship was credited to the late Harvey Ball (who drew it in the 1960s). "Smiley" is in an ad in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 10 March 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. See for yourself. The ad is for the film LILI, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. The "World Premiere Today" is at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington. The film opened nationwide, and this ad possibly ran in many newspapers.
Today
You'll laugh:) You'll cry:( You'll love (Heart-shaped face--ed.) _Lili_
I'm pretty tired of all the complaints about freeloading on any system even remotely likely Gnutella. It's the same with Carracho, Hotline, FTP, what have you: you will always have more freeloaders than sharers until equilibrium is achieved; equilibrium, though, will never be achieved.
The ratio of users who have useful, desireable files to share to users who do not will always be low, perhaps 1 to 10 or 1 to 100. This is because the "freeloaders" cannot and do not have files to share until the get them from someone else. They will continue to be non-sharing nodes until such time as the sharers with desireable files open up the portcullis.
The point of the system is filesharing: Why impose restrictions on its primary function? The way to stop "freeloading" is not to restrict downloads, but to *increase* them. The closer to the unachievable equilibrium we come, the less "freeloading" there will be.
Doc Searls has some interesting points on Nielsen Hayden's site (scroll down or just read it copied below):
Regular radio pays fees to ASCAP and BMI that go to composers, not to performers. And they are based on a station's revenues, not on a per-play/per-listener basis.
There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service.
There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug.
But Internet radio got lined up for execution because the DMCA, under pressure from a paranoid entertainment industry, characterized webcasting -- then still very young -- as something other than radio: as a "performance" delivery system, kind of like a digital venue -- a virtual club.
This characterization was born of the fear that eventually digital copies would in fact be "perfect" copies of a performance, and that therefore the artist should be compensated on a per-listen basis.
Then the DMCA based fee guidance on a "willing buyer/willing seller" concept wrapped in fuzzy and circuitous guidance language which was based in turn on the assumption that the only thing close to webcasting in prior reality was commercial radio, which has no such thing as a "willing buyer/willing seller" relationship with its audience -- only with its advertisers, which is irrelevant.
The DMCA authors ignored the example of public radio, which *does* have a seller/buyer relationship with its audience (who are customers, or at least in that position). The authors also ignored the existing webcasting successes on the Net itself, which include KPIG (which sold advertising at a higher rate because it had this bonus 2000+ people all over the world at any time, listening live) and countless other stations that put out a PayPal tip jar that collects up to $3000 and more a month in some cases.
Of course, most of these first economic models for the industry hadn't yet happened while the CARP was meeting, so they missed it. Why pause to actually observe an industry in the midst of birth? Hell, why even invite them to a meeting?
Nearly none of the major webcasters (KPIG, WCPE, Radio Paradise, SomaFM, etc.) were invited to the hearings. Live365 was, and apparently botched it by submitting and rescinding testimony, according to one RIAA guy. (That story is in Salon.)
So the CARP panel based their fees on the Yahoo example, which was worked out by Mark Cuban before he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock that he later unloaded way before the crash. Now he's known for buying big toys that most famously include the Dallas Mavericks.
Mark's plans for Broadcast.com were to scam the feds into helping him drive the small fry out of the market. He'd do that by negotiating a per-stream deal of some kind, rather than a percentage of revenue deal. That's because percentage of revenue would favor the small guys who had no revenue. Fair enough, but his scam was to agree to charges on a per-stream basis, and then multicast all the streams through one porthole, so it would be charged as just one. That porthole never got done, and was under wraps when the "Yahoo deal" was negotiated. And Yahoo has since dropped out of the radio business (wasting the whole $5.7 bil), making the CARP rationale even more absurd than it already was.
Most of this, including a highly disclosing email from Mark Cuban, is archived at RAIN.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, no, iTunes didn't rename the MP3s. They were already like that. Blame yourself for a) not naming all your files properly to begin with and b) not checking the preferences or the Read Me to know that the auto-sorting by artist and album can be turned on or off.
Reviews at Amazon are more helpful than this crappy plug, which amounts to the nth installment of Jorn's thick-headed perspective on his vague, shallow little world, in which he is a God, and anything he likes is cool and desireable.
Anything Jorn endorses, I avoid. He did this book disfavor by even mentioning it.
Well, I'm not bragging about working 50 to 70 hours a week. I'm just pointing out that those are the hours it takes.
Realize, of course, that about a third of that time is spent in transit (which I count as working, since I am clearly not playing) or at home writing proposals, writing reports, putting together and sending bills, answering non-emergency email, making notes for my own use, reading the tech sites and discussion forums, and keeping my updaters/patches/service packs up to date.
Which is what I should be doing now...
So, do I qualify to be an entrepreneur?
Sadly, no. Not funny. F-minus.
The way this person writes tells me that he doesn't know much more about computers than his 'clients'.
I don't have to point it out to you that I am indeed technically qualified, but I will. How do you think I've run the tech for entire 65-person offices? My good looks? Do you want references, or what?
If it sounds like I'm writing about people who don't know what they're doing, that's because I'm talking about the beginning stages, where I was about ten years ago. I know plenty now.
I thought this article is very depressing until I realized that this guy is NOT qualified for anything else.
Hey, you know what? I've worked as an IT Director of a 65-person ad agency. I've run a noncommercial radio station and two newspapers. My client list is filled with high-profile, well-paying clients because I'm *good*. I gave more than $90K of business away in the last 18 months because I had more than I could handle. I cherry-pick from the best clients in my niche.
I don't freelance because I'm bad: I do it because I can. It's a luxury not everyone has, because not everyone has my skill set. In my market niche--small creative businesses in New York City--I'll gladly pit myself against anyone out there, from David Pogue on down.
I'm not trying to be snobby, but I know for sure that good talents are still high in demand.
Of course they are. But as anyone with have a brain cell knows, and as I said in my entry, there are more qualified candidates than there are jobs. So that means some perfectly good candidates have to find some other way to pay the bills.
So, in closing, bite me.
I'm a single guy, with only student loans as debts, and I pay $600 a month as my part of a two-bedroom share in Greenpoint. So right away your calculations make you look like an NYC-newbie who doesn't know how to live here.
You *can* live decently in New York City for $52K a year, or even less. I did it for $24K ten years ago. It only requires that you know where to shop, where to live, and that you not have unreasonable expectations for yourself. If you see commerce and shopping as a pastime, you're doomed here.
Here's an alternate link:
http://homepage.mac.com/monickels/techjob.html
And the full text:
By Grant Barrett @ World New York
This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.
I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.
The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.
Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be PocketedBy Grant Barrett @ World New York
This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.
I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.
The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.
Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed
Last year, at a Christmas party held by a client of mine at a very nice restaurant in Manhattan, I ran into a friend of a friend. I don't know him well, but we've socialized once or twice, and have had solid geek conversations in the past. He does Active Directory management for big corporations.
I should say, he used to do that. He's been unemployed now for more than a year.
After we shook hands I could see his face change from a friendly howdy-do. He dropped down into commiseration mode: the corners of his mouth drooped, his head ducked, he took a Hapsburg stance--his feet angled, his left foot perpendicular to his right, heel against arch, his torso yawed a few degrees off center, his hands lightly on his hips--and waited expectantly.
I knew what he wanted. I make my living with private computer consulting: client-site tech support, mostly, but pretty much any of the little computer-related tasks small businesses have. I knew he wanted to talk about the tech business. And he wanted me to start, so I complied. "How's business?" I asked.
He jumped in according to the script. "Oh, it's not been going well at all. Awful. I've been out of work. I can't find anything. How're you doing?" He anticipated a long bitch session of headhunter mistreatment, interview mishaps, finicky clients, resume failure. He relished the chance.
"It's great," I said. "I've got more business than I can handle. I'm giving it away. I've probably handed off or turned down enough business in the last six months to employ another person full-time. In fact, I've just turned over a second $30,000-a-year piece of business to another tech so I could concentrate on other clients."
He looked at me in amazement. His eyes bugged out. I saw doubt, then self-doubt, there, and eventually he just walked away.
My theory: If you are reasonably adept at using or setting up a computer, there's no good reason to be unemployed.
Forget the boom-time Nineties. They're gone. I'm sorry.
By our own Roblimo, no less: Replacing Microsoft Exchange with a Linux-based solution.
I've been try to sell a color LaserJet. I'm not even sure I could give it away. It's a stalwart machine, but yet people can only see the lower up-front cost of an inkjet printer, rather thant the long-term costs and the reliability issues. Resolution is one issue where the older printers fall short, of course, but it's like processor speed: People just don't realize they don't *need* 2400 by 2400 resolution to print colored text.
Also:
seperated
After much thinking and weighing the benefits, I decided I was better off spending ten dollars a month supporting my local public radio station, WNYC. My music needs are minimal, I get the BBC and Radio France International off the Internet as well as from local radio (WNYC broadcasts the BBC during early morning hours, and a station owned by the board of education broadcasts RFI), and so there's just not much room in my life for subscription-based digital radio.
Listen, the only Mac users who buy directly from the Apple sites are those who already get discounts, or those who are very uninformed (like you, apparently).
Long-time Mac users DON'T buy directly from Apple. First, we don't want to pay sales tax. If I order from Warehouse.com, I don't. Second, we don't necessarily insist on having an Apple-branded LCD or RAM. We save hundreds there. Third, we like to get the freebies from the online vendors: extra ram, the floppy drive, the low-end inkjet printer.
Now it is true that some of the very high-end specifications are only available on the Apple site, but I believe those high-end machines are only marginally better. The savings of not buying directly from Apple are a better choice.
Plus you would be surprised how often the line "Is that the best price you can give me?" cuts the price even just a little bit more when you're on the telephone with a mail order or online vendor. Apple does no such thing.
Not as low as some, but I've been around here a while...
Sounds like you're having one of two problems. Try these links for help:
Installing Fink from scratch for 10.2
Step-by-step instruction for upgrading under 10.2
Jaguar Xterm update
The reason your other hand is using other modifier keys so often is that you don't have enough mouse buttons.
So you have a mouse button for shift, caps lock, control, alt and command? Interesting.
How many times does this have to be pointed out for OS X newbies? There is an open-source, community-driven package manager for the Unix underpinnings of OS X: It's called Fink. It's a port of the Debian tools, including apt. It currently has 1452 packages at various levels of stability, including many of the major applications required for development. It works very, very well, from a command line or via happy little Aqua app called Fink Commander. If you do use Fink, use the CVS tree: the maintainers are very conservative about adding apps to the stable tree, so most of the interesting action is in unstable.
The point: they should try to make a few more people happy. I would have switched long ago if they had a full size laptop keyboard (every key full size) and a three button trackpoint pointer.
You mean they should make *you* happy.
It's a different computer: use it differently. As a long time trackpad user, you'd have to squeeze my testicles in a vise to get me to use a laptop with the orange knob right in the middle of the keyboard. I've tried it, repeatedly, and it sucks. It's an infuriatingly useless device. I onced worked in an office where Thinkpads with such idiotic cursor-manipulating devices were standard. Everyone there was a Windows user, not converted Mac users, and a majority of users had mice. They couldn't stand the stupid thing.
Same goes for the two- and three-button trackpoint pointers. Again, I've used them, and repeatedly. It almost requires two hands to use! In fact, that's how most people do it: with two hands. What a logistical and tactical waste of effort. But a one-button trackpad, it's a one-handed device. And you can keep your other hand on the keyboard to control-click, which is natural since that hand is often using other modifier keys, as well.
Part of the reason Windows and Unix users have problems with the Mac's one button (and whine incessantly about it, to such a degree that you want to put *their* testicles in a vise), is because they tend to be unused to the click-and-hold action. On a modern Mac, this will get you the exact same action as the right-click menu. What in God's name you need a third button for, besides having another part to break, beats the hell out of me.
I'd like to retract my comment above about the possible earliest use of a smiley, or emoticon, in print.
Etymologist Barry Popik, who found the advertisement I mention, was in China, Tibet and Mongolia (and is still there, I think), but I sent him a message asking him to confirm that it *was* a punctuation-based smiley and not a yellow-faced-Harvey-Ball-type smiley. In his original message, he used ":)" to desginate a smiley that appeared in the ad--but he now confirms (from the airport at Ulaan Baatar, no less) that it *was not* the emoticon. He was merely using the emoticon to render the Harvey Ball-type smiley, the yellow round one. Therefore, my comment was misinformed, and the 1953 advertisement should *not* be considered an early appearance of the now-familiar ":)".
Let me make this clear: The smiley in the LinguistList post is a rendering by Barry Popik. It is *not* shown that way in the original advertisement.
I am Grant Barrett, and I can confirm the LinguistList message.
Barry Popik was in China, Tibet and Mongolia (and is still there, I think), but I sent him a message asking him to confirm that it *was* a punctuation-based smiley and not a yellow-faced-Harvey-Ball-type smiley. In his original message, he used ":)" to desginate a smiley that appeared in the ad--but he confirms (from the airport at Ulaan Baatar, no less) that it *was not* the emoticon. It was the Harvey Ball-type smiley, the yellow round one. Therefore, my message to Timothy was misinformed, and the 1953 advertisement should *not* be considered an early appearance of the now-familiar ":)".
While many of the Apple rumors sites are filled with made-up information and idiotic speculation, if you sample a good cross-section, you'll find that in terms of predicting *when* new models are released, but not the *specs* of new models, those sites are pretty much right on. Things to look for: models beign listed as "end of life," vendors having low stock of certainmodels, new model numbers showing up. Macrumors does a pretty good job of collating the more substantiated rumors: http://www.macrumors.com/
The earliest (not first: you can never precisely say which was first) recorded smiley in print discovered so far was found by etymologist and word researcher Barry Popik who posted this message to the email list of the American Dialect Society:
i nd 0110B&L=ads-l&P=R4596
:) :(
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=
[begin quote]
This continues discussion of the pictograph known as the "smiley." It's authorship was credited to the late Harvey Ball (who drew it in the 1960s). "Smiley" is in an ad in the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 10 March 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. See for yourself. The ad is for the film LILI, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. The "World Premiere Today" is at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington. The film opened nationwide, and this ad possibly ran in many newspapers.
Today
You'll laugh
You'll cry
You'll love (Heart-shaped face--ed.)
_Lili_
[end quote]
I'm pretty tired of all the complaints about freeloading on any system even remotely likely Gnutella. It's the same with Carracho, Hotline, FTP, what have you: you will always have more freeloaders than sharers until equilibrium is achieved; equilibrium, though, will never be achieved.
The ratio of users who have useful, desireable files to share to users who do not will always be low, perhaps 1 to 10 or 1 to 100. This is because the "freeloaders" cannot and do not have files to share until the get them from someone else. They will continue to be non-sharing nodes until such time as the sharers with desireable files open up the portcullis.
The point of the system is filesharing: Why impose restrictions on its primary function? The way to stop "freeloading" is not to restrict downloads, but to *increase* them. The closer to the unachievable equilibrium we come, the less "freeloading" there will be.
Doc Searls has some interesting points on Nielsen Hayden's site (scroll down or just read it copied below):
Regular radio pays fees to ASCAP and BMI that go to composers, not to performers. And they are based on a station's revenues, not on a per-play/per-listener basis.
There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service.
There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug.
But Internet radio got lined up for execution because the DMCA, under pressure from a paranoid entertainment industry, characterized webcasting -- then still very young -- as something other than radio: as a "performance" delivery system, kind of like a digital venue -- a virtual club.
This characterization was born of the fear that eventually digital copies would in fact be "perfect" copies of a performance, and that therefore the artist should be compensated on a per-listen basis.
Then the DMCA based fee guidance on a "willing buyer/willing seller" concept wrapped in fuzzy and circuitous guidance language which was based in turn on the assumption that the only thing close to webcasting in prior reality was commercial radio, which has no such thing as a "willing buyer/willing seller" relationship with its audience -- only with its advertisers, which is irrelevant.
The DMCA authors ignored the example of public radio, which *does* have a seller/buyer relationship with its audience (who are customers, or at least in that position). The authors also ignored the existing webcasting successes on the Net itself, which include KPIG (which sold advertising at a higher rate because it had this bonus 2000+ people all over the world at any time, listening live) and countless other stations that put out a PayPal tip jar that collects up to $3000 and more a month in some cases.
Of course, most of these first economic models for the industry hadn't yet happened while the CARP was meeting, so they missed it. Why pause to actually observe an industry in the midst of birth? Hell, why even invite them to a meeting?
Nearly none of the major webcasters (KPIG, WCPE, Radio Paradise, SomaFM, etc.) were invited to the hearings. Live365 was, and apparently botched it by submitting and rescinding testimony, according to one RIAA guy. (That story is in Salon.)
So the CARP panel based their fees on the Yahoo example, which was worked out by Mark Cuban before he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock that he later unloaded way before the crash. Now he's known for buying big toys that most famously include the Dallas Mavericks.
Mark's plans for Broadcast.com were to scam the feds into helping him drive the small fry out of the market. He'd do that by negotiating a per-stream deal of some kind, rather than a percentage of revenue deal. That's because percentage of revenue would favor the small guys who had no revenue. Fair enough, but his scam was to agree to charges on a per-stream basis, and then multicast all the streams through one porthole, so it would be charged as just one. That porthole never got done, and was under wraps when the "Yahoo deal" was negotiated. And Yahoo has since dropped out of the radio business (wasting the whole $5.7 bil), making the CARP rationale even more absurd than it already was.
Most of this, including a highly disclosing email from Mark Cuban, is archived at RAIN.