No it doesn't. It puts them in direct competition with Dell, who can bang together Taiwanese server kit and deliver it cheaper than IBM can order donuts for meeting.
Well, they're in direct competition with Dell right now - that's kinda their problem. Dell gets the money for the hardware, and Microsoft gets the money for the software. IBM can't compete on price, so they get no money. From there, if people want services, expertise and apps for that platform, they go to Microsoft, and IBM again gets no money.
They're hoping for a Linux world where they CAN sell services, expertise and apps for that platform, which in turn would make their own hardware attractive for those reasons, rather than just price.
Customers have a finite amount of money they can spend on applications, hardware, operating systems, storage and the other components of their computing infrastructure, Mr. Mills explained. "Reducing the cost of the operating system allows them to spend more money elsewhere," he said.
I think this is the crucial part of this article, and the crucial point that most Linux-embracing companies are running with. With Microsoft, the money goes Microsoft and Intel/AMD. MS OSes only run on Intel/AMD hardware. Microsoft's apps only run on Microsoft OSes. Basically, IBM and Sun and the rest are getting bugger all money from this entire market segment, and widespread acceptence of Linux might change all that.
If Linux gets big, these guys are back in the game, getting a slice of everyone's cash. They can sell hardware that runs Linux, and their apps can run on a platform not controlled by Microsoft. And, since Linux runs on everything from a watch to a toaster to a PC to bigass servers, their apps have the potential to be just about anywhere. That's a future IBM would love to come true.
I've worked with a bunch of IBM and Lotus guys and gals, and daaaaammmmnnnn do they hate Microsoft. They'd put Redmond to the torch if they thought it would get them back in the game. I don't honestly think they'd smoke AIX to make Linux succeed, but they definitely see it is a brighter future.
Let me start by saying that I think Madonna generally sucks ass*, but that of course is my own opinion and doesn't stop her from being an excellent example of superstardom and reinvention...
You're absolutely right about Madonna changing her sound, and look, and brand every few years. The only way she got that kind of control was to achieve enough early success to divorce herself from her record company and manage herself (her own record company is Maverick, I believe). This also means she gets a much bigger chunk of her music's profits.
Because of the nature of the industry, the "bigger chunk of the profits" part is the bit that the record companies paid attention to. These days, they DON'T WANT to make superstars. Superstars get big, their contract expires, they leave the company and they don't make the company any more money. They keep them in the fold, and suck every cent they can out of them until their time is up. Then, it's on to the next band/boy/girl de jour.
Of course, the other result of this system is that artists aren't allowed to reinvent themselves the way they have to if they are going to survive. Their record company wants to stick to the successful formula, and milk it until no-one can stand another second of it. This is happening with Britney Spears - she had a woeful year, but that was because her new stuff sounded... exactly like her old stuff. She should be copying Madonna and going yuppie (Vogue) or gospel (Like a Prayer) or steamy rap (Sex) or poppy William Orbit dance (Ray of Light) or jazz or acoustic or heavy metal or a million other styles.
Another example of reinvention is U2 - Under a Blood Red Sky, Rattle and Hum, Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop and All that You Can't Leave Behind are such different albums, with different styles. They had different stage shows, and different costumes (and different sunglasses). If they were still signed, their producers would be saying "Well, let's make another one that sounds like 'War' again..."
* and in her "Sex" phase, this was probably literally true too.
I know you were just estimating, but the actual figure is pretty big anyway: Sony apparently hit the 50 million mark for PS2 production just recently. Worldwide PS2 sales for Nov/Dec 2002 were 8.5 million units, which suggests they're still going strong. I think people people like sitting in front of the television playing games for hours and hours JUST FINE.
I always wondered about that sort of thing in shows like Star Trek - if getting transported actually annihilated the original you, and assembled a copy with all your memories and bits - how would anyone tell? I mean, every time someone got transported, they'd die... but to everyone else, it would look exactly like they "moved".
I have one of those picture phones - a Nokia 7650 to be precise. I have taken numerous pictures with it, but I've never sent a single picture to anyone else's phone. This is because a) no-one else I know has a phone capable of receiving pictures and b) it costs me money. When I want to get a nifty picture off the phone, I transmit it via infra-red to my laptop, and that costs me nothing.
Having a camera built into my mobile (which I carry all the time anyway) is a cool thing, although the picture quality of the 7650 isn't that great. The 640 x 480 res is ok, but the colour quality, sharpness and light response are pretty bad. It's fine for sending a postage-sized image to another phone, but it's not good enough for use as a cheap digicam. When the quality improves a bit (perhaps enough to produce a decent standard-sized print), these devices will be really useful.
The whole messaging aspect depends on everyone else having the capacity to actually receive the pictures you send. Phone manufacturers are already pushing for this, and including the facility to view transmitted images on their new mobiles, even if they don't include a camera.
5. PVRs are digital, which means fast forward, reverse, etc. work much better.
Yes yes yes, but it ASTOUNDS me how many people today still have no idea of the differences between random-access and sequential-access media. To me, it's like going back to the horror of Vic-20 cassette tapes again. One of Tivo's problems is that people really just have no idea of the difference - as an example (and I swear this actually happened) my girlfriend's sister reminded me to REWIND MY DVDS when I'd been playing them on Christmas morning at their place. Scary.
I agree, but it all comes down to a question of whether you trust the Chinese government MORE than Microsoft. The Dragon CPU and its associated hardware might, instead of DRM naughtiness, have evil capitalist pig monitoring naughtiness instead.
I'm assuming the source for Red Flag (their version of Linux) is available, but will we get details on the underlying Dragon hardware? I mean, peace and love and goodwill to all men and all that, but the main reason I trust Linux is beause the source is available. If the hardware is closed, we're back to the "no no, *trust* us" situation again...
Of course, I'm hoping if MS or China release hardware systems that take control of my computer away from me, I can just tell them to get bent and buy from someone else...
Re:Enough with the optimism
on
David Brin On LOTR
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Tolkien's themes of loss always seemed a little weird to me - everyone was always lamenting for the mighty heroes of old, and marvelling at the power of lost crafts and magics. I mean, did the Elves make Glamdring and Sting and Orcrist and then FORGET what they just did? If things worked like our world, the very next year some smart-assed Elf would hammer out Super-Glamdring, then Hyper-Glamdring, then Ultra-Glamdring, and continue to improve until Frodo's day when the Elves would be producing toothpicks that would cause every Orc in the land to explode if waved even slightly.
The idea that there was a quota of beauty and power in the world and time passing used it up was really depressing... it kinda reminded me of that Monty Python skit with the Yorkeshiremen, except going forward in time:
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that..... they won't believe you.
Not quite sure why it was so bad... it was my girlfriend's dad's work line. The transfer/receive lights hardly moved at all. Just occasional flickers and spots no matter what parts of the net I looked at, it was just crazy.
I agree - making good software is a difficult task, but most of the reason why general quality is so low is because producers can get away with it. It's such a magical fairyland - crank out some code as quick as you can, distribute the binary, tell people it does something (which may be true, partially true or an utter lie) and then you make them click through an unintelligble agreement which frees you from all liability, while enforcing your rights of ownership. The crowning glory is that anytime anything goes wrong with your software, you can blame everyone else: the operating system vendor, the hardware vendor, code libraries, driver software, other installed applications, virus writers and script kiddies. Extra credit for charging the customer a large sum when your software breaks down. There's no proof anywhere, it's all guesswork and lies, smoke and mirrors, marketing and salesmanship.
Forcing people to release their source is a kneejerk reaction. It might clear up some of the lies, but the real problem is that the industry is doing whatever the hell it wants, and getting away with murder. I agree that legislation (refunds, real guarantees and codes of conduct) would be a better path.
Total agreement here - case in point, I moved from broadband in London to an always-connected dialup in a seaside town in Australia, and nearly went out of my mind. It was the slowest net connection I'd ever experienced ever, even slower than in the early days when we were all using Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic.
What saved me was that it was so slow, I pretty much gave up using it altogether. That saved my sanity, I suspect. It was a pretty clear picture of how much broadband users take speed for granted, so I think the the Work Foundation are wrong.
The last two years has seen the Australian broadband market go completely to hell. I've been in London for that time, and it has BAFFLED me to watch the prices in the UK go DOWN and the prices in Australia go steadily up. London is a crumbling, old, busted metropolis. Half of everything doesn't work, or breaks down regularly, or is just a pile of crap. And yet, I've had solid ADSL broadband in London for 2 years, and not a single problem. In fact, the price DROPPED from 50 pounds a month to 30 a month, and everything continued to be excellent. My ISP in London was Nildram if you're interested, they rock.
Compare this with Australia, with its modern telecoms, new cities and usually quite progressive technology attitudes, and it's completely ass-backwards to see prices spiralling upwards and service agreements becoming increasingly more ridiculous. Caps are a stupid, stupid idea and I CANNOT believe that US companies are considering them. The article pisses me off because it makes it sounds like caps are this fabulous, innovative idea. Caps do little to stop the main problem, which is network overload. Bandwidth limits are far more effective at controlling usage spikes, as well as being easier to implement (no need for counters or cutoffs).
I'm back in Australia now, and I feel like I've gone back in time to the Dark Ages. I'm already looking into satellite links and WiFi connections through groups such as the Brisbane Mesh as well as up and moving to Canada. I'm hoping the high level of competition in the USA nukes capping over there, because it really sucks.
I agree about the Imax movie, it's excellent. Even Tom Cruise's hugely overdone voiceover doesn't ruin it: "And the VIEW HERE is... AWESOME. Just... AWESOME. No really, it's TOTALLY... AWESOME." Kinda like a cross between Keanu Reeves and William Shatner, with liberal snorts of cocaine.
In my experience converting DVDs to DivX video files, 700MB CD-Rs are usually fine to fit an entire ~90min movie, and therefore should be adequate for a 60min TV show.
DVDs are 720 x 480 or 720 x 512 resolution depending on aspect ratio, PAL TV is 768 x 576 (I think) so the resolutions are basically equivalent. Of course, encoding DivX movies isn't realtime unless you have a beast of a machine; the usual method is to sample a rather large hunk of raw footage in MJPEG or something to a hard drive, then encode overnight or whatever.
On top of that, you can halve the resolution, increase the compression, all kinds of stuff to get more screen time on the CD-R, but then you're cutting into your quality. I personally don't mind, I watch episodes of TV shows at half res and it seems fine to me.
The future will be interesting - faster CPUs will eventually mean we can do encoding like DivX in realtime, and the proliferation of DVD burners and even larger media will mean that we can fit more episodes per unit and per dollar - but then there's all the fun of DRM... meh, I'll let someone else talk about that.
Here in the UK I certainly felt it. I was running traces and pinging well-known sites, reconnecting and I *almost* called my ISP asking them what the hell was going on. Mail was coming in slowly, servers were appearing to fade in and out of existence... it sucked.
Penny Arcade has an excellent illustration of what happens when you get teenage gamers on a headset... it involves sucking... and a particualar body part.
So, Tony sends a message to George using this method. A third party, let's call him... Saddam... intercepts the message. George and Tony know the message has been seen, but does Saddam know? Since he changed the state of the information packet by intercepting it, I'd say yes.
Saddam therefore has the message information (which may be valuable on its own) and he has confirmation he's been busted. In other words, he knows he's disrupted Tony and George's communications, and he can take that into account when he acts on the info in the message.
Thus Saddam's role becomes one of "message wrecker" rather than "eavesdropper". This can still be quite a pain in the ass, particularly if wrecking messages is easy. After all, it would be particularly annoying to Tony and George to spend lots of their hard-earned money building such a system, and find that Saddam is wrecking every single message.
Am I right in thinking Saddam will be aware he's been busted?
I agree with everything you said, except about the 64k mp3s.
If you don't offer decent (128k is the standard, but maybe higher) quality mp3s on your site, people will make their own and share them. If they share them, they aren't coming to your site for those files anymore, which means they aren't exposed to YOU anymore, and they don't see your tour dates, merchandise and (of course) your online CD purchasing page.
Slashdot Mirror
Well uh... that's what I just did for Valentine's day... on the suggestion of my girlfriend.
Best. Girlfriend. Ever.
No it doesn't. It puts them in direct competition with Dell, who can bang together Taiwanese server kit and deliver it cheaper than IBM can order donuts for meeting.
Well, they're in direct competition with Dell right now - that's kinda their problem. Dell gets the money for the hardware, and Microsoft gets the money for the software. IBM can't compete on price, so they get no money. From there, if people want services, expertise and apps for that platform, they go to Microsoft, and IBM again gets no money.
They're hoping for a Linux world where they CAN sell services, expertise and apps for that platform, which in turn would make their own hardware attractive for those reasons, rather than just price.
Customers have a finite amount of money they can spend on applications, hardware, operating systems, storage and the other components of their computing infrastructure, Mr. Mills explained. "Reducing the cost of the operating system allows them to spend more money elsewhere," he said.
I think this is the crucial part of this article, and the crucial point that most Linux-embracing companies are running with. With Microsoft, the money goes Microsoft and Intel/AMD. MS OSes only run on Intel/AMD hardware. Microsoft's apps only run on Microsoft OSes. Basically, IBM and Sun and the rest are getting bugger all money from this entire market segment, and widespread acceptence of Linux might change all that.
If Linux gets big, these guys are back in the game, getting a slice of everyone's cash. They can sell hardware that runs Linux, and their apps can run on a platform not controlled by Microsoft. And, since Linux runs on everything from a watch to a toaster to a PC to bigass servers, their apps have the potential to be just about anywhere. That's a future IBM would love to come true.
I've worked with a bunch of IBM and Lotus guys and gals, and daaaaammmmnnnn do they hate Microsoft. They'd put Redmond to the torch if they thought it would get them back in the game. I don't honestly think they'd smoke AIX to make Linux succeed, but they definitely see it is a brighter future.
Let me start by saying that I think Madonna generally sucks ass*, but that of course is my own opinion and doesn't stop her from being an excellent example of superstardom and reinvention...
You're absolutely right about Madonna changing her sound, and look, and brand every few years. The only way she got that kind of control was to achieve enough early success to divorce herself from her record company and manage herself (her own record company is Maverick, I believe). This also means she gets a much bigger chunk of her music's profits.
Because of the nature of the industry, the "bigger chunk of the profits" part is the bit that the record companies paid attention to. These days, they DON'T WANT to make superstars. Superstars get big, their contract expires, they leave the company and they don't make the company any more money. They keep them in the fold, and suck every cent they can out of them until their time is up. Then, it's on to the next band/boy/girl de jour.
Of course, the other result of this system is that artists aren't allowed to reinvent themselves the way they have to if they are going to survive. Their record company wants to stick to the successful formula, and milk it until no-one can stand another second of it. This is happening with Britney Spears - she had a woeful year, but that was because her new stuff sounded... exactly like her old stuff. She should be copying Madonna and going yuppie (Vogue) or gospel (Like a Prayer) or steamy rap (Sex) or poppy William Orbit dance (Ray of Light) or jazz or acoustic or heavy metal or a million other styles.
Another example of reinvention is U2 - Under a Blood Red Sky, Rattle and Hum, Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop and All that You Can't Leave Behind are such different albums, with different styles. They had different stage shows, and different costumes (and different sunglasses). If they were still signed, their producers would be saying "Well, let's make another one that sounds like 'War' again..."
* and in her "Sex" phase, this was probably literally true too.
I know you were just estimating, but the actual figure is pretty big anyway: Sony apparently hit the 50 million mark for PS2 production just recently. Worldwide PS2 sales for Nov/Dec 2002 were 8.5 million units, which suggests they're still going strong. I think people people like sitting in front of the television playing games for hours and hours JUST FINE.
I always wondered about that sort of thing in shows like Star Trek - if getting transported actually annihilated the original you, and assembled a copy with all your memories and bits - how would anyone tell? I mean, every time someone got transported, they'd die... but to everyone else, it would look exactly like they "moved".
I think I'll take the damn shuttle with Bones...
I have one of those picture phones - a Nokia 7650 to be precise. I have taken numerous pictures with it, but I've never sent a single picture to anyone else's phone. This is because a) no-one else I know has a phone capable of receiving pictures and b) it costs me money. When I want to get a nifty picture off the phone, I transmit it via infra-red to my laptop, and that costs me nothing.
Having a camera built into my mobile (which I carry all the time anyway) is a cool thing, although the picture quality of the 7650 isn't that great. The 640 x 480 res is ok, but the colour quality, sharpness and light response are pretty bad. It's fine for sending a postage-sized image to another phone, but it's not good enough for use as a cheap digicam. When the quality improves a bit (perhaps enough to produce a decent standard-sized print), these devices will be really useful.
The whole messaging aspect depends on everyone else having the capacity to actually receive the pictures you send. Phone manufacturers are already pushing for this, and including the facility to view transmitted images on their new mobiles, even if they don't include a camera.
5. PVRs are digital, which means fast forward, reverse, etc. work much better.
Yes yes yes, but it ASTOUNDS me how many people today still have no idea of the differences between random-access and sequential-access media. To me, it's like going back to the horror of Vic-20 cassette tapes again. One of Tivo's problems is that people really just have no idea of the difference - as an example (and I swear this actually happened) my girlfriend's sister reminded me to REWIND MY DVDS when I'd been playing them on Christmas morning at their place. Scary.
I agree, but it all comes down to a question of whether you trust the Chinese government MORE than Microsoft. The Dragon CPU and its associated hardware might, instead of DRM naughtiness, have evil capitalist pig monitoring naughtiness instead.
I'm assuming the source for Red Flag (their version of Linux) is available, but will we get details on the underlying Dragon hardware? I mean, peace and love and goodwill to all men and all that, but the main reason I trust Linux is beause the source is available. If the hardware is closed, we're back to the "no no, *trust* us" situation again...
Of course, I'm hoping if MS or China release hardware systems that take control of my computer away from me, I can just tell them to get bent and buy from someone else...
Tolkien's themes of loss always seemed a little weird to me - everyone was always lamenting for the mighty heroes of old, and marvelling at the power of lost crafts and magics. I mean, did the Elves make Glamdring and Sting and Orcrist and then FORGET what they just did? If things worked like our world, the very next year some smart-assed Elf would hammer out Super-Glamdring, then Hyper-Glamdring, then Ultra-Glamdring, and continue to improve until Frodo's day when the Elves would be producing toothpicks that would cause every Orc in the land to explode if waved even slightly.
..... they won't believe you.
The idea that there was a quota of beauty and power in the world and time passing used it up was really depressing... it kinda reminded me of that Monty Python skit with the Yorkeshiremen, except going forward in time:
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that
When you say "a 60-65% distribution model", do you mean that their plan had only 60-65% of the people in the organization actually getting the system?
Unfortunately, I think MS wants to replace something less shitty than VB with... VB.
Not quite sure why it was so bad... it was my girlfriend's dad's work line. The transfer/receive lights hardly moved at all. Just occasional flickers and spots no matter what parts of the net I looked at, it was just crazy.
You do make an EXCELLENT point, but I use the broadband to work and get paid, so I kinda need it. Maybe I should just get a better job...
I agree - making good software is a difficult task, but most of the reason why general quality is so low is because producers can get away with it. It's such a magical fairyland - crank out some code as quick as you can, distribute the binary, tell people it does something (which may be true, partially true or an utter lie) and then you make them click through an unintelligble agreement which frees you from all liability, while enforcing your rights of ownership. The crowning glory is that anytime anything goes wrong with your software, you can blame everyone else: the operating system vendor, the hardware vendor, code libraries, driver software, other installed applications, virus writers and script kiddies. Extra credit for charging the customer a large sum when your software breaks down. There's no proof anywhere, it's all guesswork and lies, smoke and mirrors, marketing and salesmanship.
Forcing people to release their source is a kneejerk reaction. It might clear up some of the lies, but the real problem is that the industry is doing whatever the hell it wants, and getting away with murder. I agree that legislation (refunds, real guarantees and codes of conduct) would be a better path.
Total agreement here - case in point, I moved from broadband in London to an always-connected dialup in a seaside town in Australia, and nearly went out of my mind. It was the slowest net connection I'd ever experienced ever, even slower than in the early days when we were all using Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic.
What saved me was that it was so slow, I pretty much gave up using it altogether. That saved my sanity, I suspect. It was a pretty clear picture of how much broadband users take speed for granted, so I think the the Work Foundation are wrong.
The last two years has seen the Australian broadband market go completely to hell. I've been in London for that time, and it has BAFFLED me to watch the prices in the UK go DOWN and the prices in Australia go steadily up. London is a crumbling, old, busted metropolis. Half of everything doesn't work, or breaks down regularly, or is just a pile of crap. And yet, I've had solid ADSL broadband in London for 2 years, and not a single problem. In fact, the price DROPPED from 50 pounds a month to 30 a month, and everything continued to be excellent. My ISP in London was Nildram if you're interested, they rock.
Compare this with Australia, with its modern telecoms, new cities and usually quite progressive technology attitudes, and it's completely ass-backwards to see prices spiralling upwards and service agreements becoming increasingly more ridiculous. Caps are a stupid, stupid idea and I CANNOT believe that US companies are considering them. The article pisses me off because it makes it sounds like caps are this fabulous, innovative idea. Caps do little to stop the main problem, which is network overload. Bandwidth limits are far more effective at controlling usage spikes, as well as being easier to implement (no need for counters or cutoffs).
I'm back in Australia now, and I feel like I've gone back in time to the Dark Ages. I'm already looking into satellite links and WiFi connections through groups such as the Brisbane Mesh as well as up and moving to Canada. I'm hoping the high level of competition in the USA nukes capping over there, because it really sucks.
Well... I was actually thinking of "A Night with Five Jenna Jamesons", but I always was greedy.
I agree about the Imax movie, it's excellent. Even Tom Cruise's hugely overdone voiceover doesn't ruin it: "And the VIEW HERE is... AWESOME. Just... AWESOME. No really, it's TOTALLY... AWESOME." Kinda like a cross between Keanu Reeves and William Shatner, with liberal snorts of cocaine.
In my experience converting DVDs to DivX video files, 700MB CD-Rs are usually fine to fit an entire ~90min movie, and therefore should be adequate for a 60min TV show.
DVDs are 720 x 480 or 720 x 512 resolution depending on aspect ratio, PAL TV is 768 x 576 (I think) so the resolutions are basically equivalent. Of course, encoding DivX movies isn't realtime unless you have a beast of a machine; the usual method is to sample a rather large hunk of raw footage in MJPEG or something to a hard drive, then encode overnight or whatever.
On top of that, you can halve the resolution, increase the compression, all kinds of stuff to get more screen time on the CD-R, but then you're cutting into your quality. I personally don't mind, I watch episodes of TV shows at half res and it seems fine to me.
The future will be interesting - faster CPUs will eventually mean we can do encoding like DivX in realtime, and the proliferation of DVD burners and even larger media will mean that we can fit more episodes per unit and per dollar - but then there's all the fun of DRM... meh, I'll let someone else talk about that.
Here in the UK I certainly felt it. I was running traces and pinging well-known sites, reconnecting and I *almost* called my ISP asking them what the hell was going on. Mail was coming in slowly, servers were appearing to fade in and out of existence... it sucked.
Any other comparisons from around the world?
Penny Arcade has an excellent illustration of what happens when you get teenage gamers on a headset... it involves sucking... and a particualar body part.
So, Tony sends a message to George using this method. A third party, let's call him... Saddam... intercepts the message. George and Tony know the message has been seen, but does Saddam know? Since he changed the state of the information packet by intercepting it, I'd say yes.
Saddam therefore has the message information (which may be valuable on its own) and he has confirmation he's been busted. In other words, he knows he's disrupted Tony and George's communications, and he can take that into account when he acts on the info in the message.
Thus Saddam's role becomes one of "message wrecker" rather than "eavesdropper". This can still be quite a pain in the ass, particularly if wrecking messages is easy. After all, it would be particularly annoying to Tony and George to spend lots of their hard-earned money building such a system, and find that Saddam is wrecking every single message.
Am I right in thinking Saddam will be aware he's been busted?
I agree with everything you said, except about the 64k mp3s.
If you don't offer decent (128k is the standard, but maybe higher) quality mp3s on your site, people will make their own and share them. If they share them, they aren't coming to your site for those files anymore, which means they aren't exposed to YOU anymore, and they don't see your tour dates, merchandise and (of course) your online CD purchasing page.
128k mp3s are nowhere near CD-quality anyway.
I think Trinity said it best... "Dodge this".