I'm finding it hard to understand the cost factor here. We have an oven with an electric heating element. Say $200-$300 at any appliance store. Then there is a couple of high-current MOSFET controllers that use a voltage to control the amount of current that goes to the oven's heating elements. Three or four at $20 each for high-quality devices. Then there is a modem to connect to the Internet Service provider through the home dial-up. Say $50. And a microcontroller interface board to run and keep track of everything. Another $50. Some custom programming for the prototype and a few debugging hours. Let's give that $100. Don't quibble about the value of your software worth and the price of programming in general. This is amortized over the first 100 units or so. $100 for programming per unit is generous for this model.
So we have an internet-enabled 'smart oven' for $600 or so. So where does this $8500 price tag come from?
What this in Dilbert recently? 'Accidentally' leaving a coworker's resume in the copy machine so that the boss can find it and assume that the person was looking for another job.
This is a fantastic development. It is exactly the kind of thing that 64-bit processors were made for. It is the 'killer ap', the best since MP3 and CD-rippers. If it actually works, the high-tech equivalent of 'in-shaa Allah'.
We should encourage IBM to allow enough of the technology to 'escape' in order to enable other languages to be translated from speech into English. There should be some kind of open review of the translation involved, also. This can help prevent subtle errors in translation that will arise. Hopefully we can catch these before they get widespread.
Perhaps we should also remember the ancient parable of the Tower of Babel. This is a story from about 3000 years ago where a united monolingual people tried to pool all of their resources and build a tower to reach God. God, not wishing to have so many freeloaders and boors hanging around eating his food, drinking his liquor, dipping into his stash, and impregnating his angels, cast an environmental change over all the people that split them into many, many groups that spoke mutually incomprehensible languages. Perhaps this is an ancient folk explanation of how different languages came to be; perhaps it is a veiled warning about the consequences that can arise from having everyone speaking the same language.
In any event, kudos to IBM. Keep up the good work.
Electronic Hardware Technicians are constantly expected to be learning new things. The industry simply moves very fast. Techs are expected to know 'everything'. And of course it does help to know a little about everything.
Many of the hardware techs are considered rather expendable. They are often the first fired and last hired. The older that you are, the more that this is so.
Unemployed technicians often can only get 'hired' through a temp agency into a company. They encounter a wide range of very-detailed electonic environments. And a wide range of support systems like parts and production databases (which often is custom written by and for the company). One may spend three months doing wireless and then spend the next six months reading the signals from human-body transducers. Then three months laying out multi-layer PCBs. Then six months testing and calibrating nephelometers. All without getting hired anywhere or making more than $13/hr. Sucks, but that's life in the new action outsource economy.
In these situations, training becomes your responsibility. Fortunately, now the web provides a way to get very close to all that you will need to know at a level that you need to comprehend and absorb it. It was much more difficult ten years ago before this resource became available. Even finding datasheets for the ICs on the circuit boards that you were hired to maintain and repair could be extraordinarily difficult. Now it is not so bad to get precise and focused information.
Basically if you work for a company, then the company should and most likely will train you. But it is getting harder each passing year to become an actual employee in a company.
I get offers from credit card companies that have a pre-printed check for $10 with my name already on it.
Deep in tiny print on the back of the offer letter there is a notice that if I cash the check, $89.95 will be charged to my credit card for 'account insurance'.
Credit card companies are ALL assholes. Be sure to pay off the outstanding balance without fail when the first bill for it comes (usually once a month) lest you regret ever associating with these creatures.
While this was a truly impressive stunt, er...mission...it was completely unnecessary. Its scientific results don't matter to anyone, nor do they change or improve the lives of anyone.
When you have a kid with an earache and you can't get medical insurance because your job only pays $11 an hour and your local community health clinic shut down because the federal funds went to the trillion dollar insane war or to reduce the taxes of the super rich, then you will have an appreciation of how stupid, insulting, and unnecessary it is to spend money on pathetic stunts such as this.
Ecoute bien, mes amis. As Slashdotters we rarely are in contact with the people such as I described above. But that does not excuse us from viewing these 'missions' through their viewpoint. We must judge these space and so-called research projects from the perspective of the total and effective benefit to our society, not from the view of a few thousand astro scientists and rocket engineers (and their greedy employers looking for huge cost-plus defense contracts).
So, yes, celibrate the StarDust mission. Then grow up and join the human race. Learn to see all these stunt projects with a long-term humanistic sense of understanding. If this capsule brought back a cure for cancer, malaria, or AIDS, then it could be celibrated by everyone. But, in reality, there nothing in it but a few milligrams of dust .
The DVD revolution has quite a ways still to go. The great advantage of DVDs is their small lightweight size. The great disadvantage to the medium is the idiot film studios and nitwit film distributors who have insisted on such stupid things as region coding.
The whole purpose of the DVD is not just to get Hollywood product into the homes of the unwashed masses. VHS did that quite well. DVD's full potential is reached when all the movies that are uneconomical to distrubute the old way get into people's homes. I'm talking about all the independent movies shown at Sundance and the regional film festivals. And of course all the hundreds of quality films made each year in other countries that never reach the USA because it is too expensive to strike prints or dub VHS cassettes for limited audiences.
The films at Sundance rarely get seen outside of the festival or maybe one weekend at an 'art theatre' in a major metro area. And even then the admission charge is at a premium. DVD (and Netflix, should they ever get their act together) is the way to inexpensively distribute and display 'small' films to large audiences in a manner that is impossible with the photographic-film-stock in-a-can or bulky, hard-to-manufacture VHS formats. There are millions of people who would pay a dollar to watch a high-quality well-made romance from France or Italy (with subtitles of course) on DVD, but won't spend $10 to see the same film in a theater. Until DVD there has been no way to get this audience and these films together.
It still doesn't happen because Netflix doesn't seem to be aware of this huge potential audience (and has a difficult enough time posting Hollywood product), and because European filmmakers and distributors are dim-bulbs about the vast potential audience for their works that exists outside of the traditional movie theater. Le DVD? C'est OK, mais il n'est pas le cinema! Je tourne le film pour le cinema, le vrai cinema, et seul pour le cinema! Vive le cinema! With a dumb-ass attitude like that it's no wonder that le director's latest masterpiece will only get seen by a few hundred people in Paris. Which is a shame.
DVD distribution is probably the only way that Bollywood productions from Mumbai will ever become known in the USA in a big way. What's causing them to delay DVD distribution of all these films? Just business inertia and prejudice against being thought of as a director who goes 'direct to DVD'.
It's the cinema that's dying, not DVD. The numbers prove this.
I also have been a King Crimson fan since 1969. Mr. Fripp has developed many interesting guitar sounds and styles over the course of his career.
I doubt that this innovation could be compensated through the music industry. Awarding a Microsoft grant for adding unique sound textures to the new OS is an excellent idea. It gives exposure to Mr. Fripp's work. It helps make up for all the years of touring around Northern Europe in a small van, playing for small but appreciative audiences.
My favorite Fripp sounds are the aforementioned 'Exposure' from 1979, the brilliant screaming twisted lead guitar on David Bowie's 'Fashion' from 1980, King Crimson's 'Frame By Frame' (1981), and 'Darshan' (1990's) with David Sylvain. All available from the Kazaa, the world's music library.
Thank you for the link to the Swedish-English dictionary. It is a useful tool for people who are learning Swedish or English.
I had hoped to find a program where I could simply cut-and-paste a block of Swedish text and get a credible English translation. The ideal is not to ever have to learn any foreign language at all and let the computer do the translating.
There are so many languages in the world and it is impossible to learn very many. Automatic language translator programs would be very helpful in this age of free global communication.
I'm toying with the idea of a water raft inflated with hydrogen instead of air. This would be a rectanglar -boat style raft that would float in the air, because of the hydrogen. It would obviously carry only a very small payload. The hydrogen would be used to power the small engines that positioned the craft (working with prevailing winds) along with providing lighter-than-air lifting. I would envision the craft to be guided by GPS and be unmanned.
It might be an interesting way to transport 'sensitive materials' across borders, such as Bibles into a communist country. After the craft ran low on hydrogen, it would float down to land and then emit a short radio burst giving its GPS location (encrypted of course) so that the sensitive materials could be retrieved by the missionaries.
There is a lot of resistance to considering the use of hydrogen for lifting due to the 1938 Hindenburg airship disaster in New Jersey. However recent research has shown that that (1st 'that' is a conjuction, 2nd is a pronoun, grammer Nazis) inferno was due to the highly inflamable paint used on the airship's skin instead of the hydrogen itself. The H2 burned with the skin, but it was not the primary reason for the rapid spread of the fire across the surface of the craft. Using hydrogen for lift and fuel should be reconsidered for these type of craft.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Besides that I'm crazy, that is.
Seriously. I'm a registered USA voter. I live in Oregon and we are the only state in the USA to use mail-in voting ballots.
If you let me use your vote for Swedish parlimentary elections so that I can use your vote to for the 'pirate' party, then I will let you use my write-in vote in the next USA presidential election. I'll sign and send you the ballot. You mail it back to my local voting office from where you live (mail cost about 0.7 Euro or 3-4 Kroner if Sweden doesn't use Euros).
Now you can vote for the US president and I can vote for the pirates.
1) Can I join in the USA? Can I become a Swede for the day that you'all vote?
2) Can anyone recommend a good (meaning one that works and is free as in beer) Swedish-English-Swedish dictionary/translation program? There must be one somewhere. I want to read this website and its posts.
Yeah, they were just selling an xbox package of over 3000 dollars worth of games for 500 dollars...
Actually the value of the games that they were selling was far less than $3000. Items are worth what people will pay for them; no more, no less. The value of the included games was the cost of the entire package, minus the cost of the hardware sold, the cost of the labor involved, and the cost of the time for the people putting the collection of games together.
Were the game store owners 'stealing' from the game developers. No. No Way. The game developers should have made arrangements with the game sellers to have some form of compensation that would be a small percentage of the price that the game store received for selling the games.
Instead the game developers made a deal with the game distributors instead. Easier for them. But they lost out from all the residual revenue that they would have received when the games were repackaged for easy sale (when they were copied onto the hard disk with hundreds of other games).
A game that retails for $69.95 is only worth that price for a very short time and under very specific circumstances. Outside those circumstances (like its being brand new and/or state-of-the-art in its play), a game is worth far less than the price that game distributors believe that it should be selling for.
All this nonsense about 'piracy' of so-called 'intellectual property' is nothing more than the breakdown of the marketplace to bring sellers and buyers together to exchange goods for mutual benefit at a price that each party agrees on. If $500 - $700 for an XBOX with a mod chip and a 'stash' of games is the price that many buyers are willing to pay, then that's the price that's fair and reasonable. The game developers and distribution companies are just going to have to get used to working in the actual marketplace.
These stupid laws about copyright, DMCA, and 'intellectual property' are destroying the market for the product and they aren't doing anyone any good in the long run. If the developers think that they should get more money for writing software that they receive from the sale of a hard disk with their code and hundreds of other game developer's code, then get the fuck out of the game development business!. Write code for someone who will pay your more for your services.
Jeez, this isn't all that hard to figure out. Please don't raise moral, ethical, and legal arguments over what is just a pricing issue between people who never learned to haggle in a free marketplace.
Sooner or later, the Americans in Iraq will do what all the other people who have invaded Iraq over the past three thousand years have done. Which is, go native.
20 million people live in Iraq all year round all their lives. Do what they do to deal with the heat. Instead of $5000 air conditioned suits, consider wearing a shawez kameez or other clothing that has been developed by the locals over a thousand years to deal with the climate. Since the Americans are going to be there for a long time, they may as well start making an effort to blend in.
Iraq has been invaded countless times in its history. After a few years the invaders either move on to someplace with better weather or they start the long process of becoming just another minority in Iraq. The Americans are really any different. Eventually the individual solders will drift out of the command structure and find that they have to make a seperate peace with the local people. Dressing like them is a good start.
The record industry, those companies that have for the past hundred years made big bucks selling audio recordings on lightweight disks, are on auto-pilot search-and-destroy mode. They have programmed their legal weapons to seek out and burn anything that looks, sounds, or feels like new audio technology. This is like The Terminator where self-programmed robots go out to hunt and destroy anything that is human.
The record industry has set up their legal departments to automaticly hunt and destroy anything on the web that has anything remotely to do with music and pop culture. Hell, they don't own or control or make money off the web, so why not turn it into a free-fire zone. They have nothing to lose.
Even if they occasionally incure some collatoral damage or wipe out one of their own experiments by setting their lawyers into 'kill 'em all, let the market sort them out' mode, so what? At worse, all they have to do is write a meaningless letter of apology to an obscure magazine that no one will ever read anyway. Then it's another round of campaign contributions to purchased politicians to pass laws to put song file downloaders into jail. Let the poor stupid college students try to prove that the song that they downloaded was not an RIAA band. Hard to do that when you're in prison. Fuck 'em.
Don't be surprised to see Sony (the USA's largest music company) buy Wackenhut (the USA's largest corporate prison company) in the not too distant future. Sony can then get rich off selling music and from putting people like you in corporate prisons for listening to it.
Hell, maybe AOL-Warner can buy Corrections Corporation of America. That way they can actually put an RIAA MP3 file on your PC (copy it there as part of the AOL install process), and then leave it to you to prove that you didn't download it yourself. Hard to do when you're in AOL corporate prison.
200 years ago white people turned black people into slaves to make money off them. The black people created the blues music to excape (even if only on a cultural level) their enslavement. 100 years later white people start listening to the blues music created by the slaves. 50 years later the record companies steal the blues music from the black people. 50 years later (the present time) the record companies use the fact that white people are listening to the music that the record companies stole from the black people to turn the young white people into slaves by putting them in prison for listening to the blues music created by the black people to lessen the burden of slavery. And it never occurs to the white people or the black people that they wouldn't continue to be sold into slavery if they would just kill off all the record companies and slavetraders (corporate prison managers and stockholders). Instead they just piss their freedoms away endlessly bickering over horseshit ideas like 'intellectual property' and 'copyright'. Only in America.
But it's not back as a 'full' or 'real' computer. It's back as a microcontroller. In either its Atmel AVR or Microchip PIC format.
What has brought it back is the integration of all the minimum memory resources and I/O into the chip itself. That, and the reduction of cost for the 8-bit 'system' from nearly a thousand dollars twenty years ago to about ten dollars today (for CPU, minimal LCD display, and floppy storage.)
Gates-style BASIC is rarely used on new AVRs and PICs, but it is available for the PIC in the BASIC Stamp device.
Eight Bitters are not used as stand-alone home computers but as controllers that intelligently interact and manipulate other machines and sensors. But the -feeling- of raw control; and the wonder of being able to create or reconfigure the operation of a machine through typing instuctions that determine what the machine will do; this feeling remains the same as it was twenty years ago. It's just much cheaper now.
It's also much easier. Both Atmel and Microchip freely distribute high quality development tools for their devices on the web for Windows PCs. And the memory itself is far more easier to use. No more expensive ultra-violet light EPROM erasers. The program is stored in internal Flash that can be rewritten tens of thousands of times. No more $10000 in-circuit-emulators to figure out what the chip is doing when it stops working. With modern JTAG interfaces, every chip has an ICE built in. Even the most complex program can be debugged with a $39 (or less home brew) JTAG-ICE and the factory-supplied free development system programs.
My favorites are the Tiny AVRs. These are eight pin DIP chips that sell for about $1 each. They program through the PC parallel port. They have multi-channel 10-bit Analog-to-Digital convertors built in. (Try finding a 10-bit dedicated ADC chip for $1!) They run at 20 MIPS (about 20 times faster than the Commodore 64) with internal system clock generators, no crystals needed, and the speed can be fine tuned. And they have a flexible, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn instruction set.
There are even rock-bottom level Tiny AVRs (like the Tiny11) that sell for forty cents each. I use one to play a MIDI tone module with a cheap surplus PS2 PC keyboard. It reads the serial logic signals sent out from each keypress and release and transforms them into MIDI Note On/Off messages. Not bad from a 40 cent CPU.
And a 20MIPS CPU for $1 can replace a whole board of TTL chips. Sure so can a GAL or PLD for the same price. But the AVR can switch into power-down mode when not being used and burn only microAmps of current. It uses only about 10 milliAmps at full 20MIPS speed and a third of that when running at, yes, 1.8 volts! Try that with a GAL, good luck Chuck!
Plus there are lots of people on the specialized web sites from whom to get advice when you get completely stuck on something that makes no sense. Another thing that wasn't around for Eight bitters twenty years ago.
The 8-bit world is alive and dazzling well. It's just very quiet and no longer gets any media coverage as being the 'future' in the way that it was covered by the media in the Commodore and Atari years. It's still rockin'.
I did a fair amount of musical instrument buy-and-sell on eBay until recently. I bought about $1500 worth of guitar stompboxes and synthesizer tone modules, in about 120 buys and 100 sales.
I found that with good write-ups (I always used long precise descriptions) I could sell an item for about 20% more on average than I paid for it on eBay. With me paying the shipping cost, I came out about even financially after about 200 sales and retained a collection of 30 inexpensive but good-sounding guitar stompboxes, and four older MIDI synth tone modules.
I look at eBay as an inexpensive instrument rental service. Because generally with prudence one can resell an instrument for the same price as one purchased it. Therefore the only cost of using the instrument between your purchase and the instrument's resale is the cost of having it shipped from the previous owner.
I am not an entrepeneur, but I don't see how one can make money on eBay in the musical instrument field unless one is doing a high volume business on high-value/high-price instruments. And be an expert in the specialized instrument field. And even then, the price of paying for shipping and the eBay and the PayPal fees would probably equal the cost of renting a small retail space in a major metro area and having a website.
If you have been and continue to be successful in the musical instrument field on eBay, my congratulations.
Say, you wouldn't need an extra plastic $8 fuzz-box? Hey, just kidding...
While there are very few people who would argue that a file trader with 5000+ songs freely available on Kazaa has a lawsuit coming to him
I would definitely argue this. If a song has been intoduced into the public environment by playing it on the public airways to millions of people, then it becomes de facto public property. Putting people in prison for making a copy of music that gets played on public airways thousands of times is nothing by kidnapping and slavery.
most people think that suing a grandma who accidentally downloads a modern rendition of Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade is absolutely nuts.
By any civilized sense of public domain, any song that your grandma swooned to in her romantic years is public domain. You, your grandma, or anyone has a right to download it, accidentally or not. And how does one actually 'accidentally' download something? Claiming to own a 60 year old recording is absurd; using violence and intimidation against 80 year-olds who listen to 60-year-old records is criminal. This is what should be punished.
The difference between Arabs and Americans is not that one side is savage and the other benign, it's that one side has 10000 car bombs and the other side has 10000 hydrogen bombs.
And one side is playing a rather dangerous game of seeing how many car bombs that they can toss at the other side before they retaliate in a more drastic way than drafting 45 year olds and giving away fat bogus defense contracts.
Perhaps I am being too obscure. How's this for clarity: the Americans have enough hydrogen bombs and chemical weapons to decide one morning to kill every Arab on Earth, spend the morning planning it, the afternoon doing it, and still have plenty of time left to smoke some weed and watch cartoons before dinner.
Two hundred years ago, native American tribes ruled most of North America. The Europeans came, saw, conquered. The natives fought back with terrorism. The Americans killed almost all of them and put the rest in reservations.
Forty years ago, the Americans just woke up one morning and decided to kill a million Vietnamese. For no reason at all. Just go there and do it. The Vietnamese didn't send shaaheeds to any kindergartens or pizza delis.
So if the Arabs don't put an end to this business of wrapping young people in plastique explosive and sending them out to blow up ordinary people, they run the serious risk of finding themselves, their history (the books will be rewritten so that they will have never existed), and their culture...seriously dead.
Pushed too far, the Americans will accept that they must assume the burden of being thought of as the greatest mass murders in history. {Germany now holds the championship belt in this event, simply because they were so...clean... when they killed the 10 million}. It will be worth it to them to have peace on their terms, and to have another 40 years of cheap gasoline.....And listen there, bud, I didn't say 'defective culture', I said 'disfunctional culture'. Big difference. Ask your kid's school guidance counselor about the details. Don't change my words and call me a bigot.
And, oh yes, one last thing...
When people kill Americans, then those people deserve to die for what they did.
When Americans kill people, then they were killed because they deserved to die.
Is it justice? Possibly not. Justice only happens in individual cases involving small numbers of people. You won't find justice in international relations and war. Mass murder is the order of the day. But it keeps the peace and keeps the world humming.
When you understand this, then you will know your place and will be able to have a long life and happy family. Which is more important than how many people were killed for what reason so long ago.
"But they aren't Arabs, so instead of blowing people up..."
Shame on you.
Multiculturalism is a good thing. But it is basically an illusion because it assumes that all cultures are equal and that people are basically good.
However, we owe it to the thousands of people who have been randomly murdered by the adherents of a specific culture that there is the possiblity that certain cultures may be disfunctional and therefore be unable to be able to understand and follow the ideals of multiculturalism.
I deliberately chose to emphasize the fact that since the beginning of the modern age of terrorism, it has been the Arabs that have consistently and deliberately blown up random non-Arabs to bring world attention to their issues. No other people have done this to the extent that the Arabs have. I therefore am compelled in the memory of the people randomly and horribly murdered to call attention to the possiblity that it is the Arab culture that is unable to function within the ideals of multiculturalism. I should be ashamed and would be ashamed to say that this particular culture is disfunctional in the modern world, were it not for all the blood and body parts lying in the street whereever Arabs feel that they have been mistreated or slighted by either history or the modern world.
Osama Bin Laden is an extremely wealthy fanatic who believes that all Westerners and all Americans in particular are criminals because of either their religion or just their nationality.
He believes that he has the authority to do anything to these 'criminals', including the most extreme and gruesome murder and maiming.
But there are just too many Americans around, and Osama is just one man. So he randomly selects 'criminals' to be 'punished' in the horrible ways imaginable.
Paramount is a wealthy corporation that believes that all of the Westerners and most of all young Americans are 'criminals'. They bought the laws from politicians to ensure the legal details were in order from their perspective. They believe that all of these criminals should be punished. But they aren't Arabs, so instead of blowing people up, they just take everything that a person has ever owned and get a legal warrant to take from the person everything that they will own in the future. All for their 'crimes'.
But there are too many young Americans, and Paramount is only one legal person. So they randomly select people to be punished in the most spectacular fashion. Criminals are punished: all is in order in the world.
Osama is a terrorist; hunted by all civilized people on earth and protected by the uncivilized.
Paramount is a respected corporation owned by General Electric.
But they both operate in exactly the same fashion!
How embarrassing. Musicians are generally thought of as being cool people. But (I would hope) that they are getting rather uncomfortable being associated with these weirdo-goon squad from the RIAA.
The RIAA doesn't really help you in your musical career and they act like psychotic creeps. How long before people will stop want to be musicians because they don't want to have to be associated with these RIAA industry people.
Could music actually become uncool as a result of the RIAA's vulgar actions? (I sound like Carrie Bradshaw there) Or are the people who want to become rock stars so out of it anyway that they couldn't care less?
No, You're on to something important. Ebay auctions is the best way to sell entertainment products. However it is impossible to get the market controllers to think in that way (possibly because people who make their living in the entertainment industry rarely have to actually buy entertainment products, they always get comp'ed).
Consider movies. Theaters are full on Friday and Saturday nights and empty every other night. But the admission price is exactly the same. Suppose a theater owner decides to auction tickets to Kong or Munich. They could get $30+ for tickets for 8pm on opening Friday and still get $3 for tickets to the 9:30pm show on Tuesday night. Instead the price is $8.50 for every evening show. Weeknight shows after 9pm are empty while opening night has people waiting in the rain that can't get in regardless of what they are willing to pay.
But theater owners and managers have absolutely no control of ticket pricing. So nothing can change.
I used to go to movies at least once a week. But for the past two years I haven't gone to a single one in a theater. I get DVDs from the public library for free or rent them from the supermarket for $1 12-hour weeknight rentals.
Hollywood doesn't have a clue that their former audience is gone. And they're too inflexible to do anything if they did realize it.
And, no, I don't go to Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks anymore. There was a trip point price and when they went over it, I just seemed to stop buying coffee there. It wasn't a gradual dropoff of visits.
This is not free market, no, free market is where the customers determine the price. EBay is free market. Things there sell for what people will actually pay for them, not what the seller demands.
Recorded audio products should sell in the same manner, except for one problem. They are easily and infinitely reproducable with common household machinery (the PC). And they can be transfered by wire as digital data.
Therefore recorded audio products are simply not a product that fits into the market economy model. The only way to make it appear to do so is by applying absurd pseudo-market abstractions like 'intellectual property' that give the illusion that there is a restriction on the ability to freely and easily make a copy of this product.
But you can't treat audio recordings like a physical product anymore. They lost their physicality in the past 5-8 years. Not many products can ever do this, therefore it is really hard to come to understand the reality of the new situation, especially if you used to make money from selling audio recordings in physical disk format.
Well, you're just going to have to get used to it. Next time put your money into something that isn't going to lose its physicality. Something like oil or drugs.
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I'm finding it hard to understand the cost factor here. We have an oven with an electric heating element. Say $200-$300 at any appliance store. Then there is a couple of high-current MOSFET controllers that use a voltage to control the amount of current that goes to the oven's heating elements. Three or four at $20 each for high-quality devices. Then there is a modem to connect to the Internet Service provider through the home dial-up. Say $50. And a microcontroller interface board to run and keep track of everything. Another $50. Some custom programming for the prototype and a few debugging hours. Let's give that $100. Don't quibble about the value of your software worth and the price of programming in general. This is amortized over the first 100 units or so. $100 for programming per unit is generous for this model.
So we have an internet-enabled 'smart oven' for $600 or so. So where does this $8500 price tag come from?
What this in Dilbert recently? 'Accidentally' leaving a coworker's resume in the copy machine so that the boss can find it and assume that the person was looking for another job.
This is a fantastic development. It is exactly the kind of thing that 64-bit processors were made for. It is the 'killer ap', the best since MP3 and CD-rippers. If it actually works, the high-tech equivalent of 'in-shaa Allah'.
We should encourage IBM to allow enough of the technology to 'escape' in order to enable other languages to be translated from speech into English. There should be some kind of open review of the translation involved, also. This can help prevent subtle errors in translation that will arise. Hopefully we can catch these before they get widespread.
Perhaps we should also remember the ancient parable of the Tower of Babel. This is a story from about 3000 years ago where a united monolingual people tried to pool all of their resources and build a tower to reach God. God, not wishing to have so many freeloaders and boors hanging around eating his food, drinking his liquor, dipping into his stash, and impregnating his angels, cast an environmental change over all the people that split them into many, many groups that spoke mutually incomprehensible languages. Perhaps this is an ancient folk explanation of how different languages came to be; perhaps it is a veiled warning about the consequences that can arise from having everyone speaking the same language.
In any event, kudos to IBM. Keep up the good work.
Electronic Hardware Technicians are constantly expected to be learning new things. The industry simply moves very fast. Techs are expected to know 'everything'. And of course it does help to know a little about everything.
Many of the hardware techs are considered rather expendable. They are often the first fired and last hired. The older that you are, the more that this is so.
Unemployed technicians often can only get 'hired' through a temp agency into a company. They encounter a wide range of very-detailed electonic environments. And a wide range of support systems like parts and production databases (which often is custom written by and for the company). One may spend three months doing wireless and then spend the next six months reading the signals from human-body transducers. Then three months laying out multi-layer PCBs. Then six months testing and calibrating nephelometers. All without getting hired anywhere or making more than $13/hr. Sucks, but that's life in the new action outsource economy.
In these situations, training becomes your responsibility. Fortunately, now the web provides a way to get very close to all that you will need to know at a level that you need to comprehend and absorb it. It was much more difficult ten years ago before this resource became available. Even finding datasheets for the ICs on the circuit boards that you were hired to maintain and repair could be extraordinarily difficult. Now it is not so bad to get precise and focused information.
Basically if you work for a company, then the company should and most likely will train you. But it is getting harder each passing year to become an actual employee in a company.
I get offers from credit card companies that have a pre-printed check for $10 with my name already on it.
Deep in tiny print on the back of the offer letter there is a notice that if I cash the check, $89.95 will be charged to my credit card for 'account insurance'.
Credit card companies are ALL assholes. Be sure to pay off the outstanding balance without fail when the first bill for it comes (usually once a month) lest you regret ever associating with these creatures.
While this was a truly impressive stunt, er...mission...it was completely unnecessary. Its scientific results don't matter to anyone, nor do they change or improve the lives of anyone.
When you have a kid with an earache and you can't get medical insurance because your job only pays $11 an hour and your local community health clinic shut down because the federal funds went to the trillion dollar insane war or to reduce the taxes of the super rich, then you will have an appreciation of how stupid, insulting, and unnecessary it is to spend money on pathetic stunts such as this.
Ecoute bien, mes amis. As Slashdotters we rarely are in contact with the people such as I described above. But that does not excuse us from viewing these 'missions' through their viewpoint. We must judge these space and so-called research projects from the perspective of the total and effective benefit to our society, not from the view of a few thousand astro scientists and rocket engineers (and their greedy employers looking for huge cost-plus defense contracts).
So, yes, celibrate the StarDust mission. Then grow up and join the human race. Learn to see all these stunt projects with a long-term humanistic sense of understanding. If this capsule brought back a cure for cancer, malaria, or AIDS, then it could be celibrated by everyone. But, in reality, there nothing in it but a few milligrams of dust .
The DVD revolution has quite a ways still to go. The great advantage of DVDs is their small lightweight size. The great disadvantage to the medium is the idiot film studios and nitwit film distributors who have insisted on such stupid things as region coding.
The whole purpose of the DVD is not just to get Hollywood product into the homes of the unwashed masses. VHS did that quite well. DVD's full potential is reached when all the movies that are uneconomical to distrubute the old way get into people's homes. I'm talking about all the independent movies shown at Sundance and the regional film festivals. And of course all the hundreds of quality films made each year in other countries that never reach the USA because it is too expensive to strike prints or dub VHS cassettes for limited audiences.
The films at Sundance rarely get seen outside of the festival or maybe one weekend at an 'art theatre' in a major metro area. And even then the admission charge is at a premium. DVD (and Netflix, should they ever get their act together) is the way to inexpensively distribute and display 'small' films to large audiences in a manner that is impossible with the photographic-film-stock in-a-can or bulky, hard-to-manufacture VHS formats. There are millions of people who would pay a dollar to watch a high-quality well-made romance from France or Italy (with subtitles of course) on DVD, but won't spend $10 to see the same film in a theater. Until DVD there has been no way to get this audience and these films together.
It still doesn't happen because Netflix doesn't seem to be aware of this huge potential audience (and has a difficult enough time posting Hollywood product), and because European filmmakers and distributors are dim-bulbs about the vast potential audience for their works that exists outside of the traditional movie theater. Le DVD? C'est OK, mais il n'est pas le cinema! Je tourne le film pour le cinema, le vrai cinema, et seul pour le cinema! Vive le cinema! With a dumb-ass attitude like that it's no wonder that le director's latest masterpiece will only get seen by a few hundred people in Paris. Which is a shame.
DVD distribution is probably the only way that Bollywood productions from Mumbai will ever become known in the USA in a big way. What's causing them to delay DVD distribution of all these films? Just business inertia and prejudice against being thought of as a director who goes 'direct to DVD'.
It's the cinema that's dying, not DVD. The numbers prove this.
I also have been a King Crimson fan since 1969. Mr. Fripp has developed many interesting guitar sounds and styles over the course of his career.
I doubt that this innovation could be compensated through the music industry. Awarding a Microsoft grant for adding unique sound textures to the new OS is an excellent idea. It gives exposure to Mr. Fripp's work. It helps make up for all the years of touring around Northern Europe in a small van, playing for small but appreciative audiences.
My favorite Fripp sounds are the aforementioned 'Exposure' from 1979, the brilliant screaming twisted lead guitar on David Bowie's 'Fashion' from 1980, King Crimson's 'Frame By Frame' (1981), and 'Darshan' (1990's) with David Sylvain. All available from the Kazaa, the world's music library.
Thank you for the link to the Swedish-English dictionary. It is a useful tool for people who are learning Swedish or English.
I had hoped to find a program where I could simply cut-and-paste a block of Swedish text and get a credible English translation. The ideal is not to ever have to learn any foreign language at all and let the computer do the translating.
There are so many languages in the world and it is impossible to learn very many. Automatic language translator programs would be very helpful in this age of free global communication.
I'm toying with the idea of a water raft inflated with hydrogen instead of air. This would be a rectanglar -boat style raft that would float in the air, because of the hydrogen. It would obviously carry only a very small payload. The hydrogen would be used to power the small engines that positioned the craft (working with prevailing winds) along with providing lighter-than-air lifting. I would envision the craft to be guided by GPS and be unmanned.
It might be an interesting way to transport 'sensitive materials' across borders, such as Bibles into a communist country. After the craft ran low on hydrogen, it would float down to land and then emit a short radio burst giving its GPS location (encrypted of course) so that the sensitive materials could be retrieved by the missionaries.
There is a lot of resistance to considering the use of hydrogen for lifting due to the 1938 Hindenburg airship disaster in New Jersey. However recent research has shown that that (1st 'that' is a conjuction, 2nd is a pronoun, grammer Nazis) inferno was due to the highly inflamable paint used on the airship's skin instead of the hydrogen itself. The H2 burned with the skin, but it was not the primary reason for the rapid spread of the fire across the surface of the craft. Using hydrogen for lift and fuel should be reconsidered for these type of craft.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Besides that I'm crazy, that is.
Seriously. I'm a registered USA voter. I live in Oregon and we are the only state in the USA to use mail-in voting ballots.
If you let me use your vote for Swedish parlimentary elections so that I can use your vote to for the 'pirate' party, then I will let you use my write-in vote in the next USA presidential election. I'll sign and send you the ballot. You mail it back to my local voting office from where you live (mail cost about 0.7 Euro or 3-4 Kroner if Sweden doesn't use Euros).
Now you can vote for the US president and I can vote for the pirates.
1) Can I join in the USA? Can I become a Swede for the day that you'all vote?
2) Can anyone recommend a good (meaning one that works and is free as in beer) Swedish-English-Swedish dictionary/translation program? There must be one somewhere. I want to read this website and its posts.
Thank you
Yeah, they were just selling an xbox package of over 3000 dollars worth of games for 500 dollars...
Actually the value of the games that they were selling was far less than $3000. Items are worth what people will pay for them; no more, no less. The value of the included games was the cost of the entire package, minus the cost of the hardware sold, the cost of the labor involved, and the cost of the time for the people putting the collection of games together.
Were the game store owners 'stealing' from the game developers. No. No Way. The game developers should have made arrangements with the game sellers to have some form of compensation that would be a small percentage of the price that the game store received for selling the games.
Instead the game developers made a deal with the game distributors instead. Easier for them. But they lost out from all the residual revenue that they would have received when the games were repackaged for easy sale (when they were copied onto the hard disk with hundreds of other games).
A game that retails for $69.95 is only worth that price for a very short time and under very specific circumstances. Outside those circumstances (like its being brand new and/or state-of-the-art in its play), a game is worth far less than the price that game distributors believe that it should be selling for.
All this nonsense about 'piracy' of so-called 'intellectual property' is nothing more than the breakdown of the marketplace to bring sellers and buyers together to exchange goods for mutual benefit at a price that each party agrees on. If $500 - $700 for an XBOX with a mod chip and a 'stash' of games is the price that many buyers are willing to pay, then that's the price that's fair and reasonable. The game developers and distribution companies are just going to have to get used to working in the actual marketplace.
These stupid laws about copyright, DMCA, and 'intellectual property' are destroying the market for the product and they aren't doing anyone any good in the long run. If the developers think that they should get more money for writing software that they receive from the sale of a hard disk with their code and hundreds of other game developer's code, then get the fuck out of the game development business!. Write code for someone who will pay your more for your services.
Jeez, this isn't all that hard to figure out. Please don't raise moral, ethical, and legal arguments over what is just a pricing issue between people who never learned to haggle in a free marketplace.
Sooner or later, the Americans in Iraq will do what all the other people who have invaded Iraq over the past three thousand years have done. Which is, go native.
20 million people live in Iraq all year round all their lives. Do what they do to deal with the heat. Instead of $5000 air conditioned suits, consider wearing a shawez kameez or other clothing that has been developed by the locals over a thousand years to deal with the climate. Since the Americans are going to be there for a long time, they may as well start making an effort to blend in.
Iraq has been invaded countless times in its history. After a few years the invaders either move on to someplace with better weather or they start the long process of becoming just another minority in Iraq. The Americans are really any different. Eventually the individual solders will drift out of the command structure and find that they have to make a seperate peace with the local people. Dressing like them is a good start.
The record industry, those companies that have for the past hundred years made big bucks selling audio recordings on lightweight disks, are on auto-pilot search-and-destroy mode. They have programmed their legal weapons to seek out and burn anything that looks, sounds, or feels like new audio technology. This is like The Terminator where self-programmed robots go out to hunt and destroy anything that is human.
The record industry has set up their legal departments to automaticly hunt and destroy anything on the web that has anything remotely to do with music and pop culture. Hell, they don't own or control or make money off the web, so why not turn it into a free-fire zone. They have nothing to lose.
Even if they occasionally incure some collatoral damage or wipe out one of their own experiments by setting their lawyers into 'kill 'em all, let the market sort them out' mode, so what? At worse, all they have to do is write a meaningless letter of apology to an obscure magazine that no one will ever read anyway. Then it's another round of campaign contributions to purchased politicians to pass laws to put song file downloaders into jail. Let the poor stupid college students try to prove that the song that they downloaded was not an RIAA band. Hard to do that when you're in prison. Fuck 'em.
Don't be surprised to see Sony (the USA's largest music company) buy Wackenhut (the USA's largest corporate prison company) in the not too distant future. Sony can then get rich off selling music and from putting people like you in corporate prisons for listening to it.
Hell, maybe AOL-Warner can buy Corrections Corporation of America. That way they can actually put an RIAA MP3 file on your PC (copy it there as part of the AOL install process), and then leave it to you to prove that you didn't download it yourself. Hard to do when you're in AOL corporate prison.
200 years ago white people turned black people into slaves to make money off them. The black people created the blues music to excape (even if only on a cultural level) their enslavement. 100 years later white people start listening to the blues music created by the slaves. 50 years later the record companies steal the blues music from the black people. 50 years later (the present time) the record companies use the fact that white people are listening to the music that the record companies stole from the black people to turn the young white people into slaves by putting them in prison for listening to the blues music created by the black people to lessen the burden of slavery. And it never occurs to the white people or the black people that they wouldn't continue to be sold into slavery if they would just kill off all the record companies and slavetraders (corporate prison managers and stockholders). Instead they just piss their freedoms away endlessly bickering over horseshit ideas like 'intellectual property' and 'copyright'. Only in America.
But it's not back as a 'full' or 'real' computer. It's back as a microcontroller. In either its Atmel AVR or Microchip PIC format.
What has brought it back is the integration of all the minimum memory resources and I/O into the chip itself. That, and the reduction of cost for the 8-bit 'system' from nearly a thousand dollars twenty years ago to about ten dollars today (for CPU, minimal LCD display, and floppy storage.)
Gates-style BASIC is rarely used on new AVRs and PICs, but it is available for the PIC in the BASIC Stamp device.
Eight Bitters are not used as stand-alone home computers but as controllers that intelligently interact and manipulate other machines and sensors. But the -feeling- of raw control; and the wonder of being able to create or reconfigure the operation of a machine through typing instuctions that determine what the machine will do; this feeling remains the same as it was twenty years ago. It's just much cheaper now.
It's also much easier. Both Atmel and Microchip freely distribute high quality development tools for their devices on the web for Windows PCs. And the memory itself is far more easier to use. No more expensive ultra-violet light EPROM erasers. The program is stored in internal Flash that can be rewritten tens of thousands of times. No more $10000 in-circuit-emulators to figure out what the chip is doing when it stops working. With modern JTAG interfaces, every chip has an ICE built in. Even the most complex program can be debugged with a $39 (or less home brew) JTAG-ICE and the factory-supplied free development system programs.
My favorites are the Tiny AVRs. These are eight pin DIP chips that sell for about $1 each. They program through the PC parallel port. They have multi-channel 10-bit Analog-to-Digital convertors built in. (Try finding a 10-bit dedicated ADC chip for $1!) They run at 20 MIPS (about 20 times faster than the Commodore 64) with internal system clock generators, no crystals needed, and the speed can be fine tuned. And they have a flexible, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn instruction set.
There are even rock-bottom level Tiny AVRs (like the Tiny11) that sell for forty cents each. I use one to play a MIDI tone module with a cheap surplus PS2 PC keyboard. It reads the serial logic signals sent out from each keypress and release and transforms them into MIDI Note On/Off messages. Not bad from a 40 cent CPU.
And a 20MIPS CPU for $1 can replace a whole board of TTL chips. Sure so can a GAL or PLD for the same price. But the AVR can switch into power-down mode when not being used and burn only microAmps of current. It uses only about 10 milliAmps at full 20MIPS speed and a third of that when running at, yes, 1.8 volts! Try that with a GAL, good luck Chuck!
Plus there are lots of people on the specialized web sites from whom to get advice when you get completely stuck on something that makes no sense. Another thing that wasn't around for Eight bitters twenty years ago.
The 8-bit world is alive and dazzling well. It's just very quiet and no longer gets any media coverage as being the 'future' in the way that it was covered by the media in the Commodore and Atari years. It's still rockin'.
I did a fair amount of musical instrument buy-and-sell on eBay until recently. I bought about $1500 worth of guitar stompboxes and synthesizer tone modules, in about 120 buys and 100 sales.
I found that with good write-ups (I always used long precise descriptions) I could sell an item for about 20% more on average than I paid for it on eBay. With me paying the shipping cost, I came out about even financially after about 200 sales and retained a collection of 30 inexpensive but good-sounding guitar stompboxes, and four older MIDI synth tone modules.
I look at eBay as an inexpensive instrument rental service. Because generally with prudence one can resell an instrument for the same price as one purchased it. Therefore the only cost of using the instrument between your purchase and the instrument's resale is the cost of having it shipped from the previous owner.
I am not an entrepeneur, but I don't see how one can make money on eBay in the musical instrument field unless one is doing a high volume business on high-value/high-price instruments. And be an expert in the specialized instrument field. And even then, the price of paying for shipping and the eBay and the PayPal fees would probably equal the cost of renting a small retail space in a major metro area and having a website.
If you have been and continue to be successful in the musical instrument field on eBay, my congratulations.
Say, you wouldn't need an extra plastic $8 fuzz-box? Hey, just kidding...
While there are very few people who would argue that a file trader with 5000+ songs freely available on Kazaa has a lawsuit coming to him
I would definitely argue this. If a song has been intoduced into the public environment by playing it on the public airways to millions of people, then it becomes de facto public property. Putting people in prison for making a copy of music that gets played on public airways thousands of times is nothing by kidnapping and slavery.
most people think that suing a grandma who accidentally downloads a modern rendition of Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade is absolutely nuts.
By any civilized sense of public domain, any song that your grandma swooned to in her romantic years is public domain. You, your grandma, or anyone has a right to download it, accidentally or not. And how does one actually 'accidentally' download something? Claiming to own a 60 year old recording is absurd; using violence and intimidation against 80 year-olds who listen to 60-year-old records is criminal. This is what should be punished.
The difference between Arabs and Americans is not that one side is savage and the other benign, it's that one side has 10000 car bombs and the other side has 10000 hydrogen bombs.
...clean... when they killed the 10 million}. It will be worth it to them to have peace on their terms, and to have another 40 years of cheap gasoline. ....And listen there, bud, I didn't say 'defective culture', I said 'disfunctional culture'. Big difference. Ask your kid's school guidance counselor about the details. Don't change my words and call me a bigot.
And one side is playing a rather dangerous game of seeing how many car bombs that they can toss at the other side before they retaliate in a more drastic way than drafting 45 year olds and giving away fat bogus defense contracts.
Perhaps I am being too obscure. How's this for clarity: the Americans have enough hydrogen bombs and chemical weapons to decide one morning to kill every Arab on Earth, spend the morning planning it, the afternoon doing it, and still have plenty of time left to smoke some weed and watch cartoons before dinner.
Two hundred years ago, native American tribes ruled most of North America. The Europeans came, saw, conquered. The natives fought back with terrorism. The Americans killed almost all of them and put the rest in reservations.
Forty years ago, the Americans just woke up one morning and decided to kill a million Vietnamese. For no reason at all. Just go there and do it. The Vietnamese didn't send shaaheeds to any kindergartens or pizza delis.
So if the Arabs don't put an end to this business of wrapping young people in plastique explosive and sending them out to blow up ordinary people, they run the serious risk of finding themselves, their history (the books will be rewritten so that they will have never existed), and their culture...seriously dead.
Pushed too far, the Americans will accept that they must assume the burden of being thought of as the greatest mass murders in history. {Germany now holds the championship belt in this event, simply because they were so
And, oh yes, one last thing...
When people kill Americans, then those people deserve to die for what they did.
When Americans kill people, then they were killed because they deserved to die.
Is it justice? Possibly not. Justice only happens in individual cases involving small numbers of people. You won't find justice in international relations and war. Mass murder is the order of the day. But it keeps the peace and keeps the world humming.
When you understand this, then you will know your place and will be able to have a long life and happy family. Which is more important than how many people were killed for what reason so long ago.
And you were doing so well. Up to a point.
"But they aren't Arabs, so instead of blowing people up..."
Shame on you.
Multiculturalism is a good thing. But it is basically an illusion because it assumes that all cultures are equal and that people are basically good.
However, we owe it to the thousands of people who have been randomly murdered by the adherents of a specific culture that there is the possiblity that certain cultures may be disfunctional and therefore be unable to be able to understand and follow the ideals of multiculturalism.
I deliberately chose to emphasize the fact that since the beginning of the modern age of terrorism, it has been the Arabs that have consistently and deliberately blown up random non-Arabs to bring world attention to their issues. No other people have done this to the extent that the Arabs have. I therefore am compelled in the memory of the people randomly and horribly murdered to call attention to the possiblity that it is the Arab culture that is unable to function within the ideals of multiculturalism. I should be ashamed and would be ashamed to say that this particular culture is disfunctional in the modern world, were it not for all the blood and body parts lying in the street whereever Arabs feel that they have been mistreated or slighted by either history or the modern world.
Osama Bin Laden is an extremely wealthy fanatic who believes that all Westerners and all Americans in particular are criminals because of either their religion or just their nationality.
He believes that he has the authority to do anything to these 'criminals', including the most extreme and gruesome murder and maiming.
But there are just too many Americans around, and Osama is just one man. So he randomly selects 'criminals' to be 'punished' in the horrible ways imaginable.
Paramount is a wealthy corporation that believes that all of the Westerners and most of all young Americans are 'criminals'. They bought the laws from politicians to ensure the legal details were in order from their perspective. They believe that all of these criminals should be punished. But they aren't Arabs, so instead of blowing people up, they just take everything that a person has ever owned and get a legal warrant to take from the person everything that they will own in the future. All for their 'crimes'.
But there are too many young Americans, and Paramount is only one legal person. So they randomly select people to be punished in the most spectacular fashion. Criminals are punished: all is in order in the world.
Osama is a terrorist; hunted by all civilized people on earth and protected by the uncivilized.
Paramount is a respected corporation owned by General Electric.
But they both operate in exactly the same fashion!
What the hell is IPv6? No seriously.
Anything that costs $75 billion dollars should never be refered to by an ancronym.
How embarrassing. Musicians are generally thought of as being cool people. But (I would hope) that they are getting rather uncomfortable being associated with these weirdo-goon squad from the RIAA.
The RIAA doesn't really help you in your musical career and they act like psychotic creeps. How long before people will stop want to be musicians because they don't want to have to be associated with these RIAA industry people.
Could music actually become uncool as a result of the RIAA's vulgar actions? (I sound like Carrie Bradshaw there) Or are the people who want to become rock stars so out of it anyway that they couldn't care less?
No, You're on to something important. Ebay auctions is the best way to sell entertainment products. However it is impossible to get the market controllers to think in that way (possibly because people who make their living in the entertainment industry rarely have to actually buy entertainment products, they always get comp'ed).
Consider movies. Theaters are full on Friday and Saturday nights and empty every other night. But the admission price is exactly the same. Suppose a theater owner decides to auction tickets to Kong or Munich. They could get $30+ for tickets for 8pm on opening Friday and still get $3 for tickets to the 9:30pm show on Tuesday night. Instead the price is $8.50 for every evening show. Weeknight shows after 9pm are empty while opening night has people waiting in the rain that can't get in regardless of what they are willing to pay.
But theater owners and managers have absolutely no control of ticket pricing. So nothing can change.
I used to go to movies at least once a week. But for the past two years I haven't gone to a single one in a theater. I get DVDs from the public library for free or rent them from the supermarket for $1 12-hour weeknight rentals.
Hollywood doesn't have a clue that their former audience is gone. And they're too inflexible to do anything if they did realize it.
And, no, I don't go to Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks anymore. There was a trip point price and when they went over it, I just seemed to stop buying coffee there. It wasn't a gradual dropoff of visits.
So, no, you're not trolling.
This is not free market, no, free market is where the customers determine the price. EBay is free market. Things there sell for what people will actually pay for them, not what the seller demands.
Recorded audio products should sell in the same manner, except for one problem. They are easily and infinitely reproducable with common household machinery (the PC). And they can be transfered by wire as digital data.
Therefore recorded audio products are simply not a product that fits into the market economy model. The only way to make it appear to do so is by applying absurd pseudo-market abstractions like 'intellectual property' that give the illusion that there is a restriction on the ability to freely and easily make a copy of this product.
But you can't treat audio recordings like a physical product anymore. They lost their physicality in the past 5-8 years. Not many products can ever do this, therefore it is really hard to come to understand the reality of the new situation, especially if you used to make money from selling audio recordings in physical disk format.
Well, you're just going to have to get used to it. Next time put your money into something that isn't going to lose its physicality. Something like oil or drugs.