The formidable dictionary function, inside sets at the specialized dictionary which 110000 English to Chinese, 60000 Chineses England dictionary and is multitudinous may supply to download;
this is owing to the fact that bands/artists with technically savvy fans will have a lot of fans who will end up downloading music or burning cd's, whereas less tech-savvy fans will generally end up buying their cd's.
Hmmm. So just who does Moby suppose these "technically savvy" fans might be? He seems to assume that his fans -- if I may read between the lines here -- are somehow more culturally sophisticated than fans of other acts, and are therefore more likely to know how to use computers. Not true.
I recently paid a visit to some friends out in Detroit -- believe me, about as blue-collar a group as you could get -- and they told me, flat out, that they had stopped buying CDs. Period. All the music they listened to, in their car or at home, was downloaded from the Internet and burned to CD.
Why? Well, one good reason is that these people listen to a lot of mainstream crap. They like Britney Spears, they like radio rap and R&B, they like all the stuff that MTV plays. And for a lot of those types of acts, there's usually only one or two good songs on a CD to begin with (the ones that get made into videos). They don't want to pay $17 for a CD full of songs when they only want to hear the one.
These people are not Moby fans. They are plain ol' mainstream America. If Moby thinks the cultural sophistication of his fan base is what gives them the wherewithall to burn CDs, and so therefore is hurting him more than others, then some less-sophisticated musician out there is in for a real shock.
As I understand things, the Berkeley stack is pretty much universal now because it was simply better than the closed versions.
It's "universal" everywhere except in Linux, right? Or has something changed while I wasn't looking? As I understood it, Linux used its own, "from scratch" networking code (which is why the BSD zealots don't want to touch it).
Admittedly this minor quibble really doesn't have anything to do with your point, because Linux itself is open source. I just wanted to get clarification.
Ever heard of Big Head Tod and the Monsters? Their 1st cd went double platinum.. their 2nd release sold only 700,000 copies so their major label dropped them. What did they do? They started their own indie label & made more money off of that promoting their own CD's (selling less), then what they did with the major labels.
No, I've never heard of Big Head Tod and the Monsters, so I guess you make my point for me. Even so, starting your own label and publishing your own music is a lot different than what I was talking about... which is indie labels signing bands and then basically just acting like major labels, only without any of the promotion.
Years ago, I picked a password that's random as hell and was very difficult to remember. No password cracker-- dictionary *or* brute force-- has broken it yet. I use this password on about ten systems.
I was with you up until the part about the ten systems. Being so cocky that you assume that your password will never be brute-forced is one thing. You might be right. But betting the future of every system you administer on that assumption is another thing altogether.
Saying a password is "hard" to brute-force is just a measure of statistical probability. Stranger things have happened than a person getting hit by lightning, or winning the lottery.
I'm a songwriter, and I considered Napster to be a really great vehicle to get my music to others that would normally not get the opportunity hear it.
I'm not being a troll here (honest!) but... how so?
I've never understood this argument that "Napster helped independent artists distribute their music." Maybe that's hypothetically true, because you could download MP3s using Napster. But there was no mechanism in Napster that would help you market your music, nothing that would put it in front of listeners who hadn't already heard of you. The only way anybody would find your song would be if they specifically searched for it, either by your name or the name of the song.
(I'm of course assuming here that your songs aren't all named things like "Master of Puppets," "Enter Sandman," and "Dre Day." If that was your chosen method of marketing, I don't think it would say much about Napster's viability for indie artists anyway.)
The only way anybody would search for your songs by name would be if they'd heard of you before. The only way you could make sure they've heard of you would be to market your music. One fairly inexpensive method would be to start a Web site (albeit a fairly ineffective one, because you'd still need to drive traffic to the site somehow).
AHA, but -- if you had a Web site to promote your music, wouldn't it be easier to just offer the MP3s for download there? Then all your potential listeners would have an efficient, reliable channel to get your music from, rather than hoping that somebody on Napster at any given moment would have your stuff.
The total inefficiency of any P2P network as a file hosting platform is, to my mind, the biggest single argument in favor of the notion that P2P isn't good for anything but swapping copyrighted songs. P2P file sharing works if you want Metallica songs, or Dr. Dre songs, or (yes she always has to get brought up, doesn't she?) Britney Spears songs. That's because all those songs have been marketed and promoted by a record label so that you know the names of those artists and/or the names of their songs.
Say what you want about record labels, but this is the biggest (perhaps the only) service they provide to artists: marketing and promotion. I always think it's a shame when I talk to some friend of mine whose band has been signed to some indy label, and they tell me the label hasn't been doing much for them in the way of promotion. Makes me wonder what those smaller labels are in business for, actually.
Celine Dion fans don't know how to use a computer.
Errr... you seem to be missing the point, but let's assume you're correct for argument's sake. If (A) Celine Dion fans can't use a computer, and (B) the disc itself is supposed to be unplayable on computers, then how did Gracenote record enough computer users playing the disc to land it at the number 10 spot on Gracenote's chart?
Seems like it would be pretty hard to make a guarantee like "this will be the last time we will contact you."
Unlike dead-tree junk mail, where marketers often rent the mailing lists for one-time use only, a lot of spammers seem to get their addresses either from scraping Web sites or from CD-ROMs bought by mail order. To be absolutely sure that your address never appeared twice across all their sources, they would have to keep a "did not respond" database, and check it against every email address they're about to send spam to.
Now how many companies do you think will actually do such a thing? Even if it seemed technically realistic, how many marketers are going to be willing to say "I will never contact this address again, ever, for any reason, even for some purpose unrelated to the last email I sent them, at which time they did not opt in"?
So, my suggestion would be to go to school. Don't tie yourself to a career path at the age of 17 or 18. Get exposed to a few different things, have some fun, and give yourself some time to decide.
How about this one: Just don't tie yourself to a career path, ever -- especially if you're going into the computer field. This business burns people out at an alarming rate, and shoves aside the ones it's had enough of even faster. Just try to get a job at some hot tech startup as when you're fifty.
I've had a number of different jobs in the tech arena now, from systems administration to Web development to writing and editing, as well as doing other things on a freelance basis, like consulting and even illustration. And no, I didn't go to school -- which isn't to say that anybody else shouldn't go.
Whether you go or not, though, my advice is to diversify your skillset as much as possible. And if you want to concentrate on some "top" skills that will get you farthest ahead, then forget about sysadmin and forget about programming. Bone up on your communication skills. Take English classes, take public speaking, take debate. Learn to communicate effectively. On top of that, read the newspaper, listen to NPR, and learn how the world works outside the server room. It'll all help keep you afloat a lot more than knowing Unix ever will, cuz 19-year old Unix gurus are a dime a dozen.
I've never really thought about it before, but I believe you've hit on a very interesting point here. It seems plain to me now that Katz has an eminent future ahead of him as a political speechwriter.
Is it just my imagination or is queen Amidala dressed almost precisely like Britney Spears in that one scene? Tight vinyl pants and top, belly showing, etc. Except it's a white outfit instead of red.. How lame can you get? Lucas has definitely sold out to corporate America. Sad really..
You would have preferred her naked and petrified, perhaps?
A typically American story, it's less pretentious and hyped than Star Wars and more accessible to kids and die-hard comic book buffs, who remember the great, golden age of Marvel Comics. I'm one of them, I was there.
Holy smokes! Jon Katz is in his 40s? I can... not... believe that. This has to be a typo... to me he always comes off like a pretentious, self-absorbed teenager.
Oracle is not experiencing any kind of market erosion due to open-source software. Anything you run off PostgreSQL could be ported to Oracle, but you'd probably be a dummy to do so. The reverse is rarely true (except the dummy part).
Apple did the same with Spruce Tech. They had the best DVD authoring software for the PC, so Apple bought them and... killed their products. Result: did people with PCs start buying Macs to author their DVDs? No, they simply started buying Sonic's and Pinnacle's authoring programs instead.
Err... actually, I bought an Apple to do DVD authoring on. I admit I haven't used a lot of DVD authoring software, but Apple's DVD Studio Pro is pretty slick, indeed... integrates well with Final Cut Pro, and the computer comes with a DVD-R burner! Pretty good solution compared to most PCs, if you ask me.
I really don't see how people who bash Microsoft can like Apple. They have the same kind of software monopoly that Microsoft does (so they don't bundle their browser, but they bundle video editing software, MP3 software, Quicktime, DVD authoring software, CD burning software, etc.), plus a hardware monopoly (even Mac's PCI 'thinks different' from PC PCI, so you can't use PC cards on a Mac and instead must pay three times as much for a card that's five times slower)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
This is a funny statement to me, since I remember the Old Days when geeks all loved the Macintosh. It introduced all kinds of fascinating, fun, and revolutionary software development concepts, like resource forks, the toolbox, standard GUIs, etc. It was Apple's office politics (and Windows) that dulled the Mac's coolness factor... not the fact that it wasn't a cool computer.
This turned out to be a HUGE mistake, as the body count caused TF: The Movie to be a dismal box office failure.
Ha ha! That's great. The reason Transformers: The Movie was a box office failure was because it didn't include all your favorite stars. And here I thought there was some other reason.
The name. Cool for geeks, but for the general public, it sounds funny.
Yeah. Kinda like "Starbuck's." Wasn't that some guy on Battlestar Galactica? Whoah, I feel like a nerd just making that reference. And let's not forget some other lame-sounding geek brands that made no sense and so never took off, like "Napster" and "Vaio."
mp3 was "first to market". It is deeply entrenched
That's a good point, but market share matters more when you're talking about tangible goods. A store is going to devote more shelf space to the market-leading product, compounding that product's advantage. But MP3 and Ogg are intangibles, and for them market share isn't a zero-sum game. Player manufacturers don't need to pick -- they can have both.
Ogg may be better sound quality-wise, but for the majority of mp3 users, mp3's "sound good enough"
That may be true for right now, but I've seen bit rates of MP3s on file-sharing networks climbing steadily. It seems 128kbit isn't good enough sound quality for most serious traders these days, which means somebody must be re-encoding something. (I know my own ears have gotten sensitive to the "jingle" artifacts in low-bitrate MP3s.) Plus, there's more new stuff to rip every day...
Yes Ogg is FREE but again, the average Joe could care less about Free or Open Source software
This has to be the weirdest argument yet. Pay for it / Free. Pay for it / Free. Hmmmmmm. Seriously, OK we're only talking "as in beer" here, but that means a whole lot to a lot of people.
I was recently visiting some friends in Detroit -- about as "your average Joe" as you can get. They told me, point blank, that they don't buy CDs anymore. They download and burn. The music they listened to was mainly mainstream Top 40 and dance type of stuff, and they were tired of paying the price of a full CD for the one single on it that was any good. So you tell me whether cost matters or not. If recording companies start putting pressure on the people who make MP3 codecs to pay kickbacks in the form of "piracy surcharges," you think nobody will start looking at Ogg?
His specialties are software development, system building, performance tuning, parallel distributed computing, system programming, X11 configuration and software development, web development and System Administration. Pat's interests include sentient robot life forms, theoretical physics, gravity, electricity, magnetism, dimensions, complexity, astronomy, weather, chaos...
With a personals ad like that, it's no wonder he's got such an interest in building synthetic humanoid robots...
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I recently paid a visit to some friends out in Detroit -- believe me, about as blue-collar a group as you could get -- and they told me, flat out, that they had stopped buying CDs. Period. All the music they listened to, in their car or at home, was downloaded from the Internet and burned to CD.
Why? Well, one good reason is that these people listen to a lot of mainstream crap. They like Britney Spears, they like radio rap and R&B, they like all the stuff that MTV plays. And for a lot of those types of acts, there's usually only one or two good songs on a CD to begin with (the ones that get made into videos). They don't want to pay $17 for a CD full of songs when they only want to hear the one.
These people are not Moby fans. They are plain ol' mainstream America. If Moby thinks the cultural sophistication of his fan base is what gives them the wherewithall to burn CDs, and so therefore is hurting him more than others, then some less-sophisticated musician out there is in for a real shock.
Admittedly this minor quibble really doesn't have anything to do with your point, because Linux itself is open source. I just wanted to get clarification.
No, I've never heard of Big Head Tod and the Monsters, so I guess you make my point for me. Even so, starting your own label and publishing your own music is a lot different than what I was talking about
Saying a password is "hard" to brute-force is just a measure of statistical probability. Stranger things have happened than a person getting hit by lightning, or winning the lottery.
I've never understood this argument that "Napster helped independent artists distribute their music." Maybe that's hypothetically true, because you could download MP3s using Napster. But there was no mechanism in Napster that would help you market your music, nothing that would put it in front of listeners who hadn't already heard of you. The only way anybody would find your song would be if they specifically searched for it, either by your name or the name of the song.
(I'm of course assuming here that your songs aren't all named things like "Master of Puppets," "Enter Sandman," and "Dre Day." If that was your chosen method of marketing, I don't think it would say much about Napster's viability for indie artists anyway.)
The only way anybody would search for your songs by name would be if they'd heard of you before. The only way you could make sure they've heard of you would be to market your music. One fairly inexpensive method would be to start a Web site (albeit a fairly ineffective one, because you'd still need to drive traffic to the site somehow).
AHA, but -- if you had a Web site to promote your music, wouldn't it be easier to just offer the MP3s for download there? Then all your potential listeners would have an efficient, reliable channel to get your music from, rather than hoping that somebody on Napster at any given moment would have your stuff.
The total inefficiency of any P2P network as a file hosting platform is, to my mind, the biggest single argument in favor of the notion that P2P isn't good for anything but swapping copyrighted songs. P2P file sharing works if you want Metallica songs, or Dr. Dre songs, or (yes she always has to get brought up, doesn't she?) Britney Spears songs. That's because all those songs have been marketed and promoted by a record label so that you know the names of those artists and/or the names of their songs.
Say what you want about record labels, but this is the biggest (perhaps the only) service they provide to artists: marketing and promotion. I always think it's a shame when I talk to some friend of mine whose band has been signed to some indy label, and they tell me the label hasn't been doing much for them in the way of promotion. Makes me wonder what those smaller labels are in business for, actually.
I think you mean "Triumph of the Nerds," unless your nickname is Booger.
Seems like it would be pretty hard to make a guarantee like "this will be the last time we will contact you."
Unlike dead-tree junk mail, where marketers often rent the mailing lists for one-time use only, a lot of spammers seem to get their addresses either from scraping Web sites or from CD-ROMs bought by mail order. To be absolutely sure that your address never appeared twice across all their sources, they would have to keep a "did not respond" database, and check it against every email address they're about to send spam to.
Now how many companies do you think will actually do such a thing? Even if it seemed technically realistic, how many marketers are going to be willing to say "I will never contact this address again, ever, for any reason, even for some purpose unrelated to the last email I sent them, at which time they did not opt in"?
I've had a number of different jobs in the tech arena now, from systems administration to Web development to writing and editing, as well as doing other things on a freelance basis, like consulting and even illustration. And no, I didn't go to school -- which isn't to say that anybody else shouldn't go.
Whether you go or not, though, my advice is to diversify your skillset as much as possible. And if you want to concentrate on some "top" skills that will get you farthest ahead, then forget about sysadmin and forget about programming. Bone up on your communication skills. Take English classes, take public speaking, take debate. Learn to communicate effectively. On top of that, read the newspaper, listen to NPR, and learn how the world works outside the server room. It'll all help keep you afloat a lot more than knowing Unix ever will, cuz 19-year old Unix gurus are a dime a dozen.
JINX!
I've never really thought about it before, but I believe you've hit on a very interesting point here. It seems plain to me now that Katz has an eminent future ahead of him as a political speechwriter.
Oracle is not experiencing any kind of market erosion due to open-source software. Anything you run off PostgreSQL could be ported to Oracle, but you'd probably be a dummy to do so. The reverse is rarely true (except the dummy part).
The Lone Gunmen are *dead*???!! Jeez, just spoil it for everybody!
The guy's name is Spider-Man. With a hyphen. Go and look at a comic book; this has always been the case.
Only on Slashdot...
I was recently visiting some friends in Detroit -- about as "your average Joe" as you can get. They told me, point blank, that they don't buy CDs anymore. They download and burn. The music they listened to was mainly mainstream Top 40 and dance type of stuff, and they were tired of paying the price of a full CD for the one single on it that was any good. So you tell me whether cost matters or not. If recording companies start putting pressure on the people who make MP3 codecs to pay kickbacks in the form of "piracy surcharges," you think nobody will start looking at Ogg?