European barcodes are indeed different from US ones. For example, US records will have a 12-digit UPC number, whereas European records will frequently have a a 13-digit EAN code. You can actually get several different length codes within both UPC (American) and EAN (European) systems. See e-centre for more info on EAN codes.
Of course, this does mean that only American products contain the number of the beast. Make of that what you will.
I run a tiny bedroom indie record label, partially to release stuff by my own band (moonkat) but also to release stuff by other bands I like. The figures in the article, while more at the high-level end of the spectrum, are entirely plausible. So, for example, no-one makes any money out of selling singles - they cost about £1 to make, I sell them to the distributor at £1.23 and all of that 23p plus more besides gets spent on publicity.
As far as albums go, yes, I could make money because I sell them to the distributor at £5, but the promotion costs are also higher, and the album has to pay for all the money I lost on the singles. Besides which, they may turn out not to be popular at all, in which case I lose all the money I spent. The band themselves have already made more money than I will - through radioplay royalties.
So far, since starting a record label 6 months ago with £10000, I have made a loss of £6000, and a further £2000 is in the form of advances to bands (so they could buy equipment) which I will may well never recoup unless they suddenly become successful.
I don't advise anyone to start a record label unless they enjoy feeling like a glorified secretary to (often ungrateful) bands.
I wonder how this will shift the balance of power between the WAP Forum and the W3C over markup languages? They both have specs in this area: the WAP Forum with WML (Wireless Markup Language) and the W3C with XHTML Basic. (XHTML Basic is part of the modularisation effort of XHTML).
One thing people should be careful of is deciding that the W3C is morally superior - both the W3C and the WAP Forum are just associations of big companies.
Licensing isn't mentioned on the site because it hasn't yet been fixed. It is currently not open-source, although X-Tract is and will remain free for non-commercial use. Other aspects of licensing very much depend on how we sell XML Script server apps to commercial companies, and that's yet to be decided.
As to the _data file="http://...", that's a bug - could you please send this to support@xmlscript.org so we can get to the bottom of it?
As someone mentioned earlier, XSLT can often be a real pain to work with, owing to its insistence on being "side-effect free" (so variables aren't really variable, for a start) and its declarative syntax. An alternative which still has the advantage of being written in XML is "XML Script": XML Script homepage (Note that the version on the site is XML Script 1.0 - v1.1 will be out sometime this week, we reckon)
The thing about `Doom-players' or whatever being responsible for these killings is interesting, cos if you then go to a music website (e.g. www.nme.com) you find the implication that these people were rock music fans, and/that's/ why they did it. It seems that `conventional' America wants to blame any and every aspect of `alternative' (which, lets face it, isn't very alternative. How many people listen to rock music and play Doom?) for this tragedy.
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European barcodes are indeed different from US ones. For example, US records will have a 12-digit UPC number, whereas European records will frequently have a a 13-digit EAN code. You can actually get several different length codes within both UPC (American) and EAN (European) systems. See e-centre for more info on EAN codes. Of course, this does mean that only American products contain the number of the beast. Make of that what you will.
I run a tiny bedroom indie record label, partially to release stuff by my own band (moonkat) but also to release stuff by other bands I like. The figures in the article, while more at the high-level end of the spectrum, are entirely plausible. So, for example, no-one makes any money out of selling singles - they cost about £1 to make, I sell them to the distributor at £1.23 and all of that 23p plus more besides gets spent on publicity.
As far as albums go, yes, I could make money because I sell them to the distributor at £5, but the promotion costs are also higher, and the album has to pay for all the money I lost on the singles. Besides which, they may turn out not to be popular at all, in which case I lose all the money I spent. The band themselves have already made more money than I will - through radioplay royalties.
So far, since starting a record label 6 months ago with £10000, I have made a loss of £6000, and a further £2000 is in the form of advances to bands (so they could buy equipment) which I will may well never recoup unless they suddenly become successful.
I don't advise anyone to start a record label unless they enjoy feeling like a glorified secretary to (often ungrateful) bands.
I wonder how this will shift the balance of power between the WAP Forum and the W3C over markup languages? They both have specs in this area: the WAP Forum with WML (Wireless Markup Language) and the W3C with XHTML Basic. (XHTML Basic is part of the modularisation effort of XHTML).
One thing people should be careful of is deciding that the W3C is morally superior - both the W3C and the WAP Forum are just associations of big companies.
Licensing isn't mentioned on the site because it hasn't yet been fixed. It is currently not open-source, although X-Tract is and will remain free for non-commercial use. Other aspects of licensing very much depend on how we sell XML Script server apps to commercial companies, and that's yet to be decided.
As to the _data file="http://...", that's a bug - could you please send this to support@xmlscript.org so we can get to the bottom of it?
As someone mentioned earlier, XSLT can often be a real pain to work with, owing to its insistence on being "side-effect free" (so variables aren't really variable, for a start) and its declarative syntax. An alternative which still has the advantage of being written in XML is "XML Script": XML Script homepage (Note that the version on the site is XML Script 1.0 - v1.1 will be out sometime this week, we reckon)
The thing about `Doom-players' or whatever being responsible for these killings is interesting, cos if you then go to a music website (e.g. www.nme.com) you find the implication that these people were rock music fans, and /that's/ why they did it. It seems that `conventional' America wants to blame any and every aspect of `alternative' (which, lets face it, isn't very alternative. How many people listen to rock music and play Doom?) for this tragedy.