If you have iTunes check out Musicmobs. You can upload your XML file or sync your iTunes stats via an open source Cocoa application called Mobster.
It will give you a profile of what you listen to, suggest new music, show you people that have similar tastes as you, and show you related artists for all of your bands.
It's growing fast so get in now to get a low userid:)
You can check out my site (www.musicmobs.com for those with sigs turned off). There's a lot of RIAA stuff on there, but the entire site is constructed out of people's playlists, so really there should be any number of non RIAA bands as well (and there are). Just find a major label band that you'd like to find an indie alternative for, and start digging deeper through the related artists till you find something previously unheard of.
When someone tries to convince you of something they usually come at it with a million little assumptions in their head about what your arguments are going to be and what their counters are. The best way to totally de-rail someone trying to convince you of something is, to use their own assumptions against them. Destroy all the preconceptions they have and they'll be so confused that you're likely to gain the upper hand.
sales enders I've used:
"Don't you want to save money?" "No, I'm not really concerned with my budget."
"Please vote for candidate X." "I don't believe in voting." "Everyone should vote!" "Oh yeah, tell me why."
"Who makes the decisions you or your girlfriend?" "I let her decide every single aspect of my life. I'm basically just a pathetic sycophant."
Try them out, at least it will spice things up a bit!
If you want to see the social network idea extended to music, I suggest you check out my site Musicmobs. It links users together not only by the music they listen to, but also creating a web of "favorite users".
My goal is to make a place where people can not only find new music, but learn more about the music that they already listen to.
It will be interesting to see how MS fares against Apple in this market. It's all pretty much going to come down to execution. While MS has a history of out executing Apple in the business arena, I really don't think they can touch them when it comes to something more "artistic" like music.
One thing Microsoft could do (and I hope they do), is pay a commission to affiliates that make sales through their store. It would be nice if they opened it up with WebServices, and acted more as a music supply platform than the itms. Of course as long as they stick with wma they're pretty much out of the game.
I don't wear my watch anymore since I find it more discrete to just keep a cell phone/pda in my pocket and whip it out when I need to know what time it is.
I think the watch form factor was just fine when time was the only portable function. Once you start adding other features it really pays to have more interface options.
Wow, score one for the good guys! If you want to take your itms experience to the next level, I suggest checking out musicmobs (such shamless self promotion). Seriously though, it's pretty cool.
One thing I'm doing on Musicmobs is highlighting artist names in a big block of text when the artist matches one that you listen to (if you are logged in). The effect is, that when you look at someone's page you can pretty much tell right away if they listen to the same music as you.
You can also get a quick idea of how similar their taste is by the position of the color in the block. It's a good way to display multiple pieces of relevant information in the same spot when you are tight on gui real estate.
I'm hoping that people are going to use my site to find new bands to buy with their free songs. Not in the mood to download more Radiohead? Click on Radiohead on Musicmobs and find a more independent artist that people that like Radiohead also like. Of course, there's no guarantee that what you are looking for will be in the iTunes store.
Multiply the hourly rate by 1000 and you'll have ~your salary. $60 an hour would only equate to around $60,000 per year. Remember, you only run between 45-60% utilization.
Like I said, you need to be in good with your upper management. Chances are that any manager of developers isn't held in high regard by the upper management anyway since they are simply "line managers" (since developers are resources and not employees). They are probably looking for a reason to toss the dev manager anyway if they had to go through the trouble of asking the developers if there are any problems. That sounds like desperation if I've ever heard it.
If you are not politically deft enough to have a preexisting relationship with the people above your management then I'd say that you should steer clear of any major criticism. If you do have a relationship with the upper crust, then by all means try to blast your immediate manager as much as possible. Any chance you have "outside" the office to talk to the higher ups should be used to springboard yourself up the ladder. That's how they do it, that's how you should do it.
I think that it was time to retire the current incarnation of Mindstorms anyway. It would be nice if the next gen. robot toy featured: wireless (802.11x or cell) a linux based os (of course) more sophisticated moving parts cooler ai modules...
I definitely think that there is a market out there for such a product.
Does anyone know if they provide some sort of access to the listening stats ala iTunes xml files? It would be nice to have so third parties could tie into the app.
I don't know much about clustering, but maybe someone can fill me in. Would it be possible to run something like Postgres on a cluster of XServes? Would the clustering be transparent at the application level, so that any program could take advantage of the clustered resources or would specific distributed algorithm apps need to be written?
I'm hoping that I could just get a stack of XServes and run an OSS db on it for free (as in no extra effort required), but I'm guessing that's not the way it works.
You could always fill up your iPod by using my site. I link directly to the itunes music store, and you can browse music based on what you currently listen to. Sorry for the shameless self promotion, but what the heck.
It'll be nice when things like this become ubiquitous and someone starts manufacturing WiFi "cell" phones that use Vonnage or some such thing.
It's been my experience that iChat has near cell sound quality, so having a small hardware iChat (or whatever you use) client with 802.11b access would be pretty sweet.
Not necessarily. Apple has already opened up their store for 3rd party searches (to some extent). I think they could really cash in as a back-end supply for specialized "search" sites. It's nice that they provide samples too, kind of encourages people to link to them even though they don't have a referral program.
Slashdot Mirror
People do listen to/buy a lot of older stuff. Actually they mostly listen to Radiohead. Look here or here.
No, since it doesn't know where you get your music from. For all Musicmobs knows you've ripped your whole cd collection.
Ok, time for some shameless self promotion.
:)
If you have iTunes check out Musicmobs. You can upload your XML file or sync your iTunes stats via an open source Cocoa application called Mobster.
It will give you a profile of what you listen to, suggest new music, show you people that have similar tastes as you, and show you related artists for all of your bands.
It's growing fast so get in now to get a low userid
You can check out my site (www.musicmobs.com for those with sigs turned off). There's a lot of RIAA stuff on there, but the entire site is constructed out of people's playlists, so really there should be any number of non RIAA bands as well (and there are). Just find a major label band that you'd like to find an indie alternative for, and start digging deeper through the related artists till you find something previously unheard of.
You'll start listening to stuff you would have never thought you would.
When someone tries to convince you of something they usually come at it with a million little assumptions in their head about what your arguments are going to be and what their counters are. The best way to totally de-rail someone trying to convince you of something is, to use their own assumptions against them. Destroy all the preconceptions they have and they'll be so confused that you're likely to gain the upper hand.
sales enders I've used:
"Don't you want to save money?"
"No, I'm not really concerned with my budget."
"Please vote for candidate X."
"I don't believe in voting."
"Everyone should vote!"
"Oh yeah, tell me why."
"Who makes the decisions you or your girlfriend?"
"I let her decide every single aspect of my life. I'm basically just a pathetic sycophant."
Try them out, at least it will spice things up a bit!
I'm just about to leave my apartment too. Hopefully, I'll still have a site when I get back!
If you want to see the social network idea extended to music, I suggest you check out my site Musicmobs. It links users together not only by the music they listen to, but also creating a web of "favorite users".
My goal is to make a place where people can not only find new music, but learn more about the music that they already listen to.
It will be interesting to see how MS fares against Apple in this market. It's all pretty much going to come down to execution. While MS has a history of out executing Apple in the business arena, I really don't think they can touch them when it comes to something more "artistic" like music.
One thing Microsoft could do (and I hope they do), is pay a commission to affiliates that make sales through their store. It would be nice if they opened it up with WebServices, and acted more as a music supply platform than the itms. Of course as long as they stick with wma they're pretty much out of the game.
I don't wear my watch anymore since I find it more discrete to just keep a cell phone/pda in my pocket and whip it out when I need to know what time it is.
I think the watch form factor was just fine when time was the only portable function. Once you start adding other features it really pays to have more interface options.
Wow, score one for the good guys! If you want to take your itms experience to the next level, I suggest checking out musicmobs (such shamless self promotion). Seriously though, it's pretty cool.
TradeWars was the best.
I used to skip straight to the decision pages in the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You could finish a whole book in like 2 minutes.
One thing I'm doing on Musicmobs is highlighting artist names in a big block of text when the artist matches one that you listen to (if you are logged in). The effect is, that when you look at someone's page you can pretty much tell right away if they listen to the same music as you.
You can also get a quick idea of how similar their taste is by the position of the color in the block. It's a good way to display multiple pieces of relevant information in the same spot when you are tight on gui real estate.
I'm hoping that people are going to use my site to find new bands to buy with their free songs. Not in the mood to download more Radiohead? Click on Radiohead on Musicmobs and find a more independent artist that people that like Radiohead also like. Of course, there's no guarantee that what you are looking for will be in the iTunes store.
Multiply the hourly rate by 1000 and you'll have ~your salary. $60 an hour would only equate to around $60,000 per year. Remember, you only run between 45-60% utilization.
I thought about calling my site mobster but decided against it. Even as a name for a client app, it's just a bit too much.
Like I said, you need to be in good with your upper management. Chances are that any manager of developers isn't held in high regard by the upper management anyway since they are simply "line managers" (since developers are resources and not employees). They are probably looking for a reason to toss the dev manager anyway if they had to go through the trouble of asking the developers if there are any problems. That sounds like desperation if I've ever heard it.
If you are not politically deft enough to have a preexisting relationship with the people above your management then I'd say that you should steer clear of any major criticism. If you do have a relationship with the upper crust, then by all means try to blast your immediate manager as much as possible. Any chance you have "outside" the office to talk to the higher ups should be used to springboard yourself up the ladder. That's how they do it, that's how you should do it.
I think that it was time to retire the current incarnation of Mindstorms anyway. It would be nice if the next gen. robot toy featured:
wireless (802.11x or cell)
a linux based os (of course)
more sophisticated moving parts
cooler ai modules...
I definitely think that there is a market out there for such a product.
Does anyone know if they provide some sort of access to the listening stats ala iTunes xml files? It would be nice to have so third parties could tie into the app.
I don't know much about clustering, but maybe someone can fill me in. Would it be possible to run something like Postgres on a cluster of XServes? Would the clustering be transparent at the application level, so that any program could take advantage of the clustered resources or would specific distributed algorithm apps need to be written?
I'm hoping that I could just get a stack of XServes and run an OSS db on it for free (as in no extra effort required), but I'm guessing that's not the way it works.
You could always fill up your iPod by using my site. I link directly to the itunes music store, and you can browse music based on what you currently listen to. Sorry for the shameless self promotion, but what the heck.
Maybe now execs will start to see the true value of keeping their high tech centers located in stable political environments.
It'll be nice when things like this become ubiquitous and someone starts manufacturing WiFi "cell" phones that use Vonnage or some such thing.
It's been my experience that iChat has near cell sound quality, so having a small hardware iChat (or whatever you use) client with 802.11b access would be pretty sweet.
Not necessarily. Apple has already opened up their store for 3rd party searches (to some extent). I think they could really cash in as a back-end supply for specialized "search" sites. It's nice that they provide samples too, kind of encourages people to link to them even though they don't have a referral program.