Dead Can Dance were on 4AD, not Rykodisc. Their CDs were distributed by Warner in the US, Shock in Australia, and by 4AD themselves in the UK.
No idea what 4AD will be doing, but they seem like a pretty cool label... they're run by a guy who actually does music, rather than manufacturers of gadgets or bottlers of drinks.
The story said that the main character will look "like Brad Pitt". If this is successful, I wonder whether either Pitt or some future image-oriented actor will consider doing what the Princess Diana trust is now; i.e., having a 3D model made from photographs of their face and patented, so that they can sue those who replicate their image.
If the Diana people get away this, how long until we have entire business specialising in this process in one shop, from digitisation and modelling to patent submission?
I remember an ad from ages ago for a device which supposedly would load C64 games in 8 seconds or something, from a CD. Supposedly you attached the CD player to the C64 with a special cable of some sort.
Anyone know how that may have worked? My suspicion would be an interface from the digital output of a CD player to the C64's bus, writing directly to its RAM. Though most CD players didn't have digital outputs, IIRC.
Does this mean that there will be a civilisation after 2,000, and that angry mobs won't string all programmers up by their entrails in the centres of looted, burned-out cities?
Don't CD-Rs have a life expectancy somewhere in the same ballpark as NASA's tapes? I heard that they start to suffer bitrot as the dye fades/decays.
Come to think of it, is there any high-capacity digital medium that could be reasonably expected to securely hold its data for centuries (as printed text on paper lasts)?
As much as you can slander a plant... which is what DuPont and Hearst did to hemp in the 1930s. The result was marijuana prohibition, which is still in force.
Record companies are here to stay, but it would be nice if they were knocked down a notch, and didn't get to make quite such an extortionate killing. Or if the balance was shifted to smaller indie labels who cared about their music as something more than a cash crop. Perhaps the Internet and decentralisation will do this.
(At least for non-lowest-common-denominator tastes. I'd be perfectly happy for the Big 5 to maintain a monopoly on stuff like Mariah Carey, Aerosmith and all the Spice Girls/Boyz II Men clones.)
Do you believe that the current record industry business model will be still dominant in, say, 20 years' time? 50?
I have seen a comment from some industry figure that they intend to phase out CDs in a decade or two, replacing them with DVD Audio. DVD Audio will offer superior sound quality. More importantly, it will offer stronger IP protection, including watermarking and geographic zoning. Needless to say, making MP3s of a DVD will be a lot harder.
Just do it yourself. After all, you'll have about an order of magnitude more income from CD sales.
Recording companies provide startup capital. But in return, they get ownership of the recordings, and in most cases the music and the band itself, and the artists get a pittance. Short-term convenience in return for long-term loss.
Perhaps with the Net and decentralisation, record companies will finally be brought to heel to the laws of the market, and provide services without skimming extortionate profits unchallenged. Perhaps.
Given that the music industry offers most artists something like 15c from each CD sold, and then claims copyright/trademark rights to everything, often down to the name/lineup of the band itself, artists don't get much out of it.
Your average streetwalker gets more from her pimp per trick than your average musical artist gets from their record company per CD sale.
The Big 5 oligopolists (Time Warner, EMI, Seagram, BMG and Sony) are way overdue for a killer asteroid and a radical change of their environment. Unfortunately, they have money, and thus the ears of those who control guns and prisons.
It is conceivable that there would be an option to upgrade one's CPU; you'd have to first "de-authorise" your software so that it no longer runs on the old CPU, change CPUs and "re-authorise" it.
On the Mac there is such a scheme, where authorisation is done on a per-hard-disk basis, using a copy-protected floppy. (Not that I approve of it; I'd rather it wasn't there, but at least it allows customers to upgrade their machines.)
If software becomes reliant on a single random-number generator, what's to stop the NSA from instructing Intel to modify it so that the numbers have certain characteristics, difficult to detect by the unknowing but useful to those in the know? It's in Intel's best interest to be in the NSA's good books (as with any corporation). And if stuff like PGP depends on the random number generator, all of a sudden the NSA's brute-force crackers can be optimised to more quickly crack it.
Why should the music industry give a tuppenny stuff whether they piss off fans. Fans are just cattle. Where are they going to go for music? Sony, EMI, BMG, Seagram or Time Warner. A few extremists may boogie down to KFMF S3Ms and the Free Software Song, but if you like any band or artist who's part of popular culture, you have to tithe to The Man, bend over and take it nicely. And The Man has no incentive to use lubrication.
We can't read minds yet, much less "inject" thoughts into somebody's head. We've got a long way to go before we can make sense out of anything the brain does...
The Jeffersonian model of copyright was never intended as a property right. It is gradually being turned into one by powerful corporate IP interests, bent on privatising culture. If this is left unchecked, it will lead to in perpetua copyrights, the IP equivalent of land titles. The very fact that copyrights expire at all goes against the mentality of the IP barons, who have money enough to bribe politicians and brainwash the public.
One reason Sony have for suing: there is probably no way a software emulator running on generic hardware can check for PlayStation copy protection (which consists of a low-level checksum anomaly). Even if there is, patching it to ignore protection/zoning would be easier than modchipping a PSX (especially after the WIPO act when the manufacture and sale of anti-protection hardware becomes restricted). Sony are obliged to protect the integrity of their copy protection and copyright-zoning scheme, which would ultimately affect licensing revenues and the willingness of IP owners to support the PSX format (recall how Hollywood threatened to boycott DVD unless draconian forms of copy protection were implemented).
The new purple iMac looks rather nice, as do the new G3 cases...
There is a paucity of good aesthetic design in computer cases; too often you get either bland beige office furniture, or cheesy scifi plastic. I'd like to see some classic styles; how about an Art Deco Bakelite case; or perhaps curvy orange-red plastic for that swingin'-60s space-age bachelor pad look?
Slashdot Mirror
...and no ReBirth either... doesn't look like I'll be able to give up my MacOS-based setup anytime soon, unfortunately...
Dead Can Dance were on 4AD, not Rykodisc. Their CDs were distributed by Warner in the US, Shock in Australia, and by 4AD themselves in the UK.
No idea what 4AD will be doing, but they seem like a pretty cool label... they're run by a guy who actually does music, rather than manufacturers of gadgets or bottlers of drinks.
The story said that the main character will look "like Brad Pitt". If this is successful, I wonder whether either Pitt or some future image-oriented actor will consider doing what the Princess Diana trust is now; i.e., having a 3D model made from photographs of their face and patented, so that they can sue those who replicate their image.
If the Diana people get away this, how long until we have entire business specialising in this process in one shop, from digitisation and modelling to patent submission?
The street finds its own uses for things.
I remember an ad from ages ago for a device which supposedly would load C64 games in 8 seconds or something, from a CD. Supposedly you attached the CD player to the C64 with a special cable of some sort.
Anyone know how that may have worked? My suspicion would be an interface from the digital output of a CD player to the C64's bus, writing directly to its RAM. Though most CD players didn't have digital outputs, IIRC.
I wonder whether this will be available as an upgrade for owners of G3 Power Macintoshes.
I wouldn't mind a PCI card that gave me USB and FireWire either...
Does this mean that there will be a civilisation after 2,000, and that angry mobs won't string all programmers up by their entrails in the centres of looted, burned-out cities?
Don't CD-Rs have a life expectancy somewhere in the same ballpark as NASA's tapes? I heard that they start to suffer bitrot as the dye fades/decays.
Come to think of it, is there any high-capacity digital medium that could be reasonably expected to securely hold its data for centuries (as printed text on paper lasts)?
Probably the same people who in days of yore referred to BSD as "Berklix". (See the Jargon File.)
Is Bell Canada an AT&T offshoot, or a branch of the Canadian government?
Just wondering...
Wouldn't the classic Canadian response be a tax on Internet connections to subsidise postal mail or something like that?
Mass produced identical CDs will eventually be phased out, leaving all media
watermarked with its owners.
I hope not. That would eliminate the trade in second-hand CDs, and fill the landfills with the remains of unwanted CDs.
Ummm, can you slander a format?
As much as you can slander a plant... which is what DuPont and Hearst did to hemp in the 1930s. The result was marijuana prohibition, which is still in force.
Record companies are here to stay, but it would be nice if they were knocked down a notch, and didn't get to make quite such an extortionate killing. Or if the balance was shifted to smaller indie labels who cared about their music as something more than a cash crop. Perhaps the Internet and decentralisation will do this.
(At least for non-lowest-common-denominator tastes. I'd be perfectly happy for the Big 5 to maintain a monopoly on stuff like Mariah Carey, Aerosmith and all the Spice Girls/Boyz II Men clones.)
Do you believe that the current record industry business model will be still dominant in, say, 20 years' time? 50?
I have seen a comment from some industry figure that they intend to phase out CDs in a decade or two, replacing them with DVD Audio. DVD Audio will offer superior sound quality. More importantly, it will offer stronger IP protection, including watermarking and geographic zoning. Needless to say, making MP3s of a DVD will be a lot harder.
Just do it yourself. After all, you'll have about an order of magnitude more income from CD sales.
Recording companies provide startup capital. But in return, they get ownership of the recordings, and in most cases the music and the band itself, and the artists get a pittance. Short-term convenience in return for long-term loss.
Perhaps with the Net and decentralisation, record companies will finally be brought to heel to the laws of the market, and provide services without skimming extortionate profits unchallenged. Perhaps.
Given that the music industry offers most artists something like 15c from each CD sold, and then claims copyright/trademark rights to everything, often down to the name/lineup of the band itself, artists don't get much out of it.
Your average streetwalker gets more from her pimp per trick than your average musical artist gets from their record company per CD sale.
The Big 5 oligopolists (Time Warner, EMI, Seagram, BMG and Sony) are way overdue for a killer asteroid and a radical change of their environment. Unfortunately, they have money, and thus the ears of those who control guns and prisons.
It is conceivable that there would be an option to upgrade one's CPU; you'd have to first "de-authorise" your software so that it no longer runs on the old CPU, change CPUs and "re-authorise" it.
On the Mac there is such a scheme, where authorisation is done on a per-hard-disk basis, using a copy-protected floppy. (Not that I approve of it; I'd rather it wasn't there, but at least it allows customers to upgrade their machines.)
</DEVIL'S-ADVOCATE>
If software becomes reliant on a single random-number generator, what's to stop the NSA from instructing Intel to modify it so that the numbers have certain characteristics, difficult to detect by the unknowing but useful to those in the know? It's in Intel's best interest to be in the NSA's good books (as with any corporation). And if stuff like PGP depends on the random number generator, all of a sudden the NSA's brute-force crackers can be optimised to more quickly crack it.
Why should the music industry give a tuppenny stuff whether they piss off fans. Fans are just cattle. Where are they going to go for music? Sony, EMI, BMG, Seagram or Time Warner. A few extremists may boogie down to KFMF S3Ms and the Free Software Song, but if you like any band or artist who's part of popular culture, you have to tithe to The Man, bend over and take it nicely. And The Man has no incentive to use lubrication.
I suppose the DVD is Zone 1 only... any idea when (if ever) a Zone 4 disc will come out?
Not that I have a DVD... there's about a dozen titles available in Australia, and most of them aren't worth seeing. Zoning sucks.
We can't read minds yet, much less "inject" thoughts into somebody's head. We've
got a long way to go before we can make sense out of anything the brain does...
Tell that to
Russ Wuertz.
The Jeffersonian model of copyright was never intended as a property right. It is gradually being turned into one by powerful corporate IP interests, bent on privatising culture. If this is left unchecked, it will lead to in perpetua copyrights, the IP equivalent of land titles. The very fact that copyrights expire at all goes against the mentality of the IP barons, who have money enough to bribe politicians and brainwash the public.
One reason Sony have for suing: there is probably no way a software emulator running on generic hardware can check for PlayStation copy protection (which consists of a low-level checksum anomaly). Even if there is, patching it to ignore protection/zoning would be easier than modchipping a PSX (especially after the WIPO act when the manufacture and sale of anti-protection hardware becomes restricted). Sony are obliged to protect the integrity of their copy protection and copyright-zoning scheme, which would ultimately affect licensing revenues and the willingness of IP owners to support the PSX format (recall how Hollywood threatened to boycott DVD unless draconian forms of copy protection were implemented).
Wasn't Beowulf Old (pre-Norman) English?
The new purple iMac looks rather nice, as do the new G3 cases...
There is a paucity of good aesthetic design in computer cases; too often you get either bland beige office furniture, or cheesy scifi plastic. I'd like to see some classic styles; how about an Art Deco Bakelite case; or perhaps curvy orange-red plastic for that swingin'-60s space-age bachelor pad look?