As a harsh golden-eared nutjob myself, I've learned over the years that most people don't care for what we audio geeks call "quality sound". They don't notice when a singer overshoots a run, or the guitarist is slightly off-tempo. They mostly know that their home and car stereo are "good enough", and that live music is magically better, presumably because it is louder. The "smile" EQ curve has been beaten into their skulls since the very first time they heard a radio. Why ? Because the high and low end of the spectrum are what gets trashed by the electronic gauntlet that is analog radio transmission. What seems like an excellent stereo to the average person is fingernails on a chalkboard to an audio enthusiast. This is why guys like me walk around with giant expensive goofy-looking headphones and portable amplifiers for our iPods, because we'd rather look like dorks than be subjected to those nasal-sounding white earbuds. It's also why people tend to favour extreme bass at the expense of all else - they can feel the bass better than they can process the audible stuff.
Manufacturers love this, because just about any idiot with a soldering iron can create a "good enough" audio device. It's cheaply made and easily sold. Actually what they like to do is take the cheap crap, spend a fortune on marketing, and steadily increase the price over time. This is what you'll find in just about every big box store: MTX, Rockford Fosgate, Polk Audio. You'll even find similar corner-cut products sold to musicians, who are often no more discerning than laypersons unless they're well versed in recording and mixing. Then they can improve it, still not the proper circuitry, just a few extra dollars on bigger caps and gold-plated whatever, and call it their prosumer range.
The end result is that audiophiles who want properly designed and built gear either have to shell out small fortunes to extortionate specialty shops, or learn the craft and build it themselves. Anything designed for mass market appeal has to be the result of extreme compromises. If it pleases 80% of the market at 1/10th of the cost, the usual business strategy is "fuck the other 20%".
Ahh... I see your point, that is some poor judgment by Netflix. I'm no PR expert, but in this case I think they should grandfather the existing plan at $9.99, at least for some time, maybe a year, at which point you have to choose a new plan (or both) or terminate.
The way you say it, it sounds like the kind of sociopathic bullshit a telco would pull. Not cool.
I'm sure it did, just as it would cost me a billion dollars to satisfy all my I.T. clients' unreasonable demands. Does it add as much to the entertainment value ? I've had more fun watching cheap, cheesy Tarantino flicks and B-movies than almost anything out of Hollywood. Looking back 10 years, the few blockbusters I really enjoyed were the Batman reboots, and the odd guilty pleasure of Jason Statham flicks. I'm not trying to be a film snob, but the majority of >20m movies have a back-of-the-napkin plot that is invariably:
1. Boy meets girl. 2. Bad guy threatens intercourse. 3. Bad guy hurts good guy's feelings. 4. Boy has improbable luck in defeating bad guy. 5. Boy marries girl. and don't forget: 6. Random ambiguous ending sets up for a sequel
I kind-of feel bad for all the true artists working on such gigs, because they're wasting their talent on a shit story, but at the same time they're making the conscious decision to sell out, like any other artist.
I'll take a Coen Brothers' or Gondry over a big-budget wankfest any day.
Hells yes my friend! I am so kicking myself for getting into it after he turned into that cheap ass Stream of Passion. I would give my good coding arm to see a Star One concert!
Dude, you do realize nearly all digital video is progressive, right ? Or were you thinking of some fancy inter-frame interpolation gadget to turn 24fps film into 48fps, and 29.97 into 59.94 ?
Isn't $100M a drop in the bucket for Google ? I mean, I don't know their financials at all, but I doubt they'd flinch at that kind of outlay for their major mobile platform.
Why do bands sign on that dotted line ? Because for the longest time, it was the ONLY way to get any distribution. It still is, if you want your record on the shelves of Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers. You can't just walk up to the greeter with a box of your own CDs and say "Please sell these and we'll split it 50/50". You also cannot get any significant promotion outside your home town unless you have money to pay for such services.
In my experience, there are three types of big-label artists.
1. People who are well-established and can command mutually beneficial contracts 2. People who are new to the industry, have no contacts, no resources, no money, and thus no leverage 3. People who just don't give a shit and want to party on the label's dime
That last one is a dying breed. Big labels just don't want to support their artists that way anymore, it's bad for the image, but the other two are still going strong. There are some musicians who will do just about anything for the chance to get up on stage and play in front of a crowd, even if it means selling their rights away for a tiny bit of tour money.
The internet is slowly changing that, and home-based studios can rival the big guns, if you're willing to invest about $25k and know where you're going. It's quite realistically possible for an indie artist with enough talent and start-up cash to stay indie and earn a healthy living from it, but like any other small business it takes dedication and perseverance, not the most common traits in your average teenaged musician.
I, for one, would not be a "better consumer" without piracy. I would simply not consume at all. I do not like the stuff they play on the radio or on MTV. I really can't stand what they dare call hip-hop these days, this top-40 one-note tone-deaf-droning garbage with no message. I don't fit the mold because I have triple-digit IQ and damn critical hearing.
It used to be, you could go to a record store where people didn't wear stupid blue uniforms, and they could spell their own name without a tutor whispering clues. People thought those 6-disc "listening stations" were novel; those dumbasses! Any respectable record store, particularly ones that catered to DJs, would have turntables and CD decks beside the counter where you could plug your headphones and audition *ANY* album in the store. No label-approved selection, no time limit, just walk around, choose a stack of discs, and try them out. If you had no idea what to try, you could chat with the staff, who usually had near-encyclopedia knowledge of one of more genres, and they'd help you find something you'll enjoy, or perhaps steer you toward a new subgenre you might grow into. You'd bump into other music buffs and geek out about guitar solos, or they'd tell you about the awesome album they bought last week. The product was a vehicle for the culture it represented, rather than some manufactured sense of popularity.
When those record stores closed, we had to figure out alternatives. One of them is to find people online who share some of your tastes, and swap tunes until you find something you like. The knowledgeable store clerk was replaced by 10-gigabyte torrents of some random guy's favorite albums and the many pages of comments attached to them. The record industry, in its greed and impatience, has fucked itself over. Shat the bed. Screwed the pooch. Pissed in the cornflakes. They took away the one thing that made buying music FUN, and replaced it with more top-40 propaganda.
I know one person doesn't make a majority, but I would not be running a label and partering with two others if not for all the a.b.mp3 floods and multi-gigabyte "best of $genre" torrents. There is simply no way the mainstream media could have turned me onto 99% of what I listen to. Fifteen years ago I got all my music news from radio and TV, so you can imagine how awful my selection was. My only reprieve back then was the university radio stations that prided themselves on playing the weirdest niches of electronic and experimental music. Then one day, I downloaded a Slayer album. I didn't really know who they were, but the dumb thing grew on me. Now I'm a huge metalhead, I even have Slayer on vinyl, plus about 550 other artists of all genres, including a big chunk of Scandinavian metal. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe they play any Katatonia, Pagan's Mind or even Ayreon on MTV.
Had it not been for some altruistic soul on Usenet, posting his personal toplist for everyone to sample, I would never have heard of any of those acts, and if it weren't for online music stores, I would never have found copies to buy. Perhaps most importantly, I would never have attended any of those bands' concerts, and I sure as shit would not have nurtured the passion to launch a not-really-profitable business promoting indie bands beyond the local scene. Having access to that variety of music is what turned an idle hobby into an obsession.
My music spending before piracy: $10/month for one odd techno CD. My music spending after piracy: $500/month for an artist's back catalogue, a concert ticket + travel, and a dozen open mic nights at the local bars. I'm not even counting all the hours I invest into my protégés.
The problem is the RIAA probably doesn't see much of that $500, because it's often going to indie bands, small online stores, or foreign dealers for the hard-to-find stuff. The RIAA simply does not sell a product I wish to buy, not even consume for free. I swear, if I hear that stupid J.Lo Lambada rip-off one more time !@^&#!@
I'm going to stick my neck out and state that, IMO, police should be under video surveillance at all times during duty. They are granted exclusive privileges in order to do their job, such privileges require oversight to control abuse.
Or we can let them continue down this deceitful path until the police career loses all credibility, and watch as society descends into violent chaos a-la Mad Max. No, I'm not exaggerating. Bad cops only create more and badder criminals.
The problem is they expect to do the work once, and get paid over and over for it. That's just a hop away from Wall Street's practice of making up numbers and calling them money.
Recorded music is important, but to rely on such a cheap, trivially duplicated item for your primary income is just plain foolish. Artists want to make money ? Play good concerts (longer than 80 minutes FFS!), sell merch, connect with your fans. If that all sounds like too much work, get out of the music scene and get yourself a day job like everyone else. It shouldn't matter if you're playing to a sold-out stadium or a thousand-count bar in a small town, you're getting paid to do what you love. It's either that or the old 9-to-5 with bosses and rules and no fun.
I actually believe artists should release their own torrents, in very high quality. It's the most effective promotion you could ever want, and it costs about 15 minutes of your time and less than a gigabyte of upload traffic. Focus on attracting fans first, the money will come later. Play concerts, if people like you enough, they will even travel to go see you. Heck, I've been on countless day-long bus rides to and from concerts, and if you provide a discussion forum they will arrange carpooling amongst each other. Cost to you: $20 / month for web hosting, plus a little of your time. Revenue for one small concert (tickets and merch): $800. If you want, you can stay at that level, or you can build up your fan base and work your way up to bigger venues. Look at an act like Die Antwoord, they played to a sold-out crowd of 750 in Montreal last summer. I don't know the exact terms of their contract, but even if they went with an unfavorable door split deal, they would have walked away with at least $5000, after paying the venue, promoter and rentals. They are indie as hell and very strange, but they play their gigs and rev up their fans and they reap the rewards. This was long before they ever had any music up for sale, it was all free to stream and download from their web site.
The only thing the music and film industries care about is the bottom line, same as any other business.
The problem with this is that it is a giant pyramid scheme. Top 40 music doesn't cost 50 to 100 thousand dollars to make, it costs a few hours or days of a person's time per song. The only reason that number gets inflated 100x is GOUGING! Studio engineers gouge. Equipment manufacturers gouge. Account executives gouge. Venues gouge. Payola DJs gouge. Retail distributors gouge. Everyone is making a fortune off of other people's work, everyone except the few people who actually created the product in the first place. As consumers, we are stuck paying for all this gouging.
With Hollywood it's a thousand times worse. Actors making fortunes then failing to pay tax on it, just for standing around looking overly angry on camera. Just look at the last two Harry Potter movies, which supposedly cost $250 million to make (as a pair). That represents over $15,000 per second of resultant footage, $900,000 per minute. How much actual work went into the production of 276 minutes of film ? And how much of it is just extortionate hollywood salaries for the already-rich and famous ? Some people make great movies for barely a million that rake in the big bucks, while others milk the cow dry - the James Camerons and Michael Bays of the industry.
The problem is not with the consumers. The problem is with the business model. If they expect to turn a profit, they need to be far more realistic about expenses. We have better things to do with money than funneling it directly into Scientology's coffers.
Governments need to learn to rely less on identification to get shit done. We put so much power into these tiny pieces of easily falsified information, it's a wonder this society even functions at all. Real life does not actually look like hollywood crime dramas. Mob bosses don't hide in plain sight, and everyday hoodlums don't go around getting plastic surgery to impersonate Average Joes.
Cops don't need face scanning software, they need functioning brains, apparently a rare luxury these days. You'd think if someone was flagged to have their license revoked, they might have arrested that person a few times in the past. Why didn't they revoke the license back then, in person ? It's a whole lot easier to identify a repeat DUI offender when you're staring at his dented bumper and glassy eyes. If cops no longer have the guts to confront oh-so-terrifying traffic offenders face-to-face, maybe they should choose a less stressful career, like a Wal-Mart greeter ?
I've dealt with this sort of nonsense on a few occasions. In one particular incident, they couriered a license revocation notice to the wrong address, yet somehow sent a cop to my apartment complex on the very morning the order came into effect. He parked outside the gate and waited for me to drive out, nailing me with a viciously steep fine. A few weeks later my license was reinstated, and they blamed it on a computer glitch. Well I just happen to be a computer guy, I wasn't buying it. Eight months and a lawyer later, they finally fessed up that the cop used to date some chick I was seeing, and he got his brother at the DMV to add a few unpaid fines to my file. I'll let you imagine what happened to them afterward... But the point is, this facial recognition bullshit is just another excuse for convenient "glitches" to slip through the system. I'm not saying the software is perfect, it never is, but the humans manning it are infinitely more flawed.
I'd much rather see Shaw, Telus, Rogers and Bell broken up into infrastructure and services companies.
Personally, I'd rather see the infrastructure turned into a national, public asset controlled by the government, leaving the media companies to focus on providing the actual services - the exact opposite of what our corrupt and idiotic leaders have done over the past 35 years. I think it would be a much different telecom landscape if the bullies were forced to compete nationally with every other service provider, big and small.
We've reached the point where the only wire 99.9% of all homes and offices need is internet, thanks to VoIP and IPTV. I think that's a huge enough majority to justify nationalized internet service. To hell with this triple-play nonsense, I can do all three and a bunch more over one wire. Rogers can still sell me TV content, just send it over the internet. Give me a set-top box with an ethernet port and off we go. Then all this debate over channel bandwidth can be laid to rest. Same idea with the phone, there are already countless VoIP providers that ship you a preconfigured SIP gateway - if Joe Blow's Ghetto Telco can do it, surely the big greasy Robbers can do it too!
I sense a puny disturbance in the Force, as if dozens of DNS operators suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
The decades-old argument in favour of BSD is that it's more secure than Linux. Yeah, great. It also doesn't support any hardware nor software from this century. I've always felt like BSD was an unloved, unjustified waste of resources. I've never bothered supporting it, and while Linux has pissed me off lately with feature bloat and poor QC, it still causes me far fewer headaches than the handful of BSD boxes I occasionally have to support.
I like Theo, he's a good shit, but I don't care for his project. I'd rather see his great skills put to use on improving Linux.
I'm no SSD engineer, but since compressed data takes up less space and the compression is done in hardware, it results in less data to be written to the NAND flash. Less work to be done = faster I/O completion. Less wear = less work for the garbage collector.
The same is true of spinning platter hard drives. If your CPU can compress data faster than the disk can write it, you can read and write that file more quickly. This is one of the reasons why the Linux kernel is usually stored gzipped, and why things like SquashFS are used on slow media such as LiveCDs and USB flash drives.
TRIM is nowhere near as big an issue as people think. GC works fine on both Indilinx and Sandforce units. Realistically, once you start talking about RAID, the modest and highly situational performance gains from TRIM become irrelevant. Even with TRIM support, the block erase still happens in the background, so there is some delay before write performance is restored. If you're in a heavy rewrite scenario, you gain nothing as the drive doesn't idle long enough to handle those deferred erases anyway. And if you're not a heavy rewriter, the GC will take care of it sooner or later. It's all so moot.
My Revodrive X2 hits 650mb/sec with ease. My new Velodrive goes up to about 1000mb/sec, despite having a gazillion apps and games installed and my careless use of my "desktop" folder as temp space. The bottleneck is the shitty Silicon Image RAID chip, not the lack of TRIM. A very interesting product on the radar is the new Angelbird Wings, another PCI-E SSD with some cool features not found in the other brands, like mounting ISOs as virtual CDs at boot time, and a built-in Linux/XFCE distro for management/partitioning. They're claiming 900mb to 1000mb/sec speeds on the 4-channel model.
There are some of us who enjoy variety in our selection of games. The most common games are between 10 and 15 GB each. My World of Warcraft install is 25gb and growing with every new patch. Portal 2, a relatively simple game, is 11 gigs. It adds up very quickly. Of the 120 or so games in my Steam list, I can only keep around 20 installed on my relatively large 300GB SSD. It's no coincidence that the largest games benefit the most from SSD access times and read speeds. In my case, I've had to set up a 4-way RAID-0 of conventional hard drives, to have cheap and decently fast secondary storage. I would not dream of running a PC with just the 300GB drive, at least not for a multipurpose work and entertainment PC.
There's a lot of push from manufacturers for faster SSDs, but what I'd like to see is a super inexpensive "fast enough" product. Sure, I like my hyperfast PCI-E SSD with its 900mb transfer rates, but for gaming I would probably be happy with a device 1/5th as fast, because I now spend a lot of time just past the loading screen, waiting for the other players to synchronize. A cheap SSD would still be faster than any spinning platter, and I could keep this superfast one for more time-sensitive, seek-heavy duties.
By cheap, I mean less than $0.75 per GB. Right now, something like my Velodrive costs over $5.00 per gig, while consumer-grade SSDs hover near $2.00 per gig. This makes a comfortable 500gb device absolutely unaffordable for the all but the most dedicated hardware nuts, but bring it down to the price of a decent GPU, and people will budget for it as part of their next system build. The popularity of Seagate's "hybrid" drives is proof of this, though their usefulness is sorely limited to OS and application launch patterns. Modern games overwhelm the Seagate's 4GB SSD cache, unless you RAID a few of them together.
Windows 7 may not be much of a leap from XP, but in my case it was love at first sight. I get the sense that you and I have different hardware, and different expectations from the OS.
To me, XP was a very constrictive environment. For a guy like me, being limited to 32-bit operation is a no go. I need tons of Ram to do my work, and even when XP launched I was already at the 4gb limit. I had to switch to Windows 2003 Server 64-bit just to put my hardware to full use, and it wasn't always a smooth ride. Vista was indeed a slow, buggy, aimless set of GUI widgets with no real purpose, but with Win7 they scaled it back a bit, made the whole system much snappier with less bloat, and added some very nice power-user functionality like iSCSI and improved desktop management. They added a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, and overall I can work much more efficiently than I did with XP/2003.
The biggest improvement was formal, official support for 64-bit software and excellent 32-bit compatibility, something Windows 2003 and Vista never truly achieved. I have 48gb in this machine, and it is by far the most stable platform I've ever had. It's the first Windows where I don't have to mess under the hood all the time. Sure, I play a few games, but you're right, DX10 and 11 aren't game changers, at least not from the user's perspective. They're no better or worse than on XP.
If XP works for you, I see no reason to upgrade, but for me, 7 is a godsend. It does what I expect of it without getting in my way, and is very customizable just like its predecessors. I've certainly had less trouble with Win7 than I have with OSX, and yet they market the latter as a more user-friendly system - not by my standards.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Netflix user, nor have I ever been, and I don't have cable anymore. Seedbox ftw!
I know people are up in arms over the $6.00 increase, or 60% or whatever. Yes, it's relatively steep. It's still cheaper than basic cable. It's still cheaper than two PPV movies. Where I live, that's about the cost of two good pints of beer. I'd like to think that, if someone were supplying me with all-I-can-eat streaming TV and movies, on every device in my home and on the go, well I think I could buy them a couple pints. I mean, really, $16 these days is a drop in the bucket. 50 cents a day. Hell, fake starving kids in South Fuckaduckia charge more than that for a goddamned picture.
If you liked Netflix yesterday, you still like them today. Spend the extra six bucks. I spent more than that writing this comment, because I wasted more than $6.00 worth of billable time. We really have bigger things to worry about, like all these dumb BluRay discs going to landfill in five years when Sony decides to invent the next pointless proprietary format.
If this were a goddamned bank charging higher fees, I'd be supplying the soapboxes and ammo, but this is Netflix. Come on guys, they're actually doing a pretty decent job of taking our entertainment into the internet age, something the content providers would never have done on their own.
As a peddler of giant file servers, I tend to agree. I love nothing more than a client with huge storage requirements and a crisp, freshly signed cheque:)
But yeah, if the problem were storage, that's an easy fix. But changing the minds of stubborn copyright holders, that's a suicide mission.
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As a harsh golden-eared nutjob myself, I've learned over the years that most people don't care for what we audio geeks call "quality sound". They don't notice when a singer overshoots a run, or the guitarist is slightly off-tempo. They mostly know that their home and car stereo are "good enough", and that live music is magically better, presumably because it is louder. The "smile" EQ curve has been beaten into their skulls since the very first time they heard a radio. Why ? Because the high and low end of the spectrum are what gets trashed by the electronic gauntlet that is analog radio transmission. What seems like an excellent stereo to the average person is fingernails on a chalkboard to an audio enthusiast. This is why guys like me walk around with giant expensive goofy-looking headphones and portable amplifiers for our iPods, because we'd rather look like dorks than be subjected to those nasal-sounding white earbuds. It's also why people tend to favour extreme bass at the expense of all else - they can feel the bass better than they can process the audible stuff.
Manufacturers love this, because just about any idiot with a soldering iron can create a "good enough" audio device. It's cheaply made and easily sold. Actually what they like to do is take the cheap crap, spend a fortune on marketing, and steadily increase the price over time. This is what you'll find in just about every big box store: MTX, Rockford Fosgate, Polk Audio. You'll even find similar corner-cut products sold to musicians, who are often no more discerning than laypersons unless they're well versed in recording and mixing. Then they can improve it, still not the proper circuitry, just a few extra dollars on bigger caps and gold-plated whatever, and call it their prosumer range.
The end result is that audiophiles who want properly designed and built gear either have to shell out small fortunes to extortionate specialty shops, or learn the craft and build it themselves. Anything designed for mass market appeal has to be the result of extreme compromises. If it pleases 80% of the market at 1/10th of the cost, the usual business strategy is "fuck the other 20%".
Ahh... I see your point, that is some poor judgment by Netflix. I'm no PR expert, but in this case I think they should grandfather the existing plan at $9.99, at least for some time, maybe a year, at which point you have to choose a new plan (or both) or terminate.
The way you say it, it sounds like the kind of sociopathic bullshit a telco would pull. Not cool.
I'm sure it did, just as it would cost me a billion dollars to satisfy all my I.T. clients' unreasonable demands. Does it add as much to the entertainment value ? I've had more fun watching cheap, cheesy Tarantino flicks and B-movies than almost anything out of Hollywood. Looking back 10 years, the few blockbusters I really enjoyed were the Batman reboots, and the odd guilty pleasure of Jason Statham flicks. I'm not trying to be a film snob, but the majority of >20m movies have a back-of-the-napkin plot that is invariably:
1. Boy meets girl.
2. Bad guy threatens intercourse.
3. Bad guy hurts good guy's feelings.
4. Boy has improbable luck in defeating bad guy.
5. Boy marries girl.
and don't forget:
6. Random ambiguous ending sets up for a sequel
I kind-of feel bad for all the true artists working on such gigs, because they're wasting their talent on a shit story, but at the same time they're making the conscious decision to sell out, like any other artist.
I'll take a Coen Brothers' or Gondry over a big-budget wankfest any day.
Hells yes my friend! I am so kicking myself for getting into it after he turned into that cheap ass Stream of Passion. I would give my good coding arm to see a Star One concert!
I have not, and I find that rather disappointing. They could at least deinterlace it properly at the source.
Dude, you do realize nearly all digital video is progressive, right ? Or were you thinking of some fancy inter-frame interpolation gadget to turn 24fps film into 48fps, and 29.97 into 59.94 ?
Isn't $100M a drop in the bucket for Google ? I mean, I don't know their financials at all, but I doubt they'd flinch at that kind of outlay for their major mobile platform.
Why do bands sign on that dotted line ? Because for the longest time, it was the ONLY way to get any distribution. It still is, if you want your record on the shelves of Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers. You can't just walk up to the greeter with a box of your own CDs and say "Please sell these and we'll split it 50/50". You also cannot get any significant promotion outside your home town unless you have money to pay for such services.
In my experience, there are three types of big-label artists.
1. People who are well-established and can command mutually beneficial contracts
2. People who are new to the industry, have no contacts, no resources, no money, and thus no leverage
3. People who just don't give a shit and want to party on the label's dime
That last one is a dying breed. Big labels just don't want to support their artists that way anymore, it's bad for the image, but the other two are still going strong. There are some musicians who will do just about anything for the chance to get up on stage and play in front of a crowd, even if it means selling their rights away for a tiny bit of tour money.
The internet is slowly changing that, and home-based studios can rival the big guns, if you're willing to invest about $25k and know where you're going. It's quite realistically possible for an indie artist with enough talent and start-up cash to stay indie and earn a healthy living from it, but like any other small business it takes dedication and perseverance, not the most common traits in your average teenaged musician.
I, for one, would not be a "better consumer" without piracy. I would simply not consume at all. I do not like the stuff they play on the radio or on MTV. I really can't stand what they dare call hip-hop these days, this top-40 one-note tone-deaf-droning garbage with no message. I don't fit the mold because I have triple-digit IQ and damn critical hearing.
It used to be, you could go to a record store where people didn't wear stupid blue uniforms, and they could spell their own name without a tutor whispering clues. People thought those 6-disc "listening stations" were novel; those dumbasses! Any respectable record store, particularly ones that catered to DJs, would have turntables and CD decks beside the counter where you could plug your headphones and audition *ANY* album in the store. No label-approved selection, no time limit, just walk around, choose a stack of discs, and try them out. If you had no idea what to try, you could chat with the staff, who usually had near-encyclopedia knowledge of one of more genres, and they'd help you find something you'll enjoy, or perhaps steer you toward a new subgenre you might grow into. You'd bump into other music buffs and geek out about guitar solos, or they'd tell you about the awesome album they bought last week. The product was a vehicle for the culture it represented, rather than some manufactured sense of popularity.
When those record stores closed, we had to figure out alternatives. One of them is to find people online who share some of your tastes, and swap tunes until you find something you like. The knowledgeable store clerk was replaced by 10-gigabyte torrents of some random guy's favorite albums and the many pages of comments attached to them. The record industry, in its greed and impatience, has fucked itself over. Shat the bed. Screwed the pooch. Pissed in the cornflakes. They took away the one thing that made buying music FUN, and replaced it with more top-40 propaganda.
I know one person doesn't make a majority, but I would not be running a label and partering with two others if not for all the a.b.mp3 floods and multi-gigabyte "best of $genre" torrents. There is simply no way the mainstream media could have turned me onto 99% of what I listen to. Fifteen years ago I got all my music news from radio and TV, so you can imagine how awful my selection was. My only reprieve back then was the university radio stations that prided themselves on playing the weirdest niches of electronic and experimental music. Then one day, I downloaded a Slayer album. I didn't really know who they were, but the dumb thing grew on me. Now I'm a huge metalhead, I even have Slayer on vinyl, plus about 550 other artists of all genres, including a big chunk of Scandinavian metal. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe they play any Katatonia, Pagan's Mind or even Ayreon on MTV.
Had it not been for some altruistic soul on Usenet, posting his personal toplist for everyone to sample, I would never have heard of any of those acts, and if it weren't for online music stores, I would never have found copies to buy. Perhaps most importantly, I would never have attended any of those bands' concerts, and I sure as shit would not have nurtured the passion to launch a not-really-profitable business promoting indie bands beyond the local scene. Having access to that variety of music is what turned an idle hobby into an obsession.
My music spending before piracy: $10/month for one odd techno CD.
My music spending after piracy: $500/month for an artist's back catalogue, a concert ticket + travel, and a dozen open mic nights at the local bars. I'm not even counting all the hours I invest into my protégés.
The problem is the RIAA probably doesn't see much of that $500, because it's often going to indie bands, small online stores, or foreign dealers for the hard-to-find stuff. The RIAA simply does not sell a product I wish to buy, not even consume for free. I swear, if I hear that stupid J.Lo Lambada rip-off one more time !@^&#!@
I'm going to stick my neck out and state that, IMO, police should be under video surveillance at all times during duty. They are granted exclusive privileges in order to do their job, such privileges require oversight to control abuse.
Or we can let them continue down this deceitful path until the police career loses all credibility, and watch as society descends into violent chaos a-la Mad Max. No, I'm not exaggerating. Bad cops only create more and badder criminals.
The problem is they expect to do the work once, and get paid over and over for it. That's just a hop away from Wall Street's practice of making up numbers and calling them money.
Recorded music is important, but to rely on such a cheap, trivially duplicated item for your primary income is just plain foolish. Artists want to make money ? Play good concerts (longer than 80 minutes FFS!), sell merch, connect with your fans. If that all sounds like too much work, get out of the music scene and get yourself a day job like everyone else. It shouldn't matter if you're playing to a sold-out stadium or a thousand-count bar in a small town, you're getting paid to do what you love. It's either that or the old 9-to-5 with bosses and rules and no fun.
I actually believe artists should release their own torrents, in very high quality. It's the most effective promotion you could ever want, and it costs about 15 minutes of your time and less than a gigabyte of upload traffic. Focus on attracting fans first, the money will come later. Play concerts, if people like you enough, they will even travel to go see you. Heck, I've been on countless day-long bus rides to and from concerts, and if you provide a discussion forum they will arrange carpooling amongst each other. Cost to you: $20 / month for web hosting, plus a little of your time. Revenue for one small concert (tickets and merch): $800. If you want, you can stay at that level, or you can build up your fan base and work your way up to bigger venues. Look at an act like Die Antwoord, they played to a sold-out crowd of 750 in Montreal last summer. I don't know the exact terms of their contract, but even if they went with an unfavorable door split deal, they would have walked away with at least $5000, after paying the venue, promoter and rentals. They are indie as hell and very strange, but they play their gigs and rev up their fans and they reap the rewards. This was long before they ever had any music up for sale, it was all free to stream and download from their web site.
The only thing the music and film industries care about is the bottom line, same as any other business.
The problem with this is that it is a giant pyramid scheme. Top 40 music doesn't cost 50 to 100 thousand dollars to make, it costs a few hours or days of a person's time per song. The only reason that number gets inflated 100x is GOUGING! Studio engineers gouge. Equipment manufacturers gouge. Account executives gouge. Venues gouge. Payola DJs gouge. Retail distributors gouge. Everyone is making a fortune off of other people's work, everyone except the few people who actually created the product in the first place. As consumers, we are stuck paying for all this gouging.
With Hollywood it's a thousand times worse. Actors making fortunes then failing to pay tax on it, just for standing around looking overly angry on camera. Just look at the last two Harry Potter movies, which supposedly cost $250 million to make (as a pair). That represents over $15,000 per second of resultant footage, $900,000 per minute. How much actual work went into the production of 276 minutes of film ? And how much of it is just extortionate hollywood salaries for the already-rich and famous ? Some people make great movies for barely a million that rake in the big bucks, while others milk the cow dry - the James Camerons and Michael Bays of the industry.
The problem is not with the consumers. The problem is with the business model. If they expect to turn a profit, they need to be far more realistic about expenses. We have better things to do with money than funneling it directly into Scientology's coffers.
Governments need to learn to rely less on identification to get shit done. We put so much power into these tiny pieces of easily falsified information, it's a wonder this society even functions at all. Real life does not actually look like hollywood crime dramas. Mob bosses don't hide in plain sight, and everyday hoodlums don't go around getting plastic surgery to impersonate Average Joes.
Cops don't need face scanning software, they need functioning brains, apparently a rare luxury these days. You'd think if someone was flagged to have their license revoked, they might have arrested that person a few times in the past. Why didn't they revoke the license back then, in person ? It's a whole lot easier to identify a repeat DUI offender when you're staring at his dented bumper and glassy eyes. If cops no longer have the guts to confront oh-so-terrifying traffic offenders face-to-face, maybe they should choose a less stressful career, like a Wal-Mart greeter ?
I've dealt with this sort of nonsense on a few occasions. In one particular incident, they couriered a license revocation notice to the wrong address, yet somehow sent a cop to my apartment complex on the very morning the order came into effect. He parked outside the gate and waited for me to drive out, nailing me with a viciously steep fine. A few weeks later my license was reinstated, and they blamed it on a computer glitch. Well I just happen to be a computer guy, I wasn't buying it. Eight months and a lawyer later, they finally fessed up that the cop used to date some chick I was seeing, and he got his brother at the DMV to add a few unpaid fines to my file. I'll let you imagine what happened to them afterward... But the point is, this facial recognition bullshit is just another excuse for convenient "glitches" to slip through the system. I'm not saying the software is perfect, it never is, but the humans manning it are infinitely more flawed.
I believe there are many men and women willing to nearly anything for very little.
Oh, just about 308 million of them, last time they counted.
*ducks*
I'd much rather see Shaw, Telus, Rogers and Bell broken up into infrastructure and services companies.
Personally, I'd rather see the infrastructure turned into a national, public asset controlled by the government, leaving the media companies to focus on providing the actual services - the exact opposite of what our corrupt and idiotic leaders have done over the past 35 years. I think it would be a much different telecom landscape if the bullies were forced to compete nationally with every other service provider, big and small.
We've reached the point where the only wire 99.9% of all homes and offices need is internet, thanks to VoIP and IPTV. I think that's a huge enough majority to justify nationalized internet service. To hell with this triple-play nonsense, I can do all three and a bunch more over one wire. Rogers can still sell me TV content, just send it over the internet. Give me a set-top box with an ethernet port and off we go. Then all this debate over channel bandwidth can be laid to rest. Same idea with the phone, there are already countless VoIP providers that ship you a preconfigured SIP gateway - if Joe Blow's Ghetto Telco can do it, surely the big greasy Robbers can do it too!
whoosh!
I sense a puny disturbance in the Force, as if dozens of DNS operators suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
The decades-old argument in favour of BSD is that it's more secure than Linux. Yeah, great. It also doesn't support any hardware nor software from this century. I've always felt like BSD was an unloved, unjustified waste of resources. I've never bothered supporting it, and while Linux has pissed me off lately with feature bloat and poor QC, it still causes me far fewer headaches than the handful of BSD boxes I occasionally have to support.
I like Theo, he's a good shit, but I don't care for his project. I'd rather see his great skills put to use on improving Linux.
I think stories, i.e. submitters should have karma. I want to downvote this tripe so bad...
I'm no SSD engineer, but since compressed data takes up less space and the compression is done in hardware, it results in less data to be written to the NAND flash. Less work to be done = faster I/O completion. Less wear = less work for the garbage collector.
The same is true of spinning platter hard drives. If your CPU can compress data faster than the disk can write it, you can read and write that file more quickly. This is one of the reasons why the Linux kernel is usually stored gzipped, and why things like SquashFS are used on slow media such as LiveCDs and USB flash drives.
TRIM is nowhere near as big an issue as people think. GC works fine on both Indilinx and Sandforce units. Realistically, once you start talking about RAID, the modest and highly situational performance gains from TRIM become irrelevant. Even with TRIM support, the block erase still happens in the background, so there is some delay before write performance is restored. If you're in a heavy rewrite scenario, you gain nothing as the drive doesn't idle long enough to handle those deferred erases anyway. And if you're not a heavy rewriter, the GC will take care of it sooner or later. It's all so moot.
My Revodrive X2 hits 650mb/sec with ease. My new Velodrive goes up to about 1000mb/sec, despite having a gazillion apps and games installed and my careless use of my "desktop" folder as temp space. The bottleneck is the shitty Silicon Image RAID chip, not the lack of TRIM. A very interesting product on the radar is the new Angelbird Wings, another PCI-E SSD with some cool features not found in the other brands, like mounting ISOs as virtual CDs at boot time, and a built-in Linux/XFCE distro for management/partitioning. They're claiming 900mb to 1000mb/sec speeds on the 4-channel model.
Still think TRIM is the deal-breaker ?
There are some of us who enjoy variety in our selection of games. The most common games are between 10 and 15 GB each. My World of Warcraft install is 25gb and growing with every new patch. Portal 2, a relatively simple game, is 11 gigs. It adds up very quickly. Of the 120 or so games in my Steam list, I can only keep around 20 installed on my relatively large 300GB SSD. It's no coincidence that the largest games benefit the most from SSD access times and read speeds. In my case, I've had to set up a 4-way RAID-0 of conventional hard drives, to have cheap and decently fast secondary storage. I would not dream of running a PC with just the 300GB drive, at least not for a multipurpose work and entertainment PC.
There's a lot of push from manufacturers for faster SSDs, but what I'd like to see is a super inexpensive "fast enough" product. Sure, I like my hyperfast PCI-E SSD with its 900mb transfer rates, but for gaming I would probably be happy with a device 1/5th as fast, because I now spend a lot of time just past the loading screen, waiting for the other players to synchronize. A cheap SSD would still be faster than any spinning platter, and I could keep this superfast one for more time-sensitive, seek-heavy duties.
By cheap, I mean less than $0.75 per GB. Right now, something like my Velodrive costs over $5.00 per gig, while consumer-grade SSDs hover near $2.00 per gig. This makes a comfortable 500gb device absolutely unaffordable for the all but the most dedicated hardware nuts, but bring it down to the price of a decent GPU, and people will budget for it as part of their next system build. The popularity of Seagate's "hybrid" drives is proof of this, though their usefulness is sorely limited to OS and application launch patterns. Modern games overwhelm the Seagate's 4GB SSD cache, unless you RAID a few of them together.
Windows 7 may not be much of a leap from XP, but in my case it was love at first sight. I get the sense that you and I have different hardware, and different expectations from the OS.
To me, XP was a very constrictive environment. For a guy like me, being limited to 32-bit operation is a no go. I need tons of Ram to do my work, and even when XP launched I was already at the 4gb limit. I had to switch to Windows 2003 Server 64-bit just to put my hardware to full use, and it wasn't always a smooth ride. Vista was indeed a slow, buggy, aimless set of GUI widgets with no real purpose, but with Win7 they scaled it back a bit, made the whole system much snappier with less bloat, and added some very nice power-user functionality like iSCSI and improved desktop management. They added a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, and overall I can work much more efficiently than I did with XP/2003.
The biggest improvement was formal, official support for 64-bit software and excellent 32-bit compatibility, something Windows 2003 and Vista never truly achieved. I have 48gb in this machine, and it is by far the most stable platform I've ever had. It's the first Windows where I don't have to mess under the hood all the time. Sure, I play a few games, but you're right, DX10 and 11 aren't game changers, at least not from the user's perspective. They're no better or worse than on XP.
If XP works for you, I see no reason to upgrade, but for me, 7 is a godsend. It does what I expect of it without getting in my way, and is very customizable just like its predecessors. I've certainly had less trouble with Win7 than I have with OSX, and yet they market the latter as a more user-friendly system - not by my standards.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Netflix user, nor have I ever been, and I don't have cable anymore. Seedbox ftw!
I know people are up in arms over the $6.00 increase, or 60% or whatever. Yes, it's relatively steep. It's still cheaper than basic cable. It's still cheaper than two PPV movies. Where I live, that's about the cost of two good pints of beer. I'd like to think that, if someone were supplying me with all-I-can-eat streaming TV and movies, on every device in my home and on the go, well I think I could buy them a couple pints. I mean, really, $16 these days is a drop in the bucket. 50 cents a day. Hell, fake starving kids in South Fuckaduckia charge more than that for a goddamned picture.
If you liked Netflix yesterday, you still like them today. Spend the extra six bucks. I spent more than that writing this comment, because I wasted more than $6.00 worth of billable time. We really have bigger things to worry about, like all these dumb BluRay discs going to landfill in five years when Sony decides to invent the next pointless proprietary format.
If this were a goddamned bank charging higher fees, I'd be supplying the soapboxes and ammo, but this is Netflix. Come on guys, they're actually doing a pretty decent job of taking our entertainment into the internet age, something the content providers would never have done on their own.
As a peddler of giant file servers, I tend to agree. I love nothing more than a client with huge storage requirements and a crisp, freshly signed cheque :)
But yeah, if the problem were storage, that's an easy fix. But changing the minds of stubborn copyright holders, that's a suicide mission.