When a huge corporation promotes itself as having a 'cleaner-than-thou' image, and then muscles down on someone who mocks this image in a tiny inperceptable forum, they often will generate a backlash in the media; the alternative media if not the major outlets.
Then the parody gets recognized far wider than it would have from its initial presentation. This brings recognition to the parodist and simulates discussion on the practices of the corporation and the contrasts between its business practices and its manufactured image. Smart business execs usually know this and will work to avoid publicity amplification. Walmart execs tend to be more mean than savvy.
Perhaps the clearest example of this publicity effect is the Disneyland Orgy which would have disappeared as an urban legend if clueless Disney execs had not have gone batshit when it appeared and mounted a huge effort to destroy it. As you can see, it lives now on the web forever. It still is pretty funny.
Maybe this is the new cash cow, suing people and then settling for ridiculous amounts of money...
I thought of this and realise that it would work for a while. Generating money by randomly selecting doing ordinary little things that have be converted into crimes and then extorting big sums of money from them really only works when the rich do it to the middle class. Generally when lawyers try to extort from the poor it's only a matter of time before the lawyers get killed by the poor trying to protect what little that they have.
When a lawyer tells a poor person that they must pay $3000 as a 'settlement' for listening to music or go to jail for piracy, the person who doesn't have $3000 to just give away to the lawyer will 'up the ante' by telling the lawyer to drop the case or they will kill him. It won't take all that many dead record company lawyers for the message to get through that you can only extort money from people who have money.
What the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that they are going through a fundamental shift in their business. Things are never going to go back to the way that were before the MP3-P2P revolution. If the music industry succeeds in stopping file sharing of music recordings, they will end up shrinking their industry much more than would happen if they let file sharing continue unharrassed.
File sharing is critically important to the industry because it is becoming the only way that people can find new music that they like. The old method of music sales, which was a single song or group of songs unalterably imprinted on a plastic disk (or tape spool in the case of cassettes), enforced the perspective that the only 'natural' way to market recordings was to have every disk have the same price for every song sold to every listener. This seemed obvious and actually did work well for 100 years.
Then digitization hit. Digitization takes any media and separates it into parts in ways that were impossible and inconceivable before the medium is converted into a digital format. This happens to every media that becomes digitized. These separated forms are then recombined with other forms that have become separated from other media. All the wealth that is created from commercializing digitized media comes from the recombination of these separations into new formats that were impossible before digitization. Usually the new products are inferior in quality to previous pre-digital products, but this is ignored by customers because the new products have so much more utility than the previous higher quality but more expensive products.
Examples abound: the typewriter keys split from the printing of letters and combined with television to become the word processor. The piano split between the keyboard and the sound of the hammered strings to become the sampler. The light bulb split from the generated heat and combined with offset printing to become the LCD graphics display terminal....and so on.
Digitization split the recording from the disk. The recording combined with the telephone to become P2P and the disk combined with the telegraph to become the CD-R. The $15 group of songs on a disk became the $0.15 CD-R with 10 albums worth of songs. This isn't going to change back regardless of the draconian incarceration laws passed by the music industry. They're just going to turn ordinary college students into hardened criminals and dedicated revolutionaries. Just to attempt a vain effort to preserve an outmoded pop-music distribution method from its inevitable transformation.
The new method of music distribution will be centered on the marketing to the individual listener/customer instead of marketing individual disk recordings. The industry has to get used to the principal that in the new era, every listener is going to pay a different amount of money for each recording in their collection. Currently with file sharing, that cost is $0.00 with the listener/consumer having to do all the filtering of the junk and uninteresting recordings available on the Kazaa. (a new noun meaning the underground file-sharing network, as opposed to 'being in Kazaa'). The music industry will reap unimaginable profits off file sharing when they learn to filter the astronomical amount of recorded music to individual listener's tastes.
This is where their real future lies, not with harassing and alienating their customer base.
There is another good reason to buy DVDs in France. They are an excellent new tool for learning the language.
In North America, most new DVDs come with language choices. Most new DVDs are Hollywood productions and their original audio is in English. There is a subtitle set in English for the deaf. This is a great tool for learning English as a Second Language because the student can read the words as they are spoken. Even if the student's grasp of English is not yet to the point where the words can be understood, it is still an important learning tool.
The hardest part of learning a language like French or English is separating the stream of spoken phrases into individual words. In learning Romance languages like French and Spanish from English (and vice-versa), the vocabulary isn't the biggest problem because 50% of the words are the same. It's the rhythms of the pronunciations that is so hard to understand. Being able to see the words being spoken on the screen as they are being said goes a long way to understanding what is being said after getting an initial mastery of the language's basic vocabulary and grammar structure.
Hollywood films have a big problem with this learning approach, however. The audio and subtitles are translated by different teams and they never match. For this learning technique to work, you need an exact match between the spoken dialog and the subtitles. Movies made in France and put on DVD do have this needed exact match.
This is a great tool for learning a language and I suggest giving it a try. However, I would not recommend learning French if you are living in the US. Spanish is the most important foreign language to learn at this time.
In Canada, however, definitely go with learning French if you are a native English speaker. The first time that you go from Kamloops to Chicoutimi you'll see instantly how smart that it was to take a little time fooling around with audio and subtitles on your DVD player. Even if all your friends do tell you that there isn't any real reason to learn any French because you'll never ever use it. You will.
French movies used to the coolest films on the planet for a short period in the early 1960s and a major contender at all other times. The French invented cinema even if Edison invented motion pictures. But lately French movies have become either really stupid or really stupid and boring. For that reason very few of them actually make it to the US as DVD releases. Or they get filmed in English and dubbed into French. Usually these dub translations have the audio/title mismatch problem. A really great movie to start with is "La Femme Nikita" from early 1990s. Unfortunately, few of the Nouvelle Vague films from the 1960s have both French and English subtitles. And many have not aged well: becoming boring and incomprehensible over the decades. The two best French New Wave films still worth watching are "Jules And Jim" and "La Jetee", both from 1962.
This is an excellent opportunity for IBM to put 'it's money where it's mouth is'.
They're 100% behind Linux; they get the profits from the installation and support while letting everyone else do all the development work... for free...
Now here they have a product that can't be sold, has been written off and its cost absorbed into the books. Let them donate it to the open source development community and allow its strongest characteristics be integrated into the main open source product.
However given that this is IBM, expect a lot of delay, FUD, insults, ridicule, and bombastic denunciations of the suggestion to open OS-2. Fret not, it's just part of the corporate process.
Corporations are set on auto-pilot to reject anything new, innovative, and exciting. It takes a long time for anything to seep into the concrete that fills the space between the ears of upper management.
music sales profits are actually higher than they were pre-MP3.
This is possible, but it doesn't make sense. If music sales profits were actually higher than pre-MP3 levels, there wouldn't be the push to destroy MP3 distibution. The music industry has always cooked its books. The published numbers are fantasies: what they do is the only real indication to their business health. And they are going insane in their anti-MP3 efforts. Therefore MP3 must be destroying their business in ways that they can't admit publicly.
just because someone has a large collection of illegal MP3s
Laws are a collective agreement that certain activities are not to be done. The MP3 private librarians refuse to accept the illegality of their collections simply because the music industry has bribed the politicians to make their collections be contraband. It won't protect them in what passes for a 'court of law' in the USA, but they refuse to accept that collecting music recordings is doing anything wrong, even if it is illegal. As it is Passover, ask your Jewish friends about the difference between something being wrong and something being illegal. They have 5000 years of experience dealing with the subtle differences between these two concepts that everyone assumes are the same.
recording industry is only one facet of the wider music industry
The global entertainment industry currently is controlled by five corporations, soon to be four. The concert, ticket, promotion, and about one/third of the radio stations in the USA are controlled by one company. These companies will get the lion's share of all entertainment expenditures regardless of the up/down profit levels of individual divisions of the company.
There's always a five year time lag between when Intel releases a new generation processor and when the chip's capabilities are part of the public awareness. It takes that long for the both the OS to catch up and be distributed and also for new innovative applications to be conceived, written, debugged, and adopted.
So yes, the time line would be for introduction:
1971: 4004 first microprocessor
1975: Z80-8080
1978: 8086
1986: 80386
1991: Pentium 1
1998: GigaHertz Pentium
2003: 64-bit TeraByte era dawn
It doesn't matter when a chip is introduced: it matters when it gets adopted - when its use starts to 'snowball' (to begin a positive feedback loop for those lucky enough to live in climates without snow) and it becomes the 'must-have' minimum level for serious computer purchases.
What to do with the new, seemingly-incredible increase in computer power is always the second question asked when Moore's law makes a new level of technology possible. The first question is always "How do we get it work?".
So let's look back at the unexpected developments with previous jumps in microprocessor power:
1973 - 1976 -- 4040 - CPU chips enter geek consciousness. Public discovers interactive television as 'PONG'. A cubic foot of TTL chips on PCBs replaced by a handful of programmable chips.
late 1970s -- Z80 - Accountants stunned as changing a single entry in columns of figures recalculates them all instantenously. Typists amazed at being able to just hit a backspace key to change a misstruck letter, and printing a page after the mistakes have been corrected.
early 1980s -- 8086 - IBM makes it possible for you to convince the boss to buy the PCs that makes your office work shine.
late 1980s -- 80286 - GUI PCs transform symbol and visual-based professions. Photo editors, SPICE, MIDI, AutoCAD, PCB autorouter programs appear. IBM PC clones replace 8-bit BASIC trainers in the home.
early 1990s -- 80486 - Windows and Wolfenstein and Wavetable soundcards.
late 1990s -- Pentium One - Internet and MP3 revolutions
early 2000s -- MultiGigHz Pentiums - Home libraries, 5000 music albums on a $100 hard disk (music industry freaks out), full movies on 15 cent CDs, home PCs doing professional level advising (law, medicine, etc..), near free global communication, primitive language translation, speech-to-text
Recognizing the [rant] statis of your statements, I feel that your co-workers are right to feel disappointed that you can't help them with their 'nuts-and-bolts' Windows configuation and application problems and situations.
A person who has been hired to be the 'computer guy' should either know how to solve these problems with Windows, or (better for you) know where to direct the person with the problem to get their situation solved. This is reasonable, although it's a pain in the patootie.
Typewriters are like horses; they are an approach to a basic problem that has disappeared without the users being aware of it.
I ask young people (15-25 yrs old) if they have ever used a typewriter. Most say yes, once or twice, as a novelity when their parents pulled it out of the closet.
Nobody likes them. Few young people can even imagine actually doing writing on one.
Personally I hated typewriters and I'm glad to see them go. I still do, however, have my slide rule...in the closet.
Why "new business model" would that be?
An example for the music industry is Amazon. Amazon doesn't create its product or manufacture it. It does provide a network by which millions of individual customers can connect to million of individual titles to find the books that customers will be interested in. It's not the bookselling function that makes Amazon important; it's the links and recommendations for other titles and customers in the same general area of interest that brings people to Amazon rather than to other more traditional booksellers.
This is where the recording industry will find its profit when its basic product has a large decline in the price that can be charged to customers. Vastly lower prices for music recordings means vastly more amounts of junk available. Record industry profits will start to come more from its filtering function more than its distributing function.
Economists tell us that monopolies fall apart and cripple their industry in the long run while oligarpolies (3-5 companies controlling an industry) are stable and the most efficient business structure in the long run. They aren't exactly sure why this is.
These companies will get their money from people who want to give their money to the entertainment companies. In the real world, the number of people who want free entertainment from downloads is relatively small compared to those who want to buy CDs and movies. The real question is the price. Everyone has a different value on each individual entertainment product. It has been easier to price every product title the same and let people decide whether to pay the standard price for an individual title. That's the model that is breaking down in the MP3-DivX-P2P era.
If you were a music exec, would you rather hire a "criminal" or a law-abiding (and probably not knowledgeable) "professional"?
A music executive, faced with declining profits and under pressure by the upper management, will hire anyone that can show that they understand how the new music economy works. The only reason that these people (the music library uploaders) are criminals is because the music industry says that they are. They wrote the laws and bribed the politicians to pass them. When it becomes apparent that jailing file swappers isn't going to return them to the profit levels pre-MP3, they will try a different approach. They will have to; they're out of ideas.
Although no one would seriously want to be exposed as a 'criminal' by the five corporations that control the world's music recordings, the only good aspect of being on this list is that you will be one of the few people that the music industry will hire to restructure their industry when they (finally) realize that their current business model simply doesn't work anymore.
One thing that the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that the MP3-P2P revolution has changed the way that people think about buying music recordings. In other words, the market is not going to go back to the way that it was ten years ago. If they do manage to stop all the file-sharing, it no longer follows that the file traders are going to restart buying recordings in the way that their older siblings and parents did previously. They will find other areas such as video games to spend their entertainment budgets.
It doesn't matter to the global entertainment corporations where people spend their entertainment budgets, because they own the entire global entertainment industry. They're going to get the money anyway; whether it comes from recordings, movies, concerts, games, whatever. It's just a matter of time before this concept sinks in on the upper management levels of the entertainment corporations and they tell the recording division executives to finally stop harrassing their customers to the point where those customers will make a focused effort to avoid buying any product produced by the company. This is the only real scenario that they have to worry about.
Eventually the copyright situation will change from micropayments from individual recordings (sorry, superstars) to a more cloud-like revenue stream shared by all the musicians of a particular genre. Recordings will be sold in giga-byte chunks with less emphasis placed on individual musician's product and more on 'bulk' collections of recordings of the same type of music. In a manner not unlike today's swapping of hard disks full of MP3 files among music collectors.
It's ironic that one major artist is releasing a single in remixable form when the music industry is shutting down ALL the MIDI file sites in the world.
MIDI files are lists of instructions for playing a piece of music. For example, an instruction that says play G# on the trumpet for.68 seconds. These files are usually played through the wavetable synth in the sound card or audio chip. They sound somewhat ridiculous and are often laughed at. They do, however, have one very interesting and special property.
With a notation program that recreates the sheet music from a MIDI file, they allow a music student to learn a song or piece or music. You have to learn how to read music to use it, but that is not very hard. MIDI files show you the chord patterns that beginner and intermediate players would not be able to derive from simply listening to a song over and over.
It is the sheet music book publishers that are shutting down all the MIDI files on the web. They are doing this because they believe that ten thousand downloads of a Classic Rock song's MIDI file is the loss of ten thousand sales of the printed sheet music for that song at $5 for maybe five sheets of paper. So, a major music instructional resource is being destroyed to preserve an imaginary market. (Would you buy sheet music of a classic rock song? Would you even know where to get sheet music in your city?) This happens at the same time that every school in the country is ending or cutting back on music education in the classroom.
The whole music industry is insane and out of control. These guys are going to end up destroying their entire industry and destroying a significant percentage of the 20th century's music recordings in the process. First by stealing the public domain by legally extending the copyright period indefinitely. Then by enacting extraordinarily brutal jail penalities for downloading and sharing music recordings, even music that is supposed to be out of the copyright period that was in effect when the records were originally made. Then by putting unbreakable encryption on recordings and passing laws preventing the sale of any music playback device that can play recordings without this encryption. Then raising the price on recordings to pay for all this beyond its value to listeners and collectors. And finally, removing the recordings from the market because "they don't sell".
In this scenario, all the music recordings that are endlessly pumped into our heads in 2005 will be simply gone by 2055 (most of you reading this will still be alive then). All the music that you grew up will just... be... gone. Almost all of the music that your grandparents listened to is gone.
This is why downloading, sharing, and 'pirating' music is critically important to do. You simply can not trust the fools who run the music industry to protect and preserve a society's culture.
Since the original poster referred to 'warm' and 'cool' in ironic reference to chips and vacuum tubes, I would believe that they referred to the debate amoung rock musicians between vacuum tube (or valves, in the UK) and power transistor amps. Here 'warm' refers to the difference in non-linear distortion at the high-end saturation level of the amp's operation. Tubes distort differently and musicians call this characteristic 'being warmer' than the power transistor sound.
I typed the above message into Microsoft Word 2000 in order to use the integrated spelling checker.
When I cut and pasted the text from Word to the Slashdot message text box, none of the apostrophes transferred correctly. All the "don't" and "won't" became "dont" and "wont".
Any operating system that makes its users look illiterate is doomed. It's just a matter of time.
Linux is the rebellion of the intellectuals
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Linux Can't Kill Windows
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· Score: 4, Informative
Linux is the manifestation of Ayn Rand's 'rebellion of the intellect' projected in Atlas Shrugged. Computer professionals were constantly being knocked back to square one whenever management decided to change the company IT structure. Since the early 1950's it was normal to expect programmers to master a dozen languages and systems, all theoretically similar but with arbitrarily different structures. It was the modern equivalent of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again, forever.
Linux changed that. Computer professionals are telling management that they will work with one standard OS. Their OS. Designing and building it themselves and distributing it freely is a brilliant strategy to counter management's claim that some other OS was cheaper.
All this happened concurrently with the widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers into the workspace. Office computing adopted the Windows OS in order to maximize the productivity gains that could only be achieved by having the entire world adopt a single standard. An incredible stroke of luck for the company selling that standard. The price went to the company that was the most relentless and focused on forcing the world to adopt their standard. That company was also flexible and intelligent enough to integrate huge positive feedback loops into the process of getting the world to adopt its product. The astonishing success of the company in selling a product that the world was desperate to buy doesnt mean that they can do it again with another type of product.
The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years.
The current problems that result from the conversion of all other Operating Systems to Linux are temporary. They are being addressed; they will be solved. The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years. The entire next generation of desktop computers may find their doubling of power completely dedicated to transition from Windows to Linux. In other words, it may take a doubling of computer power to make Windows applications run on Linux with the same speed and efficiency that they currently run on Windows OS. This will be denounced as a complete waste by IT professionals. Theyre correct, but it will be a necessary step anyway.
In all this endless discussion about law and who 'owns' music, let us not forget that RIAA has no moral right to own music anymore.
By indefinitely extending the copyright period by paying off the politicians, the RIAA companies stole the public domain.
This is the biggest theft of artistic work in history.
As a result, they have no longer any moral right to claim to own music copyrights.
Copyrights are based on the principal that there is finite period of copyright ownership for artistic material. Since they broke this fundamental legal pricipal, we have no moral obligation to accept their claims of ownership of any artistic material, regardless of how old or new it may be.
The rule of law is a balance: destroy the balance and you have destroyed your legal protection.
If the music industry is serious about controlling how people use the internet then they should take over the ISP industry.
They should buy out all the major ISPs and offer the service for free in order to get millions to sign up for RIAA-ISP. Then they can make these absurd demands on their users.
The pomposity and ridiculousness of the Music Industry is becoming the most entertaining product that they offer. We're going to miss them when they're gone.
I worked for a little while in the Intel PC factory (Hillsboro, OR) in the 1990's. The keyboards were totally dirty; nearly brown with finger grease stain.
Everyone working at the facility was a perma-temp (a person hired through a temp agency with no benefits, no health care, no vacation, ect... doing the same job as a real Intel employee for years) and we were all scared of getting fired for any imagined chickenshit offense. No one would clean the keyboards for years.
Since then the state of the keyboard grime level is one 'secret' way that I use to evaluate a company. If the 'employees' are so intimated by the possibility of arbitary firing that no one will clean the keyboards or the company won't allocate a 59 cent bottle of rubbing alchool for this purpose, then you probably don't want to work there for too long.
By the way, if you work in a production facility, don't forget to wipe the equipment with rubbing alchool before use. For example, microscope eyepieces, telephone headsets (both mouthpiece and ear piece area), and keyboards. If your a temp (and in the USA most production workers are not hired by the companies that they work for) then you have no health insurance, and you will need to take extra precautions to avoid getting sick.
Best of luck, and welcome to the third world.
While the technical underpinnings may be fascinating for this new music distribution system, the fact remains that the core content is still the same. It's plain old jive-ass radio; the same as you would get (and from which you would want to get away) from Clear Channel. Irritating announcers, insufferable commercials, lame music. Just coming to you through the wire instead of the air.
The real alternative to radio is to use the internet to find people who have the same or similar interests in music that you do and also have large collections. Then use DVD burners to put 70 albums on each blank disk in a stack of DVD media. Fry's has stacks of 25 DVD+R this week for about $7.50 US, which is roughly about $0.29 per DVD. With good quality OGG or MP3 recording, that's about 2000 songs for a dollar in media cost. You would also need an inexpensive DVD writer for your computer, which is about $70.
This way for a few dollars you can get most of all that you would ever hear on any of these new specialized radio channels. Copy the songs to a hard drive that will interface with your car or home (PC) stereo, and use a randomizer program to play songs from the collection.
No irritating announcers, no insufferable commercials, no lame music, no Clear Channel, and no high radio access fees. Or join groups of other people who have the same interest in music. When someone finds an exceptionally good song in the collection, they can send a message to the others in the group about it.
You can get all the other radio functions, weather, sport scores, traffic reports, celib news from the web. Commercials too, if you want them.
The music industry is trying to project how much money they would have made if P2P didn't exist and get laws passed to protect future revenues from 'what if' scenarios.
They want revenues for things that might have happened. Sales of individual recordings might have been higher were not for P2P, therefore let's ban P2P. Huh?
That's like saying that if the sky turned red tomorrow, the music industry would make millions off songs recorded about the sky change. Therefore a law should be passed that allows them to collect a tax from everyone who can't prove that they prayed last year to have to sky turn red.
P2P exists because people want to share the music that they love. Music comes from the people and goes to the people. Every recording is based directly on the thousands of other recordings that the musician has previously heard. Very little individual creativity goes into any new piece of recorded music. The idea that some corporation 'owns' the music of the world is truly absurd.
It's like saying that your 'own' the air that you have breathed into your lungs and can therefore collect money from the other people in a room who are breathing the same air. Your individual creativity changed the air and now you want royalities on it, forever.
Fundamentally the RIAA is fighting a change of consciousness concerning what the nature of music actually is, and what it means to people at the dawn of the third millenium.
The most irritating part of being an astronomer must be constantly defending the allocation of millions of dollars of public funds on whatever it is that they do.
A major new theory in regards to the shape and spacing of galaxies; what difference does it make to anyone?
Any bible-thumping corrupt two-bit schmuck of a politician can come up with a reason why the millions of dollars spent on astronomical research would better be directed towards one of his campaign contributers. And there are lots of those politicians nowdays.
So how actually do the astronomers keep all this money flowing their way? I would suspect that astronomy is 80% math and computer programming now instead of primarily star-gazing.
In the past, it wasn't this hard to justify the astronomers. Gods ruled the stars; kings ruled the people by the grace of the gods; astronomers interpreted the movement of the stars to convince the people that the gods still favored the king, and the king saw to it that the astronomers got plenty of money.
Astronomical research was important in navigation and agriculture. When to plant and which direction to steer when out-of-sight of land was critically important. But real extraterrestial knowledge came slowly. It was only four hundred years ago that Westerners realized that the Earth moved around the sun.
Today the most interesting about astronomy isn't theories about objects billions of miles away, it's how astronomers justify spending millions of dollars looking at objects billions of miles away.
Now I'm going to throw away my second hand guitar...
No, please, don't throw away your guitar. Your instrument is your only way to isolate yourself from the music industry.
Better yet to learn new music on the guitar. Get some tablature files of some songs that you know. They are a pain to work through, but the new licks, chords, and styles make the effort worth it.
I also recommend getting a MIDI music notation program. This is a program that recreates the sheet music from a MIDI file. You'll need to learn to read music notation to use these, but anyone who can learn a programming language can learn to read music. MIDI files will show you chords in songs that you would never figure out by ear. I use an old Windows 3 notation program called MIDIsoft Studio ver 4.
Old synthesizers are cool also. Some of them are getting to be really cheap on eBay. They all require lots of software support to do anything with (which is why they are now so cheap). There are two types of MIDI synths: one that you can program new spacy sounds yourself and the type (called General MIDI - GM synths) that have 128 instrument samples. The best low-cost programmable synths are the Yamaha TX-81Z and FB-01. The FB01 is much cheaper but far less flexible.
People need to stop thinking of playing music as a way into the music industry (since it's impossible to be independent and successful any more there) and more as a way to protect and isolate themselves from the music industry.
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When a huge corporation promotes itself as having a 'cleaner-than-thou' image, and then muscles down on someone who mocks this image in a tiny inperceptable forum, they often will generate a backlash in the media; the alternative media if not the major outlets.
Then the parody gets recognized far wider than it would have from its initial presentation. This brings recognition to the parodist and simulates discussion on the practices of the corporation and the contrasts between its business practices and its manufactured image. Smart business execs usually know this and will work to avoid publicity amplification. Walmart execs tend to be more mean than savvy.
Perhaps the clearest example of this publicity effect is the Disneyland Orgy which would have disappeared as an urban legend if clueless Disney execs had not have gone batshit when it appeared and mounted a huge effort to destroy it. As you can see, it lives now on the web forever. It still is pretty funny.
Maybe this is the new cash cow, suing people and then settling for ridiculous amounts of money...
I thought of this and realise that it would work for a while. Generating money by randomly selecting doing ordinary little things that have be converted into crimes and then extorting big sums of money from them really only works when the rich do it to the middle class. Generally when lawyers try to extort from the poor it's only a matter of time before the lawyers get killed by the poor trying to protect what little that they have.
When a lawyer tells a poor person that they must pay $3000 as a 'settlement' for listening to music or go to jail for piracy, the person who doesn't have $3000 to just give away to the lawyer will 'up the ante' by telling the lawyer to drop the case or they will kill him. It won't take all that many dead record company lawyers for the message to get through that you can only extort money from people who have money.
What the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that they are going through a fundamental shift in their business. Things are never going to go back to the way that were before the MP3-P2P revolution. If the music industry succeeds in stopping file sharing of music recordings, they will end up shrinking their industry much more than would happen if they let file sharing continue unharrassed.
File sharing is critically important to the industry because it is becoming the only way that people can find new music that they like. The old method of music sales, which was a single song or group of songs unalterably imprinted on a plastic disk (or tape spool in the case of cassettes), enforced the perspective that the only 'natural' way to market recordings was to have every disk have the same price for every song sold to every listener. This seemed obvious and actually did work well for 100 years.
Then digitization hit. Digitization takes any media and separates it into parts in ways that were impossible and inconceivable before the medium is converted into a digital format. This happens to every media that becomes digitized. These separated forms are then recombined with other forms that have become separated from other media. All the wealth that is created from commercializing digitized media comes from the recombination of these separations into new formats that were impossible before digitization. Usually the new products are inferior in quality to previous pre-digital products, but this is ignored by customers because the new products have so much more utility than the previous higher quality but more expensive products.
Examples abound: the typewriter keys split from the printing of letters and combined with television to become the word processor. The piano split between the keyboard and the sound of the hammered strings to become the sampler. The light bulb split from the generated heat and combined with offset printing to become the LCD graphics display terminal....and so on.
Digitization split the recording from the disk. The recording combined with the telephone to become P2P and the disk combined with the telegraph to become the CD-R. The $15 group of songs on a disk became the $0.15 CD-R with 10 albums worth of songs. This isn't going to change back regardless of the draconian incarceration laws passed by the music industry. They're just going to turn ordinary college students into hardened criminals and dedicated revolutionaries. Just to attempt a vain effort to preserve an outmoded pop-music distribution method from its inevitable transformation.
The new method of music distribution will be centered on the marketing to the individual listener/customer instead of marketing individual disk recordings. The industry has to get used to the principal that in the new era, every listener is going to pay a different amount of money for each recording in their collection. Currently with file sharing, that cost is $0.00 with the listener/consumer having to do all the filtering of the junk and uninteresting recordings available on the Kazaa. (a new noun meaning the underground file-sharing network, as opposed to 'being in Kazaa'). The music industry will reap unimaginable profits off file sharing when they learn to filter the astronomical amount of recorded music to individual listener's tastes.
This is where their real future lies, not with harassing and alienating their customer base.
There is another good reason to buy DVDs in France. They are an excellent new tool for learning the language.
In North America, most new DVDs come with language choices. Most new DVDs are Hollywood productions and their original audio is in English. There is a subtitle set in English for the deaf. This is a great tool for learning English as a Second Language because the student can read the words as they are spoken. Even if the student's grasp of English is not yet to the point where the words can be understood, it is still an important learning tool.
The hardest part of learning a language like French or English is separating the stream of spoken phrases into individual words. In learning Romance languages like French and Spanish from English (and vice-versa), the vocabulary isn't the biggest problem because 50% of the words are the same. It's the rhythms of the pronunciations that is so hard to understand. Being able to see the words being spoken on the screen as they are being said goes a long way to understanding what is being said after getting an initial mastery of the language's basic vocabulary and grammar structure.
Hollywood films have a big problem with this learning approach, however. The audio and subtitles are translated by different teams and they never match. For this learning technique to work, you need an exact match between the spoken dialog and the subtitles.
Movies made in France and put on DVD do have this needed exact match.
This is a great tool for learning a language and I suggest giving it a try. However, I would not recommend learning French if you are living in the US. Spanish is the most important foreign language to learn at this time.
In Canada, however, definitely go with learning French if you are a native English speaker. The first time that you go from Kamloops to Chicoutimi you'll see instantly how smart that it was to take a little time fooling around with audio and subtitles on your DVD player. Even if all your friends do tell you that there isn't any real reason to learn any French because you'll never ever use it. You will.
French movies used to the coolest films on the planet for a short period in the early 1960s and a major contender at all other times. The French invented cinema even if Edison invented motion pictures. But lately French movies have become either really stupid or really stupid and boring. For that reason very few of them actually make it to the US as DVD releases. Or they get filmed in English and dubbed into French. Usually these dub translations have the audio/title mismatch problem. A really great movie to start with is "La Femme Nikita" from early 1990s. Unfortunately, few of the Nouvelle Vague films from the 1960s have both French and English subtitles. And many have not aged well: becoming boring and incomprehensible over the decades. The two best French New Wave films still worth watching are "Jules And Jim" and "La Jetee", both from 1962.
This is an excellent opportunity for IBM to put 'it's money where it's mouth is'.
.. for free...
They're 100% behind Linux; they get the profits from the installation and support while letting everyone else do all the development work.
Now here they have a product that can't be sold, has been written off and its cost absorbed into the books. Let them donate it to the open source development community and allow its strongest characteristics be integrated into the main open source product.
However given that this is IBM, expect a lot of delay, FUD, insults, ridicule, and bombastic denunciations of the suggestion to open OS-2. Fret not, it's just part of the corporate process.
Corporations are set on auto-pilot to reject anything new, innovative, and exciting. It takes a long time for anything to seep into the concrete that fills the space between the ears of upper management.
Be optimistic and patient.
music sales profits are actually higher than they were pre-MP3.
This is possible, but it doesn't make sense. If music sales profits were actually higher than pre-MP3 levels, there wouldn't be the push to destroy MP3 distibution. The music industry has always cooked its books. The published numbers are fantasies: what they do is the only real indication to their business health. And they are going insane in their anti-MP3 efforts. Therefore MP3 must be destroying their business in ways that they can't admit publicly.
just because someone has a large collection of illegal MP3s
Laws are a collective agreement that certain activities are not to be done. The MP3 private librarians refuse to accept the illegality of their collections simply because the music industry has bribed the politicians to make their collections be contraband. It won't protect them in what passes for a 'court of law' in the USA, but they refuse to accept that collecting music recordings is doing anything wrong, even if it is illegal. As it is Passover, ask your Jewish friends about the difference between something being wrong and something being illegal. They have 5000 years of experience dealing with the subtle differences between these two concepts that everyone assumes are the same.
recording industry is only one facet of the wider music industry
The global entertainment industry currently is controlled by five corporations, soon to be four. The concert, ticket, promotion, and about one/third of the radio stations in the USA are controlled by one company. These companies will get the lion's share of all entertainment expenditures regardless of the up/down profit levels of individual divisions of the company.
There's always a five year time lag between when Intel releases a new generation processor and when the chip's capabilities are part of the public awareness. It takes that long for the both the OS to catch up and be distributed and also for new innovative applications to be conceived, written, debugged, and adopted.
So yes, the time line would be for introduction:
1971: 4004 first microprocessor
1975: Z80-8080
1978: 8086
1986: 80386
1991: Pentium 1
1998: GigaHertz Pentium
2003: 64-bit TeraByte era dawn
It doesn't matter when a chip is introduced: it matters when it gets adopted - when its use starts to 'snowball' (to begin a positive feedback loop for those lucky enough to live in climates without snow) and it becomes the 'must-have' minimum level for serious computer purchases.
What to do with the new, seemingly-incredible increase in computer power is always the second question asked when Moore's law makes a new level of technology possible. The first question is always "How do we get it work?".
So let's look back at the unexpected developments with previous jumps in microprocessor power:
1973 - 1976 -- 4040 - CPU chips enter geek consciousness. Public discovers interactive television as 'PONG'. A cubic foot of TTL chips on PCBs replaced by a handful of programmable chips.
late 1970s -- Z80 - Accountants stunned as changing a single entry in columns of figures recalculates them all instantenously. Typists amazed at being able to just hit a backspace key to change a misstruck letter, and printing a page after the mistakes have been corrected.
early 1980s -- 8086 - IBM makes it possible for you to convince the boss to buy the PCs that makes your office work shine.
late 1980s -- 80286 - GUI PCs transform symbol and visual-based professions. Photo editors, SPICE, MIDI, AutoCAD, PCB autorouter programs appear. IBM PC clones replace 8-bit BASIC trainers in the home.
early 1990s -- 80486 - Windows and Wolfenstein and Wavetable soundcards.
late 1990s -- Pentium One - Internet and MP3 revolutions
early 2000s -- MultiGigHz Pentiums - Home libraries, 5000 music albums on a $100 hard disk (music industry freaks out), full movies on 15 cent CDs, home PCs doing professional level advising (law, medicine, etc..), near free global communication, primitive language translation, speech-to-text
late 2000s -- the TeraByte era - you tell me!!
Hello,
Recognizing the [rant] statis of your statements, I feel that your co-workers are right to feel disappointed that you can't help them with their 'nuts-and-bolts' Windows configuation and application problems and situations.
A person who has been hired to be the 'computer guy' should either know how to solve these problems with Windows, or (better for you) know where to direct the person with the problem to get their situation solved. This is reasonable, although it's a pain in the patootie.
Typewriters are like horses; they are an approach to a basic problem that has disappeared without the users being aware of it.
I ask young people (15-25 yrs old) if they have ever used a typewriter. Most say yes, once or twice, as a novelity when their parents pulled it out of the closet.
Nobody likes them. Few young people can even imagine actually doing writing on one.
Personally I hated typewriters and I'm glad to see them go. I still do, however, have my slide rule...in the closet.
Why "new business model" would that be?
An example for the music industry is Amazon. Amazon doesn't create its product or manufacture it. It does provide a network by which millions of individual customers can connect to million of individual titles to find the books that customers will be interested in. It's not the bookselling function that makes Amazon important; it's the links and recommendations for other titles and customers in the same general area of interest that brings people to Amazon rather than to other more traditional booksellers.
This is where the recording industry will find its profit when its basic product has a large decline in the price that can be charged to customers. Vastly lower prices for music recordings means vastly more amounts of junk available. Record industry profits will start to come more from its filtering function more than its distributing function.
Economists tell us that monopolies fall apart and cripple their industry in the long run while oligarpolies (3-5 companies controlling an industry) are stable and the most efficient business structure in the long run. They aren't exactly sure why this is.
These companies will get their money from people who want to give their money to the entertainment companies. In the real world, the number of people who want free entertainment from downloads is relatively small compared to those who want to buy CDs and movies. The real question is the price. Everyone has a different value on each individual entertainment product. It has been easier to price every product title the same and let people decide whether to pay the standard price for an individual title. That's the model that is breaking down in the MP3-DivX-P2P era.
If you were a music exec, would you rather hire a "criminal" or a law-abiding (and probably not knowledgeable) "professional"?
A music executive, faced with declining profits and under pressure by the upper management, will hire anyone that can show that they understand how the new music economy works. The only reason that these people (the music library uploaders) are criminals is because the music industry says that they are. They wrote the laws and bribed the politicians to pass them. When it becomes apparent that jailing file swappers isn't going to return them to the profit levels pre-MP3, they will try a different approach. They will have to; they're out of ideas.
Although no one would seriously want to be exposed as a 'criminal' by the five corporations that control the world's music recordings, the only good aspect of being on this list is that you will be one of the few people that the music industry will hire to restructure their industry when they (finally) realize that their current business model simply doesn't work anymore.
One thing that the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that the MP3-P2P revolution has changed the way that people think about buying music recordings. In other words, the market is not going to go back to the way that it was ten years ago. If they do manage to stop all the file-sharing, it no longer follows that the file traders are going to restart buying recordings in the way that their older siblings and parents did previously. They will find other areas such as video games to spend their entertainment budgets.
It doesn't matter to the global entertainment corporations where people spend their entertainment budgets, because they own the entire global entertainment industry . They're going to get the money anyway; whether it comes from recordings, movies, concerts, games, whatever. It's just a matter of time before this concept sinks in on the upper management levels of the entertainment corporations and they tell the recording division executives to finally stop harrassing their customers to the point where those customers will make a focused effort to avoid buying any product produced by the company. This is the only real scenario that they have to worry about.
Eventually the copyright situation will change from micropayments from individual recordings (sorry, superstars) to a more cloud-like revenue stream shared by all the musicians of a particular genre. Recordings will be sold in giga-byte chunks with less emphasis placed on individual musician's product and more on 'bulk' collections of recordings of the same type of music. In a manner not unlike today's swapping of hard disks full of MP3 files among music collectors.
It's ironic that one major artist is releasing a single in remixable form when the music industry is shutting down ALL the MIDI file sites in the world.
.68 seconds. These files are usually played through the wavetable synth in the sound card or audio chip. They sound somewhat ridiculous and are often laughed at. They do, however, have one very interesting and special property.
... be... gone. Almost all of the music that your grandparents listened to is gone.
MIDI files are lists of instructions for playing a piece of music. For example, an instruction that says play G# on the trumpet for
With a notation program that recreates the sheet music from a MIDI file, they allow a music student to learn a song or piece or music. You have to learn how to read music to use it, but that is not very hard. MIDI files show you the chord patterns that beginner and intermediate players would not be able to derive from simply listening to a song over and over.
It is the sheet music book publishers that are shutting down all the MIDI files on the web. They are doing this because they believe that ten thousand downloads of a Classic Rock song's MIDI file is the loss of ten thousand sales of the printed sheet music for that song at $5 for maybe five sheets of paper. So, a major music instructional resource is being destroyed to preserve an imaginary market. (Would you buy sheet music of a classic rock song? Would you even know where to get sheet music in your city?)
This happens at the same time that every school in the country is ending or cutting back on music education in the classroom.
The whole music industry is insane and out of control. These guys are going to end up destroying their entire industry and destroying a significant percentage of the 20th century's music recordings in the process. First by stealing the public domain by legally extending the copyright period indefinitely. Then by enacting extraordinarily brutal jail penalities for downloading and sharing music recordings, even music that is supposed to be out of the copyright period that was in effect when the records were originally made. Then by putting unbreakable encryption on recordings and passing laws preventing the sale of any music playback device that can play recordings without this encryption. Then raising the price on recordings to pay for all this beyond its value to listeners and collectors. And finally, removing the recordings from the market because "they don't sell".
In this scenario, all the music recordings that are endlessly pumped into our heads in 2005 will be simply gone by 2055 (most of you reading this will still be alive then). All the music that you grew up will just
This is why downloading, sharing, and 'pirating' music is critically important to do. You simply can not trust the fools who run the music industry to protect and preserve a society's culture.
Since the original poster referred to 'warm' and 'cool' in ironic reference to chips and vacuum tubes, I would believe that they referred to the debate amoung rock musicians between vacuum tube (or valves, in the UK) and power transistor amps. Here 'warm' refers to the difference in non-linear distortion at the high-end saturation level of the amp's operation. Tubes distort differently and musicians call this characteristic 'being warmer' than the power transistor sound.
I typed the above message into Microsoft Word 2000 in order to use the integrated spelling checker.
When I cut and pasted the text from Word to the Slashdot message text box, none of the apostrophes transferred correctly. All the "don't" and "won't" became "dont" and "wont".
Any operating system that makes its users look illiterate is doomed. It's just a matter of time.
Linux is the manifestation of Ayn Rand's 'rebellion of the intellect' projected in Atlas Shrugged. Computer professionals were constantly being knocked back to square one whenever management decided to change the company IT structure. Since the early 1950's it was normal to expect programmers to master a dozen languages and systems, all theoretically similar but with arbitrarily different structures. It was the modern equivalent of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again, forever.
Linux changed that. Computer professionals are telling management that they will work with one standard OS. Their OS. Designing and building it themselves and distributing it freely is a brilliant strategy to counter management's claim that some other OS was cheaper.
All this happened concurrently with the widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers into the workspace. Office computing adopted the Windows OS in order to maximize the productivity gains that could only be achieved by having the entire world adopt a single standard. An incredible stroke of luck for the company selling that standard. The price went to the company that was the most relentless and focused on forcing the world to adopt their standard. That company was also flexible and intelligent enough to integrate huge positive feedback loops into the process of getting the world to adopt its product. The astonishing success of the company in selling a product that the world was desperate to buy doesnt mean that they can do it again with another type of product.
The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years.
The current problems that result from the conversion of all other Operating Systems to Linux are temporary. They are being addressed; they will be solved. The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years. The entire next generation of desktop computers may find their doubling of power completely dedicated to transition from Windows to Linux. In other words, it may take a doubling of computer power to make Windows applications run on Linux with the same speed and efficiency that they currently run on Windows OS. This will be denounced as a complete waste by IT professionals. Theyre correct, but it will be a necessary step anyway.
In all this endless discussion about law and who 'owns' music, let us not forget that RIAA has no moral right to own music anymore.
By indefinitely extending the copyright period by paying off the politicians, the RIAA companies stole the public domain.
This is the biggest theft of artistic work in history.
As a result, they have no longer any moral right to claim to own music copyrights.
Copyrights are based on the principal that there is finite period of copyright ownership for artistic material. Since they broke this fundamental legal pricipal, we have no moral obligation to accept their claims of ownership of any artistic material, regardless of how old or new it may be.
The rule of law is a balance: destroy the balance and you have destroyed your legal protection.
Download all you want!!!
If the music industry is serious about controlling how people use the internet then they should take over the ISP industry.
They should buy out all the major ISPs and offer the service for free in order to get millions to sign up for RIAA-ISP. Then they can make these absurd demands on their users.
The pomposity and ridiculousness of the Music Industry is becoming the most entertaining product that they offer. We're going to miss them when they're gone.
I worked for a little while in the Intel PC factory (Hillsboro, OR) in the 1990's. The keyboards were totally dirty; nearly brown with finger grease stain.
Everyone working at the facility was a perma-temp (a person hired through a temp agency with no benefits, no health care, no vacation, ect... doing the same job as a real Intel employee for years) and we were all scared of getting fired for any imagined chickenshit offense. No one would clean the keyboards for years.
Since then the state of the keyboard grime level is one 'secret' way that I use to evaluate a company. If the 'employees' are so intimated by the possibility of arbitary firing that no one will clean the keyboards or the company won't allocate a 59 cent bottle of rubbing alchool for this purpose, then you probably don't want to work there for too long.
By the way, if you work in a production facility, don't forget to wipe the equipment with rubbing alchool before use. For example, microscope eyepieces, telephone headsets (both mouthpiece and ear piece area), and keyboards. If your a temp (and in the USA most production workers are not hired by the companies that they work for) then you have no health insurance, and you will need to take extra precautions to avoid getting sick.
Best of luck, and welcome to the third world.
While the technical underpinnings may be fascinating for this new music distribution system, the fact remains that the core content is still the same. It's plain old jive-ass radio; the same as you would get (and from which you would want to get away) from Clear Channel. Irritating announcers, insufferable commercials, lame music. Just coming to you through the wire instead of the air.
The real alternative to radio is to use the internet to find people who have the same or similar interests in music that you do and also have large collections. Then use DVD burners to put 70 albums on each blank disk in a stack of DVD media. Fry's has stacks of 25 DVD+R this week for about $7.50 US, which is roughly about $0.29 per DVD. With good quality OGG or MP3 recording, that's about 2000 songs for a dollar in media cost. You would also need an inexpensive DVD writer for your computer, which is about $70.
This way for a few dollars you can get most of all that you would ever hear on any of these new specialized radio channels. Copy the songs to a hard drive that will interface with your car or home (PC) stereo, and use a randomizer program to play songs from the collection.
No irritating announcers, no insufferable commercials, no lame music, no Clear Channel, and no high radio access fees. Or join groups of other people who have the same interest in music. When someone finds an exceptionally good song in the collection, they can send a message to the others in the group about it.
You can get all the other radio functions, weather, sport scores, traffic reports, celib news from the web. Commercials too, if you want them.
The music industry is trying to project how much money they would have made if P2P didn't exist and get laws passed to protect future revenues from 'what if' scenarios.
They want revenues for things that might have happened. Sales of individual recordings might have been higher were not for P2P, therefore let's ban P2P. Huh?
That's like saying that if the sky turned red tomorrow, the music industry would make millions off songs recorded about the sky change. Therefore a law should be passed that allows them to collect a tax from everyone who can't prove that they prayed last year to have to sky turn red.
P2P exists because people want to share the music that they love. Music comes from the people and goes to the people. Every recording is based directly on the thousands of other recordings that the musician has previously heard. Very little individual creativity goes into any new piece of recorded music. The idea that some corporation 'owns' the music of the world is truly absurd.
It's like saying that your 'own' the air that you have breathed into your lungs and can therefore collect money from the other people in a room who are breathing the same air. Your individual creativity changed the air and now you want royalities on it, forever.
Fundamentally the RIAA is fighting a change of consciousness concerning what the nature of music actually is, and what it means to people at the dawn of the third millenium.
The most irritating part of being an astronomer must be constantly defending the allocation of millions of dollars of public funds on whatever it is that they do.
A major new theory in regards to the shape and spacing of galaxies; what difference does it make to anyone?
Any bible-thumping corrupt two-bit schmuck of a politician can come up with a reason why the millions of dollars spent on astronomical research would better be directed towards one of his campaign contributers. And there are lots of those politicians nowdays.
So how actually do the astronomers keep all this money flowing their way? I would suspect that astronomy is 80% math and computer programming now instead of primarily star-gazing.
In the past, it wasn't this hard to justify the astronomers. Gods ruled the stars; kings ruled the people by the grace of the gods; astronomers interpreted the movement of the stars to convince the people that the gods still favored the king, and the king saw to it that the astronomers got plenty of money.
Astronomical research was important in navigation and agriculture. When to plant and which direction to steer when out-of-sight of land was critically important. But real extraterrestial knowledge came slowly. It was only four hundred years ago that Westerners realized that the Earth moved around the sun.
Today the most interesting about astronomy isn't theories about objects billions of miles away, it's how astronomers justify spending millions of dollars looking at objects billions of miles away.
Now I'm going to throw away my second hand guitar...
No, please, don't throw away your guitar. Your instrument is your only way to isolate yourself from the music industry.
Better yet to learn new music on the guitar. Get some tablature files of some songs that you know. They are a pain to work through, but the new licks, chords, and styles make the effort worth it.
I also recommend getting a MIDI music notation program. This is a program that recreates the sheet music from a MIDI file. You'll need to learn to read music notation to use these, but anyone who can learn a programming language can learn to read music. MIDI files will show you chords in songs that you would never figure out by ear. I use an old Windows 3 notation program called MIDIsoft Studio ver 4.
Old synthesizers are cool also. Some of them are getting to be really cheap on eBay. They all require lots of software support to do anything with (which is why they are now so cheap). There are two types of MIDI synths: one that you can program new spacy sounds yourself and the type (called General MIDI - GM synths) that have 128 instrument samples. The best low-cost programmable synths are the Yamaha TX-81Z and FB-01. The FB01 is much cheaper but far less flexible.
People need to stop thinking of playing music as a way into the music industry (since it's impossible to be independent and successful any more there) and more as a way to protect and isolate themselves from the music industry.
So no, don't give up your guitar!
The question that's always bugged me: what were the other things?
Vietnam