Same here, Time warner wants you to sign up for a package that includes 4 premiums like hbo, showtime, starz, etc. It costs around 120/mo with the Roadrunner service. Without the package the price is only 5 bucks a month less, no premium channels at all. This stuff is a total racket, TWC is profiting heavily. The In-Demand services are also very spotty, hard to get a movie started during peak hours. This should cost no more than 80 bucks a month maximum, for cable and internet. It is a total rip off, totally. I make sure to use all 45k/sec of my upstream traffic on a pretty constant basis so I can feel like I am getting my money's worth.
What everyone fails to mention are the game controls. Part of what made arcade games so great were the controls. They were (usually) at the right height, you stood in front of the machine, so you could put lots of 'body english' into the game, or stand comfortably. The buttons were big, bounced back, and just felt _Good_. What would Missle Command be without those big track balls, or Tempest with out the Spinning Knob. Remember Paperboy? Would it have been as fun if you didn't have real handlebars as controllers? I enjoy playing lots of games with a computer keyboard, but there are a few that I just can't enjoy without the real controls. a few that come to mind: Defender / Stargate had a very specific and complex control layout that I had trouble duplicating with a keyboard, Discs of tron had an unusual joystick/spinner combo, I'm sure you can think of a few of your favorites that you wish you had a game controller for.
I have seen the various projects to bring better controls to Mame, very tempted to get at least a Mame controller. The dopest one was the guy that built a cabinet with a console that spun to give you one of three different controller options.
I have to see this thing in action, and probably won't get to an arcade anytime soon! I am curious about this game, but all the sites with videos are dead links....
whatever. As long as you understand my communication i am happy to let you delude yourself that everyone (else besides 'hackers'_) gives a flying crack hack smack what the diff is between a hacker and a cracker and a phreaker.
Trying to legitimize the word 'hacking' is about as futile as trying to get folks to say gnu/linux. To me cracking means removing copy protection from software a la 80's apple// era.
Truly. Also, if there is exploit code, someone is using it, just maybe not as part of a trojan or virus yet. Patch or no patch, you can bet that there will be an exploit being used in the wild within a matter of hours or a day at the maximum. The latest trojan/worm/virii are programs that deliver huge amounts of machines to spammers and hackers to become part of their DOS botnets or spamnets, with built in backdoors, etc. Were you on irc the day that the mirc xdcc flaw was discovered? I received no less than 30 malformed xdcc requests that day. Discovery of a new flaw is like free candy to script kidz. Twice the 0wned machines, half the hacking.
It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Yonatan Cohen, student at well respected Tel Aviv University. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "K1bbl3zandB1tz" and are guilty of hax0ring and r3wt1ng unpatched boxes and trading 0day warez. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
These Kidz have big balls. I'd be wary of extorting a gambling sites. Usually people involved in gambling are 'connected' and can afford real protection, the kind with lead slugs and silencers. From what I have heard, they already employ hackers of their own that could track these people down. Ever heard the stories of how Las Vegas' phone system has been 0wn3d for years? Can't think what would break up a gang of asshat hackers better than bullets to the back of the head.
We are using Zenworks for a 500 machine deployment project, works great. We are a novell shop tho, so there wasn't really any question. Previously used ghost, but since we are using zenworks for app deployment this fits better. Only thing is that we only image the OS, and applications are deployed after imaging with zenworks as well.
You can also image linux machines with zenworks, cept it does it sector by sector instead of using partition table.
Is it just me or does she look like she should be Miss Long Island? The big hair, chubby arms, goofy look on her face, etc.. I don't know how Miss Massapequa ended up being Miss New York...
You will all go deaf listening to your new fangled music on your new fangled mp3 players with your new fangled mp3's and oggs and wmas. you aren't supposed to stick little things that make noise into your ears or put big headphones on and blast your music at top volume.
ok, curmudgeon mode off -
I love my ipod too, but i am in my second week of not using it because of the ringing in my ears. Headphones are evil unless used in moderation and at a moderate volume. I remember when I got my first walkman in the 80's and my mother told me that headphones would damage my ears. I know that the dead kennedy concerts and raves with 20 foot walls of speakers didn't help, but honestly after a year of listening to an ipod the ringing in my ears is... worse.
What is the typical compression ratio of flac? I have been seeing more and more discussion of this codec, and am intrigued. I would appreciate a few useful links for the layman.
I noticed that the concert taping crowd (phish, etc) are distributing their concert recordings encoded in flac. I have always believed that mp3, ogg, aac, etc are just a temporary stage until we all have huge hard drives and megabit plus connecions to the net. I believe we are approaching the end of the lossy codec era, which is pretty exciting, except i'll have to re-collect my entire mp3 library. I haven't bothered listening to aac or ogg yet, since noone is really interested in trading in those formats. Mp3 has been adequate for sampling new releases, but I always notice the swishy highs and distortion that creeps in at even the highest bitrates.
And I buy all my music on vinyl still, the original lossy codec!
My fantasy world? I would like to be able to download hi fidelity music and press it onto vinyl at home with my acme vinyl cutting machine, so I can play it at the clubs that I dj in. I played a mp3 exactly once on a big club system, and it sounded miserable, hollow, and flat. It was very disappointing.
I worked at a major advertising firm, and while the execs may have gotten 50k christmas bonuses all us proles got were $100 gift cards. I would be blown away by a $1500 bonus. To date (I am now 34 yrs old) the best christmas bonus i ever got was when i was a bagboy in highschool. Every employee got a double check the week of christmas. (Go TEAMSTERS!)
The lamest? well, I worked at good old Razorfish, remember them? for christmas bonuses we got......dum dum dum Stock Options with which to wipe our asses with. I will never forget: The sales pep talk that Jeff Dachis gave as he told us: every employee will get 1000 options, we are announcing a 2 for 1 split, so you will actually get 2000 options. If you traded those shares on the open market today, they would be worth 50000 dollars. blah blah blah
Of course, we were in a 30 day lockout then, and the stock never rose above the strike price, and eventually settled around 8 or 9 cents/share. When I got my final e-trade options account summary it read: if you chose to exercise your options today, they would be worth -$80,000.
I think gift cards are the way to go personally. You are a great boss for even considering $1500 bonuses in this day and age where companies only compensate the highest ranking employees with anything decent.
Ok, so spam and email are still largely unregulated. In the past months, we have witnessed such tactics as trojans that send spam, trojans that ddos anti spam sites, not to mention the blatant header forging, joe-jobs, etc...
This blatantly criminal behavior upsets me much more than unsolicited email. The line has been crossed from sending spam to criminal hacking of innocent people's computers. I am not sure what the solution is, but this type of thing is not tolerated in other communication types, such as mail or the telephone. Spam has been a problem for at least 10 years now, and I know that the wheels of beauracracy turn slowly, but a nuisance has become a criminal enterprise with no ethics or limits...
I love an opportunity to talk about Plato. For many people the first computer that they loved was their first home computer. Not me, I loved the Plato! These were way ahead of their time, with gui's, touch screens, and multi player games.
I was fortunate to be an 11 year old in berkeley, ca where you could rent time by the hour at the Lawrence Hall of Science on one of 8 or so Plato terminals. The dungeon games were completely amazing for being the first. Years later when the internet came around, I couldnt understand why there were no good dungeon games with first person perspectives. This was 15 years later, and it had already been done, and muds seemed pretty boring in comparison.
I work at a 600+ workstation office. We use novell 5.x (no comments on this plz, upgrade to come eventually) for print and file services, when we started deploying os x on desktops we had a problem with appletalk shares dropping and/or freezing osx clients. I called our apple rep who put me in touch with an engineer at apple. the official response? Apple no longer suppotrts appletalk for file transfers. Use samba or TCP/IP , and we will be happy to sell you an Xserve to achieve this.
In other words: we made you use appletalk, but now we are dropping it and you like a hot potato, so either upgrade your servers or buy one of ours.
He said:
What happens when it attains self-conciousness, and kills it's operators?
I can't wait for the self-concious computer! Sounds like a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Company, one of those GPP (Genuine People Personality) type features.
Good points. Once it becomes easier to transmit lossless copies of these files, mp3, ogg, aac, wma will die. Flac is a good first step in this direction. I download entire albums frequently, but if I want to play songs at a club that I dj, I need a copy on vinyl or cd. Say wat u want about bitrates and such, but even a 192kbps full stereo rip has problems, swishy hi hats, distortion, etc.
If the companies were adept, by now you would be able to download full stereo cd quality audio. Why not. If the files were served from a big pipe, my cable modem can suck files down pretty friggin fast. If people are downloading iso's, why not cd quality audio? It is all matter of time. Bandwidth and HD size are the limiters. How much longer, 3 years, 4 years? And then we'll be ditching our 200gb of mp3's trying to get wav or flac rips of all that music, and playing burned dvd-rs or using our 1 terabyte ipod xtreme or whatever.
Sorry, this was going to be a coherent post.......but then I got high!
I am taking a stand and making a plea to stop these lame in my day jokes. If i have to see one more post about whistling the modem tones I'm going to.... wait wait i got one in my day we had ummm whistle into an 8 track tape and send it by carrier pigeon good one right.
please lord let them moderate me as funny, i need this one. please. i've still got it. last week one of my 3. profit jokes got a 2 Funny. Week before i had a pretty good beowulf line, and combos seem to be in these days. I'm going to try for a 4 way combo joke this week, but its gotta be good. Maybe a 1.2.3 profit with a little beowulf back in my day in soviet russia will hit a homer. I need a 5 (Funny) badly!
Just because you think you know about music and haven't heard of an artist doesn't mean that they are nobody. Anthony Hamilton has been singing backup and writing songs for other artists for years, not to mention having a project shelved by a major label. It happens all the time. He may be somebody or may be nobody, but just because he doesn't fit into your alt.worldview doesn't mean that he isn't an important artist. He made the frontpage of/. and you Many r&b fans worldwide will buy this release, therefore it is relevant. So next time you say xxxx who? about a new artist consider that you just don't know everything about everything, and the question makes you look like an idiot that likes to crack wise.
Fact is that he has been in the biz for 10 years and this is his second album. Don't feel bad, I don't know those groups that you listen too.
full Antony Hamilton Bio on his page, linked from original post. Try reading the hyperlinks instead of showing your ignorance of (black) music.
http://www.arista.com/Page.asp?sn=Arista&pn=Arti st %20Home%20-%20Anthony%20Hamilton
Anthony Hamilton was ripped and had been traded heavily by the 'scene' 2 weeks ago, by the release group WCR. Just as every cd gets ripped well before the street date, so was this one.
The british market is quite different. There are lots of smaller labels that successfully eek out a living selling 1000-50000 units of something. The word of mouth and club scene are very influential in record sales. In the US, you have to be on a major label with major distribution deals, and major promotion in major markets to ensure major sales. The boutique labels just can't get the same kind of distribution in retail venues without hopping into bed and selling their souls to sony/warner/etc. You are considered a nobody unless you can crack 100000 units. MTV, radio, etc. only cater to the gold and platinum set, and it only seems to be getting worse. Those 'indy' bands have usually been paying dues for 5 + years before a major 'found' them and groomed them to be the next big thing in the currently super hot sub genre of the year.
I find myself downloading music that I can't really find at stores (and i live in new york city), and ordering online to get copies of these cd's. Its ultimately unfair to the artists who see jack of the money. If you are on a major label and sell 10000 units you get no money past your advance most likely.
If you can crack 10000 on an independant label, you can actually make money.
On the even smaller side, I sell mixed dj cd's for 10 bucks a pop, and a run of 200 is good income for me. Figure $2.00 for production cost each (time spent mixing cd, labels, cover printing, blanks and cases), and I can net $1600 bucks without ever really breaking a sweat. No label, no royalties, and self promoted. The music is unlicensed and therefore infringing, but little known fact: the record companies view "Mix Tapes" as a promotional tool and don't go after them. I even deal with a few label divisions called street and mix tape promotion departments. As long as I stay out of traditional retail venues I don't need to clear the music. The big mix cd's are label cleared just like a regular compilation cd would be.
Thank you for reading my disorganized rant.
the REAL first FPS and multiplayer games
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
If any of you remember CDC's Plato terminals, there was Oubilette, Mines of Moria, Krozair, all first person games, a few multiplayer games as well. This was 1978 , folks.
"Wizardry programmers Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead were both users of PLATO in the late 70's and were inspired to try and create a single player version of Oubliette on the Apple II."
Another Plato tidbit, Bruce Artwick's Microsoft Flight simulator was inspired by dogfight and airfight, the 2d and 3d flight battle games that ran on Plato. 1975, hardcore gamers. Lots of old school geeks know about the Plato terminals. I was lucky enough to use them as a curious 12 year old in the basement of the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. Before we got our first home computer (TRS-80), My father used to take me up there to rent time by the hour on these beasts. Before that I rented time on the fabulous teletype terminals.
Plato terminals also had touch sensitive screens. They were slightly ahead of their time. A little bit of history that many don't know about.
http://www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/com putergaminghistory/index5-3.shtml
Slashdot Mirror
Same here, Time warner wants you to sign up for a package that includes 4 premiums like hbo, showtime, starz, etc. It costs around 120/mo with the Roadrunner service. Without the package the price is only 5 bucks a month less, no premium channels at all. This stuff is a total racket, TWC is profiting heavily. The In-Demand services are also very spotty, hard to get a movie started during peak hours. This should cost no more than 80 bucks a month maximum, for cable and internet. It is a total rip off, totally. I make sure to use all 45k/sec of my upstream traffic on a pretty constant basis so I can feel like I am getting my money's worth.
What everyone fails to mention are the game controls. Part of what made arcade games so great were the controls. They were (usually) at the right height, you stood in front of the machine, so you could put lots of 'body english' into the game, or stand comfortably. The buttons were big, bounced back, and just felt _Good_. What would Missle Command be without those big track balls, or Tempest with out the Spinning Knob. Remember Paperboy? Would it have been as fun if you didn't have real handlebars as controllers? I enjoy playing lots of games with a computer keyboard, but there are a few that I just can't enjoy without the real controls. a few that come to mind: Defender / Stargate had a very specific and complex control layout that I had trouble duplicating with a keyboard, Discs of tron had an unusual joystick/spinner combo, I'm sure you can think of a few of your favorites that you wish you had a game controller for.
0 9/ 0242254&mode=nested&tid=127&tid=186&tid=20 2
I have seen the various projects to bring better controls to Mame, very tempted to get at least a Mame controller. The dopest one was the guy that built a cabinet with a console that spun to give you one of three different controller options.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/
sorry, i don't konw how to make links, sue me or educate me.
I have to see this thing in action, and probably won't get to an arcade anytime soon! I am curious about this game,
but all the sites with videos are dead links....
whatever. As long as you understand my communication i am happy to let you delude yourself that everyone (else besides 'hackers'_) gives a flying crack hack smack what the diff is between a hacker and a cracker and a phreaker.
// era.
Trying to legitimize the word 'hacking' is about as futile as trying to get folks to say gnu/linux. To me cracking means removing copy protection from software a la 80's apple
Truly. Also, if there is exploit code, someone is using it, just maybe not as part of a trojan or virus yet. Patch or no patch, you can bet that there will be an exploit being used in the wild within a matter of hours or a day at the maximum. The latest trojan/worm/virii are programs that deliver huge amounts of machines to spammers and hackers to become part of their DOS botnets or spamnets, with built in backdoors, etc. Were you on irc the day that the mirc xdcc flaw was discovered? I received no less than 30 malformed xdcc requests that day. Discovery of a new flaw is like free candy to script kidz. Twice the 0wned machines, half the hacking.
It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Yonatan Cohen, student at well respected Tel Aviv University. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "K1bbl3zandB1tz" and are guilty of hax0ring and r3wt1ng unpatched boxes and trading 0day warez. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.
So well put. Carry on then. Next link!
These Kidz have big balls. I'd be wary of extorting a gambling sites. Usually people involved in gambling are 'connected' and can afford real protection, the kind with lead slugs and silencers. From what I have heard, they already employ hackers of their own that could track these people down. Ever heard the stories of how Las Vegas' phone system has been 0wn3d for years? Can't think what would break up a gang of asshat hackers better than bullets to the back of the head.
We are using Zenworks for a 500 machine deployment project, works great. We are a novell shop tho, so there wasn't really any question. Previously used ghost, but since we are using zenworks for app deployment this fits better. Only thing is that we only image the OS, and applications are deployed after imaging with zenworks as well.
You can also image linux machines with zenworks, cept it does it sector by sector instead of using partition table.
Is it just me or does she look like she should be Miss Long Island? The big hair, chubby arms, goofy look on her face, etc.. I don't know how Miss Massapequa ended up being Miss New York...
You will all go deaf listening to your new fangled music on your new fangled mp3 players with your new fangled mp3's and oggs and wmas. you aren't supposed to stick little things that make noise into your ears or put big headphones on and blast your music at top volume.
... worse.
ok, curmudgeon mode off -
I love my ipod too, but i am in my second week of not using it because of the ringing in my ears.
Headphones are evil unless used in moderation and at a moderate volume. I remember when I got my first walkman in the 80's and my mother told me that headphones would damage my ears. I know that the dead kennedy concerts and raves with 20 foot walls of speakers didn't help, but honestly after a year of listening to an ipod the ringing in my ears is
What is the typical compression ratio of flac? I have been seeing more and more discussion of this codec, and am intrigued. I would appreciate a few useful links for the layman.
I noticed that the concert taping crowd (phish, etc) are distributing their concert recordings encoded in flac. I have always believed that mp3, ogg, aac, etc are just a temporary stage until we all have huge hard drives and megabit plus connecions to the net. I believe we are approaching the end of the lossy codec era, which is pretty exciting, except i'll have to re-collect my entire mp3 library. I haven't bothered listening to aac or ogg yet, since noone is really interested in trading in those formats. Mp3 has been adequate for sampling new releases, but I always notice the swishy highs and distortion that creeps in at even the highest bitrates.
And I buy all my music on vinyl still, the original lossy codec!
My fantasy world? I would like to be able to download hi fidelity music and press it onto vinyl at home with my acme vinyl cutting machine, so I can play it at the clubs that I dj in. I played a mp3 exactly once on a big club system, and it sounded miserable, hollow, and flat. It was very disappointing.
here is my two cents:
I worked at a major advertising firm, and while the execs may have gotten 50k christmas bonuses all us proles got were $100 gift cards. I would be blown away by a $1500 bonus. To date (I am now 34 yrs old) the best christmas bonus i ever got was when i was a bagboy in highschool. Every employee got a double check the week of christmas. (Go TEAMSTERS!)
The lamest? well, I worked at good old Razorfish, remember them? for christmas bonuses we got......dum dum dum
Stock Options with which to wipe our asses with. I will never forget:
The sales pep talk that Jeff Dachis gave as he told us: every employee will get 1000 options, we are announcing a 2 for 1 split, so you will actually get 2000 options. If you traded those shares on the open market today, they would be worth 50000 dollars. blah blah blah
Of course, we were in a 30 day lockout then, and the stock never rose above the strike price, and eventually settled around 8 or 9 cents/share. When I got my final e-trade options account summary it read: if you chose to exercise your options today, they would be worth -$80,000.
I think gift cards are the way to go personally. You are a great boss for even considering $1500 bonuses in this day and age where companies only compensate the highest ranking employees with anything decent.
Ok, so spam and email are still largely unregulated. In the past months, we have witnessed such tactics as trojans that send spam, trojans that ddos anti spam sites, not to mention the blatant header forging, joe-jobs, etc...
This blatantly criminal behavior upsets me much more than unsolicited email. The line has been crossed from sending spam to criminal hacking of innocent people's computers. I am not sure what the solution is, but this type of thing is not tolerated in other communication types, such as mail or the telephone. Spam has been a problem for at least 10 years now, and I know that the wheels of beauracracy turn slowly, but a nuisance has become a criminal enterprise with no ethics or limits...
I love an opportunity to talk about Plato. For many people the first computer that they loved was their first home computer. Not me, I loved the Plato! These were way ahead of their time, with gui's, touch screens, and multi player games.
I was fortunate to be an 11 year old in berkeley, ca where you could rent time by the hour at the Lawrence Hall of Science on one of 8 or so Plato terminals. The dungeon games were completely amazing for being the first. Years later when the internet came around, I couldnt understand why there were no good dungeon games with first person perspectives. This was 15 years later, and it had already been done, and muds seemed pretty boring in comparison.
Shout out to PLATO users!!!!
I work at a 600+ workstation office. We use novell 5.x (no comments on this plz, upgrade to come eventually) for print and file services, when we started deploying os x on desktops we had a problem with appletalk shares dropping and/or freezing osx clients. I called our apple rep who put me in touch with an engineer at apple. the official response? Apple no longer suppotrts appletalk for file transfers. Use samba or TCP/IP , and we will be happy to sell you an Xserve to achieve this.
In other words: we made you use appletalk, but now we are dropping it and you like a hot potato, so either upgrade your servers or buy one of ours.
He said:
What happens when it attains self-conciousness, and kills it's operators?
I can't wait for the self-concious computer!
Sounds like a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Company,
one of those GPP (Genuine People Personality) type features.
"Dave, is my butt getting too big?"
Good points. Once it becomes easier to transmit lossless copies of these files, mp3, ogg, aac, wma will die. Flac is a good first step in this direction. I download entire albums frequently, but if I want to play songs at a club that I dj, I need a copy on vinyl or cd. Say wat u want about bitrates and such, but even a 192kbps full stereo rip has problems, swishy hi hats, distortion, etc.
...but then I got high!
If the companies were adept, by now you would be able to download full stereo cd quality audio. Why not. If the files were served from a big pipe, my cable modem can suck files down pretty friggin fast. If people are downloading iso's, why not cd quality audio? It is all matter of time. Bandwidth and HD size are the limiters. How much longer, 3 years, 4 years? And then we'll be ditching our 200gb of mp3's trying to get wav or flac rips of all that music, and playing burned dvd-rs or using our 1 terabyte ipod xtreme or whatever.
Sorry, this was going to be a coherent post....
I am taking a stand and making a plea to stop these lame in my day jokes. If i have to see one more post about whistling the modem tones I'm going to .... wait wait i got one .
in my day we had ummm whistle into an 8 track tape and send it by carrier pigeon good one right
please lord let them moderate me as funny, i need this one. please. i've still got it. last week one of my 3. profit jokes got a 2 Funny. Week before i had a pretty good beowulf line, and combos seem to be in these days. I'm going to try for a 4 way combo joke this week, but its gotta be good. Maybe a 1.2.3 profit with a little beowulf back in my day in soviet russia will hit a homer. I need a 5 (Funny) badly!
i was dreading the jokes even before i finished reading....
Just because you think you know about music and haven't heard of an artist doesn't mean that they are nobody. Anthony Hamilton has been singing backup and writing songs for other artists for years, not to mention having a project shelved by a major label. It happens all the time. He may be somebody or may be nobody, but just because he doesn't fit into your alt.worldview doesn't mean that he isn't an important artist. He made the frontpage of /. and you Many r&b fans worldwide will buy this release, therefore it is relevant. So next time you say xxxx who? about a new artist consider that you just don't know everything about everything, and the question makes you look like an idiot that likes to crack wise.
i st %20Home%20-%20Anthony%20Hamilton
Fact is that he has been in the biz for 10 years and this is his second album. Don't feel bad, I don't know those groups that you listen too.
full Antony Hamilton Bio on his page, linked from original post. Try reading the hyperlinks instead of showing your ignorance of (black) music.
http://www.arista.com/Page.asp?sn=Arista&pn=Art
Anthony Hamilton was ripped and had been traded heavily by the 'scene' 2 weeks ago, by the release group WCR. Just as every cd gets ripped well before the street date, so was this one.
i l) -2003-WCR
Anthony_Hamilton-Comin_From_Where_Im_From_(Reta
so much for the encryption.
Besides, why would you want to stop someone who legitimately bought a cd from ripping it for their ipod or other mp3 player?
The music industry has had at least 6 years to sort this out, it is all so very lame.
The british market is quite different. There are lots of smaller labels that successfully eek out a living selling 1000-50000 units of something. The word of mouth and club scene are very influential in record sales. In the US, you have to be on a major label with major distribution deals, and major promotion in major markets to ensure major sales. The boutique labels just can't get the same kind of distribution in retail venues without hopping into bed and selling their souls to sony/warner/etc. You are considered a nobody unless you can crack 100000 units. MTV, radio, etc. only cater to the gold and platinum set, and it only seems to be getting worse. Those 'indy' bands have usually been paying dues for 5 + years before a major 'found' them and groomed them to be the next big thing in the currently super hot sub genre of the year.
I find myself downloading music that I can't really find at stores (and i live in new york city), and ordering online to get copies of these cd's. Its ultimately unfair to the artists who see jack of the money. If you are on a major label and sell 10000 units you get no money past your advance most likely.
If you can crack 10000 on an independant label, you can actually make money.
On the even smaller side, I sell mixed dj cd's for 10 bucks a pop, and a run of 200 is good income for me. Figure $2.00 for production cost each (time spent mixing cd, labels, cover printing, blanks and cases), and I can net $1600 bucks without ever really breaking a sweat. No label, no royalties, and self promoted. The music is unlicensed and therefore infringing, but little known fact: the record companies view "Mix Tapes" as a promotional tool and don't go after them. I even deal with a few label divisions called street and mix tape promotion departments. As long as I stay out of traditional retail venues I don't need to clear the music. The big mix cd's are label cleared just like a regular compilation cd would be.
Thank you for reading my disorganized rant.
If any of you remember CDC's Plato terminals, there was Oubilette, Mines of Moria, Krozair, all first person games, a few multiplayer games as well. This was 1978 , folks. "Wizardry programmers Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead were both users of PLATO in the late 70's and were inspired to try and create a single player version of Oubliette on the Apple II." Another Plato tidbit, Bruce Artwick's Microsoft Flight simulator was inspired by dogfight and airfight, the 2d and 3d flight battle games that ran on Plato. 1975, hardcore gamers. Lots of old school geeks know about the Plato terminals. I was lucky enough to use them as a curious 12 year old in the basement of the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. Before we got our first home computer (TRS-80), My father used to take me up there to rent time by the hour on these beasts. Before that I rented time on the fabulous teletype terminals. Plato terminals also had touch sensitive screens. They were slightly ahead of their time. A little bit of history that many don't know about. http://www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/com putergaminghistory/index5-3.shtml
473 downloads,
beaten by beos:926