The problem with the PPro was that if you handed it any 16-bit code (like a lot of Windows 95...), it would be dog slow. The lack of MMX killed it for all except Unix or NT serving functions.
Hmm... a new core design which is great at running n-bit code but sucks donkey balls at n/2-bit code... I feel a bit of Shirley Bassey coming on:
"It's all just a little bit of history repeating!"
Well, I wouldn't exactly call Stroh's a big brand...;-)
Also, I believe that Sam Adams' own brewery in Jamaica Plain, Boston is operational now (but doesn't accout for anything approaching all their production needs).
The only reason to use Linux as a router is if you're at home on a DSL/cable connection and want to use it as a mail and webserver. Obviously, I don't think anything like LRP will do that (and if he's going to a non-Unixy system, the odds are it never will).
Rather than post what you wrote, all I can say is "Bravo!"
This guy'll be sitting on a park bench 10 years from now ranting and raving about his operating system that moved away from all that Unix shit as he feeds the pigeons and drinks his Thunderbird...
I'm not making excuses. I am not saying that this is a perfect system. I am merely saying that this is a far better (or far less bad, if you prefer) system than the previous systems.
That's a big part of the point of online distribution. A record store just has posters up or whatever, clearchannel stations advertise the songs that people pay to put up, but a fair music outlet (like iTunes supposedly is) will give equal exposure to all, whereas word of mouth will spread the news of who is or is not good. I think it's imperative to have user ratings, though, so that you can get an unbiased view of what is and is not good. (Fanboys notwithstanding.)
DISCLAIMER: I have never used iTunes, as I lack a Macintosh...
User ratings are a possibility, but they can be easily gamed by promoters (look at Amazon...). Essentially it would be Slashdot karma whoring, only you actually derived financial benefit from having a high karma.
Some sort of Amazon-esque collaborative filtering system might work, but it would be strongly biased towards what is already popular, which gets you even more into the chicken and egg situation.
I highly doubt that exposure will be equal; the opportunity for exposure will be equal (which is a step forward). Essentially artists that get more exposure outside of iTunes (and maybe even pay for greater exposure within iTunes) will have a huge headstart.
Basically, when Jason left the band, the company paid him a substantial sum for his share of the company. Jason will continue to get the royalties due a writer for the 3 songs he co-wrote ("Blackened", "My Friend of Misery", and "Where the Wild Things Are"). Negotiations over what exactly his share was worth took quite a while (indeed, it wasn't actually until last December that the deal was made). I would imagine that it involved a payment somewhere in the realm of five to ten million dollars.
Anyone would agree with me that to state that Metallica are the antithesis of anti-piracy is ludicrous. The point was that equating violating copyrights on commercially released recordings and exchanging fan-made bootlegs are two issues with very little in common; one's stance on one issue means nothing in the context of the other. Indeed there are artists who take the inverse of Metallica's position, that is to say, they have no problem with people copying their albums, but they are opposed to people recording their concerts.
the grateful dead were the antithesis of anti-piracy. not only did they not discourage, hell, they actually encouraged people to tape their concerts.
If you're going to be an idiot and equate allowing taping of concerts with being "the antithesis of anti-piracy", then I've got something to point out:
You must think that METALLICA ARE THE ANTITHESIS OF ANTI-PIRACY.
Metallica has allowed the taping of their concerts since the earliest days of the band. They've allowed non-commercial distribution (with trading included in that definition) since then. Their stance is the same as the Dead's.
Metallica are distributed by Elektra in North America (and a few Polygram (which is Vivendi, IIRC) imprints in Europe and Sony in Japan). However, Metallica are effectively indies distributed by a major label now.
Metallica is legally E/M Ventures, which is a corporation set up about ten years ago to own and manage all Metallica intellectual property, as well as manage the band's affairs. It's share breakdown is basically, IIRC:
16% Elektra Records
16% Q Prime (the management company)
20% Lars Ulrich
20% James Hetfield
16% Kirk Hammett
12% Rob Trujillo
Every dollar Metallica earns goes through that corporation and is counted as revenue. Expenses such as touring, office expenses (for running the fan club), promotion, record production, etc. are deducted, and a percentage of the profits and retained earnings of the corporation are paid out as dividends (I imagine Lars, James, Kirk, and Rob are somewhat in favor of making dividends tax-free, as that would basically make 100% of their incomes tax-free!).
E/M Ventures maintains a manufacturing and distribution contract with Elektra, with a 50/50 split of wholesale prices (all this is basically risk-free money for Elektra), . Elektra is legally obligated to distribute any and all material Metallica chooses to have distributed in North America. And since, between them, any three members of the band have voting control of the corporation, what they say goes; if the band wants to release an album full of bluegrass, Elektra is obligated to send it to stores (with Elektra getting a gross profit of about $2.00 per unit, not counting their E/M dividends).
Elektra took this deal because it gave them a huge cut of the non-recording business of Metallica, which is virtually incomparable in this era. When Metallica tours, they are their own promoters. They rent at a flat rate the stadium or amphitheatre or arena. They pay the opening acts. Essentially all the risk is taken by E/M Ventures, and the massive profits go to E/M. The same is true for licensing of the Metallica name and logo.
Bands aren't required to take advances, you know; indeed there's generally not a huge difference between what an established band gets in a contract and what a startup band gets. The established band, sales being equal, walks away with more because they generally don't take any upfront money because they've accumulated enough to make it themselves.
The promotion and financing functions of the record industry will probably always be necessary, especially the promotion part. How many songs are you going to sell through iTunes if no one's heard of you?
What does an artist get from an album? 50 cents, tops. That's for approximately one hour of content which wholesales for about $10.00 and retails for anything from $10 to $18.
Here, the artist gets paid $0.12 for approximately 4 minutes of content which wholesales for $0.60 and retails for $1.00.
If an artist sells an hour of content online, he gets $1.80, which is 3.6 times what he gets from the CD. Looking at it from wholesale to wholesale, if content with a total wholesale value of $10.00 is sold, the artist gets $2.00, which is 4 times what he was getting previously. If you go for $18.00 at retail, the artist is now getting $2.16. This is about 4 times better than what the artists were getting before.
It's the specialty retailers who are feeling the pinch. Their plight in actuality has little to do with P2P apps, but does have to do with illegal activity by the RIAA.
Specifically, they're suffering because the RIAA started obeying the law.
Allow me to elaborate.
With the rise of big box retailers (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.), the RIAA began to fear about ten years ago that the big-boxes would start selling only hit music at huge discounts (possibly at or about wholesale cost) as a means of generating foot traffic. This would threaten stores that basically just sell music, but have a larger selection, especially of catalog records (which are far more profitable for the RIAA, since there's no promotion needed).
So the RIAA instituted a practice whereby they would agree to pay for advertising by retailers in newspapers and store circulars and such, but only on the condition that the prices advertised were above RIAA-set minimums. This is quite obviously price-fixing and is illegal. About three years ago, the RIAA agreed to settle the price fixing charges and refrain from the practice.
Now you have Best Buy and Wal-Mart who sell only the CDs that are currently hot, but sell them for pennies above cost. Essentially, when you buy a CD from one of these big-boxes, you're paying the wholesale cost of the CD, the shipping, and your share of the store's utility bills and the salary of the checkout girl. The store costs are fixed, regardless of how many transactions the store handles, so by spreading it out over more transactions they make even more money off the sale of TVs, stereos, food, clothing, or whatever the store's main specialties are. Against competition that's willing to make no profit whatsoever on your product, the specialty stores have huge problems.
Well, in the case of Asperger's, it's only been defined in the US literature since DSM-IV, which, IIRC, came out in 1989. So with Asperger's, it's a case of only in the last decade or so have any psychiatrists and so forth known about it to make a diagnosis.
It's kind of like saying that the number of systems running Mandrake 9.0 has increased dramatically over the past 12 months...
Am I the only one who thinks 300ft is a mite bit too far to look ahead to get reliable results? What was the old drivers ed rule, one carlength spacing per 10 miles per hour of speed? A typical car is what 20 ft., tops? 300 feet is reasonable then if the vehicle in question is going c. 150 mph.
Since most traffic is less than half of that speed, I can only shudder at the number of false positives this system's going to come up with.
Honda: at least do this: make this system by default only operational when running in cruise control (which at least takes out the cases of heavy traffic false positives).
This gives Micron carte blanche to raise their prices by 44%, which while it may save a few jobs in Idaho, will ultimately cost even more jobs at US companies that buy memory (think the likes of Dell and so forth).
That's true. However, what speed are you getting from Kazaa or whatnot? Is it greater than the 120KBytes/sec I was hitting on my DSL line from the Akamai servers that host the MetallicaVault?
Except, that's the problem. Current record label politics being what they are (and with little to indicate they're going to change sometime soon) a system where a band can choose whether or not their files are traded is not likely to come about.
Interestingly, Metallica is one of the very few artists that has the power to control how their works are distributed. Allow me to elaborate on the legal structure of Metallica and who owns their music.
Around 1993, Metallica's contract (based on the traditional record contract) with Elektra expired. The band reached a deal where they agreed to buy back all their material which Elektra previously owned the copyrights to. These rights were then transferred to a corporation called E/M Ventures, whose shareholders consisted of the 4 band members, their management company (Q Prime), and Elektra, owning essentially equal shares (I think Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield each got slightly larger shares). E/M Ventures then signed a distribution contract with Elektra which would give E/M 50% of the wholesale price of each unit as a royalty (E/M would retain ownership of all subsequent recordings). The end result is that Metallica (through having voting control of the company that formally owns their music) has total control over the distribution of their music. Why did Elektra agree to this arrangement? First, it removed virtually all front-end risk. E/M pays for the production of Metallica albums out of its own pocket. Videos and such are produced by E/M. Elektra's only risk is in manufacturing the discs. However, by being part of E/M, Elektra gets a cut of revenue streams they never had a piece of before: tour profits and merchandising being the main streams.
Only a band as successful as Metallica (IIRC, they're closing in on only having the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin ahead of them on the list of best-selling groups in history, and they're selling their back catalog faster than the others on the list... if things continue like this, Metallica will probably take over as the best selling band in history sometime before 2010) could cut a deal like that, however.
And Metallica has repeatedly stated that their goal was never for Napster to be shut down, and they were never party to any legal action to achieve that end (their only connection to the RIAA is that their music is physically distributed by Elektra, part of AOL Time Warner). All they requested was that their recordings not be exchanged through the P2P services. Ulrich explictly said that if any content creator wanted to distribute (or allow distribution of) their works through Napster et al, that Metallica had no quibble with that and would seek to preserve that option.
Of course, how many unknown acts derived any benefit from the likes of Napster and Kazaa and so forth? AFAIK, they're search based systems, which require that you search for $ARTIST_NAME or $SONG_TITLE or what not. If you're an unknown band, no one is going to search for you (unless there are people out there using dictionary attacks to come up with names of artists). Of course, what I'd be interested to see is a P2P system that, when you ran a search, would return in a separate list, a list of files that were commonly found along with what you're searching for in users' collections. But as far as I know, no one's done that yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Profane Motherfucker? Is that you?
If the color mattered, wouldn't it be a 48-ary system?
The problem with the PPro was that if you handed it any 16-bit code (like a lot of Windows 95...), it would be dog slow. The lack of MMX killed it for all except Unix or NT serving functions.
Hmm... a new core design which is great at running n-bit code but sucks donkey balls at n/2-bit code... I feel a bit of Shirley Bassey coming on:
"It's all just a little bit of history repeating!"
Well, I wouldn't exactly call Stroh's a big brand... ;-)
Also, I believe that Sam Adams' own brewery in Jamaica Plain, Boston is operational now (but doesn't accout for anything approaching all their production needs).
And at least one microbrew of the time had designs on joining the big boys and that was the Boston Beer Company (brewers of Sam Adams)...
I'd pay money to see that!
There's his source of funding... He gets /.'d every day and he sells tickets to see the server melt!
The only reason to use Linux as a router is if you're at home on a DSL/cable connection and want to use it as a mail and webserver. Obviously, I don't think anything like LRP will do that (and if he's going to a non-Unixy system, the odds are it never will).
Rather than post what you wrote, all I can say is "Bravo!"
This guy'll be sitting on a park bench 10 years from now ranting and raving about his operating system that moved away from all that Unix shit as he feeds the pigeons and drinks his Thunderbird...
I'm not making excuses. I am not saying that this is a perfect system. I am merely saying that this is a far better (or far less bad, if you prefer) system than the previous systems.
DISCLAIMER: I have never used iTunes, as I lack a Macintosh...
User ratings are a possibility, but they can be easily gamed by promoters (look at Amazon...). Essentially it would be Slashdot karma whoring, only you actually derived financial benefit from having a high karma.
Some sort of Amazon-esque collaborative filtering system might work, but it would be strongly biased towards what is already popular, which gets you even more into the chicken and egg situation.
I highly doubt that exposure will be equal; the opportunity for exposure will be equal (which is a step forward). Essentially artists that get more exposure outside of iTunes (and maybe even pay for greater exposure within iTunes) will have a huge headstart.
Basically, when Jason left the band, the company paid him a substantial sum for his share of the company. Jason will continue to get the royalties due a writer for the 3 songs he co-wrote ("Blackened", "My Friend of Misery", and "Where the Wild Things Are"). Negotiations over what exactly his share was worth took quite a while (indeed, it wasn't actually until last December that the deal was made). I would imagine that it involved a payment somewhere in the realm of five to ten million dollars.
Anyone would agree with me that to state that Metallica are the antithesis of anti-piracy is ludicrous. The point was that equating violating copyrights on commercially released recordings and exchanging fan-made bootlegs are two issues with very little in common; one's stance on one issue means nothing in the context of the other. Indeed there are artists who take the inverse of Metallica's position, that is to say, they have no problem with people copying their albums, but they are opposed to people recording their concerts.
If you're going to be an idiot and equate allowing taping of concerts with being "the antithesis of anti-piracy", then I've got something to point out:
You must think that METALLICA ARE THE ANTITHESIS OF ANTI-PIRACY.
Metallica has allowed the taping of their concerts since the earliest days of the band. They've allowed non-commercial distribution (with trading included in that definition) since then. Their stance is the same as the Dead's.
Metallica are distributed by Elektra in North America (and a few Polygram (which is Vivendi, IIRC) imprints in Europe and Sony in Japan). However, Metallica are effectively indies distributed by a major label now.
Metallica is legally E/M Ventures, which is a corporation set up about ten years ago to own and manage all Metallica intellectual property, as well as manage the band's affairs. It's share breakdown is basically, IIRC:
Every dollar Metallica earns goes through that corporation and is counted as revenue. Expenses such as touring, office expenses (for running the fan club), promotion, record production, etc. are deducted, and a percentage of the profits and retained earnings of the corporation are paid out as dividends (I imagine Lars, James, Kirk, and Rob are somewhat in favor of making dividends tax-free, as that would basically make 100% of their incomes tax-free!).
E/M Ventures maintains a manufacturing and distribution contract with Elektra, with a 50/50 split of wholesale prices (all this is basically risk-free money for Elektra), . Elektra is legally obligated to distribute any and all material Metallica chooses to have distributed in North America. And since, between them, any three members of the band have voting control of the corporation, what they say goes; if the band wants to release an album full of bluegrass, Elektra is obligated to send it to stores (with Elektra getting a gross profit of about $2.00 per unit, not counting their E/M dividends).
Elektra took this deal because it gave them a huge cut of the non-recording business of Metallica, which is virtually incomparable in this era. When Metallica tours, they are their own promoters. They rent at a flat rate the stadium or amphitheatre or arena. They pay the opening acts. Essentially all the risk is taken by E/M Ventures, and the massive profits go to E/M. The same is true for licensing of the Metallica name and logo.
Metallica (well, E/M Ventures, which is 67% owned by the members of Metallica) gets $4-$5 per CD.
Bands aren't required to take advances, you know; indeed there's generally not a huge difference between what an established band gets in a contract and what a startup band gets. The established band, sales being equal, walks away with more because they generally don't take any upfront money because they've accumulated enough to make it themselves.
The promotion and financing functions of the record industry will probably always be necessary, especially the promotion part. How many songs are you going to sell through iTunes if no one's heard of you?
...than current arrangements.
What does an artist get from an album? 50 cents, tops. That's for approximately one hour of content which wholesales for about $10.00 and retails for anything from $10 to $18.
Here, the artist gets paid $0.12 for approximately 4 minutes of content which wholesales for $0.60 and retails for $1.00.
If an artist sells an hour of content online, he gets $1.80, which is 3.6 times what he gets from the CD. Looking at it from wholesale to wholesale, if content with a total wholesale value of $10.00 is sold, the artist gets $2.00, which is 4 times what he was getting previously. If you go for $18.00 at retail, the artist is now getting $2.16. This is about 4 times better than what the artists were getting before.
It's the specialty retailers who are feeling the pinch. Their plight in actuality has little to do with P2P apps, but does have to do with illegal activity by the RIAA.
Specifically, they're suffering because the RIAA started obeying the law.
Allow me to elaborate.
With the rise of big box retailers (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.), the RIAA began to fear about ten years ago that the big-boxes would start selling only hit music at huge discounts (possibly at or about wholesale cost) as a means of generating foot traffic. This would threaten stores that basically just sell music, but have a larger selection, especially of catalog records (which are far more profitable for the RIAA, since there's no promotion needed).
So the RIAA instituted a practice whereby they would agree to pay for advertising by retailers in newspapers and store circulars and such, but only on the condition that the prices advertised were above RIAA-set minimums. This is quite obviously price-fixing and is illegal. About three years ago, the RIAA agreed to settle the price fixing charges and refrain from the practice.
Now you have Best Buy and Wal-Mart who sell only the CDs that are currently hot, but sell them for pennies above cost. Essentially, when you buy a CD from one of these big-boxes, you're paying the wholesale cost of the CD, the shipping, and your share of the store's utility bills and the salary of the checkout girl. The store costs are fixed, regardless of how many transactions the store handles, so by spreading it out over more transactions they make even more money off the sale of TVs, stereos, food, clothing, or whatever the store's main specialties are. Against competition that's willing to make no profit whatsoever on your product, the specialty stores have huge problems.
Well, in the case of Asperger's, it's only been defined in the US literature since DSM-IV, which, IIRC, came out in 1989. So with Asperger's, it's a case of only in the last decade or so have any psychiatrists and so forth known about it to make a diagnosis.
It's kind of like saying that the number of systems running Mandrake 9.0 has increased dramatically over the past 12 months...
Am I the only one who thinks 300ft is a mite bit too far to look ahead to get reliable results? What was the old drivers ed rule, one carlength spacing per 10 miles per hour of speed? A typical car is what 20 ft., tops? 300 feet is reasonable then if the vehicle in question is going c. 150 mph.
Since most traffic is less than half of that speed, I can only shudder at the number of false positives this system's going to come up with.
Honda: at least do this: make this system by default only operational when running in cruise control (which at least takes out the cases of heavy traffic false positives).
This gives Micron carte blanche to raise their prices by 44%, which while it may save a few jobs in Idaho, will ultimately cost even more jobs at US companies that buy memory (think the likes of Dell and so forth).
Tariffs BAD! Free trade GOOD!
That's true. However, what speed are you getting from Kazaa or whatnot? Is it greater than the 120KBytes/sec I was hitting on my DSL line from the Akamai servers that host the MetallicaVault?
Interestingly, Metallica is one of the very few artists that has the power to control how their works are distributed. Allow me to elaborate on the legal structure of Metallica and who owns their music.
Around 1993, Metallica's contract (based on the traditional record contract) with Elektra expired. The band reached a deal where they agreed to buy back all their material which Elektra previously owned the copyrights to. These rights were then transferred to a corporation called E/M Ventures, whose shareholders consisted of the 4 band members, their management company (Q Prime), and Elektra, owning essentially equal shares (I think Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield each got slightly larger shares). E/M Ventures then signed a distribution contract with Elektra which would give E/M 50% of the wholesale price of each unit as a royalty (E/M would retain ownership of all subsequent recordings). The end result is that Metallica (through having voting control of the company that formally owns their music) has total control over the distribution of their music. Why did Elektra agree to this arrangement? First, it removed virtually all front-end risk. E/M pays for the production of Metallica albums out of its own pocket. Videos and such are produced by E/M. Elektra's only risk is in manufacturing the discs. However, by being part of E/M, Elektra gets a cut of revenue streams they never had a piece of before: tour profits and merchandising being the main streams.
Only a band as successful as Metallica (IIRC, they're closing in on only having the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin ahead of them on the list of best-selling groups in history, and they're selling their back catalog faster than the others on the list... if things continue like this, Metallica will probably take over as the best selling band in history sometime before 2010) could cut a deal like that, however.
And Metallica has repeatedly stated that their goal was never for Napster to be shut down, and they were never party to any legal action to achieve that end (their only connection to the RIAA is that their music is physically distributed by Elektra, part of AOL Time Warner). All they requested was that their recordings not be exchanged through the P2P services. Ulrich explictly said that if any content creator wanted to distribute (or allow distribution of) their works through Napster et al, that Metallica had no quibble with that and would seek to preserve that option.
Of course, how many unknown acts derived any benefit from the likes of Napster and Kazaa and so forth? AFAIK, they're search based systems, which require that you search for $ARTIST_NAME or $SONG_TITLE or what not. If you're an unknown band, no one is going to search for you (unless there are people out there using dictionary attacks to come up with names of artists). Of course, what I'd be interested to see is a P2P system that, when you ran a search, would return in a separate list, a list of files that were commonly found along with what you're searching for in users' collections. But as far as I know, no one's done that yet.