Up until recently, I owned an additional 400 cassettes, but they degraded so much over time that I eventually had to pitch them after several unsuccessful attempts to record them as MP3s.
Funnily enough I'm in the middle of transferring around couple of hundred cassettes to CD, it's a long process. The ones that I'm transferring are mostly rare Celtic works and they are almost all in very good condition. The reason for that is that these tapes were usually of much higher quality than those put out by the major labels, most of my cassettes from the majors have long since worn out and been thrown in the bin. Another plus for these tapes is that the recordings were never subjected to any destructive Dolby processing, most of them have reasonably low levels of hiss anyway.
I will be putting mp3's of a lot of these on P2P because they are just not available any other way. They were only ever released on cassette at a time when that was the cost of a small run of CD's or vinyl was prohibitively expensive.
Record companies don't lose money on lesser selling artists, what they lose money on is promoting every artist as if they should be a million seller. There is a word for this sort of behaviour it's called stupidity. It will always be the case that the majority of artists only sell a few thousand CD's and most of these will not be sold through advertising. People who like music actively seek out artists they like and largely ignore the marketing hype.
If you spend large amounts of money trying to persuade me to buy products I don't want and then expect to recoup these costs by charging exorbitant prices for the products I do want then don't be surprised when my response to your demands is a rather terse.
It gets old seeing people repeat the same stuff over and over again like they invented it. Technical people seem to be particularly prone to this in non-technical fields -- the bias in that community that technical people are smarter than everyone else has a lot of self-reinforcing traction.
You're bang on. The only way to keep a company ethical is to own the majority of it, and to smack down the MBA's, bean counters, and assorted wide boys every time they open their mouths. If you can't do that then sell your share as soon as the value is high enough to start another company without partners. With the current state of business ethics you're screwed as soon as you allow others to control you.
Fired no, keelhauled round the fleet would be more appropriate. Fame academy is nothing more than a blatant extended advert for the people that produce the record for the eventual winner. That program is a blatant breach of the BBC's charter, it neither informs, nor educates, and is piss poor entertainment.
Where I come from "one's" is considered so affected that using it a serious faux pas. Using it will get you laughed at, at best, and a bloody nose at worst. The use of "his" is actually relatively recent, nineteenth century, and I believe it was actually mandated by law. However, the third person indefinite is naturally plural, except when referring to groups that are exclusively single sex, hence "their" always fits naturally and its use is long established. Of the three "their" is the one that is least likely to grate and most likely to be pass without being noticed. Thirty years ago "his" would have passed that test, today it does not. So in summary, "one's" is accepted by some subsets of English speaker, "his" is obsolete, "his/her" is pc slang, and "their" is the most accepted therefor the most correct.
You ear Mozart uniquely for the pure sound pleasantness, but you do not ear some of the rock/pop for its sound only (try it, many of the greatest hit sound "bland" without their lyric).
That's because in a three to five piece ensemble that , that the typical rock band consists of, the music is arranged such that when there are vocals the vocalist usually tends to carry the melody. If you replace the vocalist with another instrument and put the melody back in the music it will sound interesting again.
However I might be misunderstanding you you might be referring to songs where the music is written around the lyrics, rather than the lyrics fitted to a tune. These are essentially poems set to music, where the music is merely an adjunct to a poetic form. This is also a valid art form but it is different in kind to the type of music in a symphonic piece. Try taking out the music from most operas and listening to the dry lyrics, the result is equally as bland.
I'll do you a deal, I'll take lower the hyperbole if you stop confounding economic theory and Liberal dogma. I mean Liberal in the classic sense not in the sense of one lies in the American political spectrum. Let me expand, markets exist but the notion of a free market is a piece of wishful thinking all markets are regulated and manipulated to some degree. I find few things more irritating than the notion that free markets magically and automatically reach some kind of optimal solution. The notion of the free market is as spurious as the Freud's id and ego, or Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat. All three are religious notions and need not be considered in any rational analysis. Don't believe me, remember the concept of the free market is built upon the notion that on aggregate people act out of rational self interested. Well psych 101 tells us people aren't rational, and I think Liberal ideology is the only place I've ever heard it suggested that the mob is more rational than the individual. If people were rational advertising would consist of accurate details, facts and figures. It isn't and it works ergo people's behaviour is inconsistent with Liberal dogma.
Rant over I'll explain why I disagree with your supply/demand curve suggestion. Firstly recorded music is, (has been), relatively price inelastic. If your old enough cast your mind back to the introduction of CD's, they met tremendous consumer resistance. First quality was poor, many early CD's were badly mastered, and consumer priced CD players were generally poor quality. A lot of the CD's were mastered like vinyl with reduced bass, but the equipment didn't compensate for this like a turntable and phono amp did. The result was that for most people CD's sounded dull and lifeless. Even today many people believe that vinyl sounds more dynamic than CD, it's now a myth but there was some truth gave rise to the belief. Secondly, CD's were vastly overpriced, forget the new technology thing there is no way that a CD should ever have cost twice what a record did. The Oil shortages of the 1970's had increased the price of vinyl such that by the end of the decade records were of much poorer physical quality and twice the price they had been at the start of the decade.
So how did the record companies react, simple after a few years the suddenly stopped producing vinyl. Once people had no other choice the started by CD's and since they it was a period of relatively high disposable income they bought them in similar quantities to that which they had bought records. In fact music sales increased as people started to replace their old vinyl collections with the new medium.
So did the recording industry show a massive upturn in profits at this point, well no they didn't. The big record companies have hidden costs, payola in the US, chart fixing here in the UK. These costs get hidden by creative accounting and hidden in marketing budget. Remember for these companies profit is made through market share not through cost efficiency. The scale of the problem is huge, in the 1950's a record needed to sell 7,000 units to break even today we're told they need to 700,000 CD's to break even.
You're correct when you say that the big record companies operate on low profit margins but that doesn't mean that a lot of people aren't making a lot of money in the industry, and a lot of that is through corruption and graft. Just because margins are low don't assume that prices are at an appropriate level.
However, there are those who believe that music piracy actually helps the industry, as music pirates buy more CD's, and the music industry crash is not because of piracy but despite it.
In general terms I suspect piracy has zero effect on the industry. People will spend a given amount of their disposable income on entertainment and use piracy to supplement their legitimate collection not to replace it. That's how it worked with tapes I see little reason to think i
Just a
clarification... the RIAA is a trade group
representing the recording interests. They don't make money on a
CD-by-CD basis.
A trade group representing recording
interests? How about the visible manifestation of an illegal
cartel that has been demonstrated to engage in price fixing. That
and a lobbying group that seeks to bend democratic process to suit the
vested interests it represents. The RIAA and its equivalents in
other countries and industries represent something that flies in the
face of free market capitalism, because companies are supposed to
compete not cooperate, and flies in the face of democracy politicians
are meant to represent the interest of their constituents not listen to
lobbying groups representing capital.
Next, music is
priced the way it is because this is a free market economy and anybody
is allowed to sell anything at any price.
In that case how much will you pay me for a burned copy of Britney's
latest CD, or would that be illegal. Now I'm not saying it
shouldn't be illegal, but the fact that it is illegal demonstrate that
it is not a free market but a regulated market. So spare me the
laissez faire dogma when describing the current market.
Music prices
have typically been at that sweet
spot of the supply/demand curves. It's only relatively recently that
the widespread availability of pirated music has upset those curves.
Bullshit the record companies have never competed on price, in fact
they have been convicted of fixing prices. It is only with the
introduction of P2P that any significant form of price competition
At any
rate, remember that most CDs don't make money.
It's not often your right but your wrong again, most CD's do make money
because most CD's are produced by small and independent labels that
don't have the ridiculous cost structure that the majors do.
It's the
sales of the Britneys of the world which cover the expenses of
producing and releasing less popular music.
Another myth, most "less popular" music isn't released by the big five,
your not going to tell me that these companies are subsidising their
smaller rivals are you?
The
recording industry is a very speculative game
and despite the opinions of many slashdotters, net margins are
typically quite low.
That's because the large companies treat music the way that CocaCola
treat soft drinks, throw money at advertising so that you gain market
share and make huge profits. The result is high costs, low net
profits, huge actual profits, and poor value to customers.
No system time only affects an application in as far as it might question the system for the current time. D.O.B. fields in databases are just bits in files. The difference between the two can be calculated irrespective of what the arbitrary start date of system time was.
Er No, your right I won't. That one proves to you that you
exist and proves to me that at I exist, but does not prove to either of
us that the other exists. The problem of other minds has proved
to be intractable, the usual answer to solipsism is "don't be so
silly". So, I was on pretty safe ground when I set the
challenge:-)
Give it time. I'll stick my neck out and make a few
predictions on what to expect in the next two to three years.
First Novel will want a desktop that is corporate friendly, i.e. looks
neat and looks good. One of the current problems with say KDE is
that it looks ugly, icons that are all different colours and
sizes. It takes money to achieve this, good graphics will cost a
few million dollars. That sort of money has previously been a big
ask for Linux distributors, and if they've had the cash they've had
other priorities, but the likes of Novel can easily afford that, more
importantly they can't afford to lose sales due to appearance.
Secondly, as Linux is rolled out on corporate desktops hardware and
proprietary software manufacturers will want to fill the increased
demand for Linux compatible products, eventually these products will
find their way to home users.
Thirdly these manufacturers will look for standards which they can
code to, the distributor that can meet these needs will have a
commercial advantage. None of the commercial distributors will
want left out of that market, so expect great strides in that area.
It may be another four or five years before Linux begins to really
take off in the home user market, but those of us that do use it can
expect to see great benefits before then. All in all I'm pretty
optimistic at the moment.
I have merely pointed out that parent posts have assumed things not in evidence; namely, that just because a human being has died means that their bodies are open to whatever they desire to do to/with them.
No, you didn't ask for evidence you demanded proof of the position that nearly every person, dualist or otherwise, agrees upon that the self is no longer coincide after death. Evidence, being the lack of behaviour after death, that may not be proof but to most of us it is pretty convincing evidence. Yours is the extraordinary claim, and your position is the non negative, the burden of proof is on you.
But you are the one that seeks to determine what can and can not be done with body of a deceased person. And you are the one that seeks to speak on behalf of that dead person. Why is it that you assume that if some vestige of the self remains within the body after death, that the thing that they desire is to be stuck in a ditch, covered with earth, and eaten by worms.
I'll prove that no one inhabits the cadavers of the supposed Billy the Kids when you can prove that someone does indeed inhabit your living breathing body. Indeed if you can manage that feat I might begin to take your assertions of what is and isn't sacrosanct seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Up until recently, I owned an additional 400 cassettes, but they degraded so much over time that I eventually had to pitch them after several unsuccessful attempts to record them as MP3s.
Funnily enough I'm in the middle of transferring around couple of hundred cassettes to CD, it's a long process. The ones that I'm transferring are mostly rare Celtic works and they are almost all in very good condition. The reason for that is that these tapes were usually of much higher quality than those put out by the major labels, most of my cassettes from the majors have long since worn out and been thrown in the bin. Another plus for these tapes is that the recordings were never subjected to any destructive Dolby processing, most of them have reasonably low levels of hiss anyway.
I will be putting mp3's of a lot of these on P2P because they are just not available any other way. They were only ever released on cassette at a time when that was the cost of a small run of CD's or vinyl was prohibitively expensive.
I'm sure Mr Lawson will be delighted to hear from you. He can now boast he receives fanboy email.
If your product is viable it will sell just as well on Apple...or...*gasp* an open source platform.
What part of ((0.02*0.9)>(1*0.01)) don't you understand.
Alan Holden (A-Hole)
I think Robert Sole was the name you were looking for.
Record companies don't lose money on lesser selling artists, what they lose money on is promoting every artist as if they should be a million seller. There is a word for this sort of behaviour it's called stupidity. It will always be the case that the majority of artists only sell a few thousand CD's and most of these will not be sold through advertising. People who like music actively seek out artists they like and largely ignore the marketing hype. If you spend large amounts of money trying to persuade me to buy products I don't want and then expect to recoup these costs by charging exorbitant prices for the products I do want then don't be surprised when my response to your demands is a rather terse.
Probably the same reason that makes modern users unable to comprehend tear off menus.
Since there hasn't been a repeat of 9/11, it seems like the security precautions are working.
There are no elephants on my lawn, I guess it must be because the pepper I put down every night keeps them away.
It gets old seeing people repeat the same stuff over and over again like they invented it. Technical people seem to be particularly prone to this in non-technical fields -- the bias in that community that technical people are smarter than everyone else has a lot of self-reinforcing traction.
Now that is a heresy, and it's all too true.
Holy shit! That's more than the average Brit spends on CD's in a year.
You're bang on. The only way to keep a company ethical is to own the majority of it, and to smack down the MBA's, bean counters, and assorted wide boys every time they open their mouths. If you can't do that then sell your share as soon as the value is high enough to start another company without partners. With the current state of business ethics you're screwed as soon as you allow others to control you.
Ultimately, the rising muslim and anti-semetic populations in europe
You do know that most semitic people are muslim, don't you?
Fired no, keelhauled round the fleet would be more appropriate. Fame academy is nothing more than a blatant extended advert for the people that produce the record for the eventual winner. That program is a blatant breach of the BBC's charter, it neither informs, nor educates, and is piss poor entertainment.
Where I come from "one's" is considered so affected that using it a serious faux pas. Using it will get you laughed at, at best, and a bloody nose at worst. The use of "his" is actually relatively recent, nineteenth century, and I believe it was actually mandated by law. However, the third person indefinite is naturally plural, except when referring to groups that are exclusively single sex, hence "their" always fits naturally and its use is long established. Of the three "their" is the one that is least likely to grate and most likely to be pass without being noticed. Thirty years ago "his" would have passed that test, today it does not. So in summary, "one's" is accepted by some subsets of English speaker, "his" is obsolete, "his/her" is pc slang, and "their" is the most accepted therefor the most correct.
The singular indefinite pronoun denoting belonging to an unknown person is their; it is not that pc crap his/her.
You ear Mozart uniquely for the pure sound pleasantness, but you do not ear some of the rock/pop for its sound only (try it, many of the greatest hit sound "bland" without their lyric).
That's because in a three to five piece ensemble that , that the typical rock band consists of, the music is arranged such that when there are vocals the vocalist usually tends to carry the melody. If you replace the vocalist with another instrument and put the melody back in the music it will sound interesting again.
However I might be misunderstanding you you might be referring to songs where the music is written around the lyrics, rather than the lyrics fitted to a tune. These are essentially poems set to music, where the music is merely an adjunct to a poetic form. This is also a valid art form but it is different in kind to the type of music in a symphonic piece. Try taking out the music from most operas and listening to the dry lyrics, the result is equally as bland.
please take the hyperbole down a notch.
I'll do you a deal, I'll take lower the hyperbole if you stop confounding economic theory and Liberal dogma. I mean Liberal in the classic sense not in the sense of one lies in the American political spectrum. Let me expand, markets exist but the notion of a free market is a piece of wishful thinking all markets are regulated and manipulated to some degree. I find few things more irritating than the notion that free markets magically and automatically reach some kind of optimal solution. The notion of the free market is as spurious as the Freud's id and ego, or Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat. All three are religious notions and need not be considered in any rational analysis. Don't believe me, remember the concept of the free market is built upon the notion that on aggregate people act out of rational self interested. Well psych 101 tells us people aren't rational, and I think Liberal ideology is the only place I've ever heard it suggested that the mob is more rational than the individual. If people were rational advertising would consist of accurate details, facts and figures. It isn't and it works ergo people's behaviour is inconsistent with Liberal dogma.
Rant over I'll explain why I disagree with your supply/demand curve suggestion. Firstly recorded music is, (has been), relatively price inelastic. If your old enough cast your mind back to the introduction of CD's, they met tremendous consumer resistance. First quality was poor, many early CD's were badly mastered, and consumer priced CD players were generally poor quality. A lot of the CD's were mastered like vinyl with reduced bass, but the equipment didn't compensate for this like a turntable and phono amp did. The result was that for most people CD's sounded dull and lifeless. Even today many people believe that vinyl sounds more dynamic than CD, it's now a myth but there was some truth gave rise to the belief. Secondly, CD's were vastly overpriced, forget the new technology thing there is no way that a CD should ever have cost twice what a record did. The Oil shortages of the 1970's had increased the price of vinyl such that by the end of the decade records were of much poorer physical quality and twice the price they had been at the start of the decade.
So how did the record companies react, simple after a few years the suddenly stopped producing vinyl. Once people had no other choice the started by CD's and since they it was a period of relatively high disposable income they bought them in similar quantities to that which they had bought records. In fact music sales increased as people started to replace their old vinyl collections with the new medium.
So did the recording industry show a massive upturn in profits at this point, well no they didn't. The big record companies have hidden costs, payola in the US, chart fixing here in the UK. These costs get hidden by creative accounting and hidden in marketing budget. Remember for these companies profit is made through market share not through cost efficiency. The scale of the problem is huge, in the 1950's a record needed to sell 7,000 units to break even today we're told they need to 700,000 CD's to break even.
You're correct when you say that the big record companies operate on low profit margins but that doesn't mean that a lot of people aren't making a lot of money in the industry, and a lot of that is through corruption and graft. Just because margins are low don't assume that prices are at an appropriate level.
However, there are those who believe that music piracy actually helps the industry, as music pirates buy more CD's, and the music industry crash is not because of piracy but despite it.
In general terms I suspect piracy has zero effect on the industry. People will spend a given amount of their disposable income on entertainment and use piracy to supplement their legitimate collection not to replace it. That's how it worked with tapes I see little reason to think i
Just a clarification... the RIAA is a trade group representing the recording interests. They don't make money on a CD-by-CD basis.
A trade group representing recording interests? How about the visible manifestation of an illegal cartel that has been demonstrated to engage in price fixing. That and a lobbying group that seeks to bend democratic process to suit the vested interests it represents. The RIAA and its equivalents in other countries and industries represent something that flies in the face of free market capitalism, because companies are supposed to compete not cooperate, and flies in the face of democracy politicians are meant to represent the interest of their constituents not listen to lobbying groups representing capital.
Next, music is priced the way it is because this is a free market economy and anybody is allowed to sell anything at any price.
In that case how much will you pay me for a burned copy of Britney's latest CD, or would that be illegal. Now I'm not saying it shouldn't be illegal, but the fact that it is illegal demonstrate that it is not a free market but a regulated market. So spare me the laissez faire dogma when describing the current market.
Music prices have typically been at that sweet spot of the supply/demand curves. It's only relatively recently that the widespread availability of pirated music has upset those curves.
Bullshit the record companies have never competed on price, in fact they have been convicted of fixing prices. It is only with the introduction of P2P that any significant form of price competition
At any rate, remember that most CDs don't make money.
It's not often your right but your wrong again, most CD's do make money because most CD's are produced by small and independent labels that don't have the ridiculous cost structure that the majors do.
It's the sales of the Britneys of the world which cover the expenses of producing and releasing less popular music.
Another myth, most "less popular" music isn't released by the big five, your not going to tell me that these companies are subsidising their smaller rivals are you?
The recording industry is a very speculative game and despite the opinions of many slashdotters, net margins are typically quite low.
That's because the large companies treat music the way that CocaCola treat soft drinks, throw money at advertising so that you gain market share and make huge profits. The result is high costs, low net profits, huge actual profits, and poor value to customers.
No system time only affects an application in as far as it might question the system for the current time. D.O.B. fields in databases are just bits in files. The difference between the two can be calculated irrespective of what the arbitrary start date of system time was.
Er No, your right I won't. That one proves to you that you exist and proves to me that at I exist, but does not prove to either of us that the other exists. The problem of other minds has proved to be intractable, the usual answer to solipsism is "don't be so silly". So, I was on pretty safe ground when I set the challenge:-)
Give it time. I'll stick my neck out and make a few predictions on what to expect in the next two to three years. First Novel will want a desktop that is corporate friendly, i.e. looks neat and looks good. One of the current problems with say KDE is that it looks ugly, icons that are all different colours and sizes. It takes money to achieve this, good graphics will cost a few million dollars. That sort of money has previously been a big ask for Linux distributors, and if they've had the cash they've had other priorities, but the likes of Novel can easily afford that, more importantly they can't afford to lose sales due to appearance.
Secondly, as Linux is rolled out on corporate desktops hardware and proprietary software manufacturers will want to fill the increased demand for Linux compatible products, eventually these products will find their way to home users.
Thirdly these manufacturers will look for standards which they can code to, the distributor that can meet these needs will have a commercial advantage. None of the commercial distributors will want left out of that market, so expect great strides in that area.
It may be another four or five years before Linux begins to really take off in the home user market, but those of us that do use it can expect to see great benefits before then. All in all I'm pretty optimistic at the moment.
Damnit they said desktop not dining room tabletop.
Because, there is no spoon. Sorry, couldn't resist.
I have merely pointed out that parent posts have assumed things not in evidence; namely, that just because a human being has died means that their bodies are open to whatever they desire to do to/with them.
No, you didn't ask for evidence you demanded proof of the position that nearly every person, dualist or otherwise, agrees upon that the self is no longer coincide after death. Evidence, being the lack of behaviour after death, that may not be proof but to most of us it is pretty convincing evidence. Yours is the extraordinary claim, and your position is the non negative, the burden of proof is on you.
But you are the one that seeks to determine what can and can not be done with body of a deceased person. And you are the one that seeks to speak on behalf of that dead person. Why is it that you assume that if some vestige of the self remains within the body after death, that the thing that they desire is to be stuck in a ditch, covered with earth, and eaten by worms.
I'll prove that no one inhabits the cadavers of the supposed Billy the Kids when you can prove that someone does indeed inhabit your living breathing body. Indeed if you can manage that feat I might begin to take your assertions of what is and isn't sacrosanct seriously.