Quoth the article: "The tickets are worth what they're worth," said John Pleasants, Ticketmaster's president and chief executive. "If somebody wants to charge $50 for a ticket, but it's actually worth $1,000 on eBay, the ticket's worth $1,000. I think more and more, our clients -- the promoters, the clients in the buildings and the bands themselves -- are saying to themselves, `Maybe that money should be coming to me instead of Bob the Broker.' "
Ticketmaster has every right to dictate their business model. And I have every right not to buy from them. I applaud his efforts to take back money lost to middle-men nipping at his heels. As long as the market will bear those prices - then go for it. This means that concerts will increasingly become the past time of the rich, yes, and they will leave some of their best fans, the teenagers, out in the cold. If there's enough blowback they might go back to the 'wait in line at 8am on Sunday for cheap tickets' model - but not if they are making good money. Perhaps some alternatives will spring up to fill the gap. Who knows.
As for myself however, I find some of their business practices riotously lame, and I haven't bought tickets to a big concert in years, and I scrupulously avoid ticketmaster. Mostly because:
I don't like the last minute 'fees' and 'surcharges' - they should just list an all inclusive price up front, it's not like they have competitors in most cases, unless you want to drive to the box office of the event venue during limited hours.
I'm tired of the cavity search to get into a rock concert. I don't consider that part of a pleasant evening out. Concert security lately resembles the presidential motorcade. This is a problem in general with live events where any semi-famous person is present. It's just gotten silly and I'm not interested in feeling like I'm in the Soviet Union. It ruins the atmosphere.
I'm tired of rock concerts being at volume 11 - why should I wear earplugs when you can just turn the volume down? Are you doing that to benefit the one already-partially deaf person in the audience? Movie theaters with nice sound systems are pleasantly loud. Concerts are deafening. What's the point? Why have sound above what human hearing can tolerate without hearing protection?
the crowds, the stanky toilets, the not being able to see the band from across the stadium....
The enormous prices. I appreciate that the shows are big and expensive, but I'd much rather go to a symphony hall or a Loreena McKennitt concert. Maybe I'm just getting old. 20 years ago concerts were an order of magnitude cheaper - and that's taking inflation into account. $16 for Oingo Boingo. I have my ticket stub still.
Maybe one day live music will return to a more sane level of operation. In the mean time I'll continue to partake of smaller venues and lesser known bands. With the money I save I can buy some albums and listen to them in the comfort of my car or on my stereo / computer at home. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't agree with me, because they fill the stadiums up with people at any price currently.
Like the situation with the RIAA, the only ones who can change it are the acts themselves. They have to conciously choose to publish independently (which is actually possible with the internet) and not use companies like ticketmaster when promoting and selling live events. It takes a serious amount of balls to be the first major act, but I believe if enough acts choose to go this route, it will reach a critical mass that will again change the industry. All it takes is for one well connected entrepreuer to convince some of his rock star friends to go in on a website where the site gets 10% of the cut and the artist gets 90%. Then you can sell songs for 25 cents or 50 cents a piece, and most of it goes to the artist. And the artist is still making directly more than he or she would than through Itunes, and the sales are good because of the low price
I wholeheartedly agree. I find it very tiring to read books on screen (no matter how good the dot pitch gets) and I thoroughly enjoy reading books in my living room.
Paper books will continue to be popular until the paper is too expensive (scarce) to print them. by then hopefully there will be a digital solution that "feels" similar to the real thing. (a small folding tome consisting of two pages facing each other, which displays digital text at 600 DPI, mimicing the coloring and fiber of paper...:)
That or downloading the story directly into my brain in a book-paced trickle, for enjoyment purposes.:)
I'm doing my whole house with insteon, and so far so good. Support for Homeseer (a popular home automation and remote control software for windows) is real sketchy right now, but it will improve over time. With Insteton, it's easier to make 'scenes' or ganged light operations without needing a computer controller. So if my homeseer server goes down, my lights don't suddenly stop working. My rule when installing it is that the main switches on the wall just needed to work if the computer dies.
I had a lot of problems with signal interference with X10 and the usual problem bridging breakers or phases.
There are not very many specialty devices and controllers for insteon right now, but all inseton products are two-way compatable with X10 if you need an X10 contact closure or other widget.
I have about half the rooms done with Inseton, and the kitchen and master bedroom to go. So far so great!
The social makeup of the online community 20 years ago was so much different than it is now. Even those of us who are left are 20 years older and different from whom we were then. It's a time and a 'place' that will never again be repeated, although seeing the UI again has sparked some very distant and pleasant memories.
Thanks for bringing it back, and it was interesting to read in the thread what hardware the service originally ran on, I had always wondered. If there are any more details I'd like to know. (how many dial in lines, how were they physically situated...any PHOTOS of the hardware?)
FOr those of you who are wondering about the AOL connection - Quantumlink was run by Quantum Computer Services in Vienna, Virginia. They later started a service for PC and Mac users called America Online, and that later became their entire business and business name. As mentioned earlier, they shut down Qlink and encouraged migration to AOL, and that was the end of that.
This coincided with the general decline of C=64s and 128s in lieu of newer machines. But yes it would have been nice to have Amiga support for it, because for the next 5 or 6 years I owned probably every single model of Amiga ever made at one time or another.
Before getting a shell account with a UUCP newsfeed in '91 or so, I was visiting local multi-line BBSs. (MajorBBS with lots of lines - 16 to 32 lines) and that's where I met pretty much everyone I knew at the time. Local boards are great, because you get to meet everyone eventually at local gatherings. Oh well, that's all gone too. Back to IRC where anyone you don't know is either a pedophile or a cop.:)
"Or is this all a clever trick on Google's part to build up more and more third parties dependent upon Google?"
It's amazing how fast a company can go from being Slashdot's little darling to suddenly being suspected at every turn of being the new EvilEmpire(tm).
Guys, these people are making wonderful tools and making them available for free, and letting people mess with them. They're probably reading comments like that slack-jawed, thinking "man, you just can't win with that crowd!" Give em a break!:)
Space Adventures helped broker the $20mil Space Station rides for Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. They are also partnered with a number of rocket companies and are ready to provide passengers to the first one with an operating system.
Jon Karkow, my neighbor and project manager/designer and chief test pilot of this little airplane. It was his baby from start to finish. (in addition to all the other congratulations all around!)
I'm not sure what kind of technology they are using, but there is www.xlibris.com, which, after an initial setup fee, does one-offs as they are purchased. There is also www.mypublisher.com, which publishes onesie-twosie books for personal use (they are expensive, not much room for markup)
and then CafePress has been printing books, although their formatting options are limited. Xlibris will allow you to do color on the regular pages.
> Carmack's efforts are closer in spirit to those of the Wrights, Lindbergh, et al, than Rutan (since Burt and Dick are well known in the experimental aircraft business)
Except that the wrights spent most of the rest of their career suing other people over patents. Everyone else continued innovating despite them. But I am sure you are referring to the good part where they were building aircraft out of their bicycle shop.:)
They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Re:No need for CF? Ask the Microdrive makers...
on
4GB HD in Under an Inch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Heh. I've used a 1GB IBM Microdrive in sub-freezing temperatures, shooting Niagra Falls in the winter.
Later on I found out I shouldn't have even been using the camera at sub-freezing, but I got away with it that time. (Canon D30)
Fortunately the Microdrive heats up a lot when in use.
Been using a 1GB IBM Microdrive for 3 years now...
on
4GB HD in Under an Inch
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The drive itself in the microdrive is more like 1/4 to 1/2". Why is this new one being toted as the first? Is it somehow different? There are multi-GB microdrives on the market now.
I've been using a Microdrive in my digital cameras for the past 3 years now. Someone asked about reliability, hasn't given me any problems, but it is of course slow compared to regular CF RAM. Now that CF RAM is so cheap, I've switched to a Lexar 40x 1GB flash card, and keep the microdrive as a backup. The Microdrives were a great compromise at a time when CF RAM was really expensive.
This morning, due to all the attention, our chief engineer noticed that 138 dB is actually a typo, it's 128 dB. And we do know where it goes off the scale, it's right at that 10 meter mark.
And for runs longer than 10 seconds, both headphones and earplugs are required if you are that close. And there are indeed many good reasons to be that close when it runs. We've had thousands of runs with not a single explosion, but we're not stupid - there is a transparent blast shield made out of several layers of ultra-thick bulletproof bank teller glass, and when we're looking at the engine while its running, it's through the glass.:)
I believe our current eastimates for the EPA and various environmental impact reports are based on many different metering levels taken in different situations from varying distances, both from the test stand and on our flying rocket powered airplane, the EZ-Rocket.
Sound levels are indeed very important, not only for employee occupational hazard levels but for sound levels reaching out in to the town of Mojave and the rest of the airport. We like to be good neighbors. We also had to provide estimated sound levels as part of the Mojave Civilian Flight test Center's application to become the nation's first inland space port.
Fortunately, we're within restricted airspace near Edwards Air Force Base where you are allowed to go supersonic and make sonic booms, one of the few places in America where you can do this. The people who live here are used to the occasional BANG! BANG! in the morning as the boys and girls in the fighter jets paint circles into the skies overhead. The rocket taking off is nowhere near the level or type of sound generated by the sonic booms (good booms make your wall art crooked) and our own booms are minimalized on the ground by the fact that the aircraft is at a 70 degree climb angle.
We've been able to come up with a pretty accurate graph of noise falloff. Once we begin testing the next generation of engines on the next generation of flying vehicle we'll have an even better idea of what to expect for the full suborbital flight profile.
Well you're welcome...I was just heading out the door when I hit reload one last time, and by golly there's the press release from yesterday. So I decided to stick around and blab.:) Meaningful info is indeed a good thing, brings down the s/n ratio. Education is part of our mission, which is why we started things like the Aerospace reference library and why we take our 15 lb-thrust N2O-Ethane 'teacart' engine to conventions and fire it for people.
Yes, at 10 meters an EZ-Rocket engine test (the thing being referred to in your quote) almost requires headphones and earmuffs. And by golly if that's not the same sort of sound levels that come out of an F-4 phantom on full afterburners or a 747 taking off, except you're never that close to them. If you are you're insulated inside the plane.
When the EZ-Rocket is actually in flight, the noise from the ground isn't any different from a fighter jet. And inside the cockpit, our test pilot Dick Rutan says that the engine isn't any louder than a jet with the canopy closed and the earphones on.
The key thing to remember is that the engines that will go on the suborbital vehicle are larger and have much lower noise frequency components. The XR4K5 1800 lb-thrust engine has a low rumble well within the safety margins of just wearing headphones. It has a really beautiful sound when it runs. The 400 lb-thrust EZ-Rocket engine, which is the one that the sound levels refer to, sounds more like full spectrum white noise.
the loudest noise from a rocket engine can be heard when you are standing approximately 45 degrees from the thrust vector (45 from straight behind) and the quietest point is directly in front of it. (in the cockpit)
One of the many advantages of using liquid fuel engines is far less vibration and audable noise variation when compared to a solid fuel engine. Ever read about a NASA astronaut's experiences during the solid fuel burn on a shuttle launch? O.K. for heavy lifters but perhaps not for space tourists.:)
As a side note, I am always amazed at concertgoers for not wearing hearing protection for something that sounds almost as loud as a rocket engine.
Yes, we are not an X-Prize contender. That part of the submission is incorrect. (it's the most common journalistic mistake, we forgive/.)
To clarify...when AST receives a launch license application it deems is "sufficiently complete" it just means that they are now on a 180 day clock to either deny or grant the license. If they deny the license, they have to report to congress and tell them why it was denied. Along the way, they may request from us (XCOR) any kind of new information they might need as well.
So yes, your comment is correct. The license is not granted, but the application is in the 'sufficiently complete' mode. The newsworthy significance of this is that it's the very first sufficiently complete application for a winged suborbital vehicle, of which he hope there will be many more of in the not too distant future.:) -m
I've seen tons of converage on all of the various Discovery channels as well. We get news crews coming through here about once every two weeks at this point. There are a lot of stories about it, many of them are in the international media as well. Also remember, XCOR is not an X-Prize competitor. The time frame and vehicle specification does not currently mesh with our program.
Slashdot Mirror
Ticketmaster has every right to dictate their business model. And I have every right not to buy from them. I applaud his efforts to take back money lost to middle-men nipping at his heels. As long as the market will bear those prices - then go for it. This means that concerts will increasingly become the past time of the rich, yes, and they will leave some of their best fans, the teenagers, out in the cold. If there's enough blowback they might go back to the 'wait in line at 8am on Sunday for cheap tickets' model - but not if they are making good money. Perhaps some alternatives will spring up to fill the gap. Who knows.
As for myself however, I find some of their business practices riotously lame, and I haven't bought tickets to a big concert in years, and I scrupulously avoid ticketmaster. Mostly because:
Maybe one day live music will return to a more sane level of operation. In the mean time I'll continue to partake of smaller venues and lesser known bands. With the money I save I can buy some albums and listen to them in the comfort of my car or on my stereo / computer at home. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't agree with me, because they fill the stadiums up with people at any price currently.
Like the situation with the RIAA, the only ones who can change it are the acts themselves. They have to conciously choose to publish independently (which is actually possible with the internet) and not use companies like ticketmaster when promoting and selling live events. It takes a serious amount of balls to be the first major act, but I believe if enough acts choose to go this route, it will reach a critical mass that will again change the industry. All it takes is for one well connected entrepreuer to convince some of his rock star friends to go in on a website where the site gets 10% of the cut and the artist gets 90%. Then you can sell songs for 25 cents or 50 cents a piece, and most of it goes to the artist. And the artist is still making directly more than he or she would than through Itunes, and the sales are good because of the low price
I wholeheartedly agree. I find it very tiring to read books on screen (no matter how good the dot pitch gets) and I thoroughly enjoy reading books in my living room.
:)
:)
Paper books will continue to be popular until the paper is too expensive (scarce) to print them. by then hopefully there will be a digital solution that "feels" similar to the real thing. (a small folding tome consisting of two pages facing each other, which displays digital text at 600 DPI, mimicing the coloring and fiber of paper...
That or downloading the story directly into my brain in a book-paced trickle, for enjoyment purposes.
--Mike
I'm doing my whole house with insteon, and so far so good. Support for Homeseer (a popular home automation and remote control software for windows) is real sketchy right now, but it will improve over time. With Insteton, it's easier to make 'scenes' or ganged light operations without needing a computer controller. So if my homeseer server goes down, my lights don't suddenly stop working. My rule when installing it is that the main switches on the wall just needed to work if the computer dies.
I had a lot of problems with signal interference with X10 and the usual problem bridging breakers or phases.
There are not very many specialty devices and controllers for insteon right now, but all inseton products are two-way compatable with X10 if you need an X10 contact closure or other widget.
I have about half the rooms done with Inseton, and the kitchen and master bedroom to go. So far so great!
--M
But his main genre was time travel stories, such as the popular "Time and Again" :)
--Mike
(side tangent)
There was going to be a Prisoner movie, did it go away? There's no mention of it in IMDB anymore even. Here's something at least: http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hp&cf=prev&id=18084 05507
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0964881209
(yes, no affiliate code in that link...amazing)
Their webserver isn't as powerful as their subwoofer. Boom!
Like gold plated connectors...ever seen one in a real studio rack?
Is the innocence. :)
:)
The social makeup of the online community 20 years ago was so much different than it is now. Even those of us who are left are 20 years older and different from whom we were then. It's a time and a 'place' that will never again be repeated, although seeing the UI again has sparked some very distant and pleasant memories.
Thanks for bringing it back, and it was interesting to read in the thread what hardware the service originally ran on, I had always wondered. If there are any more details I'd like to know. (how many dial in lines, how were they physically situated...any PHOTOS of the hardware?)
FOr those of you who are wondering about the AOL connection - Quantumlink was run by Quantum Computer Services in Vienna, Virginia. They later started a service for PC and Mac users called America Online, and that later became their entire business and business name. As mentioned earlier, they shut down Qlink and encouraged migration to AOL, and that was the end of that.
This coincided with the general decline of C=64s and 128s in lieu of newer machines. But yes it would have been nice to have Amiga support for it, because for the next 5 or 6 years I owned probably every single model of Amiga ever made at one time or another.
Before getting a shell account with a UUCP newsfeed in '91 or so, I was visiting local multi-line BBSs. (MajorBBS with lots of lines - 16 to 32 lines) and that's where I met pretty much everyone I knew at the time. Local boards are great, because you get to meet everyone eventually at local gatherings. Oh well, that's all gone too. Back to IRC where anyone you don't know is either a pedophile or a cop.
to work for yourself. Being self employed is very hard but rewarding. :)
It's amazing how fast a company can go from being Slashdot's little darling to suddenly being suspected at every turn of being the new EvilEmpire(tm).
Guys, these people are making wonderful tools and making them available for free, and letting people mess with them. They're probably reading comments like that slack-jawed, thinking "man, you just can't win with that crowd!" Give em a break! :)
-M
Space Adventures helped broker the $20mil Space Station rides for Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. They are also partnered with a number of rocket companies and are ready to provide passengers to the first one with an operating system.
http://www.spaceadventures.com/intro
Jon Karkow, my neighbor and project manager/designer and chief test pilot of this little airplane. It was his baby from start to finish. (in addition to all the other congratulations all around!)
--M
I'm not sure what kind of technology they are using, but there is www.xlibris.com, which, after an initial setup fee, does one-offs as they are purchased. There is also www.mypublisher.com, which publishes onesie-twosie books for personal use (they are expensive, not much room for markup) and then CafePress has been printing books, although their formatting options are limited. Xlibris will allow you to do color on the regular pages.
Except that the wrights spent most of the rest of their career suing other people over patents. Everyone else continued innovating despite them. But I am sure you are referring to the good part where they were building aircraft out of their bicycle shop. :)
They have reaction control and heat shielding on the craft as of present. The heat shielding was recently added.
Later on I found out I shouldn't have even been using the camera at sub-freezing, but I got away with it that time. (Canon D30)
Fortunately the Microdrive heats up a lot when in use.
I've been using a Microdrive in my digital cameras for the past 3 years now. Someone asked about reliability, hasn't given me any problems, but it is of course slow compared to regular CF RAM. Now that CF RAM is so cheap, I've switched to a Lexar 40x 1GB flash card, and keep the microdrive as a backup. The Microdrives were a great compromise at a time when CF RAM was really expensive.
--Mike
This morning, due to all the attention, our chief engineer noticed that 138 dB is actually a typo, it's 128 dB. And we do know where it goes off the scale, it's right at that 10 meter mark.
:)
And for runs longer than 10 seconds, both headphones and earplugs are required if you are that close. And there are indeed many good reasons to be that close when it runs. We've had thousands of runs with not a single explosion, but we're not stupid - there is a transparent blast shield made out of several layers of ultra-thick bulletproof bank teller glass, and when we're looking at the engine while its running, it's through the glass.
--Mike
Sound levels are indeed very important, not only for employee occupational hazard levels but for sound levels reaching out in to the town of Mojave and the rest of the airport. We like to be good neighbors. We also had to provide estimated sound levels as part of the Mojave Civilian Flight test Center's application to become the nation's first inland space port.
Fortunately, we're within restricted airspace near Edwards Air Force Base where you are allowed to go supersonic and make sonic booms, one of the few places in America where you can do this. The people who live here are used to the occasional BANG! BANG! in the morning as the boys and girls in the fighter jets paint circles into the skies overhead. The rocket taking off is nowhere near the level or type of sound generated by the sonic booms (good booms make your wall art crooked) and our own booms are minimalized on the ground by the fact that the aircraft is at a 70 degree climb angle.
We've been able to come up with a pretty accurate graph of noise falloff. Once we begin testing the next generation of engines on the next generation of flying vehicle we'll have an even better idea of what to expect for the full suborbital flight profile.
--Mike M., XCOR
Well you're welcome...I was just heading out the door when I hit reload one last time, and by golly there's the press release from yesterday. So I decided to stick around and blab. :) Meaningful info is indeed a good thing, brings down the s/n ratio. Education is part of our mission, which is why we started things like the Aerospace reference library and why we take our 15 lb-thrust N2O-Ethane 'teacart' engine to conventions and fire it for people.
When the EZ-Rocket is actually in flight, the noise from the ground isn't any different from a fighter jet. And inside the cockpit, our test pilot Dick Rutan says that the engine isn't any louder than a jet with the canopy closed and the earphones on.
The key thing to remember is that the engines that will go on the suborbital vehicle are larger and have much lower noise frequency components. The XR4K5 1800 lb-thrust engine has a low rumble well within the safety margins of just wearing headphones. It has a really beautiful sound when it runs. The 400 lb-thrust EZ-Rocket engine, which is the one that the sound levels refer to, sounds more like full spectrum white noise.
the loudest noise from a rocket engine can be heard when you are standing approximately 45 degrees from the thrust vector (45 from straight behind) and the quietest point is directly in front of it. (in the cockpit)
One of the many advantages of using liquid fuel engines is far less vibration and audable noise variation when compared to a solid fuel engine. Ever read about a NASA astronaut's experiences during the solid fuel burn on a shuttle launch? O.K. for heavy lifters but perhaps not for space tourists. :)
As a side note, I am always amazed at concertgoers for not wearing hearing protection for something that sounds almost as loud as a rocket engine.
--Mike
Yes, we are not an X-Prize contender. That part of the submission is incorrect. (it's the most common journalistic mistake, we forgive /.)
To clarify...when AST receives a launch license application it deems is "sufficiently complete" it just means that they are now on a 180 day clock to either deny or grant the license. If they deny the license, they have to report to congress and tell them why it was denied. Along the way, they may request from us (XCOR) any kind of new information they might need as well.
So yes, your comment is correct. The license is not granted, but the application is in the 'sufficiently complete' mode. The newsworthy significance of this is that it's the very first sufficiently complete application for a winged suborbital vehicle, of which he hope there will be many more of in the not too distant future. :) -m
...and sorry for all the run on sentences, spelling errors and typos! Running fast tonight..
I've seen tons of converage on all of the various Discovery channels as well. We get news crews coming through here about once every two weeks at this point. There are a lot of stories about it, many of them are in the international media as well. Also remember, XCOR is not an X-Prize competitor. The time frame and vehicle specification does not currently mesh with our program.
--Mike