s. The horribly sad part is that it's fairly difficult to find a decent set of speakers these day, between overpriced boutique crap (designed to look stylish), and tinny satellite systems (designed to be hidden), both with horrid frequency response curves just distributed differently. Far too much focus on Wife Acceptance factor, in my not so humble opinion. There aren't any companies that even make anything vaguely similar to a Klipsch Cornwall, or comparable JBL's these days.
Two outstanding "bookshelf" speaker makers are Bowers & Wilkins (which I proudly own myself), and PMC (which cost a couple bucks more, IIRC, but sound very nice.)
Neither company makes 'em tiny & "wife friendly"... both look exactly like the 1-foot tall speakers your dad had in the garage back in the 70s, but they do sound very nice, especially when coupled with a high-quality active subwoofer.
If your wife will put up with big floor monoliths, you're talking Vandersteen, Carver, or any of a hundred other high-end makers.
Don't let the sudden surge in popularity of Bose crap fool you, there's good audio gear out there to be found, and it's actually cheaper (in adjusted dollars) than it ever was back in the day.
Cables have power loss, impedence, bandwidths, etc. which would make it easy to determine if the $50 cable is any better than the $10 one.
I'll save you some time: It's not.
Unless you are talking about shielded cable (where the shielding matters) or twisted-pair cable like CAT-5, there's no difference.
This is particularilly true of speaker wire. 14-guage copper is 14-guage copper. There's only 5 machine designs in the world for pulling copper wire, and a small group of factories using those machines. Monster Cable buys their speaker wire from the same factories as Radio Shack or your local hardware store. They might stick a fancy-looking plastic enclosure on one end (which does nothing) and they might add gold tips to the ends (ditto), but it's the same wire, and one magazine has a standing $20,000 prize waiting for you if you can consistantly tell the difference in double-blind testing between the thousand-dollar-per-foot stuff that Monster pimps out, and the $4 a foot stuff of the same guage from a generic no-name wire company.
As for the article... None of these speaker systems are "high end." They are expensive, but they are still basically boom boxes with iPod docks. Run your Mac's optical out to a REAL sound system, and save the iPod for the car and your morning jog.
Sorry your web surfing was interrupted by fired employees trying to hand you old office supplies. Please, please, don't quit. As you know, without a good office manager, the whole company is doomed because all executives are helpless children. A fruit basket has been sent to your desk, and your clothing stipend will be doubled. Also, your job title has been escalated yet again, from "secretary" to "receptionist" to "office manager" to "company overlord."
Thank you for your patience, and also for helping me write this. Why don't you take the afternoon off for another massage? We'll get a temp to handle the phones for you, as usual.
The fire-bombing of Tokyo killed far more civilians than both nukes combined, and the invasion of Japan would have killed millions. There's little question that the nukes were the only reason the Japanese commanders (not Hirohito himself) made the decision to surrender, and there's little question that, if they did not it would have been a disaster for Japan.
Think of it. Millions killed, followed by a Japan divided in two the way Germany was, meaning that half of the country would be an impoverished, oppressed, dystopic nightmare for the next 60 years.
There's no question that, in hindsight, dropping those bombs was the nicest thing the US could have done for them at that point.
The difference being, the Bush "quote" is obviously sarcasm taken out of context to look like he meant it.
Gore, on the other hand, was dead serious when he said, "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He really intended for people to believe that, in spite of not even being in Congress until two full years after people started calling ARPANET "the Internet", he deserved credit for its creation.
Mad props to Gore for the work he did in Congress to advance Internet infrastucture and standards, but it's still a very silly quote, and probably the biggest PR screw-up of his entire career.
(By the way, as much as people like to say it was Bush or Cheyney or Rove or whoever that blew Gore's quote out of proportion, several of his Democratic primary opponents also gave him endless shit about it as well, until he sewed up the nomination.)
"Discoteque" was not an album. It's a song off the album "Pop"
And in spite of the disposable opening single, "Pop" does have a few good ballads to redeem it. In particular, "Staring at the Sun" and "If God Would Send His Angels" are nice cuts.
I would insist that Metallica's changing sound had more to do with two other factors:
1. Line-up change. One of them died. 2. They got fucking sick of playing speed metal.
Their newer stuff didn't do much for me either, but it was well liked, and apart from a few nerds who got all pissed off at Lars's comments about Napster, I don't see a lot of "old fans" who feel betrayed by them. If anything, they are more popular now after they stopped being thought of as "cool" by the mainstream, than they ever were before the "Black Album" was relased.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you go back to it, now that all the hype is a distant memory. It's certainly a better album, by far, than their recent two "back to their roots" attempts. Side 2 (the side without any hits on it) in particular is a pleasure to spin up, and "Bullet the Blue Sky" is a rugged enough groove that it's rather easy to get past the random, meandering screed about fighter planes "pelting the women and children" near the end. It's actually kind of charming to listen to now, in a slice-of-the-zeitgeist kind of way.
Not to repeat myself, but would "Mario Kart" be a better game if you called it "Troll Racer"?
Depends. Could I still play as a fairy princess in a pink ballgown, or at least a cute little animal? And would the cars still look like adorable plastic toys, racing on magical neon-glowing floating tracks?
The name is probably the least "kiddie" thing about that game.
EXACTLY!!!!!! and because you didnt turn up Madonna blames it on P2P and does not face the fact that she is losing fans to another band...
I didn't say she's losing me as a fan. I wasn't one to begin with, and if I was, the fact that I'm not willing to pay her concert fee would not make me stop liking the music.
People start to like an up and coming band thats $50 = Less people at Madonnas concert = "must be stealing music" = Jack up prices even higher for existing fans = lose more fans to cheaper bands = blame it on P2P.
More like: Madonna sells out stadiums every time she plays at $50 a seat. She still sells out the stadium at $250 a seat, so she charges $250 and makes more money. Blames declining record sales on P2P when the fact is that, even without P2P, people are spending less of their entertainment dollars on CD's these days, because we have so many other choices out there.
You know, so long as three chords are enough for you...
"Three chords and The Truth" is all anybody ever needed for any great 12-bar blues song. If that.
If three chords are "not enough" for you to enjoy music, you don't deserve the likes of Muddy Waters or Blind Willie Johnson. Go listen to Kelly Clarkston.
But setting that aside, I'll have you know that "Running to Stand Still" uses a whopping FOUR chords.
(Although two of them are only used on the turn-around, now that I think about it.)
Even if you don't like old-school "jangly" U2, I think you owe it to yourself to give "The Joshua Tree" another listen. It's really quite a remarkable album by any standard, whether you care for any of the rest of the band's catalog or not.
I wore gray the tracks "One Tree Hill" and "Running to Stand Still" on my college roomate's vinyl copy of it.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is a very good 2nd-tier organization, but I don't know if I'd call them "World Class". The World Class Orchestra in this state is across the river, playing in one of the ugliest-looking (but best-sounding) music halls in the country.
In the 80s and early 90s, it was fairly commonplace for pop acts to sell concert seats at a loss, since album sales were so profitable for the company, and the band made a killing on merchandise.
These days, most record labels are money-losing divisions of bigger media companies. The reason for this is not P2P, but the simple fact that a wealth of media options is now competing for teens' entertainment dollars.
When "Sgt. Pepper's" came out, High School and college kids on four continents rushed out to buy it, and would sit at home listening to it for hours on their record players. But what else would they be doing with their leisure time back then? There were no playstaions, no home theaters, no MySpace pages, and certainly no way to stay in touch with their friends while out and about.
If a kid is spending $60 per game on their console system, and $20 for their MMPORPG, and another $20 on a NetFlix account, they are not going to spend much on buying albums. Especially when a Soundtrack CD often costs five bucks more than a DVD of the movie the sountrack is coming from!
Add to that the fact that the pop music industry is the most risk-averse it has been since the early 60s, and you've got a sure formula for overall long-term failure. The industry is stuck adapting to the fact that a "two hits pluss filler" pop album is simply not worth $18 to the typical mall rat anymore. If you are very lucky, the kid will spend $2 downloading the hits off iTMS, and that's the last money you'll get out of them until you bring the concert to town.
I suspect that the next Big Thing in pop music will be something that takes greater advantage of multimedia and the Interactivity offered by modern computers. Something like DEVO was hoping to do when VHS was emerging, or what Brian Eno has been up to lately (although he seems to be slightly missing the mark.) The element which is missing from a lot of these early attempts at interactive performance art is sex appeal, something which has always been an essential part of pop. The "Idol" shows in America and England seem to be a step in a direction which is generating interest, but it seems to me that somebody is going to come along and go farther with it.
I've been mocking the Nintendo Revolution's motion capture interface as much as anybody, but perhaps something like that, in which you choreograph how you want a virtual Britany Spears to dance by demonstrating the moves yourself, would be one example of a new way to sell pop music. I don't know. I suspect that it's going to take something that weirdly different to get people to care about it. After all, would teens be aware of a song like "Wakka Lakka" if it were not for DDR?
My point is, big companies are all slow movers. The place I'm working now is a Fortune 500 company that took almost a YEAR to get me on to the payroll.
Small 8-person consulting firms might get you a second interview within a week and have you start the following Monday, but the big corporations are usually not able to be as agile.
But loyalty is something I do feel owed as it's in return for my loyalty. But I guess old-school notions of loyalty just don't exist anymore - not when there are dollars in question.
But Bono and Madonna never asked for your loytalty. They are not friends of yours. They are just people who recorded music in the hopes that other people would like it enough to buy it.
The CEO of Target is where he is because I (along with a lot of other people) buy clothes in his store. That doesn't make him somebody that should be expected to "respect" me in any way whatsoever. If he wanted to turn Target into a chain of boutiques which only sold $300 jeans, that would be entirely up to him. I wouldn't feel "betrayed", or like the jeans I bought there in the past any less... I'd just look for another store to buy new jeans from.
When U2 decided to spend two or three albums doing techo parody of themselves, somebody asked Bono if what they were doing might be alienating their old fans. He replied by saying maybe it was, "but we don't need them."
What does an artist owe to the fans? Nothing.
Yeah, a "big name" got big because a shitload of people were willing to spend money on their records and t-shirts, but those people got records and t-shirts that they were happy with out of the deal. Fair exchange.
The fact that you bought all of U2's old stuff (even "October") does not buy you the right to dictate the artistic direction they choose to go next.
Likewise, the fact that you wore fishnet crop-tops in High School and know the words to "Express Yourself" by heart does not endow you in the inalienable right to get in to Madonna's concert for fifty bucks when others are willing to pay five times that for the same seat.
The fair way to set any price is supply and demand. There's a finite supply of Madonna tickets, and plenty of demand. If she sold the tickets for $50, scalpers would buy them all up and sell them for $250 on eBay. Fans would pay the same to get in, but Madonna's business venture would get less of it.
There are only three vendors that matter anymore in the GPU market: nVidea, ATI, and Intel, and Apple has built systems using each of them. How hard can it be?
Why is that ironic? Microsoft is one of Apple's biggest investors.
You spelled "Oracle" wrong.
Microsoft is a very small former investor. $150 million invested a company that was sitting on $4 Billion in cash at the time. All of those shares have now been sold (at quite a profit, too.)
Two months is "stringing along"? Only two months is OUTSTANDING!
Hell, the jobs I actually landed took longer than that. The ones that have nothing try to keep you in the hopper for several times that ammount before letting it slip that the position has been filled!
If you let your unemployment benefits run out while waiting to hear back from only one company, you are not being very serious about your job search.
There are about 2,270,000 Millionairs in the United States alone. Add to that the number of people wealthy enough to be half-millionaires, and you are talking about a lot of people.
Why NOT have one or two rows reserved at sports events and concerts for people rich and stupid enough to pay hundreds of dollars so they can sit eighteen inches closer than the unwashed masses immediately behind them?
The very fact that the ticket-scalping market exists is proof that the artists are not "fleecing" anybody. They are simply charging what their fans are willing to pay.
*I* sure as hell wouldn't pay $250 to sit in a hockey arena and watch a Madonna Concert. For that matter, I wouldn't pay that much to see a music act I really liked.
But my solution to that is to not go to such concerts. Instead of paying $200+ to see the Rolling Stones when they came to Minnesota last year, I spent about $50 to see The White Stripes instead. (And, from all reports, I saw the better show.)
There's no such thing as an "unfair" price for entertainment. It's not like the people that can't afford to go to Madonna's concert are being denied health care or something.
If seeing that elderly skank wiggle her ass while singing through a vocoder is worth $250 to you, then more power to you. Go. Enjoy the show.
If it's not, and you really like Madonna, then stay home and jerk off to the cover of your old vinyl copy of the "Like a Virgin" LP. You'll probably get just as much out of the experience.
Good shows might appeal more to one demographic than another, but a good show is a good show.
For example, you can make a show like "Gilmour Girls" and 30-something women will like it more than most other folks, resulting in a "cult hit" within that demographic, and TV people love it when that happens, because it makes selling ad time easier... but if you get a bunch of executives to say "we need to find a show that hits the Gilmour Girls market", that show will almost certainly be a complete train wreck, because they are not setting out to make a good show that will happen to click with certain people, but setting out to click with those people and the need for it to be good is a distant second.
The internet is a collection of tiny dictatorship. It's not a huge democratic thing, and it is even no anarchy (even though it comes as close to the classic definition of anarchy, where everyone governs himself and holds no power over others as it can come).
Every server is owned by someone. And he's the dictator. As benevolent or tyrannic as he wants to be. Those pages that claim they're "democratic" are so because the dictator decided it would be nice to let his "peasants", his users, act as the ruling body. But ultimately, he is in charge.
Actually, everybody being the "dictator" of their own property is pretty much what anarchy is. Don't like Slashdot? Grab the slashcode and set up a site just like it which reflects your values better. Thousands of people have done exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
s. The horribly sad part is that it's fairly difficult to find a decent set of speakers these day, between overpriced boutique crap (designed to look stylish), and tinny satellite systems (designed to be hidden), both with horrid frequency response curves just distributed differently. Far too much focus on Wife Acceptance factor, in my not so humble opinion. There aren't any companies that even make anything vaguely similar to a Klipsch Cornwall, or comparable JBL's these days.
Two outstanding "bookshelf" speaker makers are Bowers & Wilkins (which I proudly own myself), and PMC (which cost a couple bucks more, IIRC, but sound very nice.)
Neither company makes 'em tiny & "wife friendly"... both look exactly like the 1-foot tall speakers your dad had in the garage back in the 70s, but they do sound very nice, especially when coupled with a high-quality active subwoofer.
If your wife will put up with big floor monoliths, you're talking Vandersteen, Carver, or any of a hundred other high-end makers.
Don't let the sudden surge in popularity of Bose crap fool you, there's good audio gear out there to be found, and it's actually cheaper (in adjusted dollars) than it ever was back in the day.
Cables have power loss, impedence, bandwidths, etc. which would make it easy to determine if the $50 cable is any better than the $10 one.
I'll save you some time: It's not.
Unless you are talking about shielded cable (where the shielding matters) or twisted-pair cable like CAT-5, there's no difference.
This is particularilly true of speaker wire. 14-guage copper is 14-guage copper. There's only 5 machine designs in the world for pulling copper wire, and a small group of factories using those machines. Monster Cable buys their speaker wire from the same factories as Radio Shack or your local hardware store. They might stick a fancy-looking plastic enclosure on one end (which does nothing) and they might add gold tips to the ends (ditto), but it's the same wire, and one magazine has a standing $20,000 prize waiting for you if you can consistantly tell the difference in double-blind testing between the thousand-dollar-per-foot stuff that Monster pimps out, and the $4 a foot stuff of the same guage from a generic no-name wire company.
As for the article... None of these speaker systems are "high end." They are expensive, but they are still basically boom boxes with iPod docks. Run your Mac's optical out to a REAL sound system, and save the iPod for the car and your morning jog.
Hi Karen, this is Ed, the CEO.
Sorry your web surfing was interrupted by fired employees trying to hand you old office supplies. Please, please, don't quit. As you know, without a good office manager, the whole company is doomed because all executives are helpless children. A fruit basket has been sent to your desk, and your clothing stipend will be doubled. Also, your job title has been escalated yet again, from "secretary" to "receptionist" to "office manager" to "company overlord."
Thank you for your patience, and also for helping me write this. Why don't you take the afternoon off for another massage? We'll get a temp to handle the phones for you, as usual.
The fire-bombing of Tokyo killed far more civilians than both nukes combined, and the invasion of Japan would have killed millions. There's little question that the nukes were the only reason the Japanese commanders (not Hirohito himself) made the decision to surrender, and there's little question that, if they did not it would have been a disaster for Japan.
Think of it. Millions killed, followed by a Japan divided in two the way Germany was, meaning that half of the country would be an impoverished, oppressed, dystopic nightmare for the next 60 years.
There's no question that, in hindsight, dropping those bombs was the nicest thing the US could have done for them at that point.
Thats what you get for buying jeans at target.
I have a pair of $49 jeans thats ~5 years old and holding on.
I've been slowly losing weight over the past three years. My jeans get too big for me before they wear out.
The difference being, the Bush "quote" is obviously sarcasm taken out of context to look like he meant it.
Gore, on the other hand, was dead serious when he said, "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He really intended for people to believe that, in spite of not even being in Congress until two full years after people started calling ARPANET "the Internet", he deserved credit for its creation.
Mad props to Gore for the work he did in Congress to advance Internet infrastucture and standards, but it's still a very silly quote, and probably the biggest PR screw-up of his entire career.
(By the way, as much as people like to say it was Bush or Cheyney or Rove or whoever that blew Gore's quote out of proportion, several of his Democratic primary opponents also gave him endless shit about it as well, until he sewed up the nomination.)
Although I don't like Pop or Discotheque
"Discoteque" was not an album. It's a song off the album "Pop"
And in spite of the disposable opening single, "Pop" does have a few good ballads to redeem it. In particular, "Staring at the Sun" and "If God Would Send His Angels" are nice cuts.
I would insist that Metallica's changing sound had more to do with two other factors:
1. Line-up change. One of them died.
2. They got fucking sick of playing speed metal.
Their newer stuff didn't do much for me either, but it was well liked, and apart from a few nerds who got all pissed off at Lars's comments about Napster, I don't see a lot of "old fans" who feel betrayed by them. If anything, they are more popular now after they stopped being thought of as "cool" by the mainstream, than they ever were before the "Black Album" was relased.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you go back to it, now that all the hype is a distant memory. It's certainly a better album, by far, than their recent two "back to their roots" attempts. Side 2 (the side without any hits on it) in particular is a pleasure to spin up, and "Bullet the Blue Sky" is a rugged enough groove that it's rather easy to get past the random, meandering screed about fighter planes "pelting the women and children" near the end. It's actually kind of charming to listen to now, in a slice-of-the-zeitgeist kind of way.
Not to repeat myself, but would "Mario Kart" be a better game if you called it "Troll Racer"?
Depends. Could I still play as a fairy princess in a pink ballgown, or at least a cute little animal? And would the cars still look like adorable plastic toys, racing on magical neon-glowing floating tracks?
The name is probably the least "kiddie" thing about that game.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
EXACTLY!!!!!! and because you didnt turn up Madonna blames it on P2P and does not face the fact that she is losing fans to another band...
I didn't say she's losing me as a fan. I wasn't one to begin with, and if I was, the fact that I'm not willing to pay her concert fee would not make me stop liking the music.
People start to like an up and coming band thats $50 = Less people at Madonnas concert = "must be stealing music" = Jack up prices even higher for existing fans = lose more fans to cheaper bands = blame it on P2P.
More like: Madonna sells out stadiums every time she plays at $50 a seat. She still sells out the stadium at $250 a seat, so she charges $250 and makes more money. Blames declining record sales on P2P when the fact is that, even without P2P, people are spending less of their entertainment dollars on CD's these days, because we have so many other choices out there.
You know, so long as three chords are enough for you...
"Three chords and The Truth" is all anybody ever needed for any great 12-bar blues song. If that.
If three chords are "not enough" for you to enjoy music, you don't deserve the likes of Muddy Waters or Blind Willie Johnson. Go listen to Kelly Clarkston.
But setting that aside, I'll have you know that "Running to Stand Still" uses a whopping FOUR chords.
(Although two of them are only used on the turn-around, now that I think about it.)
Even if you don't like old-school "jangly" U2, I think you owe it to yourself to give "The Joshua Tree" another listen. It's really quite a remarkable album by any standard, whether you care for any of the rest of the band's catalog or not.
I wore gray the tracks "One Tree Hill" and "Running to Stand Still" on my college roomate's vinyl copy of it.
So does target's CEO say they don't need customers?
If Target started selling $300 jeans, and people were buying it, they certainly wouldn't need me and my 3-pair-of-$20-jeans-per-year.
Same with U2 making millions off their silly "Zoo TV" tour back in the 90's. Fans of "War" and "Boy" really didn't matter to them anymore.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is a very good 2nd-tier organization, but I don't know if I'd call them "World Class". The World Class Orchestra in this state is across the river, playing in one of the ugliest-looking (but best-sounding) music halls in the country.
In the 80s and early 90s, it was fairly commonplace for pop acts to sell concert seats at a loss, since album sales were so profitable for the company, and the band made a killing on merchandise.
These days, most record labels are money-losing divisions of bigger media companies. The reason for this is not P2P, but the simple fact that a wealth of media options is now competing for teens' entertainment dollars.
When "Sgt. Pepper's" came out, High School and college kids on four continents rushed out to buy it, and would sit at home listening to it for hours on their record players. But what else would they be doing with their leisure time back then? There were no playstaions, no home theaters, no MySpace pages, and certainly no way to stay in touch with their friends while out and about.
If a kid is spending $60 per game on their console system, and $20 for their MMPORPG, and another $20 on a NetFlix account, they are not going to spend much on buying albums. Especially when a Soundtrack CD often costs five bucks more than a DVD of the movie the sountrack is coming from!
Add to that the fact that the pop music industry is the most risk-averse it has been since the early 60s, and you've got a sure formula for overall long-term failure. The industry is stuck adapting to the fact that a "two hits pluss filler" pop album is simply not worth $18 to the typical mall rat anymore. If you are very lucky, the kid will spend $2 downloading the hits off iTMS, and that's the last money you'll get out of them until you bring the concert to town.
I suspect that the next Big Thing in pop music will be something that takes greater advantage of multimedia and the Interactivity offered by modern computers. Something like DEVO was hoping to do when VHS was emerging, or what Brian Eno has been up to lately (although he seems to be slightly missing the mark.) The element which is missing from a lot of these early attempts at interactive performance art is sex appeal, something which has always been an essential part of pop. The "Idol" shows in America and England seem to be a step in a direction which is generating interest, but it seems to me that somebody is going to come along and go farther with it.
I've been mocking the Nintendo Revolution's motion capture interface as much as anybody, but perhaps something like that, in which you choreograph how you want a virtual Britany Spears to dance by demonstrating the moves yourself, would be one example of a new way to sell pop music. I don't know. I suspect that it's going to take something that weirdly different to get people to care about it. After all, would teens be aware of a song like "Wakka Lakka" if it were not for DDR?
My point is, big companies are all slow movers. The place I'm working now is a Fortune 500 company that took almost a YEAR to get me on to the payroll.
Small 8-person consulting firms might get you a second interview within a week and have you start the following Monday, but the big corporations are usually not able to be as agile.
But loyalty is something I do feel owed as it's in return for my loyalty. But I guess old-school notions of loyalty just don't exist anymore - not when there are dollars in question.
But Bono and Madonna never asked for your loytalty. They are not friends of yours. They are just people who recorded music in the hopes that other people would like it enough to buy it.
The CEO of Target is where he is because I (along with a lot of other people) buy clothes in his store. That doesn't make him somebody that should be expected to "respect" me in any way whatsoever. If he wanted to turn Target into a chain of boutiques which only sold $300 jeans, that would be entirely up to him. I wouldn't feel "betrayed", or like the jeans I bought there in the past any less... I'd just look for another store to buy new jeans from.
When U2 decided to spend two or three albums doing techo parody of themselves, somebody asked Bono if what they were doing might be alienating their old fans. He replied by saying maybe it was, "but we don't need them."
What does an artist owe to the fans? Nothing.
Yeah, a "big name" got big because a shitload of people were willing to spend money on their records and t-shirts, but those people got records and t-shirts that they were happy with out of the deal. Fair exchange.
The fact that you bought all of U2's old stuff (even "October") does not buy you the right to dictate the artistic direction they choose to go next.
Likewise, the fact that you wore fishnet crop-tops in High School and know the words to "Express Yourself" by heart does not endow you in the inalienable right to get in to Madonna's concert for fifty bucks when others are willing to pay five times that for the same seat.
The fair way to set any price is supply and demand. There's a finite supply of Madonna tickets, and plenty of demand. If she sold the tickets for $50, scalpers would buy them all up and sell them for $250 on eBay. Fans would pay the same to get in, but Madonna's business venture would get less of it.
Economics 101.
There are only three vendors that matter anymore in the GPU market: nVidea, ATI, and Intel, and Apple has built systems using each of them. How hard can it be?
Why is that ironic? Microsoft is one of Apple's biggest investors.
You spelled "Oracle" wrong.
Microsoft is a very small former investor. $150 million invested a company that was sitting on $4 Billion in cash at the time. All of those shares have now been sold (at quite a profit, too.)
Two months is "stringing along"? Only two months is OUTSTANDING!
Hell, the jobs I actually landed took longer than that. The ones that have nothing try to keep you in the hopper for several times that ammount before letting it slip that the position has been filled!
If you let your unemployment benefits run out while waiting to hear back from only one company, you are not being very serious about your job search.
There are about 2,270,000 Millionairs in the United States alone. Add to that the number of people wealthy enough to be half-millionaires, and you are talking about a lot of people.
Why NOT have one or two rows reserved at sports events and concerts for people rich and stupid enough to pay hundreds of dollars so they can sit eighteen inches closer than the unwashed masses immediately behind them?
The very fact that the ticket-scalping market exists is proof that the artists are not "fleecing" anybody. They are simply charging what their fans are willing to pay.
*I* sure as hell wouldn't pay $250 to sit in a hockey arena and watch a Madonna Concert. For that matter, I wouldn't pay that much to see a music act I really liked.
But my solution to that is to not go to such concerts. Instead of paying $200+ to see the Rolling Stones when they came to Minnesota last year, I spent about $50 to see The White Stripes instead. (And, from all reports, I saw the better show.)
There's no such thing as an "unfair" price for entertainment. It's not like the people that can't afford to go to Madonna's concert are being denied health care or something.
If seeing that elderly skank wiggle her ass while singing through a vocoder is worth $250 to you, then more power to you. Go. Enjoy the show.
If it's not, and you really like Madonna, then stay home and jerk off to the cover of your old vinyl copy of the "Like a Virgin" LP. You'll probably get just as much out of the experience.
Targeted programming pretty much always sucks.
Good shows might appeal more to one demographic than another, but a good show is a good show.
For example, you can make a show like "Gilmour Girls" and 30-something women will like it more than most other folks, resulting in a "cult hit" within that demographic, and TV people love it when that happens, because it makes selling ad time easier... but if you get a bunch of executives to say "we need to find a show that hits the Gilmour Girls market", that show will almost certainly be a complete train wreck, because they are not setting out to make a good show that will happen to click with certain people, but setting out to click with those people and the need for it to be good is a distant second.
The internet is a collection of tiny dictatorship. It's not a huge democratic thing, and it is even no anarchy (even though it comes as close to the classic definition of anarchy, where everyone governs himself and holds no power over others as it can come).
Every server is owned by someone. And he's the dictator. As benevolent or tyrannic as he wants to be. Those pages that claim they're "democratic" are so because the dictator decided it would be nice to let his "peasants", his users, act as the ruling body. But ultimately, he is in charge.
Actually, everybody being the "dictator" of their own property is pretty much what anarchy is. Don't like Slashdot? Grab the slashcode and set up a site just like it which reflects your values better. Thousands of people have done exactly that.