How much you wanna bet the Royal Family doesn't give 2 shits how much it costs to run their website. Actually, the netblock changed, my guess is they changed webhosts.
To them, the difference between a low-end vhost and dedicated hosting on a 64-way Sun box would be they have to settle for the 2nd-best caviar -- about 3000 years from now.
Some label in Portugal, as I recall, was trying to get me to sign an exclusive 5-year contract, so that all music I might record would belong to them. I would have been able to release as many titles as I wanted, and they would front the money, but more like the way a bank fronts the money when you buy a house with a mortgage -- i.e. eventually all the costs would have to be repaid.
The label said they should own the copyrights so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassles... Right.
The last CD I released was on an independent label who I still work with. That label in turn had a deal with a manufacturing and distribution company. Similar to what I described above. That manufacturing and distribution company in the end would not pay the label, but also did not force the issue of repayment of their costs. That company also wanted a clause in the contract originally so they would own all music I did during the same time period as the recordings on the CD. We objected. I retained all copyrights, and licensed to them the rights to manufacture and sell copies of the recordings for a limited period (a little over 5 years).
Many artists would be much better off with this type of arrangement. Others, I think, need the muscle of a major label who can push them into the Top 40 charts. (Not a hazard for what I do.)
The problem is that often music that has a strong appeal to a limited audience can fall through the cracks, and gets locked up indefinitely in a major label's vaults where nobody can hear it. The major label owns it, and another label that believes they do know what to do with it will have an uphill battle trying to license the recordings for reissue.
How does someone move from being a Microsoft VBitch to programming UNIX/Java?
Install Apache on Windows and integrate Tomcat and whatever database software you can. Get a good book on Java Servlets and JSP, and start programming...
the "sysadmin" position that might properly be called "operator" or "lackey", and
a Systems Administrator position that is 1/3rd politics, and 1/3rd knowing how to fix things that even the 2nd-level support at the vendor is clueless about, and 1/3rd being able to translate the output of e.g. memstat into business English.
The 2nd option is probably the one to aim for, but takes time and more than just technical aptitude. A former English teacher could already be quite good at 2/3rds of the Sr. Admin position, and then the tech skills just take time and an eagerness to learn.
I started out on CP/M S100 systems at home in Jr. H.S., Apple ][, and later Amiga. I was never that intersted in hardware, but always digging into how the OS worked and how it talked to the hardware. I programmed various old and now mostly useless languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, 6502/Z80/8086 assembler) and also different types of BASIC of course.
I went into college with almost a semester of CS credit hours, learned C and more advanced assembler on AT&T 3B2.
After a Liberal Arts degree, I bootstrapped myself into small-scale relational database (Paradox for DOS). Then got a job as the all-purpose tech guy at a local gov't organization that ran Sequent DYNIX/ptx (weird System V) and Informix. I was digging into that as deeply as I could -- porting software to DYNIX/ptx, and had to learn various skills trial-by-fire. Then they migrated to Solaris 2.5 and I expanded my knowledge into that.
With the Internet moving into the picture, and other factors, things became more complex, always something new to learn, and as I say I was sort of the all-purpose tech.
After a few years, I felt like programming. It helps a lot as an admin to know what it is like to be a programmer. So I did ASP web pages and more RDBMS (MS SQL Server) for a year. During that time I doubled as a sysadmin and general-purpose tech guru. For a while we ran a Sun E450 again, Solaris 7 this time, and a more advanced configuration that I built out-of-the-box.
Then changed jobs again to work as an admin for 4 Sun E450s with IBM WebSphere and Oracle 8i. I leveraged my experience playing with Tomcat (and I suppose IIS), and learned WebSphere inside and out.
Now I have to carry a Blackberry and cell phone, and do 24-hour production support for sites that get millions of hits a week.
Why would I want to pay $1000 for this device? I can get a DVD player for $150-$200 that plays MP3s on CD-R. In fact, I did. And it plays DVDs and VCDs as well. Could put together a P3 or Athlon system for the difference in price, have a general-purpose device...which among other things can create or download the files in the first place, and burn the CD-Rs to play in the DVD player. It makes no sense.
but the hacked-on copy protection made a 'notch' in the sound.
This was one proposal, but as far as I know, it was never used commercially. SCMS uses additional data in the digital output stream, but does not alter the audio itself.
Besides - when I see a commercial saying "OWN it on DVD or VHS today" - the whole concept of 'licensing' seems somewhat suspect...
They let you own a physical copy, with the restriction that you cannot exhibit it anywhere except a private home. No hospitals, oil rigs, airplanes, schools, etc.
I wonder whether, or how, an instructor could get full, proper permission to show a film to a class. For example, in a film studies course.
I completely agree with your point though. People are accustomed to the idea of owning a physical copy -- with certain restrictions...like you can't make copies and sell them, you can't charge admission to 500 people, and various other things.
But people are not going to buy into some further restrictions (see my post "Liquid Audio anyone?").
I think one reason DVD region coding is not an issue for most people in the USA is that most people will never encounter a DVD other than region 1 without specifically seeking it out. And then how many people other than me are looking for Orson Welles' MacBeth and David Lynch's Eraserhead? On the other hand, folks in region 2,3,4,5,6 are supposed to be denied access to a great many films. Wander around IMDB or search for your favorite Hollywood films on Amazon UK and see what you cannot buy.
In all the discussions about DRM, streaming audio, perceptual encoding, etc., I do not think I have read one mention of DRM in Liquid Audio. The sound quality is quite decent all-in-all. It uses watermarking to uniquely identify content. It uses various parameters to set number of plays, expiration, whether or not to allow burning to CD, and so forth. Yet hardly anyone is using it.... They seem to have the technical issues pretty well solved and reasonably balanced against consumer needs, but evidently not much market exists.
I bought a downloadable live show in LiquidAudio by the artist Momus from the CDNow site some time ago. Supposedly I can move this file from one computer to another, but have to supply a credit card number again. Frankly I do not recall, andit does not matter much for the following reason:
I was also able to capture it digitally, so that I could edit down some of the between-song quiet (the banter, btw, is quite worth keeping), and make it fit on an 80-minute CD-R. Now, I would be
quite leery about redistributing it, due to the claimed link between the watermark and my own self (via the credit card number). But, I was indeed able to alter this content to my preference, and copy it to a new medium (CD-DA on CD-R media).
The method of copying, btw, was to send the audio to a pro audio card, and record the monitor mix (pure digital) in a sound editing app.
Any way they try to stop this would also stop me from being able to record and mix my own, original creations, in which I hold the copyright. Somehow I doubt the RIAA would mind that very much. But, I do think that the very least a centralized government could do is to protect the ability to create intellectual property in the first place!
I suppose Liquid Audio could refuse to stream to a pro card. Then I would have to buy an ordinary low-performance sound card to hear this content. But then we have those pesky analog outputs to contend with. This is where the watermark comes in...
Plenty more to say on this topic, but another time.
I did complain loudly to my buddy whose online shop I bought it from. If I return it to him, he could get stuck with it, if an unforgiving distributor will not take back this German import CD. Also I feel rather stuck as a big fan of the group, if ZOMBA in Germany decides to manufacture a CD this way, and E.N. have nothing to say about it. Do we boycott an artist based on the actions of the large parent company of a small label?
Tell you what, though: I would be quite willing to buy and return copies that I find at a retailer like Tower Records, who has enough heft and clout with distributors -- not to mention better ability to absorb the cost of getting stuck with this "faulty" merchandise.
I bought the new CD from Einstürzende Neubauten (Berlin Babylon soundtrack). On the case it says, in German, that the CD cannot be played on computers. My DVD-ROM drive and PlexWriter act like it is a blank CD-R. My CD player does recognize it, with some effort -- it takes a few seconds of seeking before the CD will begin to play. The CD clearly "breaks" the CD standard, but not badly enough that a standalone unit can't plow through it.
I have not yet tried it in my standalone DVD player, or tried to send the digital output into a DAT deck or pro sound card.
You may notice -- unfortunately I do not have the URL -- that BMG backed off one of their protection schemes due to 2% difference in returns. It is quite possible that this latest scheme will cause just enough grief among consumers that other companies will back off as well.
The CD-R has replaced the "mixtape", and today's tech-savvy population is not likely to stand still for this for long. People have been able to take it for granted for about 20 years that you can compile tracks from different discs (CD, vinyl) onto the medium of choice (cassette, CD-R). The people who buy the most music also make the most "mixtapes", and turn other people on to new artists that way. I couldn't count the number of people I turned on to how many bands over the years this way. Napster just brought this type of "promotion" to a different scale. Unfortunately the media giants do not seem to appreciate the value of free publicity.
Science THINKS that these things are possible, but science also was sure that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat and if you got to the edge, you would fall off.
Galileo was persecuted for asserting that the Earth was round and not immobile at the center of the Universe. It took the Catholic Church 359 years, until 1992, to officially change its position regarding Galileo and his assertions. Science is interested in revisions and improvements in knowledge and understanding. Religion has a strong interest in consistency over the course of centuries, independent of so-called fact or reason.
This prints the command number in square brackets, the hostname, and the current working directory in parentheses. The directory only displays up to the last 3 subdirectories.
False, many artists don't have the time to promote themselves, nor would they do a good job of it (see: Prince/The Artist Formerly Known As) and even if they did, they would not make as much money as they would by allowing their labels to promote them since it would come out of pocket.
The money for promotion already comes out of the artists' pockets -- in any event it is money that will not go into the artists' pockets until the record company recoups. The difference is only that the artists don't have to front the money.
PC-Pine. Simple and elegant, but a UNIX mentality helps to configure and use it. Other than Outlook, an average user might cope better with something like Eudora.
Slashdot Mirror
How much you wanna bet the Royal Family doesn't give 2 shits how much it costs to run their website. Actually, the netblock changed, my guess is they changed webhosts.
To them, the difference between a low-end vhost and dedicated hosting on a 64-way Sun box would be they have to settle for the 2nd-best caviar -- about 3000 years from now.
Some label in Portugal, as I recall, was trying to get me to sign an exclusive 5-year contract, so that all music I might record would belong to them. I would have been able to release as many titles as I wanted, and they would front the money, but more like the way a bank fronts the money when you buy a house with a mortgage -- i.e. eventually all the costs would have to be repaid.
The label said they should own the copyrights so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassles... Right. The last CD I released was on an independent label who I still work with. That label in turn had a deal with a manufacturing and distribution company. Similar to what I described above. That manufacturing and distribution company in the end would not pay the label, but also did not force the issue of repayment of their costs. That company also wanted a clause in the contract originally so they would own all music I did during the same time period as the recordings on the CD. We objected. I retained all copyrights, and licensed to them the rights to manufacture and sell copies of the recordings for a limited period (a little over 5 years).
Many artists would be much better off with this type of arrangement. Others, I think, need the muscle of a major label who can push them into the Top 40 charts. (Not a hazard for what I do.)
The problem is that often music that has a strong appeal to a limited audience can fall through the cracks, and gets locked up indefinitely in a major label's vaults where nobody can hear it. The major label owns it, and another label that believes they do know what to do with it will have an uphill battle trying to license the recordings for reissue.
How does someone move from being a Microsoft VBitch to programming UNIX/Java?
Install Apache on Windows and integrate Tomcat and whatever database software you can. Get a good book on Java Servlets and JSP, and start programming...
You know, there is a major difference between:
The 2nd option is probably the one to aim for, but takes time and more than just technical aptitude. A former English teacher could already be quite good at 2/3rds of the Sr. Admin position, and then the tech skills just take time and an eagerness to learn.
It was my destiny.
I started out on CP/M S100 systems at home in Jr. H.S., Apple ][, and later Amiga. I was never that intersted in hardware, but always digging into how the OS worked and how it talked to the hardware. I programmed various old and now mostly useless languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, 6502/Z80/8086 assembler) and also different types of BASIC of course.
I went into college with almost a semester of CS credit hours, learned C and more advanced assembler on AT&T 3B2.
After a Liberal Arts degree, I bootstrapped myself into small-scale relational database (Paradox for DOS). Then got a job as the all-purpose tech guy at a local gov't organization that ran Sequent DYNIX/ptx (weird System V) and Informix. I was digging into that as deeply as I could -- porting software to DYNIX/ptx, and had to learn various skills trial-by-fire. Then they migrated to Solaris 2.5 and I expanded my knowledge into that.
With the Internet moving into the picture, and other factors, things became more complex, always something new to learn, and as I say I was sort of the all-purpose tech.
After a few years, I felt like programming. It helps a lot as an admin to know what it is like to be a programmer. So I did ASP web pages and more RDBMS (MS SQL Server) for a year. During that time I doubled as a sysadmin and general-purpose tech guru. For a while we ran a Sun E450 again, Solaris 7 this time, and a more advanced configuration that I built out-of-the-box.
Then changed jobs again to work as an admin for 4 Sun E450s with IBM WebSphere and Oracle 8i. I leveraged my experience playing with Tomcat (and I suppose IIS), and learned WebSphere inside and out.
Now I have to carry a Blackberry and cell phone, and do 24-hour production support for sites that get millions of hits a week.
Why would I want to pay $1000 for this device? I can get a DVD player for $150-$200 that plays MP3s on CD-R. In fact, I did. And it plays DVDs and VCDs as well. Could put together a P3 or Athlon system for the difference in price, have a general-purpose device...which among other things can create or download the files in the first place, and burn the CD-Rs to play in the DVD player. It makes no sense.
but the hacked-on copy protection made a 'notch' in the sound.
This was one proposal, but as far as I know, it was never used commercially. SCMS uses additional data in the digital output stream, but does not alter the audio itself.
Besides - when I see a commercial saying "OWN it on DVD or VHS today" - the whole concept of 'licensing' seems somewhat suspect...
They let you own a physical copy, with the restriction that you cannot exhibit it anywhere except a private home. No hospitals, oil rigs, airplanes, schools, etc.
I wonder whether, or how, an instructor could get full, proper permission to show a film to a class. For example, in a film studies course.
I completely agree with your point though. People are accustomed to the idea of owning a physical copy -- with certain restrictions...like you can't make copies and sell them, you can't charge admission to 500 people, and various other things.
But people are not going to buy into some further restrictions (see my post "Liquid Audio anyone?").
I think one reason DVD region coding is not an issue for most people in the USA is that most people will never encounter a DVD other than region 1 without specifically seeking it out. And then how many people other than me are looking for Orson Welles' MacBeth and David Lynch's Eraserhead? On the other hand, folks in region 2,3,4,5,6 are supposed to be denied access to a great many films. Wander around IMDB or search for your favorite Hollywood films on Amazon UK and see what you cannot buy.
In all the discussions about DRM, streaming audio, perceptual encoding, etc., I do not think I have read one mention of DRM in Liquid Audio. The sound quality is quite decent all-in-all. It uses watermarking to uniquely identify content. It uses various parameters to set number of plays, expiration, whether or not to allow burning to CD, and so forth. Yet hardly anyone is using it.... They seem to have the technical issues pretty well solved and reasonably balanced against consumer needs, but evidently not much market exists.
I bought a downloadable live show in LiquidAudio by the artist Momus from the CDNow site some time ago. Supposedly I can move this file from one computer to another, but have to supply a credit card number again. Frankly I do not recall, andit does not matter much for the following reason:
I was also able to capture it digitally, so that I could edit down some of the between-song quiet (the banter, btw, is quite worth keeping), and make it fit on an 80-minute CD-R. Now, I would be quite leery about redistributing it, due to the claimed link between the watermark and my own self (via the credit card number). But, I was indeed able to alter this content to my preference, and copy it to a new medium (CD-DA on CD-R media).
The method of copying, btw, was to send the audio to a pro audio card, and record the monitor mix (pure digital) in a sound editing app.
Any way they try to stop this would also stop me from being able to record and mix my own, original creations, in which I hold the copyright. Somehow I doubt the RIAA would mind that very much. But, I do think that the very least a centralized government could do is to protect the ability to create intellectual property in the first place!
I suppose Liquid Audio could refuse to stream to a pro card. Then I would have to buy an ordinary low-performance sound card to hear this content. But then we have those pesky analog outputs to contend with. This is where the watermark comes in...
Plenty more to say on this topic, but another time.
I did complain loudly to my buddy whose online shop I bought it from. If I return it to him, he could get stuck with it, if an unforgiving distributor will not take back this German import CD. Also I feel rather stuck as a big fan of the group, if ZOMBA in Germany decides to manufacture a CD this way, and E.N. have nothing to say about it. Do we boycott an artist based on the actions of the large parent company of a small label?
Tell you what, though: I would be quite willing to buy and return copies that I find at a retailer like Tower Records, who has enough heft and clout with distributors -- not to mention better ability to absorb the cost of getting stuck with this "faulty" merchandise.
I bought the new CD from Einstürzende Neubauten (Berlin Babylon soundtrack). On the case it says, in German, that the CD cannot be played on computers. My DVD-ROM drive and PlexWriter act like it is a blank CD-R. My CD player does recognize it, with some effort -- it takes a few seconds of seeking before the CD will begin to play. The CD clearly "breaks" the CD standard, but not badly enough that a standalone unit can't plow through it.
I have not yet tried it in my standalone DVD player, or tried to send the digital output into a DAT deck or pro sound card.
You may notice -- unfortunately I do not have the URL -- that BMG backed off one of their protection schemes due to 2% difference in returns. It is quite possible that this latest scheme will cause just enough grief among consumers that other companies will back off as well.
The CD-R has replaced the "mixtape", and today's tech-savvy population is not likely to stand still for this for long. People have been able to take it for granted for about 20 years that you can compile tracks from different discs (CD, vinyl) onto the medium of choice (cassette, CD-R). The people who buy the most music also make the most "mixtapes", and turn other people on to new artists that way. I couldn't count the number of people I turned on to how many bands over the years this way. Napster just brought this type of "promotion" to a different scale. Unfortunately the media giants do not seem to appreciate the value of free publicity.
Science THINKS that these things are possible, but science also was sure that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat and if you got to the edge, you would fall off.
Galileo was persecuted for asserting that the Earth was round and not immobile at the center of the Universe. It took the Catholic Church 359 years, until 1992, to officially change its position regarding Galileo and his assertions. Science is interested in revisions and improvements in knowledge and understanding. Religion has a strong interest in consistency over the course of centuries, independent of so-called fact or reason.
MCH=$(hostname)
PS1='[\!]${MCH}(${PWD#/*/*/*/})# '
This prints the command number in square brackets, the hostname, and the current working directory in parentheses. The directory only displays up to the last 3 subdirectories.
[42]dbs01(8.1.5/admin/XYZSTAGE)# pwd[43]dbs01(8.1.5/admin/XYZSTAGE)# cd
[44]dbs01(8.1.5/admin)#
Makes it easy to know which system and directory you are in, if you administer several systems (and numerous Oracle databases).
False, many artists don't have the time to promote themselves, nor would they do a good job of it (see: Prince/The Artist Formerly Known As) and even if they did, they would not make as much money as they would by allowing their labels to promote them since it would come out of pocket.
The money for promotion already comes out of the artists' pockets -- in any event it is money that will not go into the artists' pockets until the record company recoups. The difference is only that the artists don't have to front the money.
PC-Pine. Simple and elegant, but a UNIX mentality helps to configure and use it. Other than Outlook, an average user might cope better with something like Eudora.