You're right in that the music industry is not going away, and those who think it is had better be careful what they wish for. Somebody needs to promote, market, and publish music - that is too much to ask any band to do by themselves. Anyone who doesn't think it's a huge amount of work involving dozens of people for each band just doesn't know anything about anything. No band could take that all on themselves - that's *why* most great bands languish in obscurity until they get signed. They're doing all they can already booking and playing small local clubs while they write and record music and probably maintain real jobs at the same time. Record labels are a necessary evil.
But there will be consolidation and "shrinkage", and the music industry in 2020 will probably look pretty different than the industry today. There might not be a whole lot of difference anymore between a "major" and an "indie" label - already you hear EMI referred to as "the world's largest indie", and eventually they'll probably all be around that same size. They'll offer fewer services and they'll be less important to their parent companies, so freer to do more inventive things.
I also think there is going to need to be a de-emphasis on selling products and a new emphasis on live performances (this is really a return to music's natural state), so I agree with you to a point on that. But the album and song are not going away either; people want to have that music to listen to at home. I actually think we might eventually get to a point where most albums are *of* live performances - where you go a concert, get a CD (or a memory card) made for you right there of the show you just saw, and that's your "album". (Of course, people who can't get tickets will want to listen to the music too, so there would still need to be some sort of master recording.) These new "360" deals with the record labels are already moving things in that direction, where the label takes more of an interest in concert tours and provides more support for them.
The industry will evolve and change, but it's not going away. Nor should it.
Sure, the artists you hear on the radio won't immediately leave the RIAA but after a while some groups and artists notice that they are not getting what they deserve and can get much better income elsewhere. Then they'll start switching.
The problem is you're ignoring new artists in this line of thinking. I mean, people switch jobs and companies in *every* industry, but you don't see those companies all going out of business because of it. They just hire new people, often on better terms for the company.
That's still going on. In fact, just yesterday there was a story about EMI restricting new signings as a cost-cutting move. That sure implies that there are more artists looking to get signed than the labels want, which of course has always been the case.
I don't see any major exodus from the major labels, and I see plenty of new acts being signed. If anything, the big threat facing the labels as far as any possible exodus goes is that their own cost-cutting will leave them unable to provide the services that they're contractually obligated to provide. That will make their artists unhappy, and it will give them a legal means to opt out of their contracts.
But most bands don't care a whit about these lawsuits. Or if they do, they care less about the lawsuits than they do about the money they've made since signing to a major label.
That's one dream. The summary says that they're looking at 1 to 4 dreams a night, which indicates that the dreams they're talking about are the ones we don't remember.
That doesn't do anything to explain away the implied criticism. We presumably have dozens of dreams per night that we don't remember, the vast majority of which are neither realistic nor "threat dreams". So what's the purpose of those?
I don't think there's a scientist anywhere that thinks some dreams serve one purpose and other dreams serve another. Dreaming in general probably serves more than one purpose simultaneously, but every dream serves those same purposes... whether it's defragmenting memories, or cataloging fantasies, or whatever. REM sleep is REM sleep; there are no different "categories" of REM sleep. And clearly, most of our dreams have nothing whatsoever to do with preparing us for threats. Simply using anecdotal quotes about people saying "it was like a dream!" when they respond to a real life threat situation is hardly proof of anything.
This is one of those cases where a single "false" result precludes a "true" result from the rest of the experiment. And we've all got plenty of "false" results every night.
To keep your real name offline to the best of your ability. I see no reason for people online to know my real name, or tie it to my internet activities.
I see reasons both for and against. On the one hand, yes, you have these privacy concerns that are totally valid. On the other, here you have the internet, which is *designed* to connect people. In the early days, *everybody* used their real name - heck, I still belong to one forum that was probably among the first on the web where I still use my real name (few other people there do).
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you. I've been contacted by long lost friends and family that I never thought I'd speak to again, and I've got a big network of people that I talk to online now (and in real life) that I'd never have found offline. This is one of the big attractions of the net; in fact, I consider the internet pretty pointless otherwise. Is the internet nothing more than a bunch of companies hawking products, low-quality amateur scat porn and anonymous strangers yammering at each other? That's even worse than real life. Why would anyone want that?
But I also don't see this as just an evil plot by the corporations. A person's outside behavior has *always* been fair game in terms of employment... the only difference is the internet makes it easier to track. Let's say a company hires an accountant, who at some point during his term of employment gets into a bar fight and gets arrested. He comes in to work the next day bruised and bloody, and the story makes the local newspaper. What do you think is going to happen? Most likely, he's going to get fired. It doesn't matter that he did it on his own time; companies want well-adjusted, positive people working for them, and in an "at will" system of employment, "job security" has always been an illusion. You have job security provided you play the game right, and that means at work and at home. It's always been that way.
People act like asses on the internet because they think they can get away with it. But they can no more get away with it on the net than that accountant could get away with being in a real-life bar fight that makes the local papers. An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
Of course, you can argue about moral standards, but if your company doesn't share your own moral standards, then maybe you shouldn't be working there to begin with.
As for me, I don't make any particular effort to hide my full real name but I don't freely give it out either. In a Google search of my name, I don't come up at all. Even still, I try not to do anything that's going to make me look stupid online, regardless of who's going to see it. I think that's probably good advice for anybody.
I agree that he'd be entitled to punitive damages if this were a scam, but I find it hard to fathom that Christie's would knowingly commit fraud.
Didn't read TFA posted here, but there was an article/interview in the NY Daily News the other day with this guy and he said one of the things Spiner told him when they met was "I told them not to sell" the visor because it was fake. If that's true - and it seems like you'd have to take the word of the guy who supposedly wore it - then there could be a case for fraud. Christie's at that point went ahead with an auction they were warned about by one of the principals involved with the merchandise.
Of course, it also depends on how these items were presented. I read the catalog for this auction at the time and many of the items were presented as rehearsal props or backups, or were otherwise never claimed to have actually been used on the show. Maybe this guy *believed* this visor was used on the show, but Christie's never said so. If that's the case, he's gonna have a tough time collecting anything from them.
That's fine if all you're listening to is an MP3 player and cheesy earbuds, but I have two JBL threee-way enclosures with 12 inch woofers in my living room, and a six speaker premium stereo in my car.
So I can certainly hear the difference between the compressed files and CD quality files, even with my old ears.
Neither of those speaker systems qualify as anything close to high end audio, so no, you can't tell the difference. (JBL makes some good home loudspeakers, and some nice studio monitors, but nothing that's really audiophile quality... which is what you'd need to tell the difference between a good mp3 and a CD.)
Oh, you may *think* you can, but that's why people run double blind tests. I guarantee 100% that in any double blind test you took with either of your sound systems, you would not be able to reliably tell which is an uncompressed file and which is a 256kb mp3.
Most well-encoded mp3 files at 256kbps or above (CBR) or around 200kbps or above (VBR) are transparent to about 99% of people on *all* speaker systems, whether you're using Sonus Cremona's or regular old JBL's. Many double blind tests have confirmed this (in fact, most say the transparency threshold is actually lower; I'm giving you at least some benefit of the doubt).
Often a visitor will comment on how good my stereo sounds, so at that point I usually put a CD in. I don't get any argument about CD vs MP3 quality from anyone who's listened to MP3s and CDs through good speakers.
I've done better - I've listened to mp3's and CD's through good headphones. High end headphones are much cheaper than the same quality speakers, and they have the added benefit of not being colored by room acoustics. I have actually participated in double blind tests using a pair of Sennheiser HD650's and in most cases, I couldn't tell the difference at even 128kbps. Like you, I scoffed at compressed audio before that test. I thought I'd have no problem picking out the mp3's. But most files in all formats sounded pretty much the same - only rarely did a file really jump out at me as being inferior (I found out later that ATRAC had performed far below the other codecs in the test I was in), and in most cases, even listening repeatedly, it was still tough to tell.
I'm neither a spring chicken nor an audio n00b either. I've got a home recording studio, for one thing, and I've recorded at professional studios as well. So it's not like I can't pick out subtle nuances in music.
If you're hearing major differences between mp3's and CD's, then you're not using a good encoder (like LAME) or you're using the wrong settings (which is very easy to do in LAME - it's got a complex array of options). I can guarantee you that Amazon is not having that problem.
I didn't think (from reading the article) that Mossberg thought the Dell was better, just that there was a reasonable all-in-one option for someone who wants to run Windows.
There are plenty of nice all-in-ones out there for people who run Windows. They're call laptops.
I still don't get why you'd buy either an iMac *or* an XPS One when you can buy something like this instead, and have full portability as part of the bargain. (And note the price.) I actually just bought one of those for $399 as a Christmas gift for my wife - it's a great little machine.
Yes, I know Apple makes laptops too. I have no problem with them if you're a Mac person. I just don't "get" the whole category of computers that the iMac and XPS One fit into. What is it, the bigger screen vs. a laptop? Hell, you could buy a laptop *and* a 24" LCD screen for less than an XPS One, and then you'd have a really nice computer with the same huge screen *and* it'd be fully portable!
Has Darl McBride got away with a fat severance package and a job at Microsoft, or did the directors of SCO go down with their ship in any meaningful way?
Darl McBride continues to be with the company, as do most of the other important company directors.
As with every other piece of SCO news, people around here are overreacting to this. Being de-listed from the NASDAQ doesn't really mean a whole lot, because they weren't counting on using any investor money at this point anyway. They've put all their financial eggs in one basket, and that's the lawsuits. And those are continuing; SCO has even said they'll appeal the Novell ruling.
This doesn't mean SCO is "dead", not any more than they were yesterday or the day before anyway. Essentially all that's changed is that you won't be able to point and laugh at them on Yahoo Finance anymore.
It's maybe one more nail in the coffin, but they've been building that coffin for a while now, and it's still not finished yet.
In the "old days" it was necessary to provide recording studios, press plastic records, bribe DJs, buy good reviews and coerce musicians into making records to order. Nowadays, most of those functions can be bought-in by the artist themselves.
This is an incredibly naive attitude that I see gaining in popularity lately. It's no different than saying "in the old days, you needed to buy a computer from a major manufacturer. Nowadays, you can build one yourself."
Sure, maybe you can, but the vast majority of people can't. Especially if they know next to nothing about computers, as most computer users don't.
Most bands are not experts in the music business. They are paying for a service when they sign to a record label. That service includes all sorts of things, from finding and hiring producers and session musicians to pitching the band directly to radio station music and programming directors to making sure the recording studio is stocked with the food they like during sessions. Many of these things are things that four or five people literally couldn't do by themselves - there's just not enough time. For example, there's typically one or two people representing a band whose only job is to sit there all day and call radio stations. This is a full time job and then some; if the band had to do it themselves, they'd have no time to do anything else (you know, like making music).
So at best, a band is going to need to hire a bunch of people to do this stuff. Where are they going to get the money? And how are they going to find the right people? You can't come in cold and just start doing A it's all about relationships. Ditto with production; that's a skill position.
A manager can handle some of it, but even that's usually part of what a band's paying for with a record label. You don't find good managers in the yellow pages. You find them through a record label.
It's one thing for a band like Radiohead or NIN to go sans-label. They're established, they have an existing fan base, they have a manager, they have lots of relationships built up all over the world, throughout the industry, over a number of years. And they have lots of money to pay people with up front. But they could never have gotten to that point without a label. They would have never met the same people, they would have never been heard by the same number of fans, they wouldn't have nearly the same leverage.
The internet doesn't change this at all; if anything, it makes a label more important. Because the question now is "out of 50,000 new bands every year, which one are *you* going to listen to"? How do you sift through so many bands? A new band just is not going to be able to do a professional job recording their own album, and then get it up somewhere that a large number of people will be able to hear it. What are they gonna do, put their album on their MySpace page? Along with 100,000 other bands? Yeah, good luck with that. When was the last time you actually found a decent band there, and have enough others found them for the band to be self-supporting?
Any other example of organized digital distribution that I can think of - Yahoo Music, iTunes, whatever - happens in conjunction with a record label.
Self-promotion is not the future, at least not for new and emerging artists. The future involves labels. The only question is how, and clearly they need to make some adjustment to their business models. Maybe these "360" deals like Madonna and Paramore have are the future, I don't know. I kind of hope not, because that actually gives the labels *more* control, not less. But it is a more comprehensive service. Maybe eventually the opposite will be the case; smaller, "thinner" labels have less involvement but still handle the important things that a band can't do themselves, like A&R. That's probably a more likely end result.
But the labels won't go away, and you wouldn't want them to. Otherwise, you'll be lost in a
In my experience, I think a lot of the Flash designers you come across are from animation or print design backgrounds, rather than specifically web design. A few years ago this was definitely the case.
Unfortunately that often means that the designers working on these Flash websites simply don't get the web, or how their content integrates with the page or browser, as well as someone who has been using CSS/HTML/JS for most of their career
Design is design - print or web doesn't matter. People have been slowly starting to realize this over the last half decade or so. Your talk about people who have been using CSS/HTML/JS "most of their career" is kind of moot when you consider that two of those technologies have only been around about a decade, and the third only a little longer. Do you think best practices in print design were set in stone only 10 years after the invention of the printing press? 20 or 30 years from now, the way we use the web will be completely different from the way we use it now, just as the way we use it now is pretty different from the way we used it in 1991. Would you have argued against YouTube because it's Flash-based? Or because it's video-based? Should the web only be used for text? After all, that's originally what it was, and every time some new feature or technology was added, there were people who argued against it because it made the web "uglier" or "more confusing" or led directly to "bad design".
No, the web evolves. Get used to it.
Yes, there are bad designers out there. But that's all they are; bad designers. It's got nothing to do with print vs. web or whatever. The arguments among web developers about this boil down to design vs. technology, not good design vs. bad design. And while good design is at least somewhat permanent, technology is constantly changing. So there's no point arguing that technology that worked 10 years ago is the same technology we should be using today because new technology encourages bad design; no, bad designers, producers and project managers encourage bad design. Background matters little.
btw, I say this as someone who is constantly espousing the use of AJAX at the company I work for. I find too much Flash annoying. But again, that's got nothing to do with design, it's got to do with functionality. AJAX has improved now to the point where you can do most of the same things with it as you can with Flash from a design perspective, without the incessant animations and ridiculously long load and draw times. So I do feel like it's a better choice most of the time. But the problem I give the designers and developers is usually phrased as "come up with the best and most interesting design you could do in Flash, then let's see if we can do it in AJAX." AJAX is still somewhat more limiting than Flash, which is why most large companies continue to use it.
And that is the way it should be. Bands should be propped up for any reason. They should get by on talent alone.
Ah, I remember when I was 20 and an idealist...
How is a band intended to "get by on talent alone" when nobody can hear your music? There are about 50,000 bands in every state in the US. Why should any given person listen to any one of them over any other? It would take you years just to sit through the cruft to get to a single band worth following.
I give you Bjork as a prefect example of propped shit.
Bjork was part of one of these non-RIAA bands that people like you espouse. I'm sure if it was 1985 you'd be on here talking about how we should all be buying Sugarcubes albums and boycotting the RIAA. That's the problem with idealism; reality has a different dogma. She signed to a major label as soon as she was able to, and her fans continued to follow her regardless. Nothing much about the music changed that couldn't be attributed to 20 years worth of age. Only the label changed.
So when your favorite current indie band signs to a major, will you call them "artificially propped up"? Will their music suddenly suck? Will they suddenly be really boring live? No-talent hacks...
It's pretty ridiculous to indict an entire range of artists simply because of the record label they're signed to. Talk about blind stereotyping... that's supposedly what music idealists like yourself are so against.
This is a semi-serious, only partially rhetorical question: HOW THE HELL CAN YOU PEOPLE NOT KNOW WHO GAMECOCK IS?
I can understand if you're not gamers; it's not exactly a household name among the general population. But this is a gaming thread, for god's sake, and you'd think at least some of you would be PC gamers.
Gamecock is the second iteration of the original Gathering of Developers. Ring a bell?
Run by the same guys in the same town (Austin?), I *think* even in the same offices as the old Gathering. I know a girl who used to work at Gathering and is now doing design work for Gamecock, and apparently it's a *lot* of the same old Gathering people - not just the guys at the top.
Gathering used to be famous for pulling crap like this too, so this shouldn't have been unexpected. It honestly was one of the reasons they were forced to sell out; they spent too much money and effort on stupid stunts and parties and not enough on making good games. Seems like history is repeating itself.
I think the problem isn't the music adults are buying, it's the kids who most likely drive this market more.
No, that's the problem with conventional wisdom. Who has more money, adults or kids? So why are all the "most popular" artists geared towards teenagers?
It didn't used to be this way and it shouldn't be now. It's one of the RIAA's big problems - they just don't know their market. Who had the #1 album a couple of weeks ago? The Eagles. And how many times did you hear a song from that album on a "top 40" radio station? Not once.
The music industry has a large number of problems right now. Their public image (because of the lawsuits) is one. Their marketing is another. Their A&R is another. They simply don't know their audience right now. They need to learn to follow the money. When you actively market the most to a demographic that is almost by nature 90% unemployed, you are guaranteed to have problems selling your product.
Japan's equivalent to the RIAA isn't anywhere nearly as maniacal, or so I've heard.
Oh, the RIAJ is just as maniacal, just in different ways.
At least they don't sue their own customers.
What they do, though, is install all sorts of DRM on their CD's (they're the world leader in this; in fact, Japan acts as a sort of test market for new DRM schemes) and refuse to sell their downloadable music in anything but DRM-encrusted formats. There is no such thing as an mp3 from an official Japanese source, or even an unprotected AAC file. Most downloads are Windows Media; a lot of music is even kept off iTunes (such as the entire Sony catalog). This in contrast to the RIAA - I just bought an MVI DVD/CD from Paramore, for example, that had actual mp3 files on the disc. And of course now you have iTunes Plus selling no-DRM AAC's and Amazon selling mp3's. This is one thing the US music industry is finally waking up to... Japan is still well-entrenched in DRM land.
The Japanese music industry makes it as technically difficult as possible to even rip your own CD's. They even try to region-protect their CD's. I bought a PUFFY CD a while back that had this "Label Gate" system on it (read the Wikipedia article on Puffy's "59" - I wrote most of it) that told me I couldn't load the CD in my computer because my computer wasn't running a Japanese OS. No, it wasn't just the application that wouldn't load due to some sort of language issue, it actually locked the CD out as the "wrong region". I got around this with EAC, which locks the drive as soon as you put a CD in (so the region checker couldn't load), but it just goes to show the lengths the Japanese music industry will go to in order to "protect" their content. ("Protect" it from people who bought it and now want to listen to it, apparently.)
I expect they're just watching the RIAA to see how the lawsuit campaign goes. The RIAJ is not as well-funded as the RIAA, but if they see it paying off, I'm sure they'll adopt a similar war on their consumers too. Music sales are down even further in Japan than they are here, as I understand it.
I'm not sure what you want to see the shareholders do or think, unless it is perhaps "that money is being wasted on lawsuits" which is probably not a foregone conclusion.
I'm sure what he wants them to see is that their accelerating sales declines are because of all this nonsense, not in spite of it. The conventional wisdom right now is that these lawsuits are doing all that can be done to staunch the tide of piracy and prop up sales in a difficult market... I think the reality is the industry is doing more damage to itself with these types of statements and the lawsuits that they go along with than piracy ever did.
People are calling for a boycott... I think a boycott is already in force, if you look at the sales numbers. A lot of people don't buy nearly as much music as they used to, and the declines are growing every year. (Downloads aren't rising nearly fast enough to make up for lost CD sales.) This despite the lawsuits, and the fact that even the RIAA has said that they've stemmed the rising tide of piracy.
You can argue over the reasons for that, and I agree there are probably many reasons, but I don't think it can be disputed that the RIAA's war on its own consumers has tarnished the music industry's image among the public. I don't think anybody says "I'm not buying this CD because the music industry is suing people!" but I think it's in the back of their mind all the time that this industry is at best shady and at worst evil, and so major label music is not going to automatically be put at the top of their internal wish lists. Also, it only takes 10% of people to stop buying music for sales to drop 10% (or more, depending on what types of buyers they were), and I'm sure that this campaign against common sense has turned off more than 10% of the industry's heaviest consumers.
It would be nice if the companies themselves - ie. the investors, which are the money behind everything - would finally recognize this.
I think the real problem that we have is that we view email as if it were written communication after the fact, but when we're writing it, most of us think of it roughly the same way that we view casual conversation.
On the other hand, those that do consider it formal communication can use this to their advantage.
My bosses hate email and when they do write it, they often use it like IM - one line of almost incomprehensible gibberish. They try to give any instructions they need to in person. But that leads to confusion because there's no record of the conversation, so if anything gets messed up - even if I *know* what they said - you know where the blame goes.
I've learned that to navigate the corporate world successfully, you have to know how to manipulate via email. You have to pin people down in writing. Ask simple, specific questions (ones requiring only yes or no answers are best) and use lots of bullet points.
I can't even count how many times I've had someone try to pin the blame on me for something, only to be able to whip out a 6 month old email that makes it all too clear where that blame really lies. The best part is nobody really realizes what you're doing - they think you're just being professional. You can even tell them "oh, I just like to keep a record of all my communications as a reference" (which is the truth!) and they think you're just being really thorough!
And nobody can say "I don't want to tell you by email" because then it sounds like they're hiding something.
So yes, you do have to be careful what you say, but not always for the reasons you think. You need to cover your own ass, but you can use email to your advantage in doing that.
I do think also that if everybody used corporate email properly - ie. clear, concise emails specifically relating to the work at hand - there'd be a lot less confusion in the workplace.
btw, I keep all my work-related IM conversations too:)
Note that most folk who work multiple jobs don't have a single full-time job. They may average 50-60 hours per week among their 2-5 jobs, but since none of their jobs pay benefits and they have higher-than-ordinary travel expenses, they need to work that much just to survive.
That's their choice, and their problem.
Look, I'm a hardcore Democrat, borderline socialist. But your attitude is not helpful, and it's only going to doom you to failure along with anyone else who follows the same mantra.
My parents are not well off. My dad contributed about $5,000 to my education (smart guy that he is, he started saving for that when I was 10, sacrificing much for it), my mom nothing. I financed the rest through a combination of government grants and student loans, which took me approximately 13 years to pay off. But I did it, all by myself. If my dad hadn't been able to contribute what he did, my loans would have just been that much bigger and taken a little longer to get rid of.
It also helped that I spent my first two years at a cheap state school, then transferred for my last two years to NYU. So my diploma is from NYU, but I paid about half what a four year NYU student would have paid. And I worked all the way through college.
These are all things you figure out how to do if you want to graduate from college. If you throw up your hands right at the start and say "I can't afford this!" then that's your problem. You wouldn't last a day in a real job anyway. Nobody hires a whiner.
Once I graduated from college, I paid my dues selling home electronics for a year, then through persistence got a low-paying job writing about video games. From there, it was onto a video game publisher producing web sites. And now I'm a senior producer for a major cable television channel.
Anyone who has to work multiple jobs to get by has just done something wrong with their life planning. Nothing in my situation came down to luck and the only thing I was "given" was a little bit of money my dad had saved up over a period of eight years, and that didn't even pay for a full year at state college. The rest was just hard work and persistence.
Posts like yours are enough to turn anybody Republican. Yes, there are cases where people legitimately cannot help themselves and end up out on the street, either because they have mental problems, or health problems, or whatever. But any non-disabled person who comes from even a poor home can qualify for enough student assistance to attend college, as I did (in fact, the poorer you are, the easier to qualify), and from there, it's all down to you what you do with your education. Plenty of people do work only one job with benefits, you know, and not all of them come from privileged backgrounds.
Maybe what people are proposing is, get this: we need to redefine what 'public' is.
I think the problem is we are redefining what public is.
20 years ago, there was no expectation whatsoever that being in "public" meant your every move would be tracked by government officials potentially hundreds of miles away, and then stored for all time. That's not what "public" meant. People had an expectation that yes, anybody who was around you could potentially be watching you, but that kept it a relatively level playing field because you could pretty easily identify any threats to your privacy and avoid them if you like. If you were walking down an empty side street and needed to quickly adjust your belt because your pants were too loose, you could look around and do so without fear that cops are watching ready to jump you for "reaching for a concealed explosive" or even "intent to expose oneself in public" or whatever other nonsense law they can come up with.
That is the expectation we have always had for what "public" means - yes, you can be watched, but only by those around you, and that means that you can easily watch them back. Being able to be watched - and recorded - by someone many miles away is not what "public" means to me or anybody else. That's an intrusion, just like any other. You are being watched by people who are not there. And you have no idea what they're thinking or doing, even while they can watch your every move. It's a completely one-sided relationship where the other side has all the power. That's scary. And it's the exact opposite of what "being in public" is all about.
We don't need to redefine what public means, we need to take back its original meaning. Nobody should be allowed to watch a space that they do not own (ie. a public space) without being physically present.
The big problem with the PS3, and Xbox 360, is that backward compatibility isn't a given. You might do ok, depending on the game, but it's not like you can scrap your PS2 for a PS3 and come up roses.
You can if you buy the right one. 60GB models are still out there in some places. 80GB models also have near-100% compatibility - yeah, some games have problems, but it's not like the Xbox 360 with its ~70% compatibility. And the 80GB models aren't going away.
The execution's fine. At this point the vast majority of articles I read have little or no problems.
Then we're not reading the same articles.
It may be true that the most popular pages on the site have few (though certainly not no) problems. But that's easy, and not what makes an encyclopedia what it is. Anybody can write up 200 or 300 or even 1,000 good articles.
People read encyclopedias when they need information on things they can't find information on anywhere else. Encyclopedias are the original manifestation of "the long tail". Why would you buy an encyclopedia to read about, I dunno, George Bush? You can find all you need to know about him anywhere. You read an encyclopedia when you need to know about Brazil nuts or Mexican honeycreeper birds or anything else that you otherwise don't have easy access to an authoritative source for. Encyclopedias are supposed to contain a wealth of information about everything (or as close to it as they can get), not just a couple thousand "popular" subjects. That's why the paper versions come in giant 26 volume packages. That's what makes encyclopedias truly useful - because you know that any subject you come across that you need info on will be in there, and with reliable info.
(In other words, while 10,000 people might read the article about George Bush every day, making it among the most popular articles, probably 100,000 people read all the other articles on the site every hour.)
The problem with wikipedia is that those less-traveled articles - less-traveled but vitally important, for the reason illustrated above - are riddled with errors of every kind. I don't remember the last wikipedia article I've come across that didn't have several obvious typos, for one thing - I've given up even trying to fix all of them, I'd just never be doing anything else. Some articles on wikipedia don't make any logical sense, they're so poorly written. And many contain useless insider or industry jargon (the meanings of which are never explained) that make the articles almost impossible for a layperson to read.
While the quality of the top articles on wikipedia has probably improved over the years, the quality of the encyclopedia as a whole has definitely gotten worse as more articles are added. Some of it is due to wikipedia's own policies, and some of it is due to editors and admins misunderstanding and mis-applying those policies. Some of it is due to vandalism, some of it is due to well-meaning but borderline illiterate "editors" whose work is never checked or fixed once it's put up. Those people really should not be writing anything there, but the nature of the site is such that nobody's locked out preemptively.
I know that there have been various initiatives to try to fix some of these problems; suggestions to "freeze" the number of articles on the site for a while, the purge of "non-notable" articles, etc. though most of these solutions are either impractical or ill-advised. What's needed is a change in the nature of the site.
All this talk about back alley cabals doesn't help matters at all, though, and if nothing else makes it seem a lot less likely that anything's going to change. People in power want to stay in power, and that means preserving the status quo. Wikipedia's reputation is hardly stellar as it is, though - almost everywhere you go these days that references it, you see some sort of snarky disclaimer about the reliability of the info there. There could very well come a day when most people decide that it's just not even a relevant reference anymore for most subjects.
Yes, customers have rights. Exercising them is up to the customer. I don't have to help them/you. If my help is desired, ask nicely. Payment would help.
Apple is (apparently) offering to help. They would expect payment - natch.
Generally I agree with you, although it's slightly more complicated than that because of the DMCA.
To use your 2nd amendment analogy (my thoughts on that subject being an entirely different story, but I'll go with it for the purposes of illustration), it would be like saying you have the right to bear arms, but then saying it's illegal to actually open the box that the weapon comes in because the copyright is owned by the box maker and they don't want you opening it. So then Apple comes in and says they have a legal box-opener that's sanctioned by the box maker, and only they can sell it to you.
That would be pretty ridiculous, right? You can buy the weapon, you can legally use it, but you have to buy the means to open the package separately from some third party? That's what's going on here.
I do agree completely that those offering a service should be compensated for it. I just bought an "MVI" DVD, for example, that includes the band in question's full audio CD, plus pre-ripped mp3's of the entire CD (and yes, real mp3's, on a Warner Music disc), plus 5 bonus tracks, plus about seven videos, plus extra junk like wallpaper, buddy icons, etc. I paid $2 extra over the standard audio CD for all that and I was happy to do it. I probably would have paid $2 extra just for the officially-ripped mp3's by themselves (only because I figure they've gotta have some better quality system to do it with than my LAME... although I'm probably wrong). Point being, it's an extra thing that I don't have to do, and I'm pretty tech savvy - I could do it myself pretty easily - but a lot of people couldn't, they don't even know how to import a CD in iTunes. So for them, they're paying for something that they wouldn't otherwise have at all.
But to pay for the right to do something that you otherwise should have anyway is the problem here.
Contrary to how the US Justice System is viewed today, despite the actions of any party accused or convicted of wrong-doing, there is a widely-held belief that party should be judged with objectively and conviction be dealt without malicious intent or a decision be made against the party based on personal opinion.
Yes, the point being, there already was an objective decision... and now what's to be decided are penalties. And penalties, my friend, are not decided objectively - they are decided based upon a standing court decision.
Personally, I think a knee to Darl's nuts would be a pretty good start.
It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this.
It's not really a new idea. Here's a still from Orson Welles' "The Trial" (yes, from the Kafka novel), and that was made in the 1960's. The only difference now is that there's *nothing* kept on the desk - in the old days, there was at least a typewriter. Over time, other objects appeared; in and out boxes, pencil holders, etc. And that's when the concept of "assigned desks" and the cubicle took over, out of a necessity for both better working conditions and more productive workers.
This is a regression backwards; there's nothing new about it, and it's not what workers want, that's for sure. Management loves it in theory because they can keep an eye on many employees at once. They know who is there, they know who is working and not just staring at the ceiling or throwing darts at their cube walls.
But employees hate it, and I know this from experience. My previous job didn't quite go so far as having empty desks where employees could sit anywhere, but we did have a completely open office without walls. What you invariably end up with is as many people crammed into a room as the employer can fit, because there are no boundaries telling anybody "this is enough space for one person". At my office, this was easy to do because the whole office was just a series of long metal tables pushed together, so when we hired somebody new, everybody just scrunched down a little more. And because nobody has any claim to any personal space, or any "ownership" of it, they end up throwing garbage everywhere and not ever cleaning it up. So it's cramped, crowded, smelly, and there's no privacy. It's like what you'd imagine working in an office in the Soviet Union was probably like. Or some sort of sweatshop.
Cisco probably hasn't gotten to that point yet, but I guarantee their employees already hate it. And eventually, it'll become intolerable and everybody will be clamoring for the days of cubes again.
This is just another example of somebody thinking they've stumbled onto a great idea, not thinking through the unintended consequences, and not realizing that countless other people have tried the same thing many times before, without success.
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances.
I know you mentioned LAME in your last sentence, but I'm not sure how that doesn't invalidate your last sentence. If it doesn't, then the listening test above does.
I'll sum up the double-blind test results above: LAME-encoded mp3's sound as good as AAC files and better than WMA files at the same bit rate. (The bit rates varied by insignificant amounts.)
I'm worried that all of this is leading to a time where you can only find the inferior lossy formats of music!?!?
I'd still rather get a CD, and rip it to lossless for home audio, and then to lossy for portables or the car...two of the worst listening environments there are.....
I generally agree with you, although I don't rip to lossless for home - I just keep the CD around.
But I only buy CD's, if only so I know I have an archive recording. (Yes, I know, CD's themselves have fairly low sample rates by "hi-fi" standards, but they're still better than lossy compression.) I worry that as CD sales drop and download sales rise, the record labels will lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of all purchases are still CD's. When you see stats like CD sales dropping 10% and download sales exploding by 100%, it sounds like downloads are absolutely trouncing CD's. Until you realize that it's 10% off about 1 billion CD's, and a 100% increase over about 1 million full CD-equivalent downloads.
Ditching the CD in favor of downloads at this point would be like the auto industry ditching gasoline in favor of hydrogen. It's premature at this point to say the least.
But it may happen someday. A lot of people will probably be happy about it when it does. People like you and me just have to hope that by then, bandwidth and storage space will have increased to the point where it actually makes sense for labels to offer lossless downloads in addition to lossy ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're close, but not quite there.
You're right in that the music industry is not going away, and those who think it is had better be careful what they wish for. Somebody needs to promote, market, and publish music - that is too much to ask any band to do by themselves. Anyone who doesn't think it's a huge amount of work involving dozens of people for each band just doesn't know anything about anything. No band could take that all on themselves - that's *why* most great bands languish in obscurity until they get signed. They're doing all they can already booking and playing small local clubs while they write and record music and probably maintain real jobs at the same time. Record labels are a necessary evil.
But there will be consolidation and "shrinkage", and the music industry in 2020 will probably look pretty different than the industry today. There might not be a whole lot of difference anymore between a "major" and an "indie" label - already you hear EMI referred to as "the world's largest indie", and eventually they'll probably all be around that same size. They'll offer fewer services and they'll be less important to their parent companies, so freer to do more inventive things.
I also think there is going to need to be a de-emphasis on selling products and a new emphasis on live performances (this is really a return to music's natural state), so I agree with you to a point on that. But the album and song are not going away either; people want to have that music to listen to at home. I actually think we might eventually get to a point where most albums are *of* live performances - where you go a concert, get a CD (or a memory card) made for you right there of the show you just saw, and that's your "album". (Of course, people who can't get tickets will want to listen to the music too, so there would still need to be some sort of master recording.) These new "360" deals with the record labels are already moving things in that direction, where the label takes more of an interest in concert tours and provides more support for them.
The industry will evolve and change, but it's not going away. Nor should it.
Sure, the artists you hear on the radio won't immediately leave the RIAA but after a while some groups and artists notice that they are not getting what they deserve and can get much better income elsewhere. Then they'll start switching.
The problem is you're ignoring new artists in this line of thinking. I mean, people switch jobs and companies in *every* industry, but you don't see those companies all going out of business because of it. They just hire new people, often on better terms for the company.
That's still going on. In fact, just yesterday there was a story about EMI restricting new signings as a cost-cutting move. That sure implies that there are more artists looking to get signed than the labels want, which of course has always been the case.
I don't see any major exodus from the major labels, and I see plenty of new acts being signed. If anything, the big threat facing the labels as far as any possible exodus goes is that their own cost-cutting will leave them unable to provide the services that they're contractually obligated to provide. That will make their artists unhappy, and it will give them a legal means to opt out of their contracts.
But most bands don't care a whit about these lawsuits. Or if they do, they care less about the lawsuits than they do about the money they've made since signing to a major label.
That's one dream. The summary says that they're looking at 1 to 4 dreams a night, which indicates that the dreams they're talking about are the ones we don't remember.
That doesn't do anything to explain away the implied criticism. We presumably have dozens of dreams per night that we don't remember, the vast majority of which are neither realistic nor "threat dreams". So what's the purpose of those?
I don't think there's a scientist anywhere that thinks some dreams serve one purpose and other dreams serve another. Dreaming in general probably serves more than one purpose simultaneously, but every dream serves those same purposes... whether it's defragmenting memories, or cataloging fantasies, or whatever. REM sleep is REM sleep; there are no different "categories" of REM sleep. And clearly, most of our dreams have nothing whatsoever to do with preparing us for threats. Simply using anecdotal quotes about people saying "it was like a dream!" when they respond to a real life threat situation is hardly proof of anything.
This is one of those cases where a single "false" result precludes a "true" result from the rest of the experiment. And we've all got plenty of "false" results every night.
To keep your real name offline to the best of your ability. I see no reason for people online to know my real name, or tie it to my internet activities.
I see reasons both for and against. On the one hand, yes, you have these privacy concerns that are totally valid. On the other, here you have the internet, which is *designed* to connect people. In the early days, *everybody* used their real name - heck, I still belong to one forum that was probably among the first on the web where I still use my real name (few other people there do).
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you. I've been contacted by long lost friends and family that I never thought I'd speak to again, and I've got a big network of people that I talk to online now (and in real life) that I'd never have found offline. This is one of the big attractions of the net; in fact, I consider the internet pretty pointless otherwise. Is the internet nothing more than a bunch of companies hawking products, low-quality amateur scat porn and anonymous strangers yammering at each other? That's even worse than real life. Why would anyone want that?
But I also don't see this as just an evil plot by the corporations. A person's outside behavior has *always* been fair game in terms of employment... the only difference is the internet makes it easier to track. Let's say a company hires an accountant, who at some point during his term of employment gets into a bar fight and gets arrested. He comes in to work the next day bruised and bloody, and the story makes the local newspaper. What do you think is going to happen? Most likely, he's going to get fired. It doesn't matter that he did it on his own time; companies want well-adjusted, positive people working for them, and in an "at will" system of employment, "job security" has always been an illusion. You have job security provided you play the game right, and that means at work and at home. It's always been that way.
People act like asses on the internet because they think they can get away with it. But they can no more get away with it on the net than that accountant could get away with being in a real-life bar fight that makes the local papers. An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
Of course, you can argue about moral standards, but if your company doesn't share your own moral standards, then maybe you shouldn't be working there to begin with.
As for me, I don't make any particular effort to hide my full real name but I don't freely give it out either. In a Google search of my name, I don't come up at all. Even still, I try not to do anything that's going to make me look stupid online, regardless of who's going to see it. I think that's probably good advice for anybody.
I agree that he'd be entitled to punitive damages if this were a scam, but I find it hard to fathom that Christie's would knowingly commit fraud.
Didn't read TFA posted here, but there was an article/interview in the NY Daily News the other day with this guy and he said one of the things Spiner told him when they met was "I told them not to sell" the visor because it was fake. If that's true - and it seems like you'd have to take the word of the guy who supposedly wore it - then there could be a case for fraud. Christie's at that point went ahead with an auction they were warned about by one of the principals involved with the merchandise.
Of course, it also depends on how these items were presented. I read the catalog for this auction at the time and many of the items were presented as rehearsal props or backups, or were otherwise never claimed to have actually been used on the show. Maybe this guy *believed* this visor was used on the show, but Christie's never said so. If that's the case, he's gonna have a tough time collecting anything from them.
That's fine if all you're listening to is an MP3 player and cheesy earbuds, but I have two JBL threee-way enclosures with 12 inch woofers in my living room, and a six speaker premium stereo in my car.
So I can certainly hear the difference between the compressed files and CD quality files, even with my old ears.
Neither of those speaker systems qualify as anything close to high end audio, so no, you can't tell the difference. (JBL makes some good home loudspeakers, and some nice studio monitors, but nothing that's really audiophile quality... which is what you'd need to tell the difference between a good mp3 and a CD.)
Oh, you may *think* you can, but that's why people run double blind tests. I guarantee 100% that in any double blind test you took with either of your sound systems, you would not be able to reliably tell which is an uncompressed file and which is a 256kb mp3.
Most well-encoded mp3 files at 256kbps or above (CBR) or around 200kbps or above (VBR) are transparent to about 99% of people on *all* speaker systems, whether you're using Sonus Cremona's or regular old JBL's. Many double blind tests have confirmed this (in fact, most say the transparency threshold is actually lower; I'm giving you at least some benefit of the doubt).
Often a visitor will comment on how good my stereo sounds, so at that point I usually put a CD in. I don't get any argument about CD vs MP3 quality from anyone who's listened to MP3s and CDs through good speakers.
I've done better - I've listened to mp3's and CD's through good headphones. High end headphones are much cheaper than the same quality speakers, and they have the added benefit of not being colored by room acoustics. I have actually participated in double blind tests using a pair of Sennheiser HD650's and in most cases, I couldn't tell the difference at even 128kbps. Like you, I scoffed at compressed audio before that test. I thought I'd have no problem picking out the mp3's. But most files in all formats sounded pretty much the same - only rarely did a file really jump out at me as being inferior (I found out later that ATRAC had performed far below the other codecs in the test I was in), and in most cases, even listening repeatedly, it was still tough to tell.
I'm neither a spring chicken nor an audio n00b either. I've got a home recording studio, for one thing, and I've recorded at professional studios as well. So it's not like I can't pick out subtle nuances in music.
If you're hearing major differences between mp3's and CD's, then you're not using a good encoder (like LAME) or you're using the wrong settings (which is very easy to do in LAME - it's got a complex array of options). I can guarantee you that Amazon is not having that problem.
I didn't think (from reading the article) that Mossberg thought the Dell was better, just that there was a reasonable all-in-one option for someone who wants to run Windows.
There are plenty of nice all-in-ones out there for people who run Windows. They're call laptops.
I still don't get why you'd buy either an iMac *or* an XPS One when you can buy something like this instead, and have full portability as part of the bargain. (And note the price.) I actually just bought one of those for $399 as a Christmas gift for my wife - it's a great little machine.
Yes, I know Apple makes laptops too. I have no problem with them if you're a Mac person. I just don't "get" the whole category of computers that the iMac and XPS One fit into. What is it, the bigger screen vs. a laptop? Hell, you could buy a laptop *and* a 24" LCD screen for less than an XPS One, and then you'd have a really nice computer with the same huge screen *and* it'd be fully portable!
Has Darl McBride got away with a fat severance package and a job at Microsoft, or did the directors of SCO go down with their ship in any meaningful way?
Darl McBride continues to be with the company, as do most of the other important company directors.
As with every other piece of SCO news, people around here are overreacting to this. Being de-listed from the NASDAQ doesn't really mean a whole lot, because they weren't counting on using any investor money at this point anyway. They've put all their financial eggs in one basket, and that's the lawsuits. And those are continuing; SCO has even said they'll appeal the Novell ruling.
This doesn't mean SCO is "dead", not any more than they were yesterday or the day before anyway. Essentially all that's changed is that you won't be able to point and laugh at them on Yahoo Finance anymore.
It's maybe one more nail in the coffin, but they've been building that coffin for a while now, and it's still not finished yet.
In the "old days" it was necessary to provide recording studios, press plastic records, bribe DJs, buy good reviews and coerce musicians into making records to order.
Nowadays, most of those functions can be bought-in by the artist themselves.
This is an incredibly naive attitude that I see gaining in popularity lately. It's no different than saying "in the old days, you needed to buy a computer from a major manufacturer. Nowadays, you can build one yourself."
Sure, maybe you can, but the vast majority of people can't. Especially if they know next to nothing about computers, as most computer users don't.
Most bands are not experts in the music business. They are paying for a service when they sign to a record label. That service includes all sorts of things, from finding and hiring producers and session musicians to pitching the band directly to radio station music and programming directors to making sure the recording studio is stocked with the food they like during sessions. Many of these things are things that four or five people literally couldn't do by themselves - there's just not enough time. For example, there's typically one or two people representing a band whose only job is to sit there all day and call radio stations. This is a full time job and then some; if the band had to do it themselves, they'd have no time to do anything else (you know, like making music).
So at best, a band is going to need to hire a bunch of people to do this stuff. Where are they going to get the money? And how are they going to find the right people? You can't come in cold and just start doing A it's all about relationships. Ditto with production; that's a skill position.
A manager can handle some of it, but even that's usually part of what a band's paying for with a record label. You don't find good managers in the yellow pages. You find them through a record label.
It's one thing for a band like Radiohead or NIN to go sans-label. They're established, they have an existing fan base, they have a manager, they have lots of relationships built up all over the world, throughout the industry, over a number of years. And they have lots of money to pay people with up front. But they could never have gotten to that point without a label. They would have never met the same people, they would have never been heard by the same number of fans, they wouldn't have nearly the same leverage.
The internet doesn't change this at all; if anything, it makes a label more important. Because the question now is "out of 50,000 new bands every year, which one are *you* going to listen to"? How do you sift through so many bands? A new band just is not going to be able to do a professional job recording their own album, and then get it up somewhere that a large number of people will be able to hear it. What are they gonna do, put their album on their MySpace page? Along with 100,000 other bands? Yeah, good luck with that. When was the last time you actually found a decent band there, and have enough others found them for the band to be self-supporting?
Any other example of organized digital distribution that I can think of - Yahoo Music, iTunes, whatever - happens in conjunction with a record label.
Self-promotion is not the future, at least not for new and emerging artists. The future involves labels. The only question is how, and clearly they need to make some adjustment to their business models. Maybe these "360" deals like Madonna and Paramore have are the future, I don't know. I kind of hope not, because that actually gives the labels *more* control, not less. But it is a more comprehensive service. Maybe eventually the opposite will be the case; smaller, "thinner" labels have less involvement but still handle the important things that a band can't do themselves, like A&R. That's probably a more likely end result.
But the labels won't go away, and you wouldn't want them to. Otherwise, you'll be lost in a
In my experience, I think a lot of the Flash designers you come across are from animation or print design backgrounds, rather than specifically web design. A few years ago this was definitely the case.
Unfortunately that often means that the designers working on these Flash websites simply don't get the web, or how their content integrates with the page or browser, as well as someone who has been using CSS/HTML/JS for most of their career
Design is design - print or web doesn't matter. People have been slowly starting to realize this over the last half decade or so. Your talk about people who have been using CSS/HTML/JS "most of their career" is kind of moot when you consider that two of those technologies have only been around about a decade, and the third only a little longer. Do you think best practices in print design were set in stone only 10 years after the invention of the printing press? 20 or 30 years from now, the way we use the web will be completely different from the way we use it now, just as the way we use it now is pretty different from the way we used it in 1991. Would you have argued against YouTube because it's Flash-based? Or because it's video-based? Should the web only be used for text? After all, that's originally what it was, and every time some new feature or technology was added, there were people who argued against it because it made the web "uglier" or "more confusing" or led directly to "bad design".
No, the web evolves. Get used to it.
Yes, there are bad designers out there. But that's all they are; bad designers. It's got nothing to do with print vs. web or whatever. The arguments among web developers about this boil down to design vs. technology, not good design vs. bad design. And while good design is at least somewhat permanent, technology is constantly changing. So there's no point arguing that technology that worked 10 years ago is the same technology we should be using today because new technology encourages bad design; no, bad designers, producers and project managers encourage bad design. Background matters little.
btw, I say this as someone who is constantly espousing the use of AJAX at the company I work for. I find too much Flash annoying. But again, that's got nothing to do with design, it's got to do with functionality. AJAX has improved now to the point where you can do most of the same things with it as you can with Flash from a design perspective, without the incessant animations and ridiculously long load and draw times. So I do feel like it's a better choice most of the time. But the problem I give the designers and developers is usually phrased as "come up with the best and most interesting design you could do in Flash, then let's see if we can do it in AJAX." AJAX is still somewhat more limiting than Flash, which is why most large companies continue to use it.
And that is the way it should be. Bands should be propped up for any reason. They should get by on talent alone.
Ah, I remember when I was 20 and an idealist...
How is a band intended to "get by on talent alone" when nobody can hear your music? There are about 50,000 bands in every state in the US. Why should any given person listen to any one of them over any other? It would take you years just to sit through the cruft to get to a single band worth following.
I give you Bjork as a prefect example of propped shit.
Bjork was part of one of these non-RIAA bands that people like you espouse. I'm sure if it was 1985 you'd be on here talking about how we should all be buying Sugarcubes albums and boycotting the RIAA. That's the problem with idealism; reality has a different dogma. She signed to a major label as soon as she was able to, and her fans continued to follow her regardless. Nothing much about the music changed that couldn't be attributed to 20 years worth of age. Only the label changed.
So when your favorite current indie band signs to a major, will you call them "artificially propped up"? Will their music suddenly suck? Will they suddenly be really boring live? No-talent hacks...
It's pretty ridiculous to indict an entire range of artists simply because of the record label they're signed to. Talk about blind stereotyping... that's supposedly what music idealists like yourself are so against.
This is a semi-serious, only partially rhetorical question: HOW THE HELL CAN YOU PEOPLE NOT KNOW WHO GAMECOCK IS?
I can understand if you're not gamers; it's not exactly a household name among the general population. But this is a gaming thread, for god's sake, and you'd think at least some of you would be PC gamers.
Gamecock is the second iteration of the original Gathering of Developers. Ring a bell?
Run by the same guys in the same town (Austin?), I *think* even in the same offices as the old Gathering. I know a girl who used to work at Gathering and is now doing design work for Gamecock, and apparently it's a *lot* of the same old Gathering people - not just the guys at the top.
Gathering used to be famous for pulling crap like this too, so this shouldn't have been unexpected. It honestly was one of the reasons they were forced to sell out; they spent too much money and effort on stupid stunts and parties and not enough on making good games. Seems like history is repeating itself.
I think the problem isn't the music adults are buying, it's the kids who most likely drive this market more.
No, that's the problem with conventional wisdom. Who has more money, adults or kids? So why are all the "most popular" artists geared towards teenagers?
It didn't used to be this way and it shouldn't be now. It's one of the RIAA's big problems - they just don't know their market. Who had the #1 album a couple of weeks ago? The Eagles. And how many times did you hear a song from that album on a "top 40" radio station? Not once.
The music industry has a large number of problems right now. Their public image (because of the lawsuits) is one. Their marketing is another. Their A&R is another. They simply don't know their audience right now. They need to learn to follow the money. When you actively market the most to a demographic that is almost by nature 90% unemployed, you are guaranteed to have problems selling your product.
Japan's equivalent to the RIAA isn't anywhere nearly as maniacal, or so I've heard.
Oh, the RIAJ is just as maniacal, just in different ways.
At least they don't sue their own customers.
What they do, though, is install all sorts of DRM on their CD's (they're the world leader in this; in fact, Japan acts as a sort of test market for new DRM schemes) and refuse to sell their downloadable music in anything but DRM-encrusted formats. There is no such thing as an mp3 from an official Japanese source, or even an unprotected AAC file. Most downloads are Windows Media; a lot of music is even kept off iTunes (such as the entire Sony catalog). This in contrast to the RIAA - I just bought an MVI DVD/CD from Paramore, for example, that had actual mp3 files on the disc. And of course now you have iTunes Plus selling no-DRM AAC's and Amazon selling mp3's. This is one thing the US music industry is finally waking up to... Japan is still well-entrenched in DRM land.
The Japanese music industry makes it as technically difficult as possible to even rip your own CD's. They even try to region-protect their CD's. I bought a PUFFY CD a while back that had this "Label Gate" system on it (read the Wikipedia article on Puffy's "59" - I wrote most of it) that told me I couldn't load the CD in my computer because my computer wasn't running a Japanese OS. No, it wasn't just the application that wouldn't load due to some sort of language issue, it actually locked the CD out as the "wrong region". I got around this with EAC, which locks the drive as soon as you put a CD in (so the region checker couldn't load), but it just goes to show the lengths the Japanese music industry will go to in order to "protect" their content. ("Protect" it from people who bought it and now want to listen to it, apparently.)
I expect they're just watching the RIAA to see how the lawsuit campaign goes. The RIAJ is not as well-funded as the RIAA, but if they see it paying off, I'm sure they'll adopt a similar war on their consumers too. Music sales are down even further in Japan than they are here, as I understand it.
I'm not sure what you want to see the shareholders do or think, unless it is perhaps "that money is being wasted on lawsuits" which is probably not a foregone conclusion.
I'm sure what he wants them to see is that their accelerating sales declines are because of all this nonsense, not in spite of it. The conventional wisdom right now is that these lawsuits are doing all that can be done to staunch the tide of piracy and prop up sales in a difficult market... I think the reality is the industry is doing more damage to itself with these types of statements and the lawsuits that they go along with than piracy ever did.
People are calling for a boycott... I think a boycott is already in force, if you look at the sales numbers. A lot of people don't buy nearly as much music as they used to, and the declines are growing every year. (Downloads aren't rising nearly fast enough to make up for lost CD sales.) This despite the lawsuits, and the fact that even the RIAA has said that they've stemmed the rising tide of piracy.
You can argue over the reasons for that, and I agree there are probably many reasons, but I don't think it can be disputed that the RIAA's war on its own consumers has tarnished the music industry's image among the public. I don't think anybody says "I'm not buying this CD because the music industry is suing people!" but I think it's in the back of their mind all the time that this industry is at best shady and at worst evil, and so major label music is not going to automatically be put at the top of their internal wish lists. Also, it only takes 10% of people to stop buying music for sales to drop 10% (or more, depending on what types of buyers they were), and I'm sure that this campaign against common sense has turned off more than 10% of the industry's heaviest consumers.
It would be nice if the companies themselves - ie. the investors, which are the money behind everything - would finally recognize this.
I think the real problem that we have is that we view email as if it were written communication after the fact, but when we're writing it, most of us think of it roughly the same way that we view casual conversation.
:)
On the other hand, those that do consider it formal communication can use this to their advantage.
My bosses hate email and when they do write it, they often use it like IM - one line of almost incomprehensible gibberish. They try to give any instructions they need to in person. But that leads to confusion because there's no record of the conversation, so if anything gets messed up - even if I *know* what they said - you know where the blame goes.
I've learned that to navigate the corporate world successfully, you have to know how to manipulate via email. You have to pin people down in writing. Ask simple, specific questions (ones requiring only yes or no answers are best) and use lots of bullet points.
I can't even count how many times I've had someone try to pin the blame on me for something, only to be able to whip out a 6 month old email that makes it all too clear where that blame really lies. The best part is nobody really realizes what you're doing - they think you're just being professional. You can even tell them "oh, I just like to keep a record of all my communications as a reference" (which is the truth!) and they think you're just being really thorough!
And nobody can say "I don't want to tell you by email" because then it sounds like they're hiding something.
So yes, you do have to be careful what you say, but not always for the reasons you think. You need to cover your own ass, but you can use email to your advantage in doing that.
I do think also that if everybody used corporate email properly - ie. clear, concise emails specifically relating to the work at hand - there'd be a lot less confusion in the workplace.
btw, I keep all my work-related IM conversations too
Note that most folk who work multiple jobs don't have a single full-time job. They may average 50-60 hours per week among their 2-5 jobs, but since none of their jobs pay benefits and they have higher-than-ordinary travel expenses, they need to work that much just to survive.
That's their choice, and their problem.
Look, I'm a hardcore Democrat, borderline socialist. But your attitude is not helpful, and it's only going to doom you to failure along with anyone else who follows the same mantra.
My parents are not well off. My dad contributed about $5,000 to my education (smart guy that he is, he started saving for that when I was 10, sacrificing much for it), my mom nothing. I financed the rest through a combination of government grants and student loans, which took me approximately 13 years to pay off. But I did it, all by myself. If my dad hadn't been able to contribute what he did, my loans would have just been that much bigger and taken a little longer to get rid of.
It also helped that I spent my first two years at a cheap state school, then transferred for my last two years to NYU. So my diploma is from NYU, but I paid about half what a four year NYU student would have paid. And I worked all the way through college.
These are all things you figure out how to do if you want to graduate from college. If you throw up your hands right at the start and say "I can't afford this!" then that's your problem. You wouldn't last a day in a real job anyway. Nobody hires a whiner.
Once I graduated from college, I paid my dues selling home electronics for a year, then through persistence got a low-paying job writing about video games. From there, it was onto a video game publisher producing web sites. And now I'm a senior producer for a major cable television channel.
Anyone who has to work multiple jobs to get by has just done something wrong with their life planning. Nothing in my situation came down to luck and the only thing I was "given" was a little bit of money my dad had saved up over a period of eight years, and that didn't even pay for a full year at state college. The rest was just hard work and persistence.
Posts like yours are enough to turn anybody Republican. Yes, there are cases where people legitimately cannot help themselves and end up out on the street, either because they have mental problems, or health problems, or whatever. But any non-disabled person who comes from even a poor home can qualify for enough student assistance to attend college, as I did (in fact, the poorer you are, the easier to qualify), and from there, it's all down to you what you do with your education. Plenty of people do work only one job with benefits, you know, and not all of them come from privileged backgrounds.
Maybe what people are proposing is, get this: we need to redefine what 'public' is.
I think the problem is we are redefining what public is.
20 years ago, there was no expectation whatsoever that being in "public" meant your every move would be tracked by government officials potentially hundreds of miles away, and then stored for all time. That's not what "public" meant. People had an expectation that yes, anybody who was around you could potentially be watching you, but that kept it a relatively level playing field because you could pretty easily identify any threats to your privacy and avoid them if you like. If you were walking down an empty side street and needed to quickly adjust your belt because your pants were too loose, you could look around and do so without fear that cops are watching ready to jump you for "reaching for a concealed explosive" or even "intent to expose oneself in public" or whatever other nonsense law they can come up with.
That is the expectation we have always had for what "public" means - yes, you can be watched, but only by those around you, and that means that you can easily watch them back. Being able to be watched - and recorded - by someone many miles away is not what "public" means to me or anybody else. That's an intrusion, just like any other. You are being watched by people who are not there. And you have no idea what they're thinking or doing, even while they can watch your every move. It's a completely one-sided relationship where the other side has all the power. That's scary. And it's the exact opposite of what "being in public" is all about.
We don't need to redefine what public means, we need to take back its original meaning. Nobody should be allowed to watch a space that they do not own (ie. a public space) without being physically present.
The big problem with the PS3, and Xbox 360, is that backward compatibility isn't a given. You might do ok, depending on the game, but it's not like you can scrap your PS2 for a PS3 and come up roses.
You can if you buy the right one. 60GB models are still out there in some places. 80GB models also have near-100% compatibility - yeah, some games have problems, but it's not like the Xbox 360 with its ~70% compatibility. And the 80GB models aren't going away.
The execution's fine. At this point the vast majority of articles I read have little or no problems.
Then we're not reading the same articles.
It may be true that the most popular pages on the site have few (though certainly not no) problems. But that's easy, and not what makes an encyclopedia what it is. Anybody can write up 200 or 300 or even 1,000 good articles.
People read encyclopedias when they need information on things they can't find information on anywhere else. Encyclopedias are the original manifestation of "the long tail". Why would you buy an encyclopedia to read about, I dunno, George Bush? You can find all you need to know about him anywhere. You read an encyclopedia when you need to know about Brazil nuts or Mexican honeycreeper birds or anything else that you otherwise don't have easy access to an authoritative source for. Encyclopedias are supposed to contain a wealth of information about everything (or as close to it as they can get), not just a couple thousand "popular" subjects. That's why the paper versions come in giant 26 volume packages. That's what makes encyclopedias truly useful - because you know that any subject you come across that you need info on will be in there, and with reliable info.
(In other words, while 10,000 people might read the article about George Bush every day, making it among the most popular articles, probably 100,000 people read all the other articles on the site every hour.)
The problem with wikipedia is that those less-traveled articles - less-traveled but vitally important, for the reason illustrated above - are riddled with errors of every kind. I don't remember the last wikipedia article I've come across that didn't have several obvious typos, for one thing - I've given up even trying to fix all of them, I'd just never be doing anything else. Some articles on wikipedia don't make any logical sense, they're so poorly written. And many contain useless insider or industry jargon (the meanings of which are never explained) that make the articles almost impossible for a layperson to read.
While the quality of the top articles on wikipedia has probably improved over the years, the quality of the encyclopedia as a whole has definitely gotten worse as more articles are added. Some of it is due to wikipedia's own policies, and some of it is due to editors and admins misunderstanding and mis-applying those policies. Some of it is due to vandalism, some of it is due to well-meaning but borderline illiterate "editors" whose work is never checked or fixed once it's put up. Those people really should not be writing anything there, but the nature of the site is such that nobody's locked out preemptively.
I know that there have been various initiatives to try to fix some of these problems; suggestions to "freeze" the number of articles on the site for a while, the purge of "non-notable" articles, etc. though most of these solutions are either impractical or ill-advised. What's needed is a change in the nature of the site.
All this talk about back alley cabals doesn't help matters at all, though, and if nothing else makes it seem a lot less likely that anything's going to change. People in power want to stay in power, and that means preserving the status quo. Wikipedia's reputation is hardly stellar as it is, though - almost everywhere you go these days that references it, you see some sort of snarky disclaimer about the reliability of the info there. There could very well come a day when most people decide that it's just not even a relevant reference anymore for most subjects.
Yes, customers have rights. Exercising them is up to the customer. I don't have to help them/you. If my help is desired, ask nicely. Payment would help.
Apple is (apparently) offering to help. They would expect payment - natch.
Generally I agree with you, although it's slightly more complicated than that because of the DMCA.
To use your 2nd amendment analogy (my thoughts on that subject being an entirely different story, but I'll go with it for the purposes of illustration), it would be like saying you have the right to bear arms, but then saying it's illegal to actually open the box that the weapon comes in because the copyright is owned by the box maker and they don't want you opening it. So then Apple comes in and says they have a legal box-opener that's sanctioned by the box maker, and only they can sell it to you.
That would be pretty ridiculous, right? You can buy the weapon, you can legally use it, but you have to buy the means to open the package separately from some third party? That's what's going on here.
I do agree completely that those offering a service should be compensated for it. I just bought an "MVI" DVD, for example, that includes the band in question's full audio CD, plus pre-ripped mp3's of the entire CD (and yes, real mp3's, on a Warner Music disc), plus 5 bonus tracks, plus about seven videos, plus extra junk like wallpaper, buddy icons, etc. I paid $2 extra over the standard audio CD for all that and I was happy to do it. I probably would have paid $2 extra just for the officially-ripped mp3's by themselves (only because I figure they've gotta have some better quality system to do it with than my LAME... although I'm probably wrong). Point being, it's an extra thing that I don't have to do, and I'm pretty tech savvy - I could do it myself pretty easily - but a lot of people couldn't, they don't even know how to import a CD in iTunes. So for them, they're paying for something that they wouldn't otherwise have at all.
But to pay for the right to do something that you otherwise should have anyway is the problem here.
Contrary to how the US Justice System is viewed today, despite the actions of any party accused or convicted of wrong-doing, there is a widely-held belief that party should be judged with objectively and conviction be dealt without malicious intent or a decision be made against the party based on personal opinion.
Yes, the point being, there already was an objective decision... and now what's to be decided are penalties. And penalties, my friend, are not decided objectively - they are decided based upon a standing court decision.
Personally, I think a knee to Darl's nuts would be a pretty good start.
It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this.
It's not really a new idea. Here's a still from Orson Welles' "The Trial" (yes, from the Kafka novel), and that was made in the 1960's. The only difference now is that there's *nothing* kept on the desk - in the old days, there was at least a typewriter. Over time, other objects appeared; in and out boxes, pencil holders, etc. And that's when the concept of "assigned desks" and the cubicle took over, out of a necessity for both better working conditions and more productive workers.
This is a regression backwards; there's nothing new about it, and it's not what workers want, that's for sure. Management loves it in theory because they can keep an eye on many employees at once. They know who is there, they know who is working and not just staring at the ceiling or throwing darts at their cube walls.
But employees hate it, and I know this from experience. My previous job didn't quite go so far as having empty desks where employees could sit anywhere, but we did have a completely open office without walls. What you invariably end up with is as many people crammed into a room as the employer can fit, because there are no boundaries telling anybody "this is enough space for one person". At my office, this was easy to do because the whole office was just a series of long metal tables pushed together, so when we hired somebody new, everybody just scrunched down a little more. And because nobody has any claim to any personal space, or any "ownership" of it, they end up throwing garbage everywhere and not ever cleaning it up. So it's cramped, crowded, smelly, and there's no privacy. It's like what you'd imagine working in an office in the Soviet Union was probably like. Or some sort of sweatshop.
Cisco probably hasn't gotten to that point yet, but I guarantee their employees already hate it. And eventually, it'll become intolerable and everybody will be clamoring for the days of cubes again.
This is just another example of somebody thinking they've stumbled onto a great idea, not thinking through the unintended consequences, and not realizing that countless other people have tried the same thing many times before, without success.
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances.
They do not. Here: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html
I know you mentioned LAME in your last sentence, but I'm not sure how that doesn't invalidate your last sentence. If it doesn't, then the listening test above does.
I'll sum up the double-blind test results above: LAME-encoded mp3's sound as good as AAC files and better than WMA files at the same bit rate. (The bit rates varied by insignificant amounts.)
I'm worried that all of this is leading to a time where you can only find the inferior lossy formats of music!?!?
I'd still rather get a CD, and rip it to lossless for home audio, and then to lossy for portables or the car...two of the worst listening environments there are.....
I generally agree with you, although I don't rip to lossless for home - I just keep the CD around.
But I only buy CD's, if only so I know I have an archive recording. (Yes, I know, CD's themselves have fairly low sample rates by "hi-fi" standards, but they're still better than lossy compression.) I worry that as CD sales drop and download sales rise, the record labels will lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of all purchases are still CD's. When you see stats like CD sales dropping 10% and download sales exploding by 100%, it sounds like downloads are absolutely trouncing CD's. Until you realize that it's 10% off about 1 billion CD's, and a 100% increase over about 1 million full CD-equivalent downloads.
Ditching the CD in favor of downloads at this point would be like the auto industry ditching gasoline in favor of hydrogen. It's premature at this point to say the least.
But it may happen someday. A lot of people will probably be happy about it when it does. People like you and me just have to hope that by then, bandwidth and storage space will have increased to the point where it actually makes sense for labels to offer lossless downloads in addition to lossy ones.