There is obviously a cost of supporting older browsers, but...I've always looked at it this way - do you want to be the guy who turns away a customer? If that customer calls to complain, do you want to explain to the CEO that you decided that a certain group of customers were unimportant?
I had an old CIO who insisted we spend the extra money and time to back-compatibility test. His rationale was even if we spend more than we make from having web apps that are successfully compatible with pretty much everything, it's still a lot better than losing anything because we just told a customer he can't use our site. The direct financial loss may be insignificant at first, but bad word of mouth (particularly in a very tight-knit industry like that employer was in) could be devastating long-term.
Granted, he never said it had to be *perfect* across browsers, but it had to at least work. And honestly, getting it workable-but-not-always-pretty wasn't terribly difficult or expensive.
Of course, you can take good hardware and still make it sound like complete ass. Cheap out on the ADC/DAC chain, build in a bad sound bank, whatever...you can take a great DSP chip and still make a crap synth, sampler or sound card out of it.
(the new Korg M3's are pretty fly, too. Dunno what's under the hood there)
They are all making hardware and money, but you'll note that their product lines have changed considerably over the past decade or so. E-mu's core business was hardware samplers, and the market for the kind of standalone high-end hardware samplers has dwindled as soft-samplers and lower-cost (and, unfortunately, more "current" feature-enabled) samplers became more accessible. A shame, because their hardware always sounded good - they just never kept up with competative features and products. Their "Z-plane" filters were nice, and to this day I still like the sound of the Morpheus.
Frankly I think they were hindered by their foray into standalone sound modules. The Proteus series did okay, but they flogged that horse into the ground and modules like the Mo'Phatt and the Orbit could only go so far before they became instantly recognizeable as dance-tune-in-a-box machines.
Creative probably absorbed them for the same reason they absorbed ensoniq - they wanted some good sound chip designs. Emu always did that well.
The schism between Shia and Sunni is a different than just a schism between radical and moderate. There are radicals on both sides - radical shiites get the most press because of their dominance of non-western-friendly regimes like Iran. But certain chunks of what are at least nominally Sunni, like the Wahhabi that dominate Saudi Arabia, are extrememly fundamentalist. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are Sunni, Hezbollah is Shiite. The religious schism itself was over the succession of the stewardship of Islam itself - shiites beleive that Ali was the legitimate head of the Islamic faith, whereas Sunni beleive that the guidance of the faith fell to the caliphs. Ali was martyred, too, which deepend the divide. Sunni considers itself to be the orthodoxy, Shia is a very vocal minority.
In Iraq, though, the problem is worsened by the fact that much of the religious split segments along very ancient ethnic lines. The Kurds are drawn into this because they're a separate non-arabic ethnic group entirely who have for years been trying to establish their own nation (much to the displeasure of the iraqis and the turks). Iraq itself is a manufactured nation, borders drawn by the british after the end of the Ottoman empire. It's a mix of traditional antipathies and antagonisms that was always simmering below the surface, mixed with religious divide.
Unfortunately, it seems that much of the western world views the whole region as a sort of homogenous arabic-speaking mass, and consequently over the past 100 years or so much foreign policy has been informed by this sort of mis-assumption.
From reading the comments, I'm guessing I'm the only one who doesn't really think CSS is that hard to understand. Yeah, the implementations are clumsy, and it lacks in some important areas, but holy mother of balls is it preferable to me over editing 4000 font tags in a website. The syntax is kinda ugly, but compared a lot of the other syntaxes in the web world (javascript, I'm looking at you) it's clean and sleek. Sheesh.
I think a huge problem is that a lot of people use CSS like they use font tags - instead of reusing tags and classes, and allowing for cascades, they create a new class for every block that they want to style.
There is the issue of user interface, of course. No matter how good your sampler/synth is, most people are limited by keyboard articulation and technique. There are a ton of alternate controllers, but some of them are better than others (tracking on MIDI violins, for example, is a bit sluggish). MIDI control will have to come a long way before even the most powerful synth can sound "natural."
(unless of course you don't want it to sound natural. That's, however, a different debate)
Heck yeah. This is why people pay thousands of dollars for enormous, professionally-recorded string sample libraries alone, and you can still tell they're not being played live.
No sound card opr even a prosumer sample playback system is going to even come close.
Additonally, there's a lot of data not demarcated in MIDI (or in a lot of cases, even the score) that needs to be interpreted by an instrumentalist. Certain articulations, bow strokes, etc - they can be suggested in the score, or maybe mapped to a controller in MIDI, but you need to have the appropriate sounds. In a lot of cases you need to bank switch on a sampler just to differentiate between up and down bows. Since most consumer-grade sound libraries don't have more to their strings than "marcato" and "slow strings" you're certainly not going to get things like detache, spicatto, or col legno properly represented.
Yeah, I wondered that too. I don't speak russian nor know any russian lawyers so I was never able to find out (and they eventually dropped our label's stuff - i'm guessing it just didn't sell. Niche genres and all that.)
It was never clear to me whether they actually constantly paid ROMS or just promised to pay ROMS if someone came to collect.
Indeed. Pressing a CD is cheaper than it once was, but still, it's about a buck a CD.
Mastering costs aren't cheap either. Most people dont' realize that there's an intermediate step in between "mixdown" and "going to CD." You can get cheap houses to do it for a few hundred bucks, but if you want the real pros with the high-end equipment it can run several grand.
Also, most albums aren't recorded on some guy's laptop in is spare bedroom. While more and more are, there's still a lot of traditional studio recording, which entials buying time and often hiring an engineer, a producer, etc etc. Sometimes session musicians, backing singers, gear rentals...
For me, production costs per album run a few grand. For a professional artist it can be a few orders of magnitude more. And if you count advertising and marketing...it adds up.
Yes, I too agree that there's probably some goofy accounting going on, but even with everything above board, it's still not a really cheap endeavor.
That really depends on the contract. I'd wager most indie artists own all their own master recordings and rights, and that practice is becoming much more commonplace even among the larger labels.
Some labels will own pretty much everything - right down to the rights to the band name. But more and more artists are getting savvy enough to avoid signing such a contract.
Point of note: Apple also pays labels not represented by the RIAA. I get my royalties from them just fine and my label has no connection to the RIAA whatsoever.
One problem is that, unlike registering with ASCAP (which you can do online), registering with ROMS is a difficult if not impossible slog for a smaller artist. If you don't have a label with the capability to hire translators and russian lawyers, or you yourself don't have that capability, you're kinda screwed.
I'm curious to know if allofmp3 actually gave any "unclaimed" money to ROMS, or if they just gave promissory money, as in "well, when and if Britney Spears comes to collect, THEN we'll give you the royalties she's owed from us."
The problem is that your $45 most likely never went anywhere near the pockets of the people who created, licensed, produced, etc the music you bought. Oh, in principle, there were some provisions for payout of artist royalties, but in practice it looks like it rarely (if ever) happened.
Honestly, as a musican I kind of prefer illegal downloading to scams like allofmp3. In that case, at least nobody is making money off my works.
A lot of indies give artists much better per-CD rates. Granted, their sales are lower and the advances aren't particularly large if they even exist, but for a lot of us, instead of $.50/$15CD, it's more like $3/$12CD, with the label still footing some of the cost of production and marketing.
The Big 3/4 are still notorious for their low per-CD rates, but they also are able to invest quite a significantly larger amount into production costs and marketing.
While I agree that DRM is the work of satan, AllOfMp3 was not necessarily giving you a higher quality product for less money. Quite often their "transcoded" high-bitrate files were nothing more than upsampled versions of files they pulled off the net or torrent sites.
I know this, because my band found some of our material on there in their early days. It amazed me that you could buy a "CD-quality" wav file of a song we'd never released except as a crappy 128bps download on mp3.com. While I do think that as their volume increased and they started dumping tracks like ours in favor of more major artists, it made me pretty suspicious of the quality and motivation of their entire enterprise.
Also, let's not entirely conflate RIAA with "US artists and labels." The bulk of indie labels and artists in the US have no connection with the RIAA, which represents only a small subset (admittedly, a subset with the largest sales numbers) of labels.
So AllOfMp3 was not just screwing with the Big Evil RIAA, they were screwing with Your Fried Who Runs A Label Out Of His Garage On Weekends. In fact, when AllOfMp3 and similar sites (lavamus, jet, etc) got started, they primarily used material from non-major labels, presumably to avoid the RIAA's legal muscle and exploit the fact that indies didn't have the general wherewithall to deal with foreign copyright law.
Yeah, excpet they built their practice on the backs of indie artist who they knew wouldn't have the resources to hire the russian lawyers to deal with the tangles of red tape needed to get those royalties.
Technically legal, yes, but pretty not cool.
And don't get me started on their other business practices, like selling "high quality" files that were just mp3's ripped off of torrents and such.
I'm of mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, yeah, I'd like to respect their choices as people, but on the other hand when their choices entail shutting off critical chunks of their decision-mkaing process for no reason other than dogma, I have a hard time being respectful of that.
The terrifying thing is that Epic is consistantly the highest-rated of healthcare software vendors. Even if there hadn't been cronyism, it's still a pretty decent bet that Epic would get picked.
Yes, their software is monolithic, difficult to support, and kind of suspect.
And yet it's still probably the best in the field.
The state of healthcare software overall is pretty dire.
The problem isn't exactly that large companies want to reinvetn the wheel, it's that every *user* wants to reinvent the wheel. These are doctors, after all, and none of them wants a "good enough" system, they want a system that does *precisely* what they ask for, regardless of whether anybody else in the world does it that way.
Add the complexity of federal, state, and municipal health and patient regulations - everything from HIPAA to accounting reporting - and you're looking at a business case from hell.
Google or somebody probably could do an app like that, but I'd rather they devote their manpower to writing a search engine and web tools, rather than using all their resources supporting an open source medical records app. It's the kind of programming nobody really wants to do, because while the base system is easy enough to deal with, the per-user customization and post-install support is the real nightmare.
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There is obviously a cost of supporting older browsers, but...I've always looked at it this way - do you want to be the guy who turns away a customer? If that customer calls to complain, do you want to explain to the CEO that you decided that a certain group of customers were unimportant?
I had an old CIO who insisted we spend the extra money and time to back-compatibility test. His rationale was even if we spend more than we make from having web apps that are successfully compatible with pretty much everything, it's still a lot better than losing anything because we just told a customer he can't use our site. The direct financial loss may be insignificant at first, but bad word of mouth (particularly in a very tight-knit industry like that employer was in) could be devastating long-term.
Granted, he never said it had to be *perfect* across browsers, but it had to at least work. And honestly, getting it workable-but-not-always-pretty wasn't terribly difficult or expensive.
Well, crap, I've put way too much work into my next album, then. I've got 5 good songs!
Emu always had good sound hardware.
Of course, you can take good hardware and still make it sound like complete ass. Cheap out on the ADC/DAC chain, build in a bad sound bank, whatever...you can take a great DSP chip and still make a crap synth, sampler or sound card out of it.
(the new Korg M3's are pretty fly, too. Dunno what's under the hood there)
They are all making hardware and money, but you'll note that their product lines have changed considerably over the past decade or so. E-mu's core business was hardware samplers, and the market for the kind of standalone high-end hardware samplers has dwindled as soft-samplers and lower-cost (and, unfortunately, more "current" feature-enabled) samplers became more accessible. A shame, because their hardware always sounded good - they just never kept up with competative features and products. Their "Z-plane" filters were nice, and to this day I still like the sound of the Morpheus.
Frankly I think they were hindered by their foray into standalone sound modules. The Proteus series did okay, but they flogged that horse into the ground and modules like the Mo'Phatt and the Orbit could only go so far before they became instantly recognizeable as dance-tune-in-a-box machines.
Creative probably absorbed them for the same reason they absorbed ensoniq - they wanted some good sound chip designs. Emu always did that well.
The schism between Shia and Sunni is a different than just a schism between radical and moderate. There are radicals on both sides - radical shiites get the most press because of their dominance of non-western-friendly regimes like Iran. But certain chunks of what are at least nominally Sunni, like the Wahhabi that dominate Saudi Arabia, are extrememly fundamentalist. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are Sunni, Hezbollah is Shiite. The religious schism itself was over the succession of the stewardship of Islam itself - shiites beleive that Ali was the legitimate head of the Islamic faith, whereas Sunni beleive that the guidance of the faith fell to the caliphs. Ali was martyred, too, which deepend the divide. Sunni considers itself to be the orthodoxy, Shia is a very vocal minority.
In Iraq, though, the problem is worsened by the fact that much of the religious split segments along very ancient ethnic lines. The Kurds are drawn into this because they're a separate non-arabic ethnic group entirely who have for years been trying to establish their own nation (much to the displeasure of the iraqis and the turks). Iraq itself is a manufactured nation, borders drawn by the british after the end of the Ottoman empire. It's a mix of traditional antipathies and antagonisms that was always simmering below the surface, mixed with religious divide.
Unfortunately, it seems that much of the western world views the whole region as a sort of homogenous arabic-speaking mass, and consequently over the past 100 years or so much foreign policy has been informed by this sort of mis-assumption.
From reading the comments, I'm guessing I'm the only one who doesn't really think CSS is that hard to understand. Yeah, the implementations are clumsy, and it lacks in some important areas, but holy mother of balls is it preferable to me over editing 4000 font tags in a website. The syntax is kinda ugly, but compared a lot of the other syntaxes in the web world (javascript, I'm looking at you) it's clean and sleek. Sheesh.
I think a huge problem is that a lot of people use CSS like they use font tags - instead of reusing tags and classes, and allowing for cascades, they create a new class for every block that they want to style.
There is the issue of user interface, of course. No matter how good your sampler/synth is, most people are limited by keyboard articulation and technique. There are a ton of alternate controllers, but some of them are better than others (tracking on MIDI violins, for example, is a bit sluggish). MIDI control will have to come a long way before even the most powerful synth can sound "natural."
(unless of course you don't want it to sound natural. That's, however, a different debate)
Heck yeah. This is why people pay thousands of dollars for enormous, professionally-recorded string sample libraries alone, and you can still tell they're not being played live.
No sound card opr even a prosumer sample playback system is going to even come close.
Additonally, there's a lot of data not demarcated in MIDI (or in a lot of cases, even the score) that needs to be interpreted by an instrumentalist. Certain articulations, bow strokes, etc - they can be suggested in the score, or maybe mapped to a controller in MIDI, but you need to have the appropriate sounds. In a lot of cases you need to bank switch on a sampler just to differentiate between up and down bows. Since most consumer-grade sound libraries don't have more to their strings than "marcato" and "slow strings" you're certainly not going to get things like detache, spicatto, or col legno properly represented.
Drum circles for everyone!
Yeah, I wondered that too. I don't speak russian nor know any russian lawyers so I was never able to find out (and they eventually dropped our label's stuff - i'm guessing it just didn't sell. Niche genres and all that.)
It was never clear to me whether they actually constantly paid ROMS or just promised to pay ROMS if someone came to collect.
Indeed. Pressing a CD is cheaper than it once was, but still, it's about a buck a CD.
Mastering costs aren't cheap either. Most people dont' realize that there's an intermediate step in between "mixdown" and "going to CD." You can get cheap houses to do it for a few hundred bucks, but if you want the real pros with the high-end equipment it can run several grand.
Also, most albums aren't recorded on some guy's laptop in is spare bedroom. While more and more are, there's still a lot of traditional studio recording, which entials buying time and often hiring an engineer, a producer, etc etc. Sometimes session musicians, backing singers, gear rentals...
For me, production costs per album run a few grand. For a professional artist it can be a few orders of magnitude more. And if you count advertising and marketing...it adds up.
Yes, I too agree that there's probably some goofy accounting going on, but even with everything above board, it's still not a really cheap endeavor.
That really depends on the contract. I'd wager most indie artists own all their own master recordings and rights, and that practice is becoming much more commonplace even among the larger labels.
Some labels will own pretty much everything - right down to the rights to the band name. But more and more artists are getting savvy enough to avoid signing such a contract.
Point of note: Apple also pays labels not represented by the RIAA. I get my royalties from them just fine and my label has no connection to the RIAA whatsoever.
One problem is that, unlike registering with ASCAP (which you can do online), registering with ROMS is a difficult if not impossible slog for a smaller artist. If you don't have a label with the capability to hire translators and russian lawyers, or you yourself don't have that capability, you're kinda screwed.
I'm curious to know if allofmp3 actually gave any "unclaimed" money to ROMS, or if they just gave promissory money, as in "well, when and if Britney Spears comes to collect, THEN we'll give you the royalties she's owed from us."
The problem is that your $45 most likely never went anywhere near the pockets of the people who created, licensed, produced, etc the music you bought. Oh, in principle, there were some provisions for payout of artist royalties, but in practice it looks like it rarely (if ever) happened.
Honestly, as a musican I kind of prefer illegal downloading to scams like allofmp3. In that case, at least nobody is making money off my works.
Depends on your contract and your label.
A lot of indies give artists much better per-CD rates. Granted, their sales are lower and the advances aren't particularly large if they even exist, but for a lot of us, instead of $.50/$15CD, it's more like $3/$12CD, with the label still footing some of the cost of production and marketing.
The Big 3/4 are still notorious for their low per-CD rates, but they also are able to invest quite a significantly larger amount into production costs and marketing.
While I agree that DRM is the work of satan, AllOfMp3 was not necessarily giving you a higher quality product for less money. Quite often their "transcoded" high-bitrate files were nothing more than upsampled versions of files they pulled off the net or torrent sites.
I know this, because my band found some of our material on there in their early days. It amazed me that you could buy a "CD-quality" wav file of a song we'd never released except as a crappy 128bps download on mp3.com. While I do think that as their volume increased and they started dumping tracks like ours in favor of more major artists, it made me pretty suspicious of the quality and motivation of their entire enterprise.
Also, let's not entirely conflate RIAA with "US artists and labels." The bulk of indie labels and artists in the US have no connection with the RIAA, which represents only a small subset (admittedly, a subset with the largest sales numbers) of labels.
So AllOfMp3 was not just screwing with the Big Evil RIAA, they were screwing with Your Fried Who Runs A Label Out Of His Garage On Weekends. In fact, when AllOfMp3 and similar sites (lavamus, jet, etc) got started, they primarily used material from non-major labels, presumably to avoid the RIAA's legal muscle and exploit the fact that indies didn't have the general wherewithall to deal with foreign copyright law.
Yeah, excpet they built their practice on the backs of indie artist who they knew wouldn't have the resources to hire the russian lawyers to deal with the tangles of red tape needed to get those royalties.
Technically legal, yes, but pretty not cool.
And don't get me started on their other business practices, like selling "high quality" files that were just mp3's ripped off of torrents and such.
Hey, our documentaries saved your documentaries' asses in WWII!
Inasmuch as "bald" is a hair color.
I'm of mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, yeah, I'd like to respect their choices as people, but on the other hand when their choices entail shutting off critical chunks of their decision-mkaing process for no reason other than dogma, I have a hard time being respectful of that.
It's just a shame that he's not usually all that funny.
The terrifying thing is that Epic is consistantly the highest-rated of healthcare software vendors. Even if there hadn't been cronyism, it's still a pretty decent bet that Epic would get picked.
Yes, their software is monolithic, difficult to support, and kind of suspect.
And yet it's still probably the best in the field.
The state of healthcare software overall is pretty dire.
The problem isn't exactly that large companies want to reinvetn the wheel, it's that every *user* wants to reinvent the wheel. These are doctors, after all, and none of them wants a "good enough" system, they want a system that does *precisely* what they ask for, regardless of whether anybody else in the world does it that way.
Add the complexity of federal, state, and municipal health and patient regulations - everything from HIPAA to accounting reporting - and you're looking at a business case from hell.
Google or somebody probably could do an app like that, but I'd rather they devote their manpower to writing a search engine and web tools, rather than using all their resources supporting an open source medical records app. It's the kind of programming nobody really wants to do, because while the base system is easy enough to deal with, the per-user customization and post-install support is the real nightmare.