But the artist has something that the rest of the food chain does not. The artist - not the engineers, not the studio, not the marketing guys, not the lawyers - actually create what we want. The rest of them might help get that to me, but you could substitute any of a million drop-in replacements for any step of the process except the artist.
The musician might seem to be creating what you want, but the industry created your want.
If Ashlee Simpson was a street musician, you probably would not drop a dollar into her guitar case, other than out of pure pity. But because this massive machine known as the record industry has made millions of people familiar with the melodies of her tunes, she's making buckets of cash. Who should I be more impressed with?
First, I typed in the hirigana character "ka", and hit search. After 20 pages of images, the raciest thing I could find was this picture of a woman in a mini-skirt hugging a big stuffed penguin:
Why do so many people have this fetish for giving all the money from music recording sales to the musicians?
In most cases, the performer did the least work of anybody involved in the making of the record.
I mean, sure, if you are Leo Kottke, you spent decades slavishly honing your craft, but that's not who I'm talking about. People like that are the exception, not the rule. (Also, Leo Kottke, while making a good living on his guitar, never has and never will make "pop star" money.)
Metallica and Jessica Simpson are 100% utterly replaceable cogs in a much, much bigger machine. The typical recording engineer works a hell of a lot harder than Lars Ulrich ever did in his life, as does every last member of the road crew, the promoters, the distributers, etc.
With an army of people involved in making some new band's album go gold, why should the half-drunken fucknut or fake-lesbian E-addicted bimbo pair who stumbled in to the studio to belch out tunes for a few hours become a multi-millionaire when nobody else involved in the project does so? Especially when the studio could pluck any of a dozen bands from the pool of unsigned acts in any city and make an album that's every bit as good?
Pop acts get "screwed" by their contracts because before they were famous, they signed a shitty contract which was the very best one they could get from anybody... But the only reason they became famous (and began to perceive themselves as worth more money) is because the record labels MADE them famous. They worked their asses off bribing DJ's and scrounging for airplay on iPod and Volkswagon commercials to get people hooked on the music.
The label took nearly all the risk (the majority of acts cost them money), and did nearly all the work. It's only fair that they also get most of the money, no matter how much the poor unfortunate souls who got paid to sing songs and look pretty might think they are worth.
The very first time I ever heard anybody seriously insist on the use of the word "PC" to refer specifically to a DOS box was in late 1988. Before that, most people were still calling them IBMs, IBM clones, IBM compatibles, or, in rare cases, MS-DOS PCs.
Depends on how rigid the country you are in wants to be about it.
In Japan, the only "legal" gambling is horse racing, speed boat racing, and majong.
However, they have Pachinko parlors everywhere. Pachinko is kind of like an old-fashioned pinball game, where you drop a steel ball into a glass-lined case, and watch it bounce off a bunch of pins until falling into certain holes.
The way the parlors work, you buy a certain number of balls with cash to play this "recreational" game. If you win, you can collect "prizes", which are generally stuffed toys you don't actually want or whatever.
On your way out of the parlor, you stop by a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT business who will "buy" your "prizes" from you for cash.
But it's not gambling. At least, not as far as the current law in Japan is concerned.
You think of people with disabilities when you think of the GIMP? I tend to think more of a sex slave.
Either way, it makes it very difficult when your mom or your boss asks you to reccomend a good free image editor.
The person who came up with that name should be foreced into a cage and beaten with a hose while their screams are muffled by a ball gag or perhaps a rubber mask that zips shut over the mouth.
And N-Wii would sound like an English version of 'envie' (lust), not 'ennui' (boredom).
Except an English speaker would almost never use the word "envie" for "lust", because we already have a perfectly good word for that: Lust.
Ennui, on the other hand, is a very specific state of boredom which our own language really doesn't have a word for, so the French word has come into common usage among English speakers.
Please note, many french words are co-opted by the English language; chandelier may currectly be pronounced with a distinct 'r' sound at the end, no matter how offensive you might find it.
True, but ennui is still "ahn-wee" in English as well as French.
For reference, cue up Frank Sinatra singing "I get a kick out of you." The opening verse contains the line "fight, in vein, the old ennui."
PC (as in "Macs versus PCs") was in common use in the 1980s
Not in my part of the country. We all called them either "IBM compatibles" or "clones."
Not in any of the general press of the time, either.
The effort to wrest any association with IBM from the identity of Windows systems didn't come along until the late 80s, and didn't really gain much traction until around the turn of the decade, when Windows PC's began to replace a lot of the Unix terminals in big offices, such as Piper Jaffray, a brokerage firm which hired me around 1992 to help support the new-fangled "Windows PCs" which they had just installed.
I actually liked it, when I first tried it. Chances are I'll develop a liking for Wii, too.:p
Why, does the Wii also taste like sweat?
Pocari Sweat is very popular in Japan, but having walked through a Japanese sex shop last month, I've learned that Japanese people have a lot of strange tastes that I don't share.
It's okay. We've all got our kinks. "Live and let live" is my motto. I'm just saying I'll never look at Cardcaptor Sakura quite the same way ever again. *shudder*
Well, in addition to the numbers game, FedEx actually does reliably ship overnight, while the USPS Express mail occasionally takes longer.
Likewise, Macs do have fewer virus problems, better default-config security, superior media authoring software (for free and pre-installed, no less!) and tend to be considerably more reliable and more robust.
Now, Windows has gradually gotten better, as has the USPS, but neither has closed the gap, nor have their earned back their reputations just yet.
So really, it's FedEx and Apple: 1, USPS and Windows: -1.
And just like that, a "hate" campaign makes a lot of sense.
Your sig would actually has 4 different values: 00 01 10 11
So, it should read as such: There are 1 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
You just established yourself as one of the ones who can't.
10 = zero in the "ones" plus one the "twos" column. In base-10, you would write that as "2".
1 in binary is the same as it is in base-10 or hex. It's 1. You can't have "one types."
You also made an enormously stupid fencepost error.
You don't assign one item as "0" when counting how many things you have. Even if you do say something like "the apples in this basket are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4", you still have FIVE apples in your basket.
Also, where do you get 11 from??? 11 is more than 10. He said 10 types of people. Counting them would be done thus:
Yeah, the first response to Pokari Sweat tends to be euw.
But then you figure out that it's meant to balance the body after sweating, or in marketese "with the appropriate density and electrolytes, close to that of human body fluid", and suddenly the message makes sense. Kinda.
And then you try it, and the name REALLY makes sense.
The stuff tastes exactly like sweat, with just a little added citrus and sugar. Think "Gatorade" without fruit flavor. That's pretty much what it is.
They've got a competing one in Japan called "Aquarius" which tastes almost as awful.
Trust me on this, if you are in Japan and are thirsty, go with the green tea or just drink water. Their sports drinks are appalling.
The other guy who replied to you is correct. "PC Magazine" pre-dated the IBM clones, so it was obviously *not* established to focus on clones.
There were several (probably paid) editorials in the late 80s and early 90s urging people to stop calling Compaqs and Olivettis and other DOS/Windows systems of the time "IBM Clones" and instead go with the blanket term "PC" to distinguish the (mostly) Intel-based computers (mostly) running Windows from the Commodore, Atari, and Apple systems of the time.
The term stuck, and now when you say "Macs and PCs", it makes sense to people. Trying to get non-geeks to call a Mac a PC is even more pointless than trying to stop geeks from using made-up plural forms like "boxen" and "virii." You can't do it, so don't bother trying.
Pretty much all hate campaigns I've seen against another product just didn't work out.
Well, Apple does have the advantage in that most people who own PC's already hate them. They are just having a little fun with the hatred that's already there.
But really, I'm not an expert on commercials. Anybody who can point me to some hate campaigns by major companies that seem(ed) to be effective?
Hate campaigns usually require you to identify your competition, which nobody wants to do because then you are spending your money to raise their brand awareness. A "PC hate" campaign isn't really targeting a specific company (at least, not by name), so Apple can get away with it where most businesses could not.
I do have one example, though. FedEx has been running hate ads against the USPS for decades, and it has built an emprie. The simple fact that the Post Office doesn't guarantee a specific maximum shipping date, even for their high-dollar "express" delivery, pretty much wrote FedEx's "the Post Office sucks" ads for them.
Actually, it was Windows bigots that hijacked the word "PC" to mean "Windows System."
Until the early 90's, people called computers that ran MS-DOS and Windows "IMB Compatable" computers.
Microsoft hated that, because that made it sound like a Compaq running Windows was somehow inferior to an IBM running Windows. Also, since IBM was moving away from DOS at the time (in favor of OS/2), they were worried that the term (which was essential to them usurping IBM's monopoly) was no longer going to apply.
So they "encouraged" the industry press to use the term "PC" to apply to WinTel boxes, and thus a new usage was born.
"PC" used to stand for "Personal Computer." Now, it stands for "Piece of Crap."
Soldiers in Iraq are dying about roughly at the same rate as they would be if they were "safely" on-base or at home back in the US. Nothing about the Iraq war is currently putting a strain on the military capacity to hold funerals. The entire problem is that war heroes from previous generations are now dying of old age, and we owe each an every one of them a damn good send-off.
The story: Beautiful women fight each other and play volleyball, with some obscure backstory about avenging their masters or rescuing their brothers or something. Oh, and the Chinese Tai Chi Quan girl and the German Karate girl seem to have some kind of lesbian thing going, or at the very least are very, very close friends.
Sure, it's no Tolstoy novel, but it's a hell of a lot more compelling than the plots of any of the three Star Wars prequels.
See? See what happens? This is why there are no successful libertarian comedians.
Investing in growth hardly implies a pyramid scheme anyway, but if you're anti-government, I don't expect there's any way to explain that.
Quite right! Social Security is not a Pryamid Scheme. That's just silly!
It's a Ponzi Scheme.
Oh, and there are successful libertarian comedians. P.J. O'Rourke, for one, has about ten best-sellers. How many books have you published? Bill Maher also self-identifies as a libertarian, and there's little question that Penn Jillette is in the mix as well. Almost half of the episodes of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" are straight-up libertarian think-tank critiques of society.
I think the main point is that people would like to see the demand for bugle players to go down. Trying to find a solution to a lack of bugle players by finding alternative bugles isn't the solution people are looking for.
So... Just ask all those aging WW II vets to quit dying then? Good idea!
So I guess you are advocating prioritizing every problem on the planet and forbidding people from working on the less serious issues until the more serious ones are solved?
I must have missed the part where I said that.
I just thought the parent to my post was getting a little hyperbolic and needed to be put into perspective.
If we allow this to happen and then criticize China, it's "people who live in glass houses".
Right. Because allowing private companies to charge extra for bandwidth priority is every bit as bad as killing people for their religious beliefs, censoring the news, and rolling tanks out to break up peaceful student protests.
It also would have been helpful if the Slashdot summary (instead of simply copy/pasting the first paragraph of TFA) had listed which speaker systems were being reviewed. Then it would have saved me the trouble on clicking the link to see that, in fact, the headline should have read "Zero High-End iPod Speaker Systems Reviewed."
To save the rest of you said hassle:
There's the Apple "Lo-Fi" (as I like to call it), a boom box from Altec Lansing, and Yet Another Puny Satelite System With A Subwoofer made by Klipsh. All junk. All overpriced.
What would be nice is if somebody made a rugged $50 lo-fi plastic boom box with an iPod dock. Something you could carelessly throw into an open pick-up truck bed and head to the beach with. What's the point of building a small, portable, speaker system if it's as delicate as gossimer wings, more expensive than a monthly car payment, and still sounds like ass anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
But the artist has something that the rest of the food chain does not. The artist - not the engineers, not the studio, not the marketing guys, not the lawyers - actually create what we want. The rest of them might help get that to me, but you could substitute any of a million drop-in replacements for any step of the process except the artist.
The musician might seem to be creating what you want, but the industry created your want.
If Ashlee Simpson was a street musician, you probably would not drop a dollar into her guitar case, other than out of pure pity. But because this massive machine known as the record industry has made millions of people familiar with the melodies of her tunes, she's making buckets of cash. Who should I be more impressed with?
I tried your "game."
g
First, I typed in the hirigana character "ka", and hit search. After 20 pages of images, the raciest thing I could find was this picture of a woman in a mini-skirt hugging a big stuffed penguin:
http://ameblo.jp/user_images/39/92/10001934847.jp
Kinda cute, actually.
Then I went with the english letter "k". By page 5, I hit this weird-ass oil painting of a dominatrix getting felt up by a submissive dude in a beard.
http://nohogalleryla.com/Lance%20K.Wolbransky.jpg
Japan may be freaky, but they are in good company.
Why do so many people have this fetish for giving all the money from music recording sales to the musicians?
In most cases, the performer did the least work of anybody involved in the making of the record.
I mean, sure, if you are Leo Kottke, you spent decades slavishly honing your craft, but that's not who I'm talking about. People like that are the exception, not the rule. (Also, Leo Kottke, while making a good living on his guitar, never has and never will make "pop star" money.)
Metallica and Jessica Simpson are 100% utterly replaceable cogs in a much, much bigger machine. The typical recording engineer works a hell of a lot harder than Lars Ulrich ever did in his life, as does every last member of the road crew, the promoters, the distributers, etc.
With an army of people involved in making some new band's album go gold, why should the half-drunken fucknut or fake-lesbian E-addicted bimbo pair who stumbled in to the studio to belch out tunes for a few hours become a multi-millionaire when nobody else involved in the project does so? Especially when the studio could pluck any of a dozen bands from the pool of unsigned acts in any city and make an album that's every bit as good?
Pop acts get "screwed" by their contracts because before they were famous, they signed a shitty contract which was the very best one they could get from anybody... But the only reason they became famous (and began to perceive themselves as worth more money) is because the record labels MADE them famous. They worked their asses off bribing DJ's and scrounging for airplay on iPod and Volkswagon commercials to get people hooked on the music.
The label took nearly all the risk (the majority of acts cost them money), and did nearly all the work. It's only fair that they also get most of the money, no matter how much the poor unfortunate souls who got paid to sing songs and look pretty might think they are worth.
(see the 386/33 ones)
The ones from 1989?
Thanks for proving my point.
The very first time I ever heard anybody seriously insist on the use of the word "PC" to refer specifically to a DOS box was in late 1988. Before that, most people were still calling them IBMs, IBM clones, IBM compatibles, or, in rare cases, MS-DOS PCs.
Depends on how rigid the country you are in wants to be about it.
In Japan, the only "legal" gambling is horse racing, speed boat racing, and majong.
However, they have Pachinko parlors everywhere. Pachinko is kind of like an old-fashioned pinball game, where you drop a steel ball into a glass-lined case, and watch it bounce off a bunch of pins until falling into certain holes.
The way the parlors work, you buy a certain number of balls with cash to play this "recreational" game. If you win, you can collect "prizes", which are generally stuffed toys you don't actually want or whatever.
On your way out of the parlor, you stop by a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT business who will "buy" your "prizes" from you for cash.
But it's not gambling. At least, not as far as the current law in Japan is concerned.
You think of people with disabilities when you think of the GIMP? I tend to think more of a sex slave.
Either way, it makes it very difficult when your mom or your boss asks you to reccomend a good free image editor.
The person who came up with that name should be foreced into a cage and beaten with a hose while their screams are muffled by a ball gag or perhaps a rubber mask that zips shut over the mouth.
Just sayin' is all.
And N-Wii would sound like an English version of 'envie' (lust), not 'ennui' (boredom).
Except an English speaker would almost never use the word "envie" for "lust", because we already have a perfectly good word for that: Lust.
Ennui, on the other hand, is a very specific state of boredom which our own language really doesn't have a word for, so the French word has come into common usage among English speakers.
Please note, many french words are co-opted by the English language; chandelier may currectly be pronounced with a distinct 'r' sound at the end, no matter how offensive you might find it.
True, but ennui is still "ahn-wee" in English as well as French.
For reference, cue up Frank Sinatra singing "I get a kick out of you." The opening verse contains the line "fight, in vein, the old ennui."
And not into it enough to know is name is pronounced more like "ING-vay"
A goofy controller which nobody has figured out how to develop for, and now a goofy name which nobody has figured out how to pronounce.
You know, there is such a thing as "bad publicity." Michael Jackson's been in the press a lot lately, but it hasn't helped his album sales.
PC (as in "Macs versus PCs") was in common use in the 1980s
Not in my part of the country. We all called them either "IBM compatibles" or "clones."
Not in any of the general press of the time, either.
The effort to wrest any association with IBM from the identity of Windows systems didn't come along until the late 80s, and didn't really gain much traction until around the turn of the decade, when Windows PC's began to replace a lot of the Unix terminals in big offices, such as Piper Jaffray, a brokerage firm which hired me around 1992 to help support the new-fangled "Windows PCs" which they had just installed.
I actually liked it, when I first tried it. Chances are I'll develop a liking for Wii, too. :p
Why, does the Wii also taste like sweat?
Pocari Sweat is very popular in Japan, but having walked through a Japanese sex shop last month, I've learned that Japanese people have a lot of strange tastes that I don't share.
It's okay. We've all got our kinks. "Live and let live" is my motto. I'm just saying I'll never look at Cardcaptor Sakura quite the same way ever again. *shudder*
Well, in addition to the numbers game, FedEx actually does reliably ship overnight, while the USPS Express mail occasionally takes longer.
Likewise, Macs do have fewer virus problems, better default-config security, superior media authoring software (for free and pre-installed, no less!) and tend to be considerably more reliable and more robust.
Now, Windows has gradually gotten better, as has the USPS, but neither has closed the gap, nor have their earned back their reputations just yet.
So really, it's FedEx and Apple: 1, USPS and Windows: -1.
And just like that, a "hate" campaign makes a lot of sense.
Your sig would actually has 4 different values:
00
01
10
11
So, it should read as such:
There are 1 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
You just established yourself as one of the ones who can't.
10 = zero in the "ones" plus one the "twos" column. In base-10, you would write that as "2".
1 in binary is the same as it is in base-10 or hex. It's 1. You can't have "one types."
You also made an enormously stupid fencepost error.
You don't assign one item as "0" when counting how many things you have. Even if you do say something like "the apples in this basket are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4", you still have FIVE apples in your basket.
Also, where do you get 11 from??? 11 is more than 10. He said 10 types of people. Counting them would be done thus:
1.
10.
Done.
Yeah, the first response to Pokari Sweat tends to be euw.
But then you figure out that it's meant to balance the body after sweating, or in marketese "with the appropriate density and electrolytes, close to that of human body fluid", and suddenly the message makes sense. Kinda.
And then you try it, and the name REALLY makes sense.
The stuff tastes exactly like sweat, with just a little added citrus and sugar. Think "Gatorade" without fruit flavor. That's pretty much what it is.
They've got a competing one in Japan called "Aquarius" which tastes almost as awful.
Trust me on this, if you are in Japan and are thirsty, go with the green tea or just drink water. Their sports drinks are appalling.
The other guy who replied to you is correct. "PC Magazine" pre-dated the IBM clones, so it was obviously *not* established to focus on clones.
There were several (probably paid) editorials in the late 80s and early 90s urging people to stop calling Compaqs and Olivettis and other DOS/Windows systems of the time "IBM Clones" and instead go with the blanket term "PC" to distinguish the (mostly) Intel-based computers (mostly) running Windows from the Commodore, Atari, and Apple systems of the time.
The term stuck, and now when you say "Macs and PCs", it makes sense to people. Trying to get non-geeks to call a Mac a PC is even more pointless than trying to stop geeks from using made-up plural forms like "boxen" and "virii." You can't do it, so don't bother trying.
Pretty much all hate campaigns I've seen against another product just didn't work out.
Well, Apple does have the advantage in that most people who own PC's already hate them. They are just having a little fun with the hatred that's already there.
But really, I'm not an expert on commercials. Anybody who can point me to some hate campaigns by major companies that seem(ed) to be effective?
Hate campaigns usually require you to identify your competition, which nobody wants to do because then you are spending your money to raise their brand awareness. A "PC hate" campaign isn't really targeting a specific company (at least, not by name), so Apple can get away with it where most businesses could not.
I do have one example, though. FedEx has been running hate ads against the USPS for decades, and it has built an emprie. The simple fact that the Post Office doesn't guarantee a specific maximum shipping date, even for their high-dollar "express" delivery, pretty much wrote FedEx's "the Post Office sucks" ads for them.
Actually, it was Windows bigots that hijacked the word "PC" to mean "Windows System."
Until the early 90's, people called computers that ran MS-DOS and Windows "IMB Compatable" computers.
Microsoft hated that, because that made it sound like a Compaq running Windows was somehow inferior to an IBM running Windows. Also, since IBM was moving away from DOS at the time (in favor of OS/2), they were worried that the term (which was essential to them usurping IBM's monopoly) was no longer going to apply.
So they "encouraged" the industry press to use the term "PC" to apply to WinTel boxes, and thus a new usage was born.
"PC" used to stand for "Personal Computer." Now, it stands for "Piece of Crap."
Soldiers in Iraq are dying about roughly at the same rate as they would be if they were "safely" on-base or at home back in the US. Nothing about the Iraq war is currently putting a strain on the military capacity to hold funerals. The entire problem is that war heroes from previous generations are now dying of old age, and we owe each an every one of them a damn good send-off.
No plot!? There's plenty of plot!
The story: Beautiful women fight each other and play volleyball, with some obscure backstory about avenging their masters or rescuing their brothers or something. Oh, and the Chinese Tai Chi Quan girl and the German Karate girl seem to have some kind of lesbian thing going, or at the very least are very, very close friends.
Sure, it's no Tolstoy novel, but it's a hell of a lot more compelling than the plots of any of the three Star Wars prequels.
See? See what happens? This is why there are no successful libertarian comedians.
Investing in growth hardly implies a pyramid scheme anyway, but if you're anti-government, I don't expect there's any way to explain that.
Quite right! Social Security is not a Pryamid Scheme. That's just silly!
It's a Ponzi Scheme.
Oh, and there are successful libertarian comedians. P.J. O'Rourke, for one, has about ten best-sellers. How many books have you published? Bill Maher also self-identifies as a libertarian, and there's little question that Penn Jillette is in the mix as well. Almost half of the episodes of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" are straight-up libertarian think-tank critiques of society.
I think the main point is that people would like to see the demand for bugle players to go down. Trying to find a solution to a lack of bugle players by finding alternative bugles isn't the solution people are looking for.
So... Just ask all those aging WW II vets to quit dying then? Good idea!
So I guess you are advocating prioritizing every problem on the planet and forbidding people from working on the less serious issues until the more serious ones are solved?
I must have missed the part where I said that.
I just thought the parent to my post was getting a little hyperbolic and needed to be put into perspective.
If we allow this to happen and then criticize China, it's "people who live in glass houses".
Right. Because allowing private companies to charge extra for bandwidth priority is every bit as bad as killing people for their religious beliefs, censoring the news, and rolling tanks out to break up peaceful student protests.
It also would have been helpful if the Slashdot summary (instead of simply copy/pasting the first paragraph of TFA) had listed which speaker systems were being reviewed. Then it would have saved me the trouble on clicking the link to see that, in fact, the headline should have read "Zero High-End iPod Speaker Systems Reviewed."
To save the rest of you said hassle:
There's the Apple "Lo-Fi" (as I like to call it), a boom box from Altec Lansing, and Yet Another Puny Satelite System With A Subwoofer made by Klipsh. All junk. All overpriced.
What would be nice is if somebody made a rugged $50 lo-fi plastic boom box with an iPod dock. Something you could carelessly throw into an open pick-up truck bed and head to the beach with. What's the point of building a small, portable, speaker system if it's as delicate as gossimer wings, more expensive than a monthly car payment, and still sounds like ass anyway?