I would like to see a retrospective history of the previous outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. What has that meant for those displaced workers, the company doing the outsourcing, and the company's customers.
Also, would be interesting to investigate to see if there was any "outsourcing" done from England to the Americas 300-400 years ago.
From the letter posted "Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
This is an overstatement, but a commercial company will know exactly who was working on which projects at what time. They have the programmers' addresses, phone numbers, ssn#, resume, salary history, etc. In this way the programmers are "secured". They know where they live and lots more personal info about them.
Do free software developers submit this kind of personal tracking information for verification? In this way free software is less "secure".
Save ALL email in 1 folder and then search through it to find what you need. Organizing ahead of time is a BIG time waster. Computers were made to search anyway...
I did an indie release in 2000 of 100 CD's that cost me $300 to have someone print & dupe. I did the artwork myself. Turned out nice & was happily accepted at local CD stores.
What's the minimum # of cd's CDBaby requires you to stock with them?
I recently attended the NAB conference and sat in on a lot of presentations. The industry is building the tools to deliver MPEG-4 and/or WMF9 through digital cable/satellite. The talks about DRM seemed to balance the need of the producers to make money off what they make and the need of the consumer to do what they want with the content (outside of sharing the content with one million of their closest friends). The big thing with DRM was to create tools that would allow for a wide range of potential usage.
There seemed to be an assumption that within the next 5 years the PVR will be ubiquitous. I also observed a large amount of set-top-boxes on display from a number of manufacturers - many of these had DVD burners built in with the PVR and digital TV tuner. There was also some concern expressed about delivering content in a format that consumers could re-purpose for any devices (home or moble) that they want to view their content on.
Oh yeah, and a lot of talk about how the broadcast industry would be able to change their business models in order to take advantage & make money off all this.
The over-sized series from Ziff-Davis with the How PC's Work, How Macs Work, etc would be ideal for public libraries. These books can help bridge the gap between a know nothing and a know it all.
I was with you up until step 6. Mostly independent artists are lucky if they get their stuff played at 3AM on the "local music show" on the radio. The radio stations are in with the major record companies.
What I've heard from most small labels is that they don't like Napster. Napster really has the potential to hit their sales the hardest. Also, most successful small labels have been continually bought out by larger labels...
Actually, if you have an agreement with Napster to help distribute your music, I don't think the court order applies to you. If you hold the copyright to music you want to be available via Napster, make sure to email them so you don't get shut off.
Two words: collaborative filtering. You find a song you like or don't like, click somewhere to tell mp3.com your opinion. Soon, you can filter down to stuff that's enjoyed by people who share your love of Power Pop, your hatred of Smooth Jazz, etc.
Hey, the record companies are already feeding the public what they want to hear. Otherwise why do they keep selling more and more cd's? Collaborative filtering is already in place in today's music model.
Go ahead and trade mp3's with your friends
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Hey, if you want to trade mp3's with a few of your friends that's one thing. Go ahead and set up your own FTP server and file sharing and go to town. Allowing *anyone* on the internet to get the files in a very easy manner is where the RIAA and musicians get upset.
If you want to own something, make it yourself. Start small and work your way up. Maybe you'll even be able to profit from selling the something you made someday!
Even the internet was made by big government and big companies. Who's twisting your arm to use it? There are alternatives.
I was playing in a band three years ago. We decided, "Screw the record labels, let's record and release a CD on our own!" We had spent 2 years developing original songs at that point. We spent another 6 months rehearsing and fine-tuning the songs we decided to record.
We had a budget of $6000 to do the actual recording and CD duplication. $4000 of that was spent on a too-short 3-week period in the recording studio (they cut us a BIG break on rates!) and the other $2000 got us 1000 CD's with artwork and some x-tra promotional materials (about 100 t-shirts).
During this time we were all working regular jobs to pay the bills and pay the loan payment on the 6 grand we borrowed to do the CD. We also gigged as often as we could manage to get gigs - none of which payed enough to contribute to our financial situation.
We wanted to price the CD's at about $10 each so that meant we had to get them to the record stores (all on consignment - they don't pay you unless the product sells) at about $6 to $7. Because we didn't have a big distributor, we had to drive around to the independent record stores to stock our own product. We sent out the t-shirts with CD's to local radio stations, newspapers, music critics, and booking agencies - about 100 promo packages in all - all at our own expense. I created a web site for the band and had artist friends contribute so that we would have a page with artwork, lyrics, and an audio clip for each song.
What happened? We got a few plays on local radio stations, two great reviews in the local media, sold 150 CD's, and had to pay a $6000 loan. A definite disappointment! We've resigned ourselves to the fact that we'll probably never make any money from all of our work, so this year I posted everything on mp3.com (I haven't seen any money from them, either - but that's another story...). Music is very subjective but you can go to www.mp3.com/souldoubt if you want to judge if the band was any good or not.
I'm no fan of record labels. Part of their function is to narrow down your choices for listening entertainment. There are hundreds of thousands of musical acts out there creating music. Most of them will tell you stories similar to mine,if not more depressing.
You need to realize that in order for you to listen to your mp3's, someone needs to create music. And, unfortunately, just making the music isn't enough.
The music needs to be brought to your attention so that you can download it and listen to it. Surprisingly, most people *need* someone to tell them what to listen to! Your friend maybe tells you that "Band X" is a really rockin' band. They found out about Band X from their cousin in Seattle. The cousin in Seattle heard the band's song on the radio because some RECORD COMPANY GUY managed to convince the stations Program Manager that Band X is the shit!
Very few people will take it upon themselves to discover new music. Do you randomly browse mp3.com or Napster and just download stuff? I think an increasing number of people are more inclined to do exactly this because of mp3's. But I'll also bet that more commonly, people are looking for a specific song that they heard about from a friend or heard on the radio. (BTW: People are even less inclined to go to a concert of a band they've never heard of. This is another reason you depend on big record companies. "Hey! Band X is playing at the Palimino Club tonight! My cousin said they rock!")
There are too many artists making music for most people to really make listening decisions on their own. If you were presented with a list of songs by bands that weren't on major labels (all of which you'd never heard of), where would you start listening? And if you did pick something and liked it, what would you say when your friend hears it and tells you it sucks? Now your buddy thinks you're a looser because you listen to sucky music! I have yet to see an artist become well known because they released their stuff as mp3's on the net and shunned major record labels. (I'd love it if someone proved me wrong on this one, believe it!)
So finally a big fuck off to all of you consumers out there that are used to getting all your music free and can't get off your lazy ass and create something to contribute to society! The next time you feel like listening to some music, pick up a fucking instrument and MAKE some! Record the shit and release it on the net so I can hear it!
>"With all these pirates stealing our music, artists no longer have incentive to produce!"
Actually, artists will produce art whether or not there is a "market" for it. That's why the music companies have always gotten away with giving the shaft to new artists. The incentive to spend thousands of dollars in the studio, thousands more to duplicate media, and even more thousands on marketing to sell the media will be gone for the record company. The act of creating is the main incentive for the artist. Otherwise it's just another fucking job.
One of the things that is seen as a minus for platforms like Win98 and MacOS is actually a plus for doing music (especially with video). You can easily (well, on MacOS anyway) configure the system so that the largest portion of resources is available to the music/video program. Here is an example of the kind of problem that companies like Steinberg, Digidesign, Emagic, etc have solved on Win98 and MacOS systems.
Imagine that you are trying to score music to a video clip. You'll want to be able to play along in real-time and have what you recorded happen exactly when you played it (digital audio and/or midi). You'll want to play along with existing tracks and make sure everything syncs up during and after the recording. If you've got a lot of multi-tasking going on, your music program may not get the resources it needs to reproduce a portion of the music without skipping or dropping out. Your video track needs to play without dropping frames while you're playing back 24 or more tracks of audio. And no matter how much processing you may be trying to do to individual tracks, sub-mixes of tracks, or the whole mix, *everything* has to sync up with the video timecode (including the video) on playback!
Can Linux be configured to allocate system resources and not allow background tasks to interfere when you are composing or mixing? For instance, getting a large email attachment in the background could choke your system because of network and disk accesses just when you are in the middle of recording that "perfect take". Then that performance is gone forever because of unreliability of the recording system. In a professional music studio with clients paying hundreds of dollars an hour this is unacceptable. At a personal studio level, it's still a pain in the ass. Is there a resource allocation solution in Linux that is easy to implement?
Is the Linux architecture capable of such heavy, all-important real-time tasking?
Actually, I've heard street prices for a dual-channel Ultra160 card will be around $525.
Re:Clearly you guys are missing the point
on
Firewire Harddrives
·
· Score: 1
Whoah! If these are for notebooks, why doesn't VST's web page say it supports the Sony VAIO series? I think all of those already have 1394 ports. I'm sure if Apple ever does release a new notebook that it will have a 1394 port, but the Sonys have been around already for several months. Unless you can boot a G3 from these drives, they seem a little pricy for Apple's desktop Macs. Also, I was hoping to see faster 1394 storage devices from the get go.
If VST worked on getting the drives to work with the VAIO's it might push others to commit to more 1394 devices.
A closer look at the specs for these drives show them with a max transfer rate of 5.5 mb/sec. That's not much faster than say a SCSI I narrow hard drive!
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to see a retrospective history of the previous outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. What has that meant for those displaced workers, the company doing the outsourcing, and the company's customers.
Also, would be interesting to investigate to see if there was any "outsourcing" done from England to the Americas 300-400 years ago.
From the letter posted "Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software. This process is designed to monitor the security and ownership of intellectual property rights associated with the code."
This is an overstatement, but a commercial company will know exactly who was working on which projects at what time. They have the programmers' addresses, phone numbers, ssn#, resume, salary history, etc. In this way the programmers are "secured". They know where they live and lots more personal info about them.
Do free software developers submit this kind of personal tracking information for verification? In this way free software is less "secure".
Save ALL email in 1 folder and then search through it to find what you need. Organizing ahead of time is a BIG time waster. Computers were made to search anyway...
I did an indie release in 2000 of 100 CD's that cost me $300 to have someone print & dupe. I did the artwork myself. Turned out nice & was happily accepted at local CD stores.
What's the minimum # of cd's CDBaby requires you to stock with them?
I recently attended the NAB conference and sat in on a lot of presentations. The industry is building the tools to deliver MPEG-4 and/or WMF9 through digital cable/satellite. The talks about DRM seemed to balance the need of the producers to make money off what they make and the need of the consumer to do what they want with the content (outside of sharing the content with one million of their closest friends). The big thing with DRM was to create tools that would allow for a wide range of potential usage.
There seemed to be an assumption that within the next 5 years the PVR will be ubiquitous. I also observed a large amount of set-top-boxes on display from a number of manufacturers - many of these had DVD burners built in with the PVR and digital TV tuner. There was also some concern expressed about delivering content in a format that consumers could re-purpose for any devices (home or moble) that they want to view their content on.
Oh yeah, and a lot of talk about how the broadcast industry would be able to change their business models in order to take advantage & make money off all this.
The over-sized series from Ziff-Davis with the How PC's Work, How Macs Work, etc would be ideal for public libraries. These books can help bridge the gap between a know nothing and a know it all.
I was with you up until step 6. Mostly independent artists are lucky if they get their stuff played at 3AM on the "local music show" on the radio. The radio stations are in with the major record companies.
EOM
What I've heard from most small labels is that they don't like Napster. Napster really has the potential to hit their sales the hardest. Also, most successful small labels have been continually bought out by larger labels...
Actually, if you have an agreement with Napster to help distribute your music, I don't think the court order applies to you. If you hold the copyright to music you want to be available via Napster, make sure to email them so you don't get shut off.
Two words: collaborative filtering. You find a song you like or don't like, click somewhere to tell mp3.com your opinion. Soon, you can filter down to stuff that's enjoyed by people who share your love of Power Pop, your hatred of Smooth Jazz, etc.
Hey, the record companies are already feeding the public what they want to hear. Otherwise why do they keep selling more and more cd's? Collaborative filtering is already in place in today's music model.
Hey, if you want to trade mp3's with a few of your friends that's one thing. Go ahead and set up your own FTP server and file sharing and go to town. Allowing *anyone* on the internet to get the files in a very easy manner is where the RIAA and musicians get upset.
If you want to own something, make it yourself. Start small and work your way up. Maybe you'll even be able to profit from selling the something you made someday!
Even the internet was made by big government and big companies. Who's twisting your arm to use it? There are alternatives.
I was playing in a band three years ago. We decided, "Screw the record labels, let's record and release a CD on our own!" We had spent 2 years developing original songs at that point. We spent another 6 months rehearsing and fine-tuning the songs we decided to record.
We had a budget of $6000 to do the actual recording and CD duplication. $4000 of that was spent on a too-short 3-week period in the recording studio (they cut us a BIG break on rates!) and the other $2000 got us 1000 CD's with artwork and some x-tra promotional materials (about 100 t-shirts).
During this time we were all working regular jobs to pay the bills and pay the loan payment on the 6 grand we borrowed to do the CD. We also gigged as often as we could manage to get gigs - none of which payed enough to contribute to our financial situation.
We wanted to price the CD's at about $10 each so that meant we had to get them to the record stores (all on consignment - they don't pay you unless the product sells) at about $6 to $7. Because we didn't have a big distributor, we had to drive around to the independent record stores to stock our own product. We sent out the t-shirts with CD's to local radio stations, newspapers, music critics, and booking agencies - about 100 promo packages in all - all at our own expense. I created a web site for the band and had artist friends contribute so that we would have a page with artwork, lyrics, and an audio clip for each song.
What happened? We got a few plays on local radio stations, two great reviews in the local media, sold 150 CD's, and had to pay a $6000 loan. A definite disappointment! We've resigned ourselves to the fact that we'll probably never make any money from all of our work, so this year I posted everything on mp3.com (I haven't seen any money from them, either - but that's another story...). Music is very subjective but you can go to www.mp3.com/souldoubt if you want to judge if the band was any good or not.
I'm no fan of record labels. Part of their function is to narrow down your choices for listening entertainment. There are hundreds of thousands of musical acts out there creating music. Most of them will tell you stories similar to mine,if not more depressing.
You need to realize that in order for you to listen to your mp3's, someone needs to create music. And, unfortunately, just making the music isn't enough.
The music needs to be brought to your attention so that you can download it and listen to it. Surprisingly, most people *need* someone to tell them what to listen to! Your friend maybe tells you that "Band X" is a really rockin' band. They found out about Band X from their cousin in Seattle. The cousin in Seattle heard the band's song on the radio because some RECORD COMPANY GUY managed to convince the stations Program Manager that Band X is the shit!
Very few people will take it upon themselves to discover new music. Do you randomly browse mp3.com or Napster and just download stuff? I think an increasing number of people are more inclined to do exactly this because of mp3's. But I'll also bet that more commonly, people are looking for a specific song that they heard about from a friend or heard on the radio. (BTW: People are even less inclined to go to a concert of a band they've never heard of. This is another reason you depend on big record companies. "Hey! Band X is playing at the Palimino Club tonight! My cousin said they rock!")
There are too many artists making music for most people to really make listening decisions on their own. If you were presented with a list of songs by bands that weren't on major labels (all of which you'd never heard of), where would you start listening? And if you did pick something and liked it, what would you say when your friend hears it and tells you it sucks? Now your buddy thinks you're a looser because you listen to sucky music! I have yet to see an artist become well known because they released their stuff as mp3's on the net and shunned major record labels. (I'd love it if someone proved me wrong on this one, believe it!)
So finally a big fuck off to all of you consumers out there that are used to getting all your music free and can't get off your lazy ass and create something to contribute to society! The next time you feel like listening to some music, pick up a fucking instrument and MAKE some! Record the shit and release it on the net so I can hear it!
Peace,
Ibodog
My guess is that the original company is having a hard time collecting the full fee they negotiated from your employer.
>"With all these pirates stealing our music, artists no longer have incentive to produce!"
Actually, artists will produce art whether or not there is a "market" for it. That's why the music companies have always gotten away with giving the shaft to new artists. The incentive to spend thousands of dollars in the studio, thousands more to duplicate media, and even more thousands on marketing to sell the media will be gone for the record company. The act of creating is the main incentive for the artist. Otherwise it's just another fucking job.
-Joel
One of the things that is seen as a minus for platforms like Win98 and MacOS is actually a plus for doing music (especially with video). You can easily (well, on MacOS anyway) configure the system so that the largest portion of resources is available to the music/video program. Here is an example of the kind of problem that companies like Steinberg, Digidesign, Emagic, etc have solved on Win98 and MacOS systems.
Imagine that you are trying to score music to a video clip. You'll want to be able to play along in real-time and have what you recorded happen exactly when you played it (digital audio and/or midi). You'll want to play along with existing tracks and make sure everything syncs up during and after the recording. If you've got a lot of multi-tasking going on, your music program may not get the resources it needs to reproduce a portion of the music without skipping or dropping out. Your video track needs to play without dropping frames while you're playing back 24 or more tracks of audio. And no matter how much processing you may be trying to do to individual tracks, sub-mixes of tracks, or the whole mix, *everything* has to sync up with the video timecode (including the video) on playback!
Can Linux be configured to allocate system resources and not allow background tasks to interfere when you are composing or mixing? For instance, getting a large email attachment in the background could choke your system because of network and disk accesses just when you are in the middle of recording that "perfect take". Then that performance is gone forever because of unreliability of the recording system. In a professional music studio with clients paying hundreds of dollars an hour this is unacceptable. At a personal studio level, it's still a pain in the ass. Is there a resource allocation solution in Linux that is easy to implement?
Is the Linux architecture capable of such heavy, all-important real-time tasking?
-ibo
Actually, I've heard street prices for a dual-channel Ultra160 card will be around $525.
Whoah! If these are for notebooks, why doesn't VST's web page say it supports the Sony VAIO series? I think all of those already have 1394 ports. I'm sure if Apple ever does release a new notebook that it will have a 1394 port, but the Sonys have been around already for several months. Unless you can boot a G3 from these drives, they seem a little pricy for Apple's desktop Macs. Also, I was hoping to see faster 1394 storage devices from the get go.
If VST worked on getting the drives to work with the VAIO's it might push others to commit to more 1394 devices.
A closer look at the specs for these drives show them with a max transfer rate of 5.5 mb/sec. That's not much faster than say a SCSI I narrow hard drive!