>I'm not suggesting that it's as hard to make an album as it is to write a book
This would depend on the book or alblum. Lets compare a Stephen King book to Sgt. Pepper's lonely heart's club. I bet it was harder to make the alblum.
I am working on an alblum now. It sometimes takes over a year of hard work to produce an alblum from concept to finish. Books also can take over a year. (Witness the Oxford English Dictionary)
Anything worth while does. it's not just the recording process that makes the artistic work, it's writing lyrics, then the music, then arranging it, then filling it out with other instruments, producing the song (dealing with all of the people psychologically to get the best out of everyone, and "making it happen"), mixing it, reararranging, pre-master mixing, then mastering. Lets not forget about the risk and monetary investment.
All of this takes time, creativity, other people's time and creativity, and substantial monetary investment.
I think any worthwhile creative work which someone works on for a year and finishes should have both a nominal price, and some sort of copy protection.
It is a tangible good that has value. If a book were a PDF would that make it equally tangible to an MP3? Any more valuable? The MP3 actually has more information in it. Look at the file size! A five minute uncompressed 24/96 wave would undoubtably contain more information than an Oxford Dictionary PDF.
A hardbound book copy costs a lot more to produce than an mp3 copy. There's paper, leather cover, binding, the rent on the machines that printed it, transport, storage, trucking, editing, proofreading, sometimes illustration and font work. $40 for this is justifiable, if the binding is high quality. Charging $10 for the PDF isn't. That PDF costs nothing to produce, in terms of logistics and distribution.
I don't think there is a hard and fast rule about how much work a book or alblum takes. In fact the value doesn't reflect the amount of work put into it. They aren't even related. An idiot could take his entire lifetime to write a book but it wouldn't be more "valuable" than a When the Levee Breaks mp3, at least not to me.
I think.39 per mp3 is a fair deal. Think about bang for the buck. If you listen to it 20 times, that's almost 2 hours of entertainment for $.39.
But it should have some serious copy protection. You have to pay for the bandwidth at both ends, the artist and people that paid for the artist to record also need to get paid.
Hopefully not Larry Flint or FCC Chairman Powell. Hopefully not the pope.
It's anything you would rather not have your kids find on the internet. Porn, gore, real images of death, gynecological or urological discussions, the anarchist's cookbook. I think this is about protecting kids, they just want to do it a stupid way.
There needs to be a mechanism for parents to control what their kids see, other than unplugging the network cable or forcing people to change their business names.
How about independantly maintained or government maintained child safety blacklists, broken down by age range? If they want to do something real they'll have to put some work into it.
Copyright infringement is already at a federal level. The FBI warning is merely informing that you are violating copyright if you copy the stuff, and saying "we will get you if you pirate this".
Copyright is a federally assured protection, therefore is federal by default, with or without the FBI warning. That little c on the back cover is all that is legally required. The rest of us have to pay. The pirates just cut out the annoying delay and FBI message.
That's why copyright is far superiour to the "mail it to yourself" trick for music protection. If you only mail it to yourself you only have federal proof that you had the recording on a given date, meaning it is good enough for evidence.
Since you aren't protected by a copyright certificate, you need to fight the court battles in all 50 states to sue for infringement. Basically you are almost as screwed as doing nothing at all.... You are protected, but do you have the money for that kind of fight? Most mail it to yourselfer's don't.
Copyright doesn't matter anyway, since it all ends up somewhere on line anyway and not even the federal gov can really kill it.
This sucks because we might be up for a possible signing deal soon. Even if I get signed, I won't ever make anything : ( Luckily I am not in it for the money.
"Unsafe at any speed" Ralph Nader. I think they left one out.
Though, my brother restores them, we think they got a bad rap. For their time they were very advanced... rear engine, air cooled, and way fast with a turbo charged 6(spyder). Like a VW beetle on steroids.
we have driven them at 100+ MPH on a track, and they seemed as safe or safer than other cars of the period.
Very few of the cars on this list have had a book devoted to their horrible safety, wrong or right.
> You're snobbish hatred of a language that's really Not That Bad is indcative of the fact that you are not "A Real Programmer".
Right on! I don't like vb because I don't like windows. However, if my boss hands me a VB project I will do it without complaint and do the best I can to make VB do what the spec says it should.
Your language should be determined by the customer, and available equipment. I always try to steer clear of VB, but if the dept has an SQL server they want to talk to from an IIS box, you don't want to go trying to use php-cgi and odbc for the job. ADO and asp makes more sense.
Learn as many languages as you can and get good at all of them. You will probably need all of them eventually, if you want to keep working; )
Limiting yourself to one, or a family of languages related to a high dollar product means you might find it hard to get a job one day.
My dad taught me to always use the right tool for the job. He was referring to a 10mm socket. Same thing applies to languages.
Need a free CMS? Zope. Learn python. Need an all IBM app server? Websphere. Learn java. MS Shop?.Nut Learn C#
Hopefully you get what I am saying. Most companies have narrow set of technologies they allow and support. You need to be able to adapt when times are bad and jobs get scarce.
IMHO it helps enforce coding consistency. Very helpful when writing and debugging code. If you wrote a program using hungarian notation and say use: String arrMyArray[5];//my java is rusty
It is easier if case sensitivity won't let the lazy type arrmyarray[x]. It almost disappears in the text. When debugging and examining code, consistent variable names help you pick stuff out of the fray, visually, easier.
I am a huge fan of languages such as C and java which are fast, strongly typed, and rigidly enforce consistency in referencing variables.
Slop=hard to maintain.
Imagine reading a book where the case is all whacked. It wouldn't be as easy.
/. does wonders for the servers swimming in it's info stream... It can reduce an underpowered server to froth in minutes.
I can almost hear the silent cries for help and see the avg load meter being clipped; I can see the 500 errors, just before the ping replies "host unreachable"... ohhhh the humanity.
hello all,
Just a thought.
Maybe it is a good idea to befriend a reporter before engaging in these types of activities. Let the reporter do the talking and act as a technical advisor, protected by journalistic ethics.
Agreed, this sucks, but maybe it is the way to go.
If you are hungry for the attention yourself, become employed at a magazine or newspaper as a volunteer reporter. They will print the story, and you will get your recognition, you just won't get paid for it.
l8,
neilio
Re:Vertical markets with nice profit margins
on
Compaq Shifts Focus
·
· Score: 1
Check out http://bjbrew.org/cpq/ci_linux/index.htm
Here is one of their newer initiatives. The software is free... they are opening the source on a lot of stuff. They will make their money making the stuff work: )
New business paradigm. Give the software away, but make it so difficult to use that it takes the author to make it work.
I like it becuase it opens quite a few doors. My client can now afford a clustering solution for themselves (since the software is free), and I can make money on implementing solutions that were previously out of reach of my clients. I LOVE YOU COMPAQ!!!
PS, Compaq will never be out of the hardware business. They are only shifting focus, not dropping products.
L8,
neilio
I have heard from several sources that the giant stars of yesteryear are going to be starring in full length movies very soon! There are 2 scheduled for release next year....
creepy.
neilio
Hey,
Great post... first of all.
Cooling by increasing voltage is not weird at all!
Think about it. When you double your voltage, the amount of current necessary to do the same work, gets cut in half.
Now if you remember your science classes, 2x the current = 2x the heat. 20 AMPS will be twice as hot as 10 AMPS (not exactly, I don't have my electro-thermal equations handy). Therefore the gauge of the wire carrying the current can be smaller.
Since it takes 60 AMPS of 110v to run the average external AC unit(for example) you can save copper and make it more robust by running the AC unit on 220v with 30 AMP wire (as long as you don't live in San Francisco...hehehe). Higher voltage is always preferable to low voltage high current. Motors last longer etc. because the copper is less susceptible to heat damage.
The down side to high voltage is that it is more dangerous. It arcs easier etc. and kills much more completely, faster. Don't get me wrong, with enough current, 1 volt can kill you just as dead as 50,000 volts, depending on the current. That is what kills...
High voltage scrambles neurons more than it burns, unless the current is high. You can get knocked out by your ignition coil on your car, but it can't fry your arm off (at least you wouldn't be able to hold that on your arm anyway). Why?
Low current.
High voltage and high current are a deadly mix indeed. 50,000 volts at 500,000 amps will vaporize you from 1 foot away. You don't even need to touch it. That is why power companies use high tension wires... they are cooler and the electricity suffers less loss (through heat).
Hope this clarified that whole thing a bit. I am not an electrical engineer (I am just another programmer...), but worked in an electrical motor shop during college. I used to know the equations.
L8,
Neil
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm not suggesting that it's as hard to make an album as it is to write a book
.39 per mp3 is a fair deal. Think about bang for the buck. If you listen to it 20 times, that's almost 2 hours of entertainment for $.39.
This would depend on the book or alblum. Lets compare a Stephen King book to Sgt. Pepper's lonely heart's club. I bet it was harder to make the alblum.
I am working on an alblum now. It sometimes takes over a year of hard work to produce an alblum from concept to finish. Books also can take over a year. (Witness the Oxford English Dictionary)
Anything worth while does. it's not just the recording process that makes the artistic work, it's writing lyrics, then the music, then arranging it, then filling it out with other instruments, producing the song (dealing with all of the people psychologically to get the best out of everyone, and "making it happen"), mixing it, reararranging, pre-master mixing, then mastering. Lets not forget about the risk and monetary investment.
All of this takes time, creativity, other people's time and creativity, and substantial monetary investment.
I think any worthwhile creative work which someone works on for a year and finishes should have both a nominal price, and some sort of copy protection.
It is a tangible good that has value. If a book were a PDF would that make it equally tangible to an MP3? Any more valuable? The MP3 actually has more information in it. Look at the file size! A five minute uncompressed 24/96 wave would undoubtably contain more information than an Oxford Dictionary PDF.
A hardbound book copy costs a lot more to produce than an mp3 copy. There's paper, leather cover, binding, the rent on the machines that printed it, transport, storage, trucking, editing, proofreading, sometimes illustration and font work. $40 for this is justifiable, if the binding is high quality. Charging $10 for the PDF isn't. That PDF costs nothing to produce, in terms of logistics and distribution.
I don't think there is a hard and fast rule about how much work a book or alblum takes. In fact the value doesn't reflect the amount of work put into it. They aren't even related. An idiot could take his entire lifetime to write a book but it wouldn't be more "valuable" than a When the Levee Breaks mp3, at least not to me.
I think
But it should have some serious copy protection. You have to pay for the bandwidth at both ends, the artist and people that paid for the artist to record also need to get paid.
my 2 cents...
neilio
>Who decides what is adult?
Hopefully not Larry Flint or FCC Chairman Powell.
Hopefully not the pope.
It's anything you would rather not have your kids find on the internet. Porn, gore, real images of death, gynecological or urological discussions, the anarchist's cookbook.
I think this is about protecting kids, they just want to do it a stupid way.
There needs to be a mechanism for parents to control what their kids see, other than unplugging the network cable or forcing people to change their business names.
How about independantly maintained or government maintained child safety blacklists, broken down by age range? If they want to do something real they'll have to put some work into it.
Enforcement of this would be a joke.
>>pursuits will add a new federal level
Copyright infringement is already at a federal level. The FBI warning is merely informing that you are violating copyright if you copy the stuff, and saying "we will get you if you pirate this".
Copyright is a federally assured protection, therefore is federal by default, with or without the FBI warning. That little c on the back cover is all that is legally required. The rest of us have to pay. The pirates just cut out the annoying delay and FBI message.
That's why copyright is far superiour to the "mail it to yourself" trick for music protection. If you only mail it to yourself you only have federal proof that you had the recording on a given date, meaning it is good enough for evidence.
Since you aren't protected by a copyright certificate, you need to fight the court battles in all 50 states to sue for infringement. Basically you are almost as screwed as doing nothing at all.... You are protected, but do you have the money for that kind of fight? Most mail it to yourselfer's don't.
Copyright doesn't matter anyway, since it all ends up somewhere on line anyway and not even the federal gov can really kill it.
This sucks because we might be up for a possible signing deal soon. Even if I get signed, I won't ever make anything : ( Luckily I am not in it for the money.
l8,
neilio
"Unsafe at any speed"
Ralph Nader.
I think they left one out.
Though, my brother restores them, we think they got a bad rap. For their time they were very advanced... rear engine, air cooled, and way fast with a turbo charged 6(spyder). Like a VW beetle on steroids.
we have driven them at 100+ MPH on a track, and they seemed as safe or safer than other cars of the period.
Very few of the cars on this list have had a book devoted to their horrible safety, wrong or right.
What a horrible oversight by forbes.
L8,
AC
>It takes MASSIVE amounts of rain or snow
true, but it only takes a 30mph wind hitting it to make it useless ; )
In my hood this happens very rarely.
>Overall it's far more reliable than my old Timer Warner cable was.
Definitely!!!
l8,
AC
Direct TV customer
... and the author says it didn't. I think there are some typos lurking in that article, or maybe you just have to be there.
neilio
> You're snobbish hatred of a language that's really Not That Bad is indcative of the fact that you are not "A Real Programmer".
.Nut Learn C#
Right on! I don't like vb because I don't like windows. However, if my boss hands me a VB project I will do it without complaint and do the best I can to make VB do what the spec says it should.
Your language should be determined by the customer, and available equipment. I always try to steer clear of VB, but if the dept has an SQL server they want to talk to from an IIS box, you don't want to go trying to use php-cgi and odbc for the job. ADO and asp makes more sense.
Learn as many languages as you can and get good at all of them. You will probably need all of them eventually, if you want to keep working; )
Limiting yourself to one, or a family of languages related to a high dollar product means you might find it hard to get a job one day.
My dad taught me to always use the right tool for the job. He was referring to a 10mm socket. Same thing applies to languages.
Need a free CMS? Zope. Learn python.
Need an all IBM app server? Websphere. Learn java.
MS Shop?
Hopefully you get what I am saying. Most companies have narrow set of technologies they allow and support. You need to be able to adapt when times are bad and jobs get scarce.
neilio
IMHO it helps enforce coding consistency. Very helpful when writing and debugging code. If you wrote a program using hungarian notation and say use: //my java is rusty
String arrMyArray[5];
It is easier if case sensitivity won't let the lazy type arrmyarray[x]. It almost disappears in the text. When debugging and examining code, consistent variable names help you pick stuff out of the fray, visually, easier.
I am a huge fan of languages such as C and java which are fast, strongly typed, and rigidly enforce consistency in referencing variables.
Slop=hard to maintain.
Imagine reading a book where the case is all whacked. It wouldn't be as easy.
neilio
They have an itch to be rich they won't be able to scratch. Maybe some special shampoo would help...
Someone should have warned them not to be so promiscuous and try to fsck *everyone*.
sweeeet. does it compile? I don't have the energy to check...
/. does wonders for the servers swimming in it's info stream... It can reduce an underpowered server to froth in minutes.
... ohhhh the humanity.
I can almost hear the silent cries for help and see the avg load meter being clipped; I can see the 500 errors, just before the ping replies "host unreachable"
neilio
Well, France is in the EU. I think it is safe to assume he means Euros...
hello all, Just a thought. Maybe it is a good idea to befriend a reporter before engaging in these types of activities. Let the reporter do the talking and act as a technical advisor, protected by journalistic ethics. Agreed, this sucks, but maybe it is the way to go. If you are hungry for the attention yourself, become employed at a magazine or newspaper as a volunteer reporter. They will print the story, and you will get your recognition, you just won't get paid for it. l8, neilio
Check out http://bjbrew.org/cpq/ci_linux/index.htm
Here is one of their newer initiatives. The software is free... they are opening the source on a lot of stuff. They will make their money making the stuff work: )
New business paradigm. Give the software away, but make it so difficult to use that it takes the author to make it work.
I like it becuase it opens quite a few doors. My client can now afford a clustering solution for themselves (since the software is free), and I can make money on implementing solutions that were previously out of reach of my clients.
I LOVE YOU COMPAQ!!!
PS, Compaq will never be out of the hardware business. They are only shifting focus, not dropping products.
L8,
neilio
I have heard from several sources that the giant stars of yesteryear are going to be starring in full length movies very soon! There are 2 scheduled for release next year.... creepy. neilio
I just printed this post and followed your advice, all over it.
Hey, Great post... first of all. Cooling by increasing voltage is not weird at all! Think about it. When you double your voltage, the amount of current necessary to do the same work, gets cut in half. Now if you remember your science classes, 2x the current = 2x the heat. 20 AMPS will be twice as hot as 10 AMPS (not exactly, I don't have my electro-thermal equations handy). Therefore the gauge of the wire carrying the current can be smaller. Since it takes 60 AMPS of 110v to run the average external AC unit(for example) you can save copper and make it more robust by running the AC unit on 220v with 30 AMP wire (as long as you don't live in San Francisco...hehehe). Higher voltage is always preferable to low voltage high current. Motors last longer etc. because the copper is less susceptible to heat damage. The down side to high voltage is that it is more dangerous. It arcs easier etc. and kills much more completely, faster. Don't get me wrong, with enough current, 1 volt can kill you just as dead as 50,000 volts, depending on the current. That is what kills... High voltage scrambles neurons more than it burns, unless the current is high. You can get knocked out by your ignition coil on your car, but it can't fry your arm off (at least you wouldn't be able to hold that on your arm anyway). Why? Low current. High voltage and high current are a deadly mix indeed. 50,000 volts at 500,000 amps will vaporize you from 1 foot away. You don't even need to touch it. That is why power companies use high tension wires... they are cooler and the electricity suffers less loss (through heat). Hope this clarified that whole thing a bit. I am not an electrical engineer (I am just another programmer...), but worked in an electrical motor shop during college. I used to know the equations. L8, Neil