Within weeks, KaZaA users will see the premiere of ads offering Altnet audio and video content for sale. The selection will appear alongside -- but distinguishable from -- KaZaA content on the KaZaA Media Desktop
I don't think this is a bad idea at all.
If there were a way to discern reliable, high-bandwidth servers with complete files from Joe's Dorm computer, that would be a big plus.
It would be nice to have cheap (read: free) and possibly unreliable sources for experimenting and sampling things, and also in the same interface, be able download (and even pay! I would!) a batch of songs by a particular artist quickly and reliably.
I don't use Kazaa. AudioGalaxy doesn't seem to work for me on RH7. Gnutella is the only P2P I've used recently, and it can be frustrating when you want *this* song right *now* and you can't connect to a hit.
I can tell you I'd happily pay 25-50 cents a song for the LOTR soundtrack. Prolly the Spider-Man soundtrack, although I haven't heard it yet, but it is by Danny Elfman. I'd have to hear a few tracks first.
$5 for a modern CD is wonderful. $18 for a modern CD is a joke -- especially paying $18 for a disc that only has two or three good songs.
I'm actually going to buy a Flesh Field disc this weekend. I'm paying cold,hard Visa for a a disc. I discovered Flesh Field while listening to Digital Gunfire. Great music to code do. (A fan plug. I don't know them.)
Yes, that's me. I use Gnutella, I listen to Internet Radio, and I buy music.
Some hosting providers are lame. I recommend changing providers.
I host my site at pair.com. It's a cheap ftp-only site that costs only $5/mo. The provide raw logs, or will run analog on them. I've never had a single problem with them.
You can also get more robust accounts beyond ftp-only.
If you're willing to pay for tool shack, then consider switching providers and getting stats and logs for free.
This article says java developers are making more money:
Our 2002 career survey sampled Java programmers' work and compensation and compared it against geography and gender, education and training. The results--starting with total remuneration--were perhaps surprising, given what we've come to expect from a squeezed economy and lowered expectations. Last year, the programmers we surveyed in the United States earned on average $83,000, but this year the average total compensation--salary and benefits--of our sample was $93,500--11% more than last year.
I'd say the IT world is shedding the cruft. I hope I'm not cruft.
The premise is that all the studios and distributors are now controlled by a handful of mega corps who make and market movies based on a formula of risk management.
hell no. i loved spider-man, and i loved some of the 2099 titles (punisher 2099 was great.) but spider-man 2099 sucked hard.
The first 10 or so issue Doom 2099 (don't know how far it got) was the best comic I had read in years. I had a letter published, in issue #15, I think. The one with this cover.
In any case, I dig spiderman, and don't mind his organic webshooters in 2099 or today.
This is stunning. We should encourage this sort of behavior. Luckily for us, Ol' Ted is carrying out thier argument to the logical and absurd extreme. By being as incendiary as he is, even the most lethargic of people will draw the right conclusions.
Like another post said: Is muting during the commerials "breaking the contract"? What contract? Wouldn't his logic also make fast-forwarding the commercial on a regular VCR "theft" also?
Keep saying it, Ted. You'll win this issue for us.
One way to understand the conflict between the Content Faction and the Tech Faction is to look at how they describe their customers. For the content industries, they're "consumers." By contrast, the information technology companies talk about "users."
If you see people as consumers, you control access to what you offer, and you do everything you can to prevent theft, for the same reason supermarkets have cameras by the door and bookstores have electronic theft detectors. Allowing people to take stuff for free is inconsistent with your business model.
But if you see people as users, you want to give them more features and power at cheaper prices. The impulse to empower users was at the heart of the microcomputer revolution: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wanted to put computing power into ordinary people's hands, and that's why they founded Apple Computer. If this is your approach -- enabling people to do new things -- it's hard to adjust to the idea of building in limitations.
Very articulate framing of the issue: control versus empowerment. At first blush, this strikes as the best way to cast the issue to the general population. Nobody likes being controlled, and everyone likes being empowered.
The other issue, not mentioned in the article, is to manage the issue of the perception of theft. File sharing does not equate to theft. It does violate a license agreement in many cases, but it's not theft. File sharing creates more copies of the same thing, it does not move the thing from possession of person A to to possession of person B.
I think the tech world is at a distinct PR disadvantage here. RIAA, et al, have done a good job of equating the two. How can the debate be turned around, putting them on the defensive side of things: "This is not about theft, it's about your outdated, draconian licensing scheme designed to limit user empowerment?"
Lifted: Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
That's why it costs $18 for a CD instead of $1.50? Right.....
I read practically nothing but one sort of SF or another, and I'm not even vaguely interested in the space program. So why should *I* be taxed for it??
Which begs the question: Who should be taxed for it?
Prices and availability are subject to change without notice. Errors will be corrected where discovered, and Best Buy reserves the right to revoke any stated offer and to correct any errors, inaccuracies or omissions including after an order has been submitted and whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged.
You gotta love corporations.
They have legions of lawyers to pummel whatever they percieve as a threat, yet still manage to couch every statement they make with disclaimer text like this or obtuse legal agreements, that amount to changing this:
[statement by corporation]
into:
We announce [statement by corporation] but we do not mean it, and we are not responsible for anything that might happen because of it.
Does every American now need to have a law degree now before crawling out of bed?
I saw the banner advertising the book yesterday, and actually clicked-thru to Amazon out of curiousity. It actually got good user-reviews. But, it's not my kind of book.
However, with this blantant advertorial for the book, I think it showed gross bad judgement by Katz, and by other slashdot editors for letting it happen.
I'm pretty tolerant. But now, thanks to slashdot preferences, I will never see a Katz-authored story again.
Capped bandwidth reduces the cost of the service to ordinary users by not making the rest of us pay for what is probably P2P piracy.
Which could possibly be the big reason behind this.
It's also going to kill net radio services like shoutcast.
Another thought: It's going to make people (well, me at least) even more resentful of advertising.
I have to pay for (1) simple access, then I have to pay for (2) metered usage, then I have to be bombarded with (3) advertisements to see anything of value -- which I am paying to (4) download, and I have to (5) register with the content provider to get the content and advertisements.
I've got an internal network for testing and development. But I've been spoiled by the net. Maybe I'll just switch back dial up, and use lynx to read slashdot, google groups, search.cpan.org and java.sun.com. And pine (though Evolution is pretty nice) to read email. Maybe I'll resubscribe to a print newspaper and a weekly news magazine for news again.
I'll miss having so much technical information immediately at my disposal, but I've paid for all these technical reference books on my bookshelf. And many of them come with a digital version of themselves. Maybe it's time to use them as a first resource instead of google groups.
Yet another thought: I've been lazy wasting all this "precious" bandwidth by continually accessing content that doesn't change regularly. I'll start using local copies.
I'll have to look inito creating a caching server.
I'll certainly get some junkbuster software running now.
If they want us to *really* pay attention to bandwidth, it will kill a lot of the internet. Animation Express will die. That stuff is interesting, but I'm not going to pay to see it. Even stuff like Yahoo! Games (which I haven't played in while) won't last.
Think about it. A lot of the Internet is entertainment. What sorts of entertainment are people willing to *pay* for? Movies, Music, Pr0n... what else? This is all high-bandwidth, and outside of mp3, the online quality sucks.
Dancing Hamsters? 3 minutes Flash cartoons? Are you kidding?
Quickly changing information is useful to have. Weather, stocks, news. Which can all be distilled down to text and tranferred efficiently.
Technical documation, I can have a local copy of.
This is why I cancelled cable. If they started making you pay for each tv show you watched, how much of it is really worth watching? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure.
So, for me, the internet boils down to two things: one-to-one communication (email and instant messaging) and e-commerce. I shop online to save trips to the store.
Here's a good question. If you had to pay for metered access, can you name any reason at that you ever, ever go to these web sites:
Lastly, one of the beautiful things about the Net was the smaller niche and fringe communities that conform without being bound by geographical boundaries. With metered access, those communities will have one more barrier. If you have to pay for acesss, people will more likely stick with the "tried and true" sites, rather that sifting through the mountains of crap to find the gems. This will undoubtedly result result in more concentration of users, content and money around the Big 10 Media Corporations. Which will incredibly boring.
Slashdot Mirror
Within weeks, KaZaA users will see the premiere of ads offering Altnet audio and video content for sale. The selection will appear alongside -- but distinguishable from -- KaZaA content on the KaZaA Media Desktop
I don't think this is a bad idea at all.
If there were a way to discern reliable, high-bandwidth servers with complete files from Joe's Dorm computer, that would be a big plus.
It would be nice to have cheap (read: free) and possibly unreliable sources for experimenting and sampling things, and also in the same interface, be able download (and even pay! I would!) a batch of songs by a particular artist quickly and reliably.
I don't use Kazaa. AudioGalaxy doesn't seem to work for me on RH7. Gnutella is the only P2P I've used recently, and it can be frustrating when you want *this* song right *now* and you can't connect to a hit.
I can tell you I'd happily pay 25-50 cents a song for the LOTR soundtrack. Prolly the Spider-Man soundtrack, although I haven't heard it yet, but it is by Danny Elfman. I'd have to hear a few tracks first.
$5 for a modern CD is wonderful. $18 for a modern CD is a joke -- especially paying $18 for a disc that only has two or three good songs.
Other things I'd pay (and have, and will) for:
Flesh Field
Faith And The Muse
KMFDM
I'm actually going to buy a Flesh Field disc this weekend. I'm paying cold,hard Visa for a a disc. I discovered Flesh Field while listening to Digital Gunfire. Great music to code do. (A fan plug. I don't know them.)
Yes, that's me. I use Gnutella, I listen to Internet Radio, and I buy music.
There's a comet hunting for the masses? Run! Hide!
Some hosting providers are lame. I recommend changing providers.
I host my site at pair.com. It's a cheap ftp-only site that costs only $5/mo. The provide raw logs, or will run analog on them. I've never had a single problem with them.
You can also get more robust accounts beyond ftp-only.
If you're willing to pay for tool shack, then consider switching providers and getting stats and logs for free.
I'd say the IT world is shedding the cruft. I hope I'm not cruft.
The deal for Spiderman, and for Daredevil and Hulk in the next year or so, is more normal, and they will get royalties.
Hulk? Holy shit! It's IMDB Listing doesn't say who who's going to be the Hulk? Is he going to be all CGI?
Looking forward to that one!
The premise is that all the studios and distributors are now controlled by a handful of mega corps who make and market movies based on a formula of risk management.
You mean these big 10 media companies?
Spiderman (Peter Parker) DOESN'T get the girl. Its a TRAGIC ending. In fact, thats what makes this film
Thanks for the fucking spoiler.
hell no. i loved spider-man, and i loved some of the 2099 titles (punisher 2099 was great.) but spider-man 2099 sucked hard.
The first 10 or so issue Doom 2099 (don't know how far it got) was the best comic I had read in years. I had a letter published, in issue #15, I think. The one with this cover.
In any case, I dig spiderman, and don't mind his organic webshooters in 2099 or today.
This is stunning. We should encourage this sort of behavior. Luckily for us, Ol' Ted is carrying out thier argument to the logical and absurd extreme. By being as incendiary as he is, even the most lethargic of people will draw the right conclusions.
Like another post said: Is muting during the commerials "breaking the contract"? What contract? Wouldn't his logic also make fast-forwarding the commercial on a regular VCR "theft" also?
Keep saying it, Ted. You'll win this issue for us.
One way to understand the conflict between the Content Faction and the Tech Faction is to look at how they describe their customers. For the content industries, they're "consumers." By contrast, the information technology companies talk about "users."
If you see people as consumers, you control access to what you offer, and you do everything you can to prevent theft, for the same reason supermarkets have cameras by the door and bookstores have electronic theft detectors. Allowing people to take stuff for free is inconsistent with your business model.
But if you see people as users, you want to give them more features and power at cheaper prices. The impulse to empower users was at the heart of the microcomputer revolution: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wanted to put computing power into ordinary people's hands, and that's why they founded Apple Computer. If this is your approach -- enabling people to do new things -- it's hard to adjust to the idea of building in limitations.
Very articulate framing of the issue: control versus empowerment. At first blush, this strikes as the best way to cast the issue to the general population. Nobody likes being controlled, and everyone likes being empowered.
The other issue, not mentioned in the article, is to manage the issue of the perception of theft. File sharing does not equate to theft. It does violate a license agreement in many cases, but it's not theft. File sharing creates more copies of the same thing, it does not move the thing from possession of person A to to possession of person B.
I think the tech world is at a distinct PR disadvantage here. RIAA, et al, have done a good job of equating the two. How can the debate be turned around, putting them on the defensive side of things: "This is not about theft, it's about your outdated, draconian licensing scheme designed to limit user empowerment?"
I would prefer a Stanley Kubrick video game.
RIAA Propoganda: The Cost Of A CD
Lifted:
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
That's why it costs $18 for a CD instead of $1.50? Right.....
That is so lame.
I read practically nothing but one sort of SF or another, and I'm not even vaguely interested in the space program. So why should *I* be taxed for it??
Which begs the question: Who should be taxed for it?
Prices and availability are subject to change without notice. Errors will be corrected where discovered, and Best Buy reserves the right to revoke any stated offer and to correct any errors, inaccuracies or omissions including after an order has been submitted and whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged.
You gotta love corporations.
They have legions of lawyers to pummel whatever they percieve as a threat, yet still manage to couch every statement they make with disclaimer text like this or obtuse legal agreements, that amount to changing this:
[statement by corporation]
into:
We announce [statement by corporation] but we do not mean it, and we are not responsible for anything that might happen because of it.
Does every American now need to have a law degree now before crawling out of bed?
I saw the banner advertising the book yesterday, and actually clicked-thru to Amazon out of curiousity. It actually got good user-reviews. But, it's not my kind of book.
However, with this blantant advertorial for the book, I think it showed gross bad judgement by Katz, and by other slashdot editors for letting it happen.
I'm pretty tolerant. But now, thanks to slashdot preferences, I will never see a Katz-authored story again.
Bad slashdot.
Sometimes coffee helps, but for motivation doesn't last long, and you crash hard after it wears off.
;)
That's when I switch to Mountain Dew
There's Gimp, Sketch, Killustator (I forget what it's called now; I use Gnome). But where is the Quark clone?!
I don't care if it's beige or flourscent orange. Just make it fast and fat. It sits under my desk, for Christ's sake.
If you want to concentrate on the design of the case, then try to make the computer quieter and cooler.
Color? Does it sell better if it matches your curtains?
Psychohistory!
This post was only two minutes shy of being the most appropriate first-post in slashdot history.
Beware The Mule.
but maybe it's just me: I never buy used books. :) Unless it's a school text, does anyone?
As often as possible, for two reasons:
1) I'm cheap.
2) With books, it's the information I want, not pristine paper.
Capped bandwidth reduces the cost of the service to ordinary users by not making the rest of us pay for what is probably P2P piracy.
Which could possibly be the big reason behind this.
It's also going to kill net radio services like shoutcast.
Another thought: It's going to make people (well, me at least) even more resentful of advertising.
I have to pay for (1) simple access, then I have to pay for (2) metered usage, then I have to be bombarded with (3) advertisements to see anything of value -- which I am paying to (4) download, and I have to (5) register with the content provider to get the content and advertisements.
I've got an internal network for testing and development. But I've been spoiled by the net. Maybe I'll just switch back dial up, and use lynx to read slashdot, google groups, search.cpan.org and java.sun.com. And pine (though Evolution is pretty nice) to read email. Maybe I'll resubscribe to a print newspaper and a weekly news magazine for news again.
I'll miss having so much technical information immediately at my disposal, but I've paid for all these technical reference books on my bookshelf. And many of them come with a digital version of themselves. Maybe it's time to use them as a first resource instead of google groups.
Yet another thought: I've been lazy wasting all this "precious" bandwidth by continually accessing content that doesn't change regularly. I'll start using local copies.
I'll have to look inito creating a caching server.
I'll certainly get some junkbuster software running now.
If they want us to *really* pay attention to bandwidth, it will kill a lot of the internet. Animation Express will die. That stuff is interesting, but I'm not going to pay to see it. Even stuff like Yahoo! Games (which I haven't played in while) won't last.
Think about it. A lot of the Internet is entertainment. What sorts of entertainment are people willing to *pay* for? Movies, Music, Pr0n... what else? This is all high-bandwidth, and outside of mp3, the online quality sucks.
Dancing Hamsters? 3 minutes Flash cartoons? Are you kidding?
Quickly changing information is useful to have. Weather, stocks, news. Which can all be distilled down to text and tranferred efficiently.
Technical documation, I can have a local copy of.
This is why I cancelled cable. If they started making you pay for each tv show you watched, how much of it is really worth watching? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure.
So, for me, the internet boils down to two things: one-to-one communication (email and instant messaging) and e-commerce. I shop online to save trips to the store.
Here's a good question. If you had to pay for metered access, can you name any reason at that you ever, ever go to these web sites:
Burger King
7-Eleven
insert usless site here.
Lastly, one of the beautiful things about the Net was the smaller niche and fringe communities that conform without being bound by geographical boundaries. With metered access, those communities will have one more barrier. If you have to pay for acesss, people will more likely stick with the "tried and true" sites, rather that sifting through the mountains of crap to find the gems. This will undoubtedly result result in more concentration of users, content and money around the Big 10 Media Corporations. Which will incredibly boring.
Maybe this internet thing was a fad after all.
Don't mind me. I'm just bitter.
The mozilla team should thank the gator software company and evil commie bastard marketing reps around the world.
I'd mod this up higher if I could. Imagine, the browser wars re-igninited and the battle is how much control it can give to the user. Cool.
With the popularity of IIS servers on the rise maybe it is time that Apache gets a GUI and setup wizard option.
That's what determine's market share? Tabs and dropdown?!
Ignore slashdot on April 1 for the rest of my life.