a bunch of stuff down in San Jose? San Jose, fercryinoutloud? How can you send a person to the San Francisco Bay Area without suggesting a tript to San Francisco. The friggin' exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu) is up here. And the night life is better in The City.
I know that on/. it's always fashionable to bash msft. but the truth is that sunw has more to win from this than msft.
- sun hope to convert aix users to solaris. - linux and freebsd hurt sun more than msft.
In the short term, this helps Sun; but in the long term, Linux/BSD are huge threats to Microsoft.
Consider Microsoft: their biggest areas of growth have always been focused on the desktop: various flavors of Windows and Office. The growth there has stopped for two reasons: 90% marketshare and the fact that folks don't really need to to upgrade.
Microsoft needs to keep the revenue comming in, and the big prize is the huge mid-range server market in all those Fortune 500 companies. And Microsft's argument was compelling: cheaper then Unix, and stable enough. And it looked like Microsoft was making headway; AIX and Solaris were in trouble.
Last year, the company that I work for decided that we needed to save serious money on our AIX and Solaris hardware. Something like 3,000 machines running some flavor of Unix. Both windows and linux were considered. Linux won. As our AIX leases end, those machines are being convereted to Linux. In order to purchase Solaris or AIX, one needs permission from the CIO.
And that is why MS is attacking Linux. Not because of a threat to the desktop. It is because they are about to be shut out of the market that they have been trying to take over for the bast eight years. If they don't stop linux now, then millions of dollars of R&D are lost.
If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US)
It is damn near impossible to avoid some form of taxes in the US. Yes, this family above does avoid paying federal income taxes, but -- depending on where they live -- look at the other taxes they pay:
Payroll taxes
State and local income taxes
State and local sales taxes
Federal, state and local taxes on various products (cigarettes, gas, etc.)
State and local taxes to cover bond indebtedness (often appearing on utility bills)
The bottom half of the population effectively pays around 5-10% of the income tax. The top half pays the 90-95%.
Two points here:
Income tax does not tax all of the money a person may earn in a year. For example, capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate.
Extended from the first point, the more money you have, the easier it is to shield your income from taxes.
But there is no point in going after the little guys. SCO wants money, so they are going to go after the corporations with fat wads of cash. All those fortune 500 companies that are using Linux. And those corporations are not going to just roll over.
But wait, it gets better. Those Fortune 500 companies aren't downloading Linux from Red Hat or some other distro bendor. No, they are signing up with a company like Red Hat or IBM to build and support Linux. The best part about this: F-500 Co. has IBM or Red Hat indemnify their little butts. In other words, SCO sues F-500 Co., and it becomes IBM's or Red Hat's problem. So again, SCO goes head-to-head with IBM.
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
I can't believe that this was modded up as insightful. Sure, all energy sources create some kind of damage to the environment. What matters is the degree of damage.
If I may trot out a lame analogy: a punch on the arm or a kick in the balls. Choose one.
Fossil fuel and nuclear are a kick to the balls, environmentaly speaking. I say lets go for the solar or wind punch to the arm.
60 years ago the studios may have gotten away with this. That was back when an actor signed with a studio for X number of years and basically was at their mercy to do whatever films the studio wanted. All of that, however, changed in the early 60's. Now actor's are contracted on a per-movie basis and are free to work for whatever studio they want.
There are still instances of actors signing multi-movie deals. The bulk of the cast for the first X-Men were signed for two sequals. Studios can still get away with this for little known actors trying to break into the industry.
Integrating a system to charge, process and report state taxes, and losing business due to your higher prices,
OR:
Moving away from california.
Seems the best business decision is to abandon the state that ranks first in total population, tenth in per capita income, and fourteenth in per capita disposable income. Indeed, only a fool would want to conduct business in California, a state which accounts for 12.8% of the total disposable income in the United States.
Do you think that the US Gov't is spending the lives of its soldiers cheaply? I can't think of any army in history that places so much value on the lives of individual soldiers as today's US Army. To accomplish a given mission, the Army would rather spend millions of dollars on high tech surveillance and "smart" missiles than risk the life of a single US soldier in actual combat.
The soldiers may be brave and willing, but the Army is so risk-adverse they are willing to do almost anything, at any cost, to avoid American combat casualties.
This is not becuase our leaders value life; this is because of a lesson from Vietnam. The key lesson: the more American boys who die, the more angry the American public gets. Our leaders are doing everything the keep the body count low so that they can get re-elected in 2004.
How nice that this piece ignored the US support of the Iraq throughout the 1980s. Yes, he was a brutal dictator, but he was our brutal dictator.
6. After the Persian Gulf War Iraq had uprisings in the North and South. This is where Saddam used chemical weapons and killed over a thousand Iraqi men, women, and children.
The Shia majority in the south were ecouraged to rise up in early 1991 by the US government. So they did, expecting US help. Imagine their surprise when US forces allowed Iraq to use helicopters, along with elements of the Republican Guard, to surpress this rebelion. Additionaly, US forces kept the rebels from accessing weapons caches that could have helped their cause. Indeed, US military commanders wanted to help, but the civilian leadership said no.
And don't think the Shia have forgot. It would not be at all surprising to see a bit of unrest during the US occupation.
"and suddenly finds itself surrounded by loaded and cocked weapons. They shake their heads in bemusement, and slowly lift their hands above their heads."
I thought the French were staying out of this?
Don't be such an asshole. The French Army during WWI was over 8.4 million strong. Of those, 1.4 million died and another 4.3 million were wounded. Those from a popuation of 39 million. Almost 14% of the French were wounded or killed during WWI.
And where was the Untied States while 76% of the French army was wounded or killed? Sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, until a passenger ship went and got sunk by a U-Boat.
Enter WWII. Remember all those dead French men? Well, they can't have kids if they are dead, so the French army, facing the most powerful military power of the time, was woefully undermaned. Yet they still fought bravely, with over 300,000 dead and wounded before the fall of Paris? And where was the United States? Sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, until Germany declares war on the United States (11 Dec 41).
And don't the debt that we owe the French. This nation would not even exist if not for the French during Revolutionary War. And they also helped out the Union side during the Civil War.
we've been actively fulfilling our obligations under that treaty since day one, policing the Iraqi no-fly zones. the fact that US planes routinely get shot at while doing their duty there proves Iraq's contempt for that peace treaty.
The reason that Iraq was firing on US and British planes is because there was no legal basis for the no-fly zones. The US and the UK were the only nations that recognized said zones.
Did you know that the coalition of nations providing either troops and/or monetary or other types of support now numbers near 40? It is the third largest coalition ever assembled behind World War II and the Gulf War.
It must be comforting to buy into US propaganda. Check out this article:
"The first Persian Gulf War was prosecuted by a 34-nation military force, with each nation listed in the coalition contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. (The list is sometimes reported as 31, because four Persian Gulf states provided a combined force.) Dozens of others nations voiced support for the war against Iraq in 1991, meaning that under the standards used by the current Bush administration, the size of the 1991 coalition likely topped 100 countries."
Man, you should get a job as a flak for the RIAA. You are so good at it.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500); 40-channel mixer/sound board($6,000); studio musicians ($???/hour); booth construction (ca. $10,000); sundries such as cables, media, beer, etc. ($1,000)
Let's start from the premise that we are dealing with a talented band, and not a no-talent like Brittney. Good-bye studio musicians! Also, let's assume that this band is recording on digital media and that they will provide their own beer ($45 keg). Good-bye $1,000 sundries!
The rest of your physical expense -- $19,500 for the studio -- is not covered by the band. As I'm sure you are aware, there are these things called recording studios that bands can rent to record their albums. Indeed, these studios are used by independent bands as well as the big labels. Depending on a band's specific needs, these venues can be had for as little as $100 a day.
This is just to record. Now each artist has to remaster their own music (a very technically difficult job for which people study years).
Again, a skill that you can rent for a reasonable rate. And, if you are a solo musician, or a small band with no odd-effects on your ablum, something that can be done by the band themselves.
Then they have to shop around for a place to stamp CDs for them.
You pick up the phone, call someone and ask "How much." This ain't that hard. And not very expensive.
These artists now have over $30,000 wrapped up in their album, which they have to recoup from concerts, because everyone knows you don't make squat for profit on CD sales.
I know of a swing band that put together an album for about $10,000. Between the internet, live shows and sales in local record stores, they turned a profit on CD sales in under three months.
So you book a music hall, hire ticket printers, take out an insurance policy, and suddenly add another $50,000 to your bill. I sure hope your/. buddies bring their friends.
You are funny, RIAA man. The other choice is to contact a local venues -- say a bar, a nightclub, or a small theater -- and work out a deal. The venue deals with the insurance and rent, and tickets are sold at the door. Most of these type of deals have the band getting the door, while the venue keeps the bar. If the band gets popular enough, the deal becomes a flat fee to play. If the band is highly motivated, they can book gigs outside of their local area. All without the help of a Big Label.
Taking care of these "business" tasks are the major perks of studios -- and the reason why artists are willing to give up 85% of their sales to them. Exactly where did a computer take over these roles? Destroy the recording agencies, and I can guarantee you will destroy quality music.
Whatever. There are already lots of quality musicians and bands recording, publishing and performing their muisc, without the aid of a Big Label. I'm sure it would be hard to convince these folks that they should turn over 85% of their sales for the dubious benefits of the large label. And even if the band wanted the Big Label magic, many of these bands don't appeal to the 12 - 20 year old market, so the labels don't want anything to do with them.
How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound? Do you think U2 could charge $75 a ticket if their only exposure had been to the geek music community?
And there it is. The only time that it even starts to make sense to use the big labels is if your ultimate goal is to become a huge band playing stadium shows. Guess what: not everyone measures success based on how much money they have accumulated. For many musicians, all they want is enough money so that they can keep making their music.
If you don't want any calls from me and I will continue making calls you could get a court order which would prohibit me from calling you. Why this should be any different if the caller is a company?
Because it costs me money to hire a lawyer to get this court order for me. And if there are lots of companies, then it will cost me lots of money to stop all these companies. End result, only those with lots of money would be free from harrasment, while the rest of us suffer.
UNIX is unsuitable for this platform. It does an excellent job of using the hardware available, memory especially. Mainframe memory is hugely expensive, why waste it by having n copies of the same page in the buffer caches of n instances of Linux?
Bizarre idea...
The company that I work for has a massive data center in the Phoenix area. Over 100,000 square feet of space to accommodate thousands of Unix and Windows machines, as well as our mainframe systems. The building houses only 125 of the hundreds of employees involved with the support of the machines; the rest of the workers are in another building a few blocks a way. Several miles away, we have a redundant data center -- same size and same number of machines -- sitting idle with only a few employees working there (mostly security guards).
Consider for a moment the huge facilities cost of cooling 200,000 square feet of raised floor during the summer months in Arizona. Or the cost of electricity for thousands of servers. And don't forget the cost of general maintenance of such large buildings. Sounds expensive, doesn't it? Might be a pretty massive cost savings if we could eliminate a significant number of those Unix and Windows machines and move to a data center a quarter the size.
Even if we ignore the facilities, there is money to save elsewhere, by looking at the actual usage patterns of our hardware. Every night, the mainframes sling terabytes of data in massive batch jobs. But during the day they mostly sit idle. The Windows and Unix boxes show the exact opposite usage: busy days, idle nights. Why use the mainframe for Linux stuff? Why the hell not! Who cares how much it cost up front, that's a sunk cost. Which is more expensive and inefficient: use the hardware for Linux emulation; or let it sit idle throughout the day?
The number of enterprise Linux applications is miniscule in comparison to those on available on Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, so you're likely to be developing them in-house - why bother, if you're spending that sort of cash on the hardware, I sure you can afford some decent software?
For a small 50 - 100 person company this may be the case. But look at a company like Merrill-Lynch: tens of thousands of employees with an annual IT budget that is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. And they have embraced Linux.
When a vendor walks in the door at M-L, looking at a $15 million a year licensing deal, they listen to the customer's needs. And if the customer wants the product to run on Linux, then you can bet your ass they will make it happen. Vendors that don't offer a Linux version are fast becoming the exception.
But unlike these cities, out here we have hardly anything at best. BART is great to get around in the East Bay and to get you to San Francisco, but once you are in the city you are walking pretty much anywhere. Caltrains is a decent option for people in the south bay who want to go to the city, but it is pretty slow and only goes to 4th street, once again leaving you a hefty walk if you are going anywhere other than Pac Bell Park.
As a long time residnet of San Francisco (24 years) I want to point out that The City has pretty good public transportation. While there have been problems, the system moves over 700,000 people a day within the confines of San Francisco, a city with a little over 720,000 residents. According to Muni, over 90% of the population lives within two blocks of a bus or lightrail/subway line. Muni works well enough that I don't own a car after 35 years on this earth.
As someone noted in another reply, density is the key. San Francisco, with a little over 700,000 people in just 49 square miles has one of the highest population desnsities in the world.
As for the rest of the bay area, yeah mass transit pretty much sucks. But that is more related to the fact that those areas have grown more like traditional American suburbs, with low population densistiy and centered around the car as the main mode of transportation.
Bugger me, but the slashcode seems to be having troubles with the URL. just remove the space between "safire" and "19.shtml" to fix the URL. Or better yet, do a search for "Poindexter" at google news.
But if everytime I walked down the soda isle and was told Mountain Dew was on sale, I would buy it, even if I didn't need it, because we all know you can never have too much Dew.. For those privacy advocates out there, do you REALLY care that the managers of a supermarket know you buy a pack of pringles every shopping trip? Yes, I do care if the government wants to know, but not some store managers.
Guess what Slick, the government wants to know: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/96167_safi re 19.shtml
And even if the governement wants to know, I don't want Safeway collecting information on my shopping habits and then selling that information to other companies. You may be willing to sell your privacy for a few cents off a can of soda, but I'm not willing to sell out so cheap.
I'd like to thank everyone out there who voted GOP and gave complete control of the government to the fascists. Before the election -- when the senate was still controlled by the Democrats -- the senate version of the Fatherland Security Bill was 35 pages long. After the election, it balloned to over 400 pages -- including this noxious bit -- with pro-business and pro-repression amendments introduced by the Compassionate Conservatives.
Welcome to George Bush's America. It's going to be a very long two years.
Dudes, it's turning into "1984". Unelect the current occupants of office, it's our only hope.
That means one has to believe that the current occupant of the White House was elected in the first place. I, for one, don't. And if one accepts the fact that El Presidente came to power in a coup worthy of any third world dictator, then his current governments attacks on our constitutional rights are not all that surprising.
Turning into 1984? 9/11 was the day that 1984 became a reality. Bush got his Reichstag fire, and he has used it to his advantage.
Don't be surprised within 18 months (heck, we might even see a concept vehicle as early as the 2003 Detroit International Auto Show in a few months!) a Toyota RAV4 or even a Scion SUV with a hybrid powertrain.
A hybrid RAV 4 already exists. Toyota has been advertising it in SciAm for the past several months.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Bay Area there is . . .
a bunch of stuff down in San Jose? San Jose, fercryinoutloud? How can you send a person to the San Francisco Bay Area without suggesting a tript to San Francisco. The friggin' exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu) is up here. And the night life is better in The City.
thx,
eric
I know that on /. it's always fashionable to bash msft. but the truth is that sunw has more to win from this than msft.
- sun hope to convert aix users to solaris.
- linux and freebsd hurt sun more than msft.
In the short term, this helps Sun; but in the long term, Linux/BSD are huge threats to Microsoft.
Consider Microsoft: their biggest areas of growth have always been focused on the desktop: various flavors of Windows and Office. The growth there has stopped for two reasons: 90% marketshare and the fact that folks don't really need to to upgrade.
Microsoft needs to keep the revenue comming in, and the big prize is the huge mid-range server market in all those Fortune 500 companies. And Microsft's argument was compelling: cheaper then Unix, and stable enough. And it looked like Microsoft was making headway; AIX and Solaris were in trouble.
Last year, the company that I work for decided that we needed to save serious money on our AIX and Solaris hardware. Something like 3,000 machines running some flavor of Unix. Both windows and linux were considered. Linux won. As our AIX leases end, those machines are being convereted to Linux. In order to purchase Solaris or AIX, one needs permission from the CIO.
And that is why MS is attacking Linux. Not because of a threat to the desktop. It is because they are about to be shut out of the market that they have been trying to take over for the bast eight years. If they don't stop linux now, then millions of dollars of R&D are lost.
thx,
eric
If your family makes $20000, and you pay no tax (as is presently the case in the US)
It is damn near impossible to avoid some form of taxes in the US. Yes, this family above does avoid paying federal income taxes, but -- depending on where they live -- look at the other taxes they pay:
The bottom half of the population effectively pays around 5-10% of the income tax. The top half pays the 90-95%.
Two points here:
But the most evil tax has to be inheritance tax. Even when you die you end up paying tax.
No, you don't pay the tax when you die. Your heirs pay a tax for newly acquired wealth.
http://www.responsiblewealth.org/
Oh, and think of the irony that it comes at a time when -ending of Matrix: Reloaded snipped-
Other folks seem to be too afraid of losing Karma so they are posting anon. However, I am so very happy to take the karma hit to say:
What a class act you are for revealing the ending of a movie I have as yet to see. Prick.
thx,
eric
It's the little guys who will end up caving.
But there is no point in going after the little guys. SCO wants money, so they are going to go after the corporations with fat wads of cash. All those fortune 500 companies that are using Linux. And those corporations are not going to just roll over.
But wait, it gets better. Those Fortune 500 companies aren't downloading Linux from Red Hat or some other distro bendor. No, they are signing up with a company like Red Hat or IBM to build and support Linux. The best part about this: F-500 Co. has IBM or Red Hat indemnify their little butts. In other words, SCO sues F-500 Co., and it becomes IBM's or Red Hat's problem. So again, SCO goes head-to-head with IBM.
thx,
eric
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
I can't believe that this was modded up as insightful. Sure, all energy sources create some kind of damage to the environment. What matters is the degree of damage.
If I may trot out a lame analogy: a punch on the arm or a kick in the balls. Choose one.
Fossil fuel and nuclear are a kick to the balls, environmentaly speaking. I say lets go for the solar or wind punch to the arm.
thx,
eric
60 years ago the studios may have gotten away with this. That was back when an actor signed with a studio for X number of years and basically was at their mercy to do whatever films the studio wanted.
All of that, however, changed in the early 60's. Now actor's are contracted on a per-movie basis and are free to work for whatever studio they want.
There are still instances of actors signing multi-movie deals. The bulk of the cast for the first X-Men were signed for two sequals. Studios can still get away with this for little known actors trying to break into the industry.
thx,
eric
Integrating a system to charge, process and report state taxes, and losing business due to your higher prices,
OR:
Moving away from california.
Seems the best business decision is to abandon the state that ranks first in total population, tenth in per capita income, and fourteenth in per capita disposable income. Indeed, only a fool would want to conduct business in California, a state which accounts for 12.8% of the total disposable income in the United States.
Source: http://www.bea.gov/bea/regional/spi/
Do you think that the US Gov't is spending the lives of its soldiers cheaply? I can't think of any army in history that places so much value on the lives of individual soldiers as today's US Army. To accomplish a given mission, the Army would rather spend millions of dollars on high tech surveillance and "smart" missiles than risk the life of a single US soldier in actual combat.
The soldiers may be brave and willing, but the Army is so risk-adverse they are willing to do almost anything, at any cost, to avoid American combat casualties.
This is not becuase our leaders value life; this is because of a lesson from Vietnam. The key lesson: the more American boys who die, the more angry the American public gets. Our leaders are doing everything the keep the body count low so that they can get re-elected in 2004.
thx,
eric
How nice that this piece ignored the US support of the Iraq throughout the 1980s. Yes, he was a brutal dictator, but he was our brutal dictator.
6. After the Persian Gulf War Iraq had uprisings in the North and South. This is where Saddam used chemical weapons and killed over a thousand Iraqi men, women, and children.
The Shia majority in the south were ecouraged to rise up in early 1991 by the US government. So they did, expecting US help. Imagine their surprise when US forces allowed Iraq to use helicopters, along with elements of the Republican Guard, to surpress this rebelion. Additionaly, US forces kept the rebels from accessing weapons caches that could have helped their cause. Indeed, US military commanders wanted to help, but the civilian leadership said no.
And don't think the Shia have forgot. It would not be at all surprising to see a bit of unrest during the US occupation.
thx,
eric
"and suddenly finds itself surrounded by loaded and cocked weapons. They shake their heads in bemusement, and slowly lift their hands above their heads."
I thought the French were staying out of this?
Don't be such an asshole. The French Army during WWI was over 8.4 million strong. Of those, 1.4 million died and another 4.3 million were wounded. Those from a popuation of 39 million. Almost 14% of the French were wounded or killed during WWI.
And where was the Untied States while 76% of the French army was wounded or killed? Sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, until a passenger ship went and got sunk by a U-Boat.
Enter WWII. Remember all those dead French men? Well, they can't have kids if they are dead, so the French army, facing the most powerful military power of the time, was woefully undermaned. Yet they still fought bravely, with over 300,000 dead and wounded before the fall of Paris? And where was the United States? Sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, until Germany declares war on the United States (11 Dec 41).
And don't the debt that we owe the French. This nation would not even exist if not for the French during Revolutionary War. And they also helped out the Union side during the Civil War.
we've been actively fulfilling our obligations under that treaty since day one, policing the Iraqi no-fly zones. the fact that US planes routinely get shot at while doing their duty there proves Iraq's contempt for that peace treaty.
The reason that Iraq was firing on US and British planes is because there was no legal basis for the no-fly zones. The US and the UK were the only nations that recognized said zones.
Did you know that the coalition of nations providing either troops and/or monetary or other types of support now numbers near 40? It is the third largest coalition ever assembled behind World War II and the Gulf War.
1 32 5-2003Mar20.html
It must be comforting to buy into US propaganda. Check out this article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
"The first Persian Gulf War was prosecuted by a 34-nation military force, with each nation listed in the coalition contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. (The list is sometimes reported as 31, because four Persian Gulf states provided a combined force.) Dozens of others nations voiced support for the war against Iraq in 1991, meaning that under the standards used by the current Bush administration, the size of the 1991 coalition likely topped 100 countries."
Man, you should get a job as a flak for the RIAA. You are so good at it.
/. buddies bring their friends.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500); 40-channel mixer/sound board($6,000); studio musicians ($???/hour); booth construction (ca. $10,000); sundries such as cables, media, beer, etc. ($1,000)
Let's start from the premise that we are dealing with a talented band, and not a no-talent like Brittney. Good-bye studio musicians! Also, let's assume that this band is recording on digital media and that they will provide their own beer ($45 keg). Good-bye $1,000 sundries!
The rest of your physical expense -- $19,500 for the studio -- is not covered by the band. As I'm sure you are aware, there are these things called recording studios that bands can rent to record their albums. Indeed, these studios are used by independent bands as well as the big labels. Depending on a band's specific needs, these venues can be had for as little as $100 a day.
This is just to record. Now each artist has to remaster their own music (a very technically difficult job for which people study years).
Again, a skill that you can rent for a reasonable rate. And, if you are a solo musician, or a small band with no odd-effects on your ablum, something that can be done by the band themselves.
Then they have to shop around for a place to stamp CDs for them.
You pick up the phone, call someone and ask "How much." This ain't that hard. And not very expensive.
These artists now have over $30,000 wrapped up in their album, which they have to recoup from concerts, because everyone knows you don't make squat for profit on CD sales.
I know of a swing band that put together an album for about $10,000. Between the internet, live shows and sales in local record stores, they turned a profit on CD sales in under three months.
So you book a music hall, hire ticket printers, take out an insurance policy, and suddenly add another $50,000 to your bill. I sure hope your
You are funny, RIAA man. The other choice is to contact a local venues -- say a bar, a nightclub, or a small theater -- and work out a deal. The venue deals with the insurance and rent, and tickets are sold at the door. Most of these type of deals have the band getting the door, while the venue keeps the bar. If the band gets popular enough, the deal becomes a flat fee to play. If the band is highly motivated, they can book gigs outside of their local area. All without the help of a Big Label.
Taking care of these "business" tasks are the major perks of studios -- and the reason why artists are willing to give up 85% of their sales to them. Exactly where did a computer take over these roles? Destroy the recording agencies, and I can guarantee you will destroy quality music.
Whatever. There are already lots of quality musicians and bands recording, publishing and performing their muisc, without the aid of a Big Label. I'm sure it would be hard to convince these folks that they should turn over 85% of their sales for the dubious benefits of the large label. And even if the band wanted the Big Label magic, many of these bands don't appeal to the 12 - 20 year old market, so the labels don't want anything to do with them.
How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound? Do you think U2 could charge $75 a ticket if their only exposure had been to the geek music community?
And there it is. The only time that it even starts to make sense to use the big labels is if your ultimate goal is to become a huge band playing stadium shows. Guess what: not everyone measures success based on how much money they have accumulated. For many musicians, all they want is enough money so that they can keep making their music.
If you don't want any calls from me and I will continue making calls you could get a court order which would prohibit me from calling you. Why this should be any different if the caller is a company?
Because it costs me money to hire a lawyer to get this court order for me. And if there are lots of companies, then it will cost me lots of money to stop all these companies. End result, only those with lots of money would be free from harrasment, while the rest of us suffer.
UNIX is unsuitable for this platform. It does an excellent job of using the hardware available, memory especially. Mainframe memory is hugely expensive, why waste it by having n copies of the same page in the buffer caches of n instances of Linux?
Bizarre idea...
The company that I work for has a massive data center in the Phoenix area. Over 100,000 square feet of space to accommodate thousands of Unix and Windows machines, as well as our mainframe systems. The building houses only 125 of the hundreds of employees involved with the support of the machines; the rest of the workers are in another building a few blocks a way. Several miles away, we have a redundant data center -- same size and same number of machines -- sitting idle with only a few employees working there (mostly security guards).
Consider for a moment the huge facilities cost of cooling 200,000 square feet of raised floor during the summer months in Arizona. Or the cost of electricity for thousands of servers. And don't forget the cost of general maintenance of such large buildings. Sounds expensive, doesn't it? Might be a pretty massive cost savings if we could eliminate a significant number of those Unix and Windows machines and move to a data center a quarter the size.
Even if we ignore the facilities, there is money to save elsewhere, by looking at the actual usage patterns of our hardware. Every night, the mainframes sling terabytes of data in massive batch jobs. But during the day they mostly sit idle. The Windows and Unix boxes show the exact opposite usage: busy days, idle nights. Why use the mainframe for Linux stuff? Why the hell not! Who cares how much it cost up front, that's a sunk cost. Which is more expensive and inefficient: use the hardware for Linux emulation; or let it sit idle throughout the day?
The number of enterprise Linux applications is miniscule in comparison to those on available on Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, so you're likely to be developing them in-house - why bother, if you're spending that sort of cash on the hardware, I sure you can afford some decent software?
For a small 50 - 100 person company this may be the case. But look at a company like Merrill-Lynch: tens of thousands of employees with an annual IT budget that is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. And they have embraced Linux.
When a vendor walks in the door at M-L, looking at a $15 million a year licensing deal, they listen to the customer's needs. And if the customer wants the product to run on Linux, then you can bet your ass they will make it happen. Vendors that don't offer a Linux version are fast becoming the exception.
But unlike these cities, out here we have hardly anything at best. BART is great to get around in the East Bay and to get you to San Francisco, but once you are in the city you are walking pretty much anywhere. Caltrains is a decent option for people in the south bay who want to go to the city, but it is pretty slow and only goes to 4th street, once again leaving you a hefty walk if you are going anywhere other than Pac Bell Park.
As a long time residnet of San Francisco (24 years) I want to point out that The City has pretty good public transportation. While there have been problems, the system moves over 700,000 people a day within the confines of San Francisco, a city with a little over 720,000 residents. According to Muni, over 90% of the population lives within two blocks of a bus or lightrail/subway line. Muni works well enough that I don't own a car after 35 years on this earth.
As someone noted in another reply, density is the key. San Francisco, with a little over 700,000 people in just 49 square miles has one of the highest population desnsities in the world.
As for the rest of the bay area, yeah mass transit pretty much sucks. But that is more related to the fact that those areas have grown more like traditional American suburbs, with low population densistiy and centered around the car as the main mode of transportation.
thx,
eric
Bugger me, but the slashcode seems to be having troubles with the URL. just remove the space between "safire" and "19.shtml" to fix the URL. Or better yet, do a search for "Poindexter" at google news.
thx,
erci
That's odd. The URL I pasted in got mucked-up on submission. Here is the URL, one more time:
i re 19.shtml
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/96167_saf
But if everytime I walked down the soda isle and was told Mountain Dew was on sale, I would buy it, even if I didn't need it, because we all know you can never have too much Dew.. For those privacy advocates out there, do you REALLY care that the managers of a supermarket know you buy a pack of pringles every shopping trip? Yes, I do care if the government wants to know, but not some store managers .
i re 19.shtml
Guess what Slick, the government wants to know:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/96167_saf
And even if the governement wants to know, I don't want Safeway collecting information on my shopping habits and then selling that information to other companies. You may be willing to sell your privacy for a few cents off a can of soda, but I'm not willing to sell out so cheap.
thx,
eric
I'd like to thank everyone out there who voted GOP and gave complete control of the government to the fascists. Before the election -- when the senate was still controlled by the Democrats -- the senate version of the Fatherland Security Bill was 35 pages long. After the election, it balloned to over 400 pages -- including this noxious bit -- with pro-business and pro-repression amendments introduced by the Compassionate Conservatives.
Welcome to George Bush's America. It's going to be a very long two years.
eric
No shit, you fucking pedant. You know, I'm not in a mood today to deal with people who think that Geo. Bush being president is a good thing.
Dudes, it's turning into "1984". Unelect the current occupants of office, it's our only hope.
That means one has to believe that the current occupant of the White House was elected in the first place. I, for one, don't. And if one accepts the fact that El Presidente came to power in a coup worthy of any third world dictator, then his current governments attacks on our constitutional rights are not all that surprising.
Turning into 1984? 9/11 was the day that 1984 became a reality. Bush got his Reichstag fire, and he has used it to his advantage.
Don't be surprised within 18 months (heck, we might even see a concept vehicle as early as the 2003 Detroit International Auto Show in a few months!) a Toyota RAV4 or even a Scion SUV with a hybrid powertrain.
A hybrid RAV 4 already exists. Toyota has been advertising it in SciAm for the past several months.