It has nothing to do with the music specifically being rap, and everything to do with it really having no redeeming value outside the massive advertising campaign for it. Many pop acts are created to fit a marketing niche, rather than marketing being designed to sell music.
Full-length previews are going to be available one way or the other no matter what. Either we get them from itunes.com, or we get them from thepiratebay.org.
On #3: There's a difference between marketing what you're selling and selling marketing.
I went into Best Buy to buy a printer cartridge and saw giant posters advertising some new rap CD. This is excessive. Telling people about your product is one thing; selling a product based solely on advertising is, in the long run, a recipe for failure. Ultimately there has to be something behind the marketing.
On #7: There is no technological or legal way to stop filesharing. The best they can do is appeal to the honor of the filesharers and at least maybe get some donations out of it.
It's going to happen. Do you want to fight a battle you can't win, or realize that people are going to copy files over the internet no matter *what* you do?
1. Offer unencumbered mp3/flac/ogg/whatever downloads as their primary product at a reasonable price. This is below $1/song. 2. Tell the customer exactly where their money goes: "Out of every download, $.30 goes to the band, $.10 goes to the people who operated the recording equipment..." People will buy music from bands they like if they know they're actually supporting the band. 3. Save money by cutting marketing bullshit. Market music by selling *good* music, not by convincing 16-year-olds that they'll be cool if they listen to XYZ. 4. Diversify. Rather than trying to "produce" some canned pop "product" that they can sell to everyone, recognize that people's music tastes are often pretty eclectic, and their catalog needs to match that. 5. Stop trying to make obscene profits by underhanded dealings, and be happy with a sustainable business. Recognize that you're a middleman, and that you succeed by being as transparent as possible. 6. Cut the compression bullshit. If I want my music to sound louder I'll turn up my speakers, thanks. 7. Operate anonymous tip jars with a known cut (65% to the artist/35% to us, or whatever), and encourage people to download music via bittorrent or whatever and then donate to the artist. People will use them.
Actually, quite a lot of the midrange photography market is using IS lenses now. Panasonic's been using it as a brand trait for a while -- *everything* they sell has IS, and their pretty amazing market success with it has forced Canon and some of the more traditional camera makers to include it in consumer cameras to keep up. You can get a Panasonic camera with a terrific IS lens for $250 or so.
I'd say Japan's economy is a hell of a lot better than the US considering how much land and how many natural resources they have to work with.
They've got not much land, even less arable land, an absurdly high population density in the land that they *can* live in... and they're still the world's second largest country.
The US has about a half a continent to itself. Japan is a couple of volcanic islands. Hardly a fair comparison.
I think Japan has a very weak spot: they are excellent at improving existing technologies, but they cannot create new ones.
Really? They pretty much created the commercially-available hybrid automobile. (Sure, they didn't invent it, but the idea for hybrid gas/electric powertrains has been around for a very long time).
They also created one of the most impressive technologies in modern photography, image-stabilized lenses. (I think Canon did it first, but now Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic all make IS/VR/OIS/whatever lenses).
Wasn't the CD invented by a Japanese company?
No, the Japanese haven't invented everything; the rest of the world invents stuff too. But the Japanese invent stuff too; just because they're excellent at improving technologies doesn't mean that they don't invent new stuff.
The USA spends a shitload on our military. The Japanese spend nearly zero.
I am sitting here typing on a computer designed partly in Japan. Sitting next to me is a cell phone designed by Koreans, and a digital camera made by Japanese engineers. The piece of glass on front of it was designed by Germans, and built in a Japanese factory.
I've got an American car. It doesn't work too well, especially when compared to Japanese cars.
I'm a physics grad student. The US gave up building the next-gen particle accelerator; that's being done in Europe now, because the US figured it would rather spend the money on the military. If the guys in the next lab over know what they're talking about, it should be running next year. The Japanese beat us in scientific supercomputer technology a while back. I understand they're also far ahead in robotics.
If military spending on R&D helps out the rest of society, I'm not seeing it. If we've got such great aerospace technology, how come getting a plane from Tucson to Philly is still so damn hard and expensive? Of course, these days US military R&D isn't about producing weapons that work; it's about getting more contracts and more money. I personally know engineers who admit that it's more about the cash than actually getting stuff that works.
1. Jurisprudence depends on the fact that the law is above all, fair and relatively predictable.
2. Having annoyed citizens running around randomly nullifying cases because they feel like it undermines our entire justice system.
When (1) is not true (the law is not fair and predictable), then which would you rather have happen: enforcement of bad law, or jurors nullifying cases?
I'll take the latter. Ideally there is fair law and no jury nullification, but when the laws are broken...
In all seriousness, I remember the days of having to fix people's boxes back in the dorms. 98 box? Reboot it, and it'll probably work. ME box? Reboot it six times, sacrifice four chickens, and pray to Mephistopheles, and it'll *possibly* work if the phase of the moon is right.
And somehow it's okay that it only costs about the same as an entry-level DSLR?
A camera has a sensor with a gajillion pixels on it, a bunch of electronics, a flippy mirror and viewfinder optics, and -- if you buy a lens, which you probably did -- a lot of high-precision coated optical glass.
Photoshop is a bunch of bits.
Guess which is easier to manufacture an additional copy of?
1) It only has one "sharpen" button with no parameters. For an operation that's as touchy as sharpening, you need more control. 2) The highlights/shadows/fill light sliders aren't as flexible or as easy to use as the Gimp's curves tool for adjusting contrast.
Add a proper unsharp mask tool and a tone curve, and Picasa would be able to do 90% of post-process jobs. Now it can only do 10%, simply because curves is so useful.
"Innocent until proven guilty" and "The fact that you refuse to obey a law is not proof that you are breaking other laws" apparently don't apply to accused pedophiles and terrorists.
You're degrading time-critical but relatively low-bandwidth traffic intentionally in order to improve responsiveness for some ssh connections?
Granted, Halo 3 is less important than Prof. Smith's Monte Carlo, but the fact that you have to do this at all means that you need more capacity. Plus it's damn rude to the students: "Oh, they're doing something new that we don't degrade! Ah, well, just degrade student UDP traffic too, that'll fix it!"
I'm not saying that transfer limits are a bad idea -- someone downloading 100GB/month and saturating a line needs to be told off, certainly -- but if a bunch of low-bandwidth gaming traffic from the dorms kills the network...
Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network.
If I knew what uni you were at I'd seriously consider adding my (meager) 256kbps upstream to the load by writing a script to refresh your homepage over and over.
Taiwan isn't part of China according to the Taiwanese. They don't pay taxes to the Chinese government. Supporting Taiwanese companies isn't supporting China.
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It has nothing to do with the music specifically being rap, and everything to do with it really having no redeeming value outside the massive advertising campaign for it. Many pop acts are created to fit a marketing niche, rather than marketing being designed to sell music.
That's the difference.
Full-length previews are going to be available one way or the other no matter what. Either we get them from itunes.com, or we get them from thepiratebay.org.
On #3: There's a difference between marketing what you're selling and selling marketing.
I went into Best Buy to buy a printer cartridge and saw giant posters advertising some new rap CD. This is excessive. Telling people about your product is one thing; selling a product based solely on advertising is, in the long run, a recipe for failure. Ultimately there has to be something behind the marketing.
On #7: There is no technological or legal way to stop filesharing. The best they can do is appeal to the honor of the filesharers and at least maybe get some donations out of it.
It's going to happen. Do you want to fight a battle you can't win, or realize that people are going to copy files over the internet no matter *what* you do?
1. Offer unencumbered mp3/flac/ogg/whatever downloads as their primary product at a reasonable price. This is below $1/song.
2. Tell the customer exactly where their money goes: "Out of every download, $.30 goes to the band, $.10 goes to the people who operated the recording equipment..." People will buy music from bands they like if they know they're actually supporting the band.
3. Save money by cutting marketing bullshit. Market music by selling *good* music, not by convincing 16-year-olds that they'll be cool if they listen to XYZ.
4. Diversify. Rather than trying to "produce" some canned pop "product" that they can sell to everyone, recognize that people's music tastes are often pretty eclectic, and their catalog needs to match that.
5. Stop trying to make obscene profits by underhanded dealings, and be happy with a sustainable business. Recognize that you're a middleman, and that you succeed by being as transparent as possible.
6. Cut the compression bullshit. If I want my music to sound louder I'll turn up my speakers, thanks.
7. Operate anonymous tip jars with a known cut (65% to the artist/35% to us, or whatever), and encourage people to download music via bittorrent or whatever and then donate to the artist. People will use them.
Actually, quite a lot of the midrange photography market is using IS lenses now. Panasonic's been using it as a brand trait for a while -- *everything* they sell has IS, and their pretty amazing market success with it has forced Canon and some of the more traditional camera makers to include it in consumer cameras to keep up. You can get a Panasonic camera with a terrific IS lens for $250 or so.
I did mean.
Thanks.
In case you were interested, modern American cars are just as reliable as newer Japanese cars.
Not according to Consumer Reports, who tests this stuff.
I'd say Japan's economy is a hell of a lot better than the US considering how much land and how many natural resources they have to work with.
... and they're still the world's second largest country.
They've got not much land, even less arable land, an absurdly high population density in the land that they *can* live in
The US has about a half a continent to itself. Japan is a couple of volcanic islands. Hardly a fair comparison.
I think Japan has a very weak spot: they are excellent at improving existing technologies, but they cannot create new ones.
Really? They pretty much created the commercially-available hybrid automobile. (Sure, they didn't invent it, but the idea for hybrid gas/electric powertrains has been around for a very long time).
They also created one of the most impressive technologies in modern photography, image-stabilized lenses. (I think Canon did it first, but now Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic all make IS/VR/OIS/whatever lenses).
Wasn't the CD invented by a Japanese company?
No, the Japanese haven't invented everything; the rest of the world invents stuff too. But the Japanese invent stuff too; just because they're excellent at improving technologies doesn't mean that they don't invent new stuff.
WRONG.
The USA spends a shitload on our military. The Japanese spend nearly zero.
I am sitting here typing on a computer designed partly in Japan. Sitting next to me is a cell phone designed by Koreans, and a digital camera made by Japanese engineers. The piece of glass on front of it was designed by Germans, and built in a Japanese factory.
I've got an American car. It doesn't work too well, especially when compared to Japanese cars.
I'm a physics grad student. The US gave up building the next-gen particle accelerator; that's being done in Europe now, because the US figured it would rather spend the money on the military. If the guys in the next lab over know what they're talking about, it should be running next year. The Japanese beat us in scientific supercomputer technology a while back. I understand they're also far ahead in robotics.
If military spending on R&D helps out the rest of society, I'm not seeing it. If we've got such great aerospace technology, how come getting a plane from Tucson to Philly is still so damn hard and expensive? Of course, these days US military R&D isn't about producing weapons that work; it's about getting more contracts and more money. I personally know engineers who admit that it's more about the cash than actually getting stuff that works.
Do you really trust the current Chinese economy to make precision optics?
1. Jurisprudence depends on the fact that the law is above all, fair and relatively predictable.
2. Having annoyed citizens running around randomly nullifying cases because they feel like it undermines our entire justice system.
When (1) is not true (the law is not fair and predictable), then which would you rather have happen: enforcement of bad law, or jurors nullifying cases?
I'll take the latter. Ideally there is fair law and no jury nullification, but when the laws are broken...
So Windows ME is Windows Vista?
In all seriousness, I remember the days of having to fix people's boxes back in the dorms. 98 box? Reboot it, and it'll probably work. ME box? Reboot it six times, sacrifice four chickens, and pray to Mephistopheles, and it'll *possibly* work if the phase of the moon is right.
Or not.
Now "Made in Japan" is like "Made in the USA" or "Made in Germany" used to be...
Ford turns out pieces of shit and Hondas last forever.
And somehow it's okay that it only costs about the same as an entry-level DSLR?
A camera has a sensor with a gajillion pixels on it, a bunch of electronics, a flippy mirror and viewfinder optics, and -- if you buy a lens, which you probably did -- a lot of high-precision coated optical glass.
Photoshop is a bunch of bits.
Guess which is easier to manufacture an additional copy of?
Picasa is excellent, but:
1) It only has one "sharpen" button with no parameters. For an operation that's as touchy as sharpening, you need more control.
2) The highlights/shadows/fill light sliders aren't as flexible or as easy to use as the Gimp's curves tool for adjusting contrast.
Add a proper unsharp mask tool and a tone curve, and Picasa would be able to do 90% of post-process jobs. Now it can only do 10%, simply because curves is so useful.
"Innocent until proven guilty" and "The fact that you refuse to obey a law is not proof that you are breaking other laws" apparently don't apply to accused pedophiles and terrorists.
Or do you still believe the law is just?
You're degrading time-critical but relatively low-bandwidth traffic intentionally in order to improve responsiveness for some ssh connections?
Granted, Halo 3 is less important than Prof. Smith's Monte Carlo, but the fact that you have to do this at all means that you need more capacity. Plus it's damn rude to the students: "Oh, they're doing something new that we don't degrade! Ah, well, just degrade student UDP traffic too, that'll fix it!"
I'm not saying that transfer limits are a bad idea -- someone downloading 100GB/month and saturating a line needs to be told off, certainly -- but if a bunch of low-bandwidth gaming traffic from the dorms kills the network...
Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network.
If I knew what uni you were at I'd seriously consider adding my (meager) 256kbps upstream to the load by writing a script to refresh your homepage over and over.
No.
:)
Evictions on behalf of slum lords.
Thus, it's important to have sound policies governing a technological society
And lawyers create these?
Right now a lawyer is IM'ing me asking how to sabotage a computer and make it look accidental in order to claim a warranty.
They can use whatever software they want. MS Office can save plaintext files, after all.
I, however, insist that I have the same freedom as well.
This is the whole point of open formats!
Taiwan isn't part of China according to the Taiwanese. They don't pay taxes to the Chinese government. Supporting Taiwanese companies isn't supporting China.
Isn't that what matters here?
Well, she ought to know better than to use any MS format.
Around here openoffice formats, postscript, and pdf are about the only things used.
... and refusing to accept work from students submitted in MS Office formats.
.docx?), then I'm not going to grade it.
If I have to guess how to open it (wtf is a