As more people start looking to online communities of like-minded individuals to find things that are to their taste, traditional media falls behind because it's much more difficult for a corporation to engage in that sort of marketing.
If you don't think you're being astroturfed up the wazoo already out in the blogsphere, I think you're being a bit naive.
Well, I prefer the music of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service (Gibbon's groups) over girly 80's bubble-gum pop, but if that's what does it for you, my point applies equally to either one of them.
It's entirely possible that FortKnox is not one of those people who was touting the X-Box graphics at the time.
I know it's easy to lump people together under the "fanboy" label, pretend they all think in exactly the same way, and treat any disagreements between them as hypocracy (since they are obviously contradicting themselves... even if they aren't the same selves... or something.)
As a Mac guy, I get that shit all the time.
"What??? You think Intel-based laptops are a good move? Hah! What a joke! Last week, you Mac fanboi's all thought Intel was t3h suX0rz!!!1!!eleventy-one!!"
The original X-Box had pretty good gameplay on a few titles, and very nice graphics compared to the PS2, which had a wider variety of games.
The new X-Box looks like it will be a step forward in performance, but perhaps not as great of one as the PS3 (which we have not yet seen... the PS2 was hyped as due to arrive with better graphics than the first X-Box, too. We know how that one turned out.)
They are clearly betting the farm on X-Box Live... which is probably the biggest reason why I'm not likely to buy the new console anytime soon. I'm not interested in paying $100/year (or whatever) on top of the cost of a new console until I know that there are titles out there good enough to make me want it.
Yes, CDBaby is essentially an indie label, as far as resellers like iTMS and Yahoo are concerned. Apple could not buy directly from you even if they wanted to. (At least not without re-negotiating their lawsuit settlement with Apple Records and becoming a music label themselves.)
The new digital model the GP was referring to is the band creating a website, hosting it, and charging $0.25 a song download (or even givign it away for free and make money selling merchandise or concert tickets). Therefore, the music store is obsolete (or can be used just for selling branded merchandise).
Name three rock bands who were never signed by labels and make a living that way sufficient to quit their day jobs.
Imagine if the music version of slashdot existed (it may already, I don't know). Bands could post links to their new releases, users can comment on the songs / bands, and the best bands will gain the largest following.
Dozens of such sites exist. Hardly anybody goes to them. A few hard-core people do so they can pat themselves on the back for supporting indie bands, but most people fall in love with some fractin of the crap they hear on the radio. Even psuedo-indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie are in the position they are in only because a record label pimped them like crazy.
If you will pardon me for briefly playing the Devil's Advocate...
One could easilly make the case that the work done by a record label is more important to the financial success of a music act than the work done by the band itself. When you look at it in that light (and realize that the labels take the brunt of most of the financial risk), it really isn't so eeeevil that they take a bigger slice of the pie.
I mean, David Gibbon just sat in front of a microphone and crooned for a few hours. Behind every album his band has made, there was an army of promotors, engineers, event planners, office staff, and several layers of management, all putting in 40-hour work weeks to make sure that you and as many of your friends as possible buy the album. They all worked just as hard as he did, and for considerably less money. Yet people consider it this horrible injustice when this ONE EMPLOYEE of the record company, who happened to have the most fun job of anybody involved, doesn't get to hog a majority of the profit for themselves.
So yea, if you are a singer and think that's unfair, go out and try to do the work of all those people by yourself. You will probably end up with a much larger slice of a vastly smaller pie, unless you are just as good at music promotion as you are at being a musician.
If the record companies had their way, you would still pay a lot per song for the back-catalog "hits" from your favorite hair-metal bands.
Motley Crue's title track "Shout At The Devil" would cost $3.99, but for a mere 40 cents you could download their woefully bad cover of "Helter Skelter" from the same album.
That being said, I think prices will drop because artists will find that it is more lucrative to sell songs for.25 without giving the RIAA a cut.
The RIAA is a trade union. It's "cut" of a song sale, rounded to the nearest penny, is zero.
I think you mean the media companies, and so far most "artists" have found selling their music without a media company promoting them to be the surest possible path to obscure poverty.
Yes, you can press your own CD's in batches of 5,000 for a modest investment and get your local "Used Records and Head Shop" store to put it on their shelves where almost everybody will ignore it, but you will never get it on the shelves at Best Buy, nor will you get it played outside of one or two spins by a sympathetic DJ on a college radio staion.
You gotta play to win, and the media companies own the game. The smartest thing Apple did when getting in to music sales was realize this fact. Note that you must already be signed on a label (even if it's a tiny "independent" label) before Apple will even consider putting your stuff on iTMS.
"Today EMI Group boss Alain Levy said at press conference today that he believed Jobs would introduce multiple price points for iTunes music within the next year."
So one guy says with no control over the situation tells Forbes magazine that he thinks Jobs will make this happen, and it gets reported on Slashdot as fact.
For fuck's sake, not even the various Mac rumor sites have run with this one yet. When did MacSlash become MacWildGossip?
I made my assumption of your background based on your original comment, which reeked of PHB-ism.
If you are indeed a good engineer, then as a boss of engineers I would expect you to be in close enough communication with your underlings that seeing them come in months ahead of schedule on a project would not come as a sudden surprise to you that requires a sit-down meeting to evaluate.
Both are true. It will flop, but then it will rebound and dominate the 2007 Christmas season.
Also, researchers will find a cure for cancer in June of 2009, the next two martian probes will fail, one because of a math error, the other mistaken for an invader and shot down by the Martian Defense Alliance, which so far has spent most of their resources on stealth technology to hide their vast cities from our telescopes and rovers. In other news, we will all have hydrogen fuel-cell based flying cars, which will have iPod cradles (even though the old-style iPod will be long obscolete, thanks to the new sKullPod) before the decade is over.
Furthermore, when I die, on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me... which is nice.
I'm not certain whether these interface changes will be for the better or not, but it is nice to see Microsoft trying to use design improvements and (dare I use the "i" word?) innovation to sell their new Office suite, rather than simply breaking their document formats yet again, which forces everybody to update in order to keep up with any customer who might have recently bought a new computer.
Not that I care much. I like Excel for my spreadsheets, but for everything else I prefer other tools. It would take an awful lot to get be to switch back to Word, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook at this point.
In my experience, the only way to have any success at work is to constantly keep my boss "in the loop", whether they are asking for updates or not, for the very reason you cite.
The good managers appreciate the communication, and make use of it.
Fair enough. I called you an ass because the tone of your first post implied that you would call an engineer out on the carpet for radically mis-estimating a deadline. Perhaps you did not mean to be that emphatic.
Depending on the industry, time estimates are 90% bullshit in my line of work. The vast majority of them will either be completely blown, or else way ahead of schedule.
This is because it is often difficult, especially in software design, to understand the true scope of what you are doing until you are up to your elbows in it.
For example, you might run in to an unexpected technical limitation of the tools you are using (even if you are very experienced as a programmer or engineer, programming languages and tools are always changing, so nobody has a lifetime of experience in what they are using at any given moment), and as a result a shortcut you were hoping to take is suddenly a dead end.
Or you might find some BSD utility (which you were unaware of at the time of the estimate) which integrates nicely and does half the job for you.
Or you might have a "eureka" moment which speeds things along.
Or your customer might change the design specs, dragging things out with feature-creep.
Or there might be some nebulous "cloud" of innovation expected in the middle of the project flow which you were hoping to solve in two days but turns out to take a month.
It's all guesswork. Seasoned programmers learn to err on the side of caution, and still find themselves working on the occational Saturday to keep their manager happy about ship dates matching estimates.
Finding ways to make the process of time estimates more accurate is all well and good, but we are not manufacturing rocking chairs here. Nearly every program is a process of invention, and inventions rely on creativity. You can predict how long it will take you to grind out familiar subroutines that are not unlike ones you used on other projects, but that's the best you can hope for.
If you hire an artist to make a landscape painting for your living room, and insist that it must be the best painting he ever made, he can tell you how long it will take to cover the canvas in paint, but he can't tell you how long it will take him to decide what color the grass needs to be. By the time he knows how long that will take, he's already done it.
If someone tells me a project will be done in six months and they complete it in six weeks, I want to know why the original timeline was so poorly calculated.
Were I working for an ass like you, I'd just say, "gee, boss. I guess I'm just much better at completing projects than setting projected timelines. Perhaps you should fire me and hire a guy who takes three times as long, but always knows how long he will take."
Or, if I wanted to play by your rules, I'd finish the project in six weeks and not tell you I'm done for another four and a half months. You get to have your little project spreadsheets look pretty, I get paid for playing World of Warcraft for months on end. It's win-win!
My point still stands that it's there are no little kids dragging their moms to the store over those license tie-ins. Sports games are being bought by adult gamers who chose based on game-play more than any other factor.
Slashdot Mirror
As more people start looking to online communities of like-minded individuals to find things that are to their taste, traditional media falls behind because it's much more difficult for a corporation to engage in that sort of marketing.
If you don't think you're being astroturfed up the wazoo already out in the blogsphere, I think you're being a bit naive.
I think you mean Debbie Gibson.
Well, I prefer the music of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service (Gibbon's groups) over girly 80's bubble-gum pop, but if that's what does it for you, my point applies equally to either one of them.
It's entirely possible that FortKnox is not one of those people who was touting the X-Box graphics at the time.
I know it's easy to lump people together under the "fanboy" label, pretend they all think in exactly the same way, and treat any disagreements between them as hypocracy (since they are obviously contradicting themselves... even if they aren't the same selves... or something.)
As a Mac guy, I get that shit all the time.
"What??? You think Intel-based laptops are a good move? Hah! What a joke! Last week, you Mac fanboi's all thought Intel was t3h suX0rz!!!1!!eleventy-one!!"
The original X-Box had pretty good gameplay on a few titles, and very nice graphics compared to the PS2, which had a wider variety of games.
The new X-Box looks like it will be a step forward in performance, but perhaps not as great of one as the PS3 (which we have not yet seen... the PS2 was hyped as due to arrive with better graphics than the first X-Box, too. We know how that one turned out.)
They are clearly betting the farm on X-Box Live... which is probably the biggest reason why I'm not likely to buy the new console anytime soon. I'm not interested in paying $100/year (or whatever) on top of the cost of a new console until I know that there are titles out there good enough to make me want it.
Grateful Dead, Phish, and King Crimson.
Warner, Elektra, and Decca.
Try again.
The cost isn't getting it recorded.
The cost is getting that recording on popular radio stations during drive-time.
Yes, CDBaby is essentially an indie label, as far as resellers like iTMS and Yahoo are concerned. Apple could not buy directly from you even if they wanted to. (At least not without re-negotiating their lawsuit settlement with Apple Records and becoming a music label themselves.)
The new digital model the GP was referring to is the band creating a website, hosting it, and charging $0.25 a song download (or even givign it away for free and make money selling merchandise or concert tickets). Therefore, the music store is obsolete (or can be used just for selling branded merchandise).
Name three rock bands who were never signed by labels and make a living that way sufficient to quit their day jobs.
Imagine if the music version of slashdot existed (it may already, I don't know). Bands could post links to their new releases, users can comment on the songs / bands, and the best bands will gain the largest following.
Dozens of such sites exist. Hardly anybody goes to them. A few hard-core people do so they can pat themselves on the back for supporting indie bands, but most people fall in love with some fractin of the crap they hear on the radio. Even psuedo-indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie are in the position they are in only because a record label pimped them like crazy.
If you will pardon me for briefly playing the Devil's Advocate...
One could easilly make the case that the work done by a record label is more important to the financial success of a music act than the work done by the band itself. When you look at it in that light (and realize that the labels take the brunt of most of the financial risk), it really isn't so eeeevil that they take a bigger slice of the pie.
I mean, David Gibbon just sat in front of a microphone and crooned for a few hours. Behind every album his band has made, there was an army of promotors, engineers, event planners, office staff, and several layers of management, all putting in 40-hour work weeks to make sure that you and as many of your friends as possible buy the album. They all worked just as hard as he did, and for considerably less money. Yet people consider it this horrible injustice when this ONE EMPLOYEE of the record company, who happened to have the most fun job of anybody involved, doesn't get to hog a majority of the profit for themselves.
So yea, if you are a singer and think that's unfair, go out and try to do the work of all those people by yourself. You will probably end up with a much larger slice of a vastly smaller pie, unless you are just as good at music promotion as you are at being a musician.
If the record companies had their way, you would still pay a lot per song for the back-catalog "hits" from your favorite hair-metal bands.
Motley Crue's title track "Shout At The Devil" would cost $3.99, but for a mere 40 cents you could download their woefully bad cover of "Helter Skelter" from the same album.
Then two things will happen:
1. The non-sucky music will become more popular, which will lead to:
2. The non-sucky music will become more expensive
You forgot:
3. Slashbots will now insist that the non-sucky music sucks, because it became popular and therefore must suck.
If this was M$ instead of Apple, you would post some anti-m$ crap here. Just admit your bias here. We all see it.
Uh. He's siding with the record companies against Apple.
So now that your "fanboi" theory is shot all to hell, want to try again?
That being said, I think prices will drop because artists will find that it is more lucrative to sell songs for .25 without giving the RIAA a cut.
The RIAA is a trade union. It's "cut" of a song sale, rounded to the nearest penny, is zero.
I think you mean the media companies, and so far most "artists" have found selling their music without a media company promoting them to be the surest possible path to obscure poverty.
Yes, you can press your own CD's in batches of 5,000 for a modest investment and get your local "Used Records and Head Shop" store to put it on their shelves where almost everybody will ignore it, but you will never get it on the shelves at Best Buy, nor will you get it played outside of one or two spins by a sympathetic DJ on a college radio staion.
You gotta play to win, and the media companies own the game. The smartest thing Apple did when getting in to music sales was realize this fact. Note that you must already be signed on a label (even if it's a tiny "independent" label) before Apple will even consider putting your stuff on iTMS.
It's a non-story anyway. From TFA:
"Today EMI Group boss Alain Levy said at press conference today that he believed Jobs would introduce multiple price points for iTunes music within the next year."
So one guy says with no control over the situation tells Forbes magazine that he thinks Jobs will make this happen, and it gets reported on Slashdot as fact.
For fuck's sake, not even the various Mac rumor sites have run with this one yet. When did MacSlash become MacWildGossip?
I made my assumption of your background based on your original comment, which reeked of PHB-ism.
If you are indeed a good engineer, then as a boss of engineers I would expect you to be in close enough communication with your underlings that seeing them come in months ahead of schedule on a project would not come as a sudden surprise to you that requires a sit-down meeting to evaluate.
Wow. You are exactly the sort of whiner who would complain if they hung you with a brand-new rope. ;)
the capitalists have won.
Hooray! We won!
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! w00t! w00t!
Both are true. It will flop, but then it will rebound and dominate the 2007 Christmas season.
Also, researchers will find a cure for cancer in June of 2009, the next two martian probes will fail, one because of a math error, the other mistaken for an invader and shot down by the Martian Defense Alliance, which so far has spent most of their resources on stealth technology to hide their vast cities from our telescopes and rovers. In other news, we will all have hydrogen fuel-cell based flying cars, which will have iPod cradles (even though the old-style iPod will be long obscolete, thanks to the new sKullPod) before the decade is over.
Furthermore, when I die, on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me... which is nice.
I'm not certain whether these interface changes will be for the better or not, but it is nice to see Microsoft trying to use design improvements and (dare I use the "i" word?) innovation to sell their new Office suite, rather than simply breaking their document formats yet again, which forces everybody to update in order to keep up with any customer who might have recently bought a new computer.
Not that I care much. I like Excel for my spreadsheets, but for everything else I prefer other tools. It would take an awful lot to get be to switch back to Word, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook at this point.
Apple have delivered FAR behind schedule for plenty of things, too. never hitting 3GHz is the first example that comes to mind
That would be an example of IBM missing a deadline. Apple was the customer of the G5, not the inventor.
In my experience, the only way to have any success at work is to constantly keep my boss "in the loop", whether they are asking for updates or not, for the very reason you cite.
The good managers appreciate the communication, and make use of it.
Fair enough. I called you an ass because the tone of your first post implied that you would call an engineer out on the carpet for radically mis-estimating a deadline. Perhaps you did not mean to be that emphatic.
Depending on the industry, time estimates are 90% bullshit in my line of work. The vast majority of them will either be completely blown, or else way ahead of schedule.
This is because it is often difficult, especially in software design, to understand the true scope of what you are doing until you are up to your elbows in it.
For example, you might run in to an unexpected technical limitation of the tools you are using (even if you are very experienced as a programmer or engineer, programming languages and tools are always changing, so nobody has a lifetime of experience in what they are using at any given moment), and as a result a shortcut you were hoping to take is suddenly a dead end.
Or you might find some BSD utility (which you were unaware of at the time of the estimate) which integrates nicely and does half the job for you.
Or you might have a "eureka" moment which speeds things along.
Or your customer might change the design specs, dragging things out with feature-creep.
Or there might be some nebulous "cloud" of innovation expected in the middle of the project flow which you were hoping to solve in two days but turns out to take a month.
It's all guesswork. Seasoned programmers learn to err on the side of caution, and still find themselves working on the occational Saturday to keep their manager happy about ship dates matching estimates.
Finding ways to make the process of time estimates more accurate is all well and good, but we are not manufacturing rocking chairs here. Nearly every program is a process of invention, and inventions rely on creativity. You can predict how long it will take you to grind out familiar subroutines that are not unlike ones you used on other projects, but that's the best you can hope for.
If you hire an artist to make a landscape painting for your living room, and insist that it must be the best painting he ever made, he can tell you how long it will take to cover the canvas in paint, but he can't tell you how long it will take him to decide what color the grass needs to be. By the time he knows how long that will take, he's already done it.
Don't worry man, you know DOA: eXtreme Beach Volleyball 2 is going to come out at some point.
Don't toy with my heart like that. A sequel is too much to hope for.
If someone tells me a project will be done in six months and they complete it in six weeks, I want to know why the original timeline was so poorly calculated.
Were I working for an ass like you, I'd just say, "gee, boss. I guess I'm just much better at completing projects than setting projected timelines. Perhaps you should fire me and hire a guy who takes three times as long, but always knows how long he will take."
Or, if I wanted to play by your rules, I'd finish the project in six weeks and not tell you I'm done for another four and a half months. You get to have your little project spreadsheets look pretty, I get paid for playing World of Warcraft for months on end. It's win-win!
Seems Dr. Moore has forsaken poor Apple.
Well, Dr. Moore did work for Intel, after all. In January the mountain comes to Mohammed.
You want to run Photoshop on an iBook?
I run Photoshop all the time on the current iBook.
Some filters take a few extra seconds to apply, but it works great.
No need to be all bold-type incredulous, sport.
My point still stands that it's there are no little kids dragging their moms to the store over those license tie-ins. Sports games are being bought by adult gamers who chose based on game-play more than any other factor.