Loads of 'click through'. Allow me to demonstrate:
"Clip out this coupon and send it in and we will send you ten cases of our new triple-caffienated cola drink for free, just to get you to try it!"
Hey presto, _lots_ of 'click through' from a plain paper ad. Hell, you'd get geeks photocopying the Times, or hunting down copies that are being employed wrapping fish;) it's a question of, "How much do you WANT to respond?" It's easy to measure coupon pulls too, and many people have over the years. Scientific advertising draws heavily on such sources.
The effectiveness of any sort of ad depends heavily on how much you WANT to check out the product once you've seen the ad. If the ad convincingly offers you gifts like free samples just to try and get you to like the product, then it's going to be very effective. "FREE" is the single most effective word in an ad. Then, it's all down to whether the product sucks or not, and whether you're lying to the customer or not:)
If that is so, why shouldn't both the 'little free' sites and the 'horrific corporate pablum' sites pay the _whole_ bill for keeping their servers etc. going? Where's the need for having readers pay sites at all?
I figure, if some corporation wants to get past my lack of interest in TV, past my lack of interest in radio, defeat my usual tendency to read books over magazines, and GET THEIR MESSAGE in front of my eyes, they can damned well pay for that themselves. I'm not paying them to do it. I don't care if it's the New York Times. They've got to prove to me they're _worth_ my attention. For the most part, sites on the web that think they deserve to be paid just for graciously deigning to allow my attention to rest on their splendiferousness... get a big *PHHBBBTTT!* and my undying contempt. They've _so_ got the wrong idea about the value of their 'content' versus the value of my attention. 30 seconds of sitting, stuck, in front of an interruption-based web ad is thirty seconds I won't have again. (this is why I hate spam too...)
I've got all the time in the world for good people, or interesting people, or even just random maniacs who are fun to watch. Impress me. Interest me. But _don't_ get the idea you are _entitled_ to my attention, Mr. Marketroid, because you're n...
What? Are we throwing a little snit because I'm not being a good consumer? So sorry please, so sorry >:)
It's called COUPONS, and magazine, newspaper and direct mailing advertisers have often used them to gauge the effectiveness of ads. You can have one ad pull TWENTY times the coupon responses as another, simply because the appeal was correctly aimed.
And this is the biggest thing idiot marketroids fail to comprehend: they do NOT HAVE A RIGHT to have people WANT to buy their product! People have to WANT to buy. Everywhere I look, there's some lunatic like this editorial author, or the head of the MPAA, or some RIAA maniac, or Microsoft, behaving as if they did not have to sell people on their product- as if it was a natural law that people must go out and get Product X, and therefore the only concern is how to stop them from copying it for their friends, or how to change banner ads to order the people more FORCEFULLY to go out and get Product X. It's goddamned arrogance, is all it is, and there's nothing particularly noble or clever about that.
I remember having a similar feeling of 'this is ridiculous!' over dot-com hebephrenia and 'The Long Boom', and sure enough, reality went *WHACK* "Hi! I'm reality! Suck it down!". I think the absurdity of this 'advertising' situation is comparable.
The fact of the matter is, advertising DOES NOT MAKE MONEY. What it does is tell people who you are and what you do: if THAT is appealing enough, then people might pay money for that. But the advertising itself is a supportive role- it's about maintaining a visibility before the endless procession of passing people (not 'consumers') who have a thousand other things to care about and don't owe you a DAMN thing. To me the most offensive part of the situation is the incredibly pervasive idea that consumers, websurfers etc. OWE the companies something, just for existing. Uh- no.
A web site itself can be advertising- in the sense of something _you_ pay for, to maintain visibility. I pay $45 a month for not-that-much space to keep airwindows.com out there, and I've reworked the site several times during its life. It is never going to go out of business unless private ownership of.com sites becomes against the law, because _I_ pay for it in order to have a mode of communication that I can extend to anywhere in the world. There is no requirement whatsoever that the site 'pay its own way'. That's not what it's for.
Now, if you look at sites like Yahoo- since they are not personal expressions or any one person's 'turf', and in addition do not offer any services besides internet stuff that people expect to get for free, does that mean that site is required to 'pay its own way'? That its users are obligated to pay for it? Of course not- it can just go out of business if it cannot find a way to keep operating without leeching off its users. What does it have to sell that's that much more deserving of payment than other sites that are free? And there will be free sites- if nothing else, for any such site you'll have one funded by Microsoft because they _do_ sell products and have the willingness to spend money for 'mindshare' without demanding an accounting. (At least, they used to be willing to do this, which is how they got where they are- possibly they will want to start demanding more returns, which will erode their position.)
But the whole attitude of "this is my ad, therefore I am entitled to have people OBEY it!" is despicable and extremely stupid and uninformed. And the attitude of "gee, look at all these nice sites and fancy banners, maybe we're _obligated_ to pay directly for all this" is... naive.
When you go to MSNBC or Yahoo or whatever, or see a banner ad- _they_ are the ones with hat in hand. Not you. They need to be respectful if they want your money- because the burden of sales is on them, not you. None of these people are selling oxygen on the Moon, or water in the Sahara...
By all means. I am more than happy to help it out for some of those purposes (the sound-oriented ones). I've been trying to find people who are _doing_ something toward an open console, to persuade them to go with a 32-bit floating point audio internal buss and my GPLed dithering algorithms. You might not be aware that pretty much all the really high performance dither and noise shaping routines suffer from a bad case of 'proprietary-itis'. I decided to kick their asses a bit. *G*
Mind you, if nothing ever comes together, I'll keep doing that work: I do it for my studio and digital mastering needs. It just _happens_ to be totally applicable to a Free console. Maybe not everyone feels you need to have the equivalent of 24-bit audio and professional mastering-quality onboard dynamics processing on a game console- but seriously, why not?
Yeah, and you have to remember there's convergence. I know a lot of musician types who would _like_ to be running Linux but aren't really up to it.
I can supply an example, as well. Here's the deal- a lot of the skills needed are specialised. Computer geeks don't necessarily know squat about how to (for instance) make sound that is really, seriously impressive. But _other_ types of geeks, like sound engineering geeks *bows* do have that technology and the knowledge base to know what to do. And you'll find that some of them (like me) resonate with the computer geek Free Software GNU-oriented approach.
My 'Mastering Tools' software is Free- it's GPLed. It's not C- in fact it only understands a certain type of AIFF file because I'm not programmer enough (yet) to really have the file handling routines down, seeing as I'm making sense out of the very expandable AIFF format byte-by-byte, and trying to do everything with just two file streams and no buffers.
But although it's weak from a programming standpoint, it's got two serious dither algorithms and various sonic enhancers and all of it could be put together to make a sort of SDK for a Free game console- and since this is my scene, I am certain that it could kick the butt of X-Box or whatever else is coming out there. Sure, it's only audio, but it's _there_ to be used- but you've gotta be open source to use it. And I've done enough work with digital mastering, and have enough contacts with pro mastering engineers, to inspire and produce a sound infrastructure that would _really_ kick, hurt, stomp and maim generic sound routines such as we're likely to see in X-Box et al, or even PS2 etc.
The trick is to do all the sound mixing on a high resolution mix buss like 32-bit floating point- and then reduce it to 16 bit to feed to affordable DACs using professional techniques, not the lame truncation or TPDF dither that the commercial consoles are likely to use (if that- I would not be at all surprised to learn they did everything on a 16 bit buss). This is so totally do-able, and I'd be delighted to work with anyone who's doing Free software and wishes to do things like this. It's about knowing what to do, who to ask. For instance, who here has ever heard of sidechain compression (the _audio_ compression)? Turns out that's not only an old mastering engineer trick to add lushness and detail, but it is also very easily doable realtime with just a few extra variables. I've got a 'primitive root residue' dither that sounds very deep and more importantly is fast as hell to compute- not that this matters so terribly much with today's processors! Picture something like Quake 3's sounds, only instead of being roughly mixed by a tinny 3D sound card, you'd have them coming through four channels of high-end surround sound with subtle compression and loads of soundstage depth from even non-optimal speakers- fully immersive sound _textures_ that really brought you into the game. A lot of that could be done just through proper design of the system audio busses... and the code's GPL and ready to be taken and adapted...
Mind you- this work is still going to be done whether Linux game people pick up on it or not. It's not being done _for_ 'TuxBox'. It's being done for pro quality digital mastering. But the Linux movement has started to affect people outside the arena of just raw coding- I'm not sure anyone on Slashdot would know this, but mastering engineers _and_ radio station technical people are being boxed into a corner by corporate brainlessness, overcompression and an industry-driven, listener-hostile 'arms race' of CD and radio loudness. There's a huge amount of dissatisfaction with this- and understandably, some people (like me, obviously) react to this dissatisfation by rebelling, doing stuff that makes no concessions to corporate fashion, and sacrificing mass media access- and the GNU camp just sits there, looking appealing, saying 'You can put your stuff out and share with people who will share with you, and bring whatever you have to offer to the table- do it the best you can and see where it takes you!'
I have to wonder what people are out there working in visual imaging, AI, 3D API writing, game concepts etc. who are also being frustrated and turning to the principles of Free software. I see things like this from time to time, and then I ignore them, because that's not my field. I'm the one who's doing Free work in high end digital audio. They probably have no idea who I am, either.
But add enough of these non-communicating, marginalized people together, and you'll really have something. Aren't there people working on Free _hardware_? That blows my mind. But I suppose it would blow theirs if they knew they could spec out a severely competitive audio subsystem for cheap using regular 16-bit DACs just by knowing what parts had to be overbuilt (coupling caps, DAC or DAC buffer power supply caps), and applying software to 'master' the output busses of the system.
I agree with jfunk- "For just about anything creative, you'll find people not only willing, but enthusiastic.". But do you know how far it extends? Neither do I, because I'm not competent to spot which 3D coders or board designers are really hot. I just know that there's some overlap between the Free stuff _I_ do, and the Free game console being talked about. And I'm not going to chase it, I've got a _lot_ else to do- but I write GPLed code for a reason, and will do absolutely everything I can to help anyone who _wants_ help that I can provide. We all benefit by cooperation. That's too easily forgotten.
So, the MPAA is _already_ being hit with full-length movie copying. *G* I remember when that was a hypothetical notion...
Here's what gets me: the MPAA is working to 'educate' people as in, beat into their brains a particular view of things. Now, government could do this as well, but it's difficult because there's a lot of precedent to suggest that this is not the place of government- that government is for establishing a social framework within which people can make up their minds. This move by the MPAA is an ideological power-grab: expressing the idea that people do not have a right to make up their own mind if the result is at odds with what is profitable for the corporation. In practice, either the government or the corporation can send police and have you put away for ten years- this should be obvious in this day and age.
Does this provide evidence that corporations are more powerful than governments?
If they were to be kept to comparable powers, which would make more sense: to give government the fully exercised capacity to brainwash its citizenry, refusing to tolerate 'dissent'- or to hold corporations to the same standard that government is vaguely held to, and take the position that, although there is debate on the subject, it may be that the MPAA does not have the right to 'educate' the citizenry in this one-sided manner?
The story about how you helped your friend is good. That's absolutely the sort of thing you should be doing.
While you were doing it, how much energy did you devote to monitoring toxic waste disposal, resisting encroaching copyright issues, fixing pork barrel appropriations in Congress, stopping 'soft money' corporate influences in government, and writing open source? o_O
Do you see that the level of work that is needed is not just hard but _impossible_ to dump on private individuals in a libertarianesque freemarketish way? That you cannot coordinate individuals to counter or resist composite entities like corporations (or governments!) because there are just too many of the latter to be able to deal with? Alvin Toffler wasn't so far off the mark in 'Future Shock'- but the nasty part is, with the increasing pace of all things, the corporations increasingly get to run amok and their interests are pretty well understood by now. You'll come home from helping your friend and also working with neighbors to fight a nearby toxic waste burning facility, will collapse on your chair and the seat will _explode_ because some corporation felt like making special high-tech cushioning materials that were spontaneously combustible. Reading the fine print as you try and scrape your ass off the ceiling, you see that the warranty is void if you collapse on the chair in an immoderate manner.
*g*
Okay, so that _was_ funny, but do you see the point? I think we can't continue to have the culture you speak of for much longer. It affects our corporations and our government and leaves us ill-equipped to defend ourselves against these monsters we've created in our own image.
This is an interesting point. I guess the Open Society idea is based on the notion that we as individuals might have the _capability_ to, say, inspect Bill Gates' tax records for cheating, or watch what Dubya or Clinton do in bed.
There is an element of truth to this- but there's also an unstated assumption. In order to do such monitoring, you've got to have a level of competency- you've got to have education and information enough to provide a context for what you see, you've got to have time to do it in.
I'm wondering if this is where it breaks down- if it is really not much more than a libertarian fantasy of darwinistic power. If you are brilliant and energetic and stubborn then perhaps you'd be able to be as influential as the government- all the while, being entirely unconcerned about the peasants. After all, it's not YOUR job to look after peasants. Isn't it a bit like "If they don't have the energy to do as I do 18 hours a day keeping track of these little issues, they deserve to be spied on, controlled, and then be poisoned by having toxic waste facilities built on their blocks, right? They would in theory have the _ability_ to learn chemistry, learn to identify toxic waste, save up for and buy chemical analysis tools to prove it, track down the corporate layers of obfuscation, learn public speaking and motivate their fellow peasants- what's stopping them? If they choose to work all day and drag themselves home and collapse, then they _deserve_ to die, right?"
This isn't even overstating the case- the modern world is just _too_ complex for individuals to take on the role of watchdog over all possible threats. You'd spend weeks learning about toxins the local paper mill was dumping in your drinking water, get it together enough to raise the issue, and on the way to your big meeting you'd get mugged and left for dead- then, picked up off the street and sent to prison because you downloaded a movie off the net. There's too much for any single individual to deal with, you have to prioritize and this makes it impossible to be truly self sufficient in any sense of the word.
The way this applies to Open Society is simple: who's paid to spy on you and benefit by that, and how much time and effort do you really have available to spy on them back? The very real danger is that this would stratify society into peasants and aristocracy- not only aristocracy of wealth and power, but a new and strange aristocracy of information. The people who've always been more or less scorned except you'd ask them how to fix your PC, would suddenly be the ones who know what you did last night, with who, and could correlate it with other times to establish a pattern. Yes, being on slashdot talking to slashdotters I can see how this might have an appeal- but it does NOT take the place of extending rights to citizens.
I have a problem with anything that increases the tendency to make a lower class into peasantry. Open Society would make a huge percentage of people into peasantry- cutting across lines of income and background. Those Winston Smiths would be surrounded by screens and cameras. And in theory they could look out into the world instead of just being helpless... unfortunately, Winston's VCR is blinking 12:00... 12:00... 12:00... 12:00...
Salon once did an article where they tried to get through to spamvertised vendors to buy from them and see if they were otherwise honest.
If I remember correctly, they could not find _one_ good or service that was reachable and purchasable. This suggests nobody makes money off it simply because there's no valid contact information...
I'm thinking primarily of 'X-Plane'. This is an aero sim that I'm very fond of- a real hacker's playground, because unlike all other flightsim games, X-Plane takes a physical design you give it, with weight, balance, airfoil descriptions etc, and literally _models_ the whole pile of parts ten times a second to produce a flight model.
It works well enough that it can model anything from an X plane to a 747 to a Cessna 172 with enough plausibility that people gripe about small details of the flight handling, without even recognising the brilliance of the accomplishment- the program doesn't know it's trying to model a 172, it's just interacting with the flight surfaces as they are given to it. You can put together absolutely anything no matter how weird and it will model that with the same degree of pretty-much-accurate-mostly.
I play with this sim on a 300mhz G3, and get almost 20 fps out of it, so by itself it is not that killer app. But- the compelling quality about it is that capacity to model real aircraft behavior from a given design. Well- one word, turbulence. Spins, stalls, nonlinear airflow, interaction of control surfaces- it already models propwash, but the fact is, 100% true modelling of airflow is not possible. Turbulence is chaotic... and yet, the closer you get, the more compellingly interesting the problem becomes.
An unhappy side-note: I've had to drop out of the upgrade cycle for X-Plane, even though I've paid for 5.* series upgrades, because the most recent ones, with drool-inducing GFX improvements and flight model refinements, are coded to require MacOS 8.5 or 9. I'm sticking to 8.1 so far, because I can control it and have hardware that's known to work with it (and some, that's potentially troublesome under later versions- some, like my glass-lens ADB Color Quickcam, is already rendered incompatible with recent versions of Quicktime). So even though my hardware will mostly support the very latest newest X-Plane- my other software will not. And so it goes- I'll have to catch up with X-Plane when I'm good and ready to run a substantially more recent computer, one that's a better match with the newer software etc.
So it's not only the digital unwashed who don't upgrade- some people who are very informed on the details of the systems also will resist, _because_ they are capable of establishing 'snapshots' of their computer systems in which any faults are known and avoidable, and the behavior is predictable... and will sometimes pass up 'newer and better' because it is also 'newer and untested'...
Seriously- I'm picturing some type of minimalist industrial electronic music with this text as a spoken word passage (perhaps a vocoder like on that Cher song, only instead of a singing Nord Lead it'd be a talking bench grinder or arc welder)
Makes me wish I had time to do it- but _somebody_ should. dh003i, get some recording software and a mic and do more stuff like this!:)
By the same token, a corporation cannot pass laws, have its own police force, or put you in jail, but it's okay for them to pay Congress to pass laws (and con them into accepting all sorts of things), have the government send police after you, and have the police throw you in jail for breaking the new laws they paid for.
Seems to me the end result is exactly the same. Exactly how are corporations _not_ government in this day and age? Who pulls the strings? Who gives the orders?
Re:Take this with a grain of salt.
on
Pentium IV study
·
· Score: 2
Oh, but I do appreciate thermal management in my buying decisions. That's why I have a G3 upgrade card in my PowerMac:) cute little (no fan) heatsink on it, much smaller and tidier than the huge (no fan) heatsink on the old 604e:)
Actually, you know the funny thing? I personally have no problem with grocery stores learning more about which stuff sells where to who. Research of that nature is _important_- hell, if they learn I like certain things maybe they wouldn't annoy me by discontinuing them so often, and there's the crucial point...
There's nothing wrong with corporations learning all sorts of things about me, but the deal is they do that to exert FORCE. If they learn that I buy X kind of food, and strongly dislike substituting other sorts, they can and will jack up the price and collude with other corporations to make sure I don't have anywhere else to go. They're no friend of mine, they honor no social contract with me- they are nothing but predators trying to reduce me to the most helpless state they can manage, and feed off me as intensely as they can. That is their 'duty' to their shareholders.
THAT is the problem. It's not that there's something inherently wrong with a company learning stuff, or discontinuing a product that they can't afford to produce! But the reality is, these organizations devote great effort to boxing me into a corner and leaving me with minimal or illusory choice, and I call that force in the sense that a checkmate in chess could be called force. (Do Libertarians concede checkmates in chess, or do they always play until their king is captured because the situation is not real to them until the last move? Do they have an ability to project outcomes or are they unable to?)
This reminds me of another discussion in rec.audio.pro I recently sat in on. A guy was ranting and being offended because some posters had questioned his use and recommendation of 'Behringer' gear. Turns out, Behringer makes a practice of getting other gear (Aphex, dbx, Mackie) and taking it over to China and having people do an exact clone of the other company's design, only with cheaper parts, and then underselling the original company and doing lots of business.
Now, on the one hand that situation is about the sanctity of intellectual property- but in another sense, that situation is about force. If Behringer, by being basically an IP parasite, is capable of severely undercutting the companies that actually do the R+D for products like mixers, then they are capable of driving their 'host' companies out of business. Not only do they force higher costs onto the competing products (legal bills in trying to fight Behringer), not only do they exert competitive force making those companies choose between making shoddier, cheaper products that don't work, or going out of business, but if you take a Libertarian sort of view, you have no justification for buying the product of the beleaugered original developer, because it costs more than the Behringer clone. It's a cancerous sort of situation that is blatantly, obviously unhealthy, but it plays right into notions of darwinistic competition in the marketplace as the invisible hand. It's unfortunately impossible to have a healthy market under the invisible hand, because the invisible hand likes cheaters as long as they don't get caught, and the invisible hand REALLY loves parasites that don't really contribute anything, and any sort of scam or rip-off that earns profit without producing anything of value.
Maybe rather than getting worked up over the mechanisms of privacy abuses like turning collected personal data over to the government, it would be better to look at it in a broader sense. If something collects data on you, what are its responsibilities to you? The Libertarian view would be, it has no responsibilities other than what you can FORCE it to have (funny, I thought only governments had force, not individuals). The socialist view that I favor would suggest that it has as many responsibilities to you as you have to it- possibly quite a lot, depending on what's deemed acceptable for each party to do. Maybe what's needed is for corporations to have some, limited, responsibilities towards just individuals- for instance, it can see what stuff is selling, it can see how much insulin it needs to order for different stores' pharmacies, but it cannot use that information to identify pockets of diabetics and collude to jack up the prices unbearably in those areas.
Some of that should sound familiar, because we've always had some types of legislation to take care of that. However, it's worth repeating, because it's being forgotten.
Sounds very reasonable. The only point of failure is the rare but noisy libertarians- who seem to be religiously committed to the notion that SOME things don't ever need any sort of checks and balances. I'm having an interesting time libertarianspotting in this article's comments, and am pleased and amused at the pique expressed. Come on, people- no _other_ political group gets to be taken as final truth, what makes you guys so special? You are nothing but a faction among many, and had better behave as such. And that means you will not GET the zero government you desire, and had better get comfortable with co-existing with other factions.
Honestly, you'd think that sort of thing _hadn't_ been extensively tried in Chile and damn near destroyed the country. It just doesn't work. The invisible hand is an article of faith- means 'there's nothing there'. In practice, and libertarian forms of government HAVE been tried in practice (by force- Chile), it just doesn't work.
Here's an interesting perspective on the matter... just occurred to me how this could be a good thing, in a peculiar way.
Let's assume that Microsoft gets its way, that it genuinely does have the ability to make a majority of mp3 files 56K or whatever. To some extent this will proliferate WMA, but in addition it will simply proliferate 56K mp3 files: many people really don't seem to care.
So, rather than Napster being full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 128 with Xing, Napster (or its equivalent) will be full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 56K using an intentionally bad encoder- or at 128K with the same intentionally bad encoder, if people learn to change the registry key.
Meanwhile, some of us in the content producing and open source code writing arenas are busily producing content that can be encoded much better (LAME, with special settings to handle 'mastering' to mp3) from CD audio- and even that can be done much better than the industry's overcompressed, intentionally-full-of-errors-for-copy-protection efforts.
While there is still any channel for independent artistic expression- while it is still legal to make your own music and make mp3s of it and put them out there- the playing field is being tilted in two directions at once. It's being tilted legislatively away from indie content producers, and this is the obvious way. But! With all this cynical the-consumer-will-eat-slops-and-love-it thinking from the big corporations, the playing field of quality is being tilted TOWARD indies. I mean, when you can fool around with some synthesisers, maybe a bit of recording equipment, free audio software, and produce music that has audio quality that is _dramatically_ superior to the corporate product, there is something major happening, with major implications for the image of corporate entertainment. And you can- the fact that the big labels, that Microsoft _are_ capable of producing quality output does not mean they're going to, or that they want to. The labels are busy trying to out-loud each other on the increasingly ignored Top 40 radio stations- this is a well known scandal among mastering engineers. They're increasingly turning to cheap production methods like Pro Tools and _ignoring_ their ability to draw on really top of the line studios and talent. And Microsoft? Let me put it this way: "56K WMA built into the OS- 128K and up WMA available over.NET on a pay-per-encode basis!". This isn't 1998. Microsoft are NOT IN A POSITION to reproduce their previous successes with WMA- they have too much of a need to tie it in with.NET and this will get in the way of widespread adoption of it- the jaws of the trap are just too obvious this time, and the 'worse-is-better' alternative, mp3, is just too entrenched.
It's a very good, though very nerve-racking, time to be involved with Free software, with indie music and arts. Rarely in history have our enemies been so powerful, but rarely have they been so sloppy, contemptuous, and full of hubris.
Frankly, it is not time to weep. It is time to kick ass and take no prisoners.
It's hardly an open standard- mp3 has lots of its own problems. But with the incredible hostility towards it, in a way that keeps Fraunhofer from running amok. Balance of power:)
Ampcast.com have been making changes as well- they got flooded with new artist signups after some recent unpleasant changes at mp3.com, and ad banners are NOT what they used to be. Ampcast's response (unlike mp3c) was not to seize more artist rights through contract changes- instead, the agreement is still very good but you _pay_ web hosting to have stuff up on Ampcast now.
The cost is $25 a year (not month, year- about $2 a month), so I would have to resoundingly agree that it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than to dicker with the major labels:D
Ampcast is also sticking with their 'six cent payment to artists per download' though some of the artists actually would like Ampcast to drop that as well and just focus on stuff like the CD program they're coming out with (on the assumption that since nobody pays to download mp3s, getting paid for such downloads is stupid and liable to hurt the music service provider in the long run). However, there's a twist- Ampcast streaming has never paid a royalty, just the downloads- and with the CD program, artists will be sorta encouraged to make tracks 'streaming only'. All real geeks know this is meaningless- read an m3u file lately?;) but it would certainly be meaningful in the sense of not having to cost Ampcast six cents a download.
I'm told BeSonic is delivering a new option to insist that page visitors pay to download files- I host on BeSonic at the moment but wasn't aware of this because naturally I consider the idea extremely silly:)
More on mp3.com- they have polarized their artist base (probably still the largest collection of artists in the industry- and the most spotty in quality) by establishing a Premium Artist program- in order to qualify for being paid anything, you pay them $20 a month (_not_ year). They have also started something called 'Back The Band': effectively, it is an auction for graffiti space on artist's band pages. If you bid highest and pay with your credit card, you can write "This band sucks!" on anyone's page if they are not Madonna. You can also write they LOVE your music and link to your own page- all they can do about such lies is outbid you or complain to management. Management prioritises paying artists more and causes 'free' artists to wait weeks for any response. The money from Back The Band is split- half goes to mp3.com and half goes to the artist whose page you deface. In theory it's for writing nice comments, but that illusion was very quickly dispelled when it went into action. Finally, mp3.com has expanded the class of music content to which it grabs perpetual rights- and subtly altered their contract to permit them to make changes and edit your actual music if they choose. This clears the way for 'Back The Tune', so that in future, you may get 50% of the money someone pays when they bid for the chance to place an audio clip of a fart onto the official mp3.com DAM CD of your album, or a commercial for them! It all makes a twisted kind of sense.
Any other status reports from music service provider customers?
I'll concede that this is the reality, but do _you_ concede that it's crazy?
The dot-com situation was crazy, and look what happened to _that_. The thing with situations that are crazy is that they're not necessarily self-sustaining, they break down... particularly if you don't prop 'em up by proclaiming, "Hey, crazy as it is, this is the reality!". It may be more temporary than you think....
Fine. Agreed. Granted (and I'm an American- well, apart from voting for Nader and being pretty socialist-anarchist).
So, are you going to keep it up or are you gonna follow our bad example? If things go much farther, it'll be you guys fighting to keep the world safe from us... though for the first time I'm aware of, the entities putting people in prison for ten years etc etc. are NOT GOVERNMENTS. So you'd be fighting us, not because America itself is inherently a bad country, but because we have too willingly become the private police force of agencies that seek to seize domination all over the world.
Damn. It really is our turn to wear the brown shirt, isn't it? How far will it go? It makes me ashamed to live where I do.
If I produce a CD or game, and on the CD or game for reasons of my own (competitiveness? establishing goodwill?) I write, "You have full permission to copy this CD/game noncommercially as much as you want and distribute it as long as you're not selling it", which law holds? Are you saying that my own ability to dictate my own terms for distribution of my own CD/game automatically trumps any such law? I wish I had your touching faith in the inherent logic and common sense of law.
The simple fact (as you put it) is that I really don't trust the law to protect _MY_ interests. I think it is all too likely that the content control cartels will more or less make all 'copying' punishable by death or prison (review the punishments of the DMCA again), and completely fail to consider that there might be anybody in the world who would WANT to give their 'fans' or 'users' such freedoms to proliferate the material without pay to the creator, or profit to the distributor.
Because... the simple fact is, anyone doing this with permission of the content creator is not only operating outside the cartel, they are legitimizing that content creator as COMPETITION. What with the internet and all, such a cartel is potentially threatened, people could choose to buy or download something else. The only option for the cartel is to actually act as a government, and take on (indirectly) the ability and desire to punish, imprison, or kill people who do not obey it. And so we are getting legislation to do just that, and it's not a joke, and your assumption that a market exists (of cartel and non-cartel goods) is _wildly_ speculative. I don't approve of your making this suggestion: it's not your 'air supply' being cut off, it's mine. This is not your fight.
Again, the nasty part here is the way the cartel overrides, not consumer rights, but my rights as a potentially competing content producer. I think it would be tragic if, say, Audio CDs were outlawed and I could no longer legally produce them, but I think that is unlikely. By contrast, with the DMCA as precedent, it is quite likely and possible that legislation could be passed so that copying/mp3ing of the same Audio CDs gets _imprisonment_. In this context, I could attempt to extend permission for fans to copy MY OWN CDs, have them try to do so, and be responsible for seeing my own fans put IN PRISON for violating rules that I do not control and cannot override. And that is quite intolerable...
If I release a DVD with a statement on it that says "I as the copyright holder authorise using DeCSS on this DVD and ripping it and posting it on the internet", and my fan does that, can you guarantee that my fan does not go to prison for ten years? I think you can't make any such promises. I as the copyright holder am not the boss. It is the cartel getting ready to put people in prison, and it would be more than happy to have an excuse to put the fans of its competition in prison for ten years. I _dare_ you to find, in the DMCA or any of this legislation, anything to suggest that noncommercial copying and distribution can be authorised by the copyright holder even if desired...
Slashdot Mirror
You might be hosing yourselves :) still, it's your funeral.
"Clip out this coupon and send it in and we will send you ten cases of our new triple-caffienated cola drink for free, just to get you to try it!"
Hey presto, _lots_ of 'click through' from a plain paper ad. Hell, you'd get geeks photocopying the Times, or hunting down copies that are being employed wrapping fish ;) it's a question of, "How much do you WANT to respond?" It's easy to measure coupon pulls too, and many people have over the years. Scientific advertising draws heavily on such sources.
The effectiveness of any sort of ad depends heavily on how much you WANT to check out the product once you've seen the ad. If the ad convincingly offers you gifts like free samples just to try and get you to like the product, then it's going to be very effective. "FREE" is the single most effective word in an ad. Then, it's all down to whether the product sucks or not, and whether you're lying to the customer or not :)
I figure, if some corporation wants to get past my lack of interest in TV, past my lack of interest in radio, defeat my usual tendency to read books over magazines, and GET THEIR MESSAGE in front of my eyes, they can damned well pay for that themselves. I'm not paying them to do it. I don't care if it's the New York Times. They've got to prove to me they're _worth_ my attention. For the most part, sites on the web that think they deserve to be paid just for graciously deigning to allow my attention to rest on their splendiferousness... get a big *PHHBBBTTT!* and my undying contempt. They've _so_ got the wrong idea about the value of their 'content' versus the value of my attention. 30 seconds of sitting, stuck, in front of an interruption-based web ad is thirty seconds I won't have again. (this is why I hate spam too...)
I've got all the time in the world for good people, or interesting people, or even just random maniacs who are fun to watch. Impress me. Interest me. But _don't_ get the idea you are _entitled_ to my attention, Mr. Marketroid, because you're n...
What? Are we throwing a little snit because I'm not being a good consumer? So sorry please, so sorry >:)
It's called COUPONS, and magazine, newspaper and direct mailing advertisers have often used them to gauge the effectiveness of ads. You can have one ad pull TWENTY times the coupon responses as another, simply because the appeal was correctly aimed.
And this is the biggest thing idiot marketroids fail to comprehend: they do NOT HAVE A RIGHT to have people WANT to buy their product! People have to WANT to buy. Everywhere I look, there's some lunatic like this editorial author, or the head of the MPAA, or some RIAA maniac, or Microsoft, behaving as if they did not have to sell people on their product- as if it was a natural law that people must go out and get Product X, and therefore the only concern is how to stop them from copying it for their friends, or how to change banner ads to order the people more FORCEFULLY to go out and get Product X. It's goddamned arrogance, is all it is, and there's nothing particularly noble or clever about that.
I remember having a similar feeling of 'this is ridiculous!' over dot-com hebephrenia and 'The Long Boom', and sure enough, reality went *WHACK* "Hi! I'm reality! Suck it down!". I think the absurdity of this 'advertising' situation is comparable.
The fact of the matter is, advertising DOES NOT MAKE MONEY. What it does is tell people who you are and what you do: if THAT is appealing enough, then people might pay money for that. But the advertising itself is a supportive role- it's about maintaining a visibility before the endless procession of passing people (not 'consumers') who have a thousand other things to care about and don't owe you a DAMN thing. To me the most offensive part of the situation is the incredibly pervasive idea that consumers, websurfers etc. OWE the companies something, just for existing. Uh- no.
A web site itself can be advertising- in the sense of something _you_ pay for, to maintain visibility. I pay $45 a month for not-that-much space to keep airwindows.com out there, and I've reworked the site several times during its life. It is never going to go out of business unless private ownership of .com sites becomes against the law, because _I_ pay for it in order to have a mode of communication that I can extend to anywhere in the world. There is no requirement whatsoever that the site 'pay its own way'. That's not what it's for.
Now, if you look at sites like Yahoo- since they are not personal expressions or any one person's 'turf', and in addition do not offer any services besides internet stuff that people expect to get for free, does that mean that site is required to 'pay its own way'? That its users are obligated to pay for it? Of course not- it can just go out of business if it cannot find a way to keep operating without leeching off its users. What does it have to sell that's that much more deserving of payment than other sites that are free? And there will be free sites- if nothing else, for any such site you'll have one funded by Microsoft because they _do_ sell products and have the willingness to spend money for 'mindshare' without demanding an accounting. (At least, they used to be willing to do this, which is how they got where they are- possibly they will want to start demanding more returns, which will erode their position.)
But the whole attitude of "this is my ad, therefore I am entitled to have people OBEY it!" is despicable and extremely stupid and uninformed. And the attitude of "gee, look at all these nice sites and fancy banners, maybe we're _obligated_ to pay directly for all this" is... naive.
When you go to MSNBC or Yahoo or whatever, or see a banner ad- _they_ are the ones with hat in hand. Not you. They need to be respectful if they want your money- because the burden of sales is on them, not you. None of these people are selling oxygen on the Moon, or water in the Sahara...
Mind you, if nothing ever comes together, I'll keep doing that work: I do it for my studio and digital mastering needs. It just _happens_ to be totally applicable to a Free console. Maybe not everyone feels you need to have the equivalent of 24-bit audio and professional mastering-quality onboard dynamics processing on a game console- but seriously, why not?
Aim for the stars, indeed.
I can supply an example, as well. Here's the deal- a lot of the skills needed are specialised. Computer geeks don't necessarily know squat about how to (for instance) make sound that is really, seriously impressive. But _other_ types of geeks, like sound engineering geeks *bows* do have that technology and the knowledge base to know what to do. And you'll find that some of them (like me) resonate with the computer geek Free Software GNU-oriented approach.
My 'Mastering Tools' software is Free- it's GPLed. It's not C- in fact it only understands a certain type of AIFF file because I'm not programmer enough (yet) to really have the file handling routines down, seeing as I'm making sense out of the very expandable AIFF format byte-by-byte, and trying to do everything with just two file streams and no buffers.
But although it's weak from a programming standpoint, it's got two serious dither algorithms and various sonic enhancers and all of it could be put together to make a sort of SDK for a Free game console- and since this is my scene, I am certain that it could kick the butt of X-Box or whatever else is coming out there. Sure, it's only audio, but it's _there_ to be used- but you've gotta be open source to use it. And I've done enough work with digital mastering, and have enough contacts with pro mastering engineers, to inspire and produce a sound infrastructure that would _really_ kick, hurt, stomp and maim generic sound routines such as we're likely to see in X-Box et al, or even PS2 etc.
The trick is to do all the sound mixing on a high resolution mix buss like 32-bit floating point- and then reduce it to 16 bit to feed to affordable DACs using professional techniques, not the lame truncation or TPDF dither that the commercial consoles are likely to use (if that- I would not be at all surprised to learn they did everything on a 16 bit buss). This is so totally do-able, and I'd be delighted to work with anyone who's doing Free software and wishes to do things like this. It's about knowing what to do, who to ask. For instance, who here has ever heard of sidechain compression (the _audio_ compression)? Turns out that's not only an old mastering engineer trick to add lushness and detail, but it is also very easily doable realtime with just a few extra variables. I've got a 'primitive root residue' dither that sounds very deep and more importantly is fast as hell to compute- not that this matters so terribly much with today's processors! Picture something like Quake 3's sounds, only instead of being roughly mixed by a tinny 3D sound card, you'd have them coming through four channels of high-end surround sound with subtle compression and loads of soundstage depth from even non-optimal speakers- fully immersive sound _textures_ that really brought you into the game. A lot of that could be done just through proper design of the system audio busses... and the code's GPL and ready to be taken and adapted...
Mind you- this work is still going to be done whether Linux game people pick up on it or not. It's not being done _for_ 'TuxBox'. It's being done for pro quality digital mastering. But the Linux movement has started to affect people outside the arena of just raw coding- I'm not sure anyone on Slashdot would know this, but mastering engineers _and_ radio station technical people are being boxed into a corner by corporate brainlessness, overcompression and an industry-driven, listener-hostile 'arms race' of CD and radio loudness. There's a huge amount of dissatisfaction with this- and understandably, some people (like me, obviously) react to this dissatisfation by rebelling, doing stuff that makes no concessions to corporate fashion, and sacrificing mass media access- and the GNU camp just sits there, looking appealing, saying 'You can put your stuff out and share with people who will share with you, and bring whatever you have to offer to the table- do it the best you can and see where it takes you!'
I have to wonder what people are out there working in visual imaging, AI, 3D API writing, game concepts etc. who are also being frustrated and turning to the principles of Free software. I see things like this from time to time, and then I ignore them, because that's not my field. I'm the one who's doing Free work in high end digital audio. They probably have no idea who I am, either.
But add enough of these non-communicating, marginalized people together, and you'll really have something. Aren't there people working on Free _hardware_? That blows my mind. But I suppose it would blow theirs if they knew they could spec out a severely competitive audio subsystem for cheap using regular 16-bit DACs just by knowing what parts had to be overbuilt (coupling caps, DAC or DAC buffer power supply caps), and applying software to 'master' the output busses of the system.
I agree with jfunk- "For just about anything creative, you'll find people not only willing, but enthusiastic.". But do you know how far it extends? Neither do I, because I'm not competent to spot which 3D coders or board designers are really hot. I just know that there's some overlap between the Free stuff _I_ do, and the Free game console being talked about. And I'm not going to chase it, I've got a _lot_ else to do- but I write GPLed code for a reason, and will do absolutely everything I can to help anyone who _wants_ help that I can provide. We all benefit by cooperation. That's too easily forgotten.
Chris Johnson
Here's what gets me: the MPAA is working to 'educate' people as in, beat into their brains a particular view of things. Now, government could do this as well, but it's difficult because there's a lot of precedent to suggest that this is not the place of government- that government is for establishing a social framework within which people can make up their minds. This move by the MPAA is an ideological power-grab: expressing the idea that people do not have a right to make up their own mind if the result is at odds with what is profitable for the corporation. In practice, either the government or the corporation can send police and have you put away for ten years- this should be obvious in this day and age.
Does this provide evidence that corporations are more powerful than governments?
If they were to be kept to comparable powers, which would make more sense: to give government the fully exercised capacity to brainwash its citizenry, refusing to tolerate 'dissent'- or to hold corporations to the same standard that government is vaguely held to, and take the position that, although there is debate on the subject, it may be that the MPAA does not have the right to 'educate' the citizenry in this one-sided manner?
While you were doing it, how much energy did you devote to monitoring toxic waste disposal, resisting encroaching copyright issues, fixing pork barrel appropriations in Congress, stopping 'soft money' corporate influences in government, and writing open source? o_O
Do you see that the level of work that is needed is not just hard but _impossible_ to dump on private individuals in a libertarianesque freemarketish way? That you cannot coordinate individuals to counter or resist composite entities like corporations (or governments!) because there are just too many of the latter to be able to deal with? Alvin Toffler wasn't so far off the mark in 'Future Shock'- but the nasty part is, with the increasing pace of all things, the corporations increasingly get to run amok and their interests are pretty well understood by now. You'll come home from helping your friend and also working with neighbors to fight a nearby toxic waste burning facility, will collapse on your chair and the seat will _explode_ because some corporation felt like making special high-tech cushioning materials that were spontaneously combustible. Reading the fine print as you try and scrape your ass off the ceiling, you see that the warranty is void if you collapse on the chair in an immoderate manner.
*g*
Okay, so that _was_ funny, but do you see the point? I think we can't continue to have the culture you speak of for much longer. It affects our corporations and our government and leaves us ill-equipped to defend ourselves against these monsters we've created in our own image.
There is an element of truth to this- but there's also an unstated assumption. In order to do such monitoring, you've got to have a level of competency- you've got to have education and information enough to provide a context for what you see, you've got to have time to do it in.
I'm wondering if this is where it breaks down- if it is really not much more than a libertarian fantasy of darwinistic power. If you are brilliant and energetic and stubborn then perhaps you'd be able to be as influential as the government- all the while, being entirely unconcerned about the peasants. After all, it's not YOUR job to look after peasants. Isn't it a bit like "If they don't have the energy to do as I do 18 hours a day keeping track of these little issues, they deserve to be spied on, controlled, and then be poisoned by having toxic waste facilities built on their blocks, right? They would in theory have the _ability_ to learn chemistry, learn to identify toxic waste, save up for and buy chemical analysis tools to prove it, track down the corporate layers of obfuscation, learn public speaking and motivate their fellow peasants- what's stopping them? If they choose to work all day and drag themselves home and collapse, then they _deserve_ to die, right?"
This isn't even overstating the case- the modern world is just _too_ complex for individuals to take on the role of watchdog over all possible threats. You'd spend weeks learning about toxins the local paper mill was dumping in your drinking water, get it together enough to raise the issue, and on the way to your big meeting you'd get mugged and left for dead- then, picked up off the street and sent to prison because you downloaded a movie off the net. There's too much for any single individual to deal with, you have to prioritize and this makes it impossible to be truly self sufficient in any sense of the word.
The way this applies to Open Society is simple: who's paid to spy on you and benefit by that, and how much time and effort do you really have available to spy on them back? The very real danger is that this would stratify society into peasants and aristocracy- not only aristocracy of wealth and power, but a new and strange aristocracy of information. The people who've always been more or less scorned except you'd ask them how to fix your PC, would suddenly be the ones who know what you did last night, with who, and could correlate it with other times to establish a pattern. Yes, being on slashdot talking to slashdotters I can see how this might have an appeal- but it does NOT take the place of extending rights to citizens.
I have a problem with anything that increases the tendency to make a lower class into peasantry. Open Society would make a huge percentage of people into peasantry- cutting across lines of income and background. Those Winston Smiths would be surrounded by screens and cameras. And in theory they could look out into the world instead of just being helpless... unfortunately, Winston's VCR is blinking 12:00... 12:00... 12:00... 12:00...
If I remember correctly, they could not find _one_ good or service that was reachable and purchasable. This suggests nobody makes money off it simply because there's no valid contact information...
It works well enough that it can model anything from an X plane to a 747 to a Cessna 172 with enough plausibility that people gripe about small details of the flight handling, without even recognising the brilliance of the accomplishment- the program doesn't know it's trying to model a 172, it's just interacting with the flight surfaces as they are given to it. You can put together absolutely anything no matter how weird and it will model that with the same degree of pretty-much-accurate-mostly.
I play with this sim on a 300mhz G3, and get almost 20 fps out of it, so by itself it is not that killer app. But- the compelling quality about it is that capacity to model real aircraft behavior from a given design. Well- one word, turbulence. Spins, stalls, nonlinear airflow, interaction of control surfaces- it already models propwash, but the fact is, 100% true modelling of airflow is not possible. Turbulence is chaotic... and yet, the closer you get, the more compellingly interesting the problem becomes.
An unhappy side-note: I've had to drop out of the upgrade cycle for X-Plane, even though I've paid for 5.* series upgrades, because the most recent ones, with drool-inducing GFX improvements and flight model refinements, are coded to require MacOS 8.5 or 9. I'm sticking to 8.1 so far, because I can control it and have hardware that's known to work with it (and some, that's potentially troublesome under later versions- some, like my glass-lens ADB Color Quickcam, is already rendered incompatible with recent versions of Quicktime). So even though my hardware will mostly support the very latest newest X-Plane- my other software will not. And so it goes- I'll have to catch up with X-Plane when I'm good and ready to run a substantially more recent computer, one that's a better match with the newer software etc.
So it's not only the digital unwashed who don't upgrade- some people who are very informed on the details of the systems also will resist, _because_ they are capable of establishing 'snapshots' of their computer systems in which any faults are known and avoidable, and the behavior is predictable... and will sometimes pass up 'newer and better' because it is also 'newer and untested'...
Seriously- I'm picturing some type of minimalist industrial electronic music with this text as a spoken word passage (perhaps a vocoder like on that Cher song, only instead of a singing Nord Lead it'd be a talking bench grinder or arc welder)
Makes me wish I had time to do it- but _somebody_ should. dh003i, get some recording software and a mic and do more stuff like this! :)
Seems to me the end result is exactly the same. Exactly how are corporations _not_ government in this day and age? Who pulls the strings? Who gives the orders?
Oh, but I do appreciate thermal management in my buying decisions. That's why I have a G3 upgrade card in my PowerMac :) cute little (no fan) heatsink on it, much smaller and tidier than the huge (no fan) heatsink on the old 604e :)
And Pinkerton which Thompson-machine-gunned strikers in the '20s.
There's nothing wrong with corporations learning all sorts of things about me, but the deal is they do that to exert FORCE. If they learn that I buy X kind of food, and strongly dislike substituting other sorts, they can and will jack up the price and collude with other corporations to make sure I don't have anywhere else to go. They're no friend of mine, they honor no social contract with me- they are nothing but predators trying to reduce me to the most helpless state they can manage, and feed off me as intensely as they can. That is their 'duty' to their shareholders.
THAT is the problem. It's not that there's something inherently wrong with a company learning stuff, or discontinuing a product that they can't afford to produce! But the reality is, these organizations devote great effort to boxing me into a corner and leaving me with minimal or illusory choice, and I call that force in the sense that a checkmate in chess could be called force. (Do Libertarians concede checkmates in chess, or do they always play until their king is captured because the situation is not real to them until the last move? Do they have an ability to project outcomes or are they unable to?)
This reminds me of another discussion in rec.audio.pro I recently sat in on. A guy was ranting and being offended because some posters had questioned his use and recommendation of 'Behringer' gear. Turns out, Behringer makes a practice of getting other gear (Aphex, dbx, Mackie) and taking it over to China and having people do an exact clone of the other company's design, only with cheaper parts, and then underselling the original company and doing lots of business.
Now, on the one hand that situation is about the sanctity of intellectual property- but in another sense, that situation is about force. If Behringer, by being basically an IP parasite, is capable of severely undercutting the companies that actually do the R+D for products like mixers, then they are capable of driving their 'host' companies out of business. Not only do they force higher costs onto the competing products (legal bills in trying to fight Behringer), not only do they exert competitive force making those companies choose between making shoddier, cheaper products that don't work, or going out of business, but if you take a Libertarian sort of view, you have no justification for buying the product of the beleaugered original developer, because it costs more than the Behringer clone. It's a cancerous sort of situation that is blatantly, obviously unhealthy, but it plays right into notions of darwinistic competition in the marketplace as the invisible hand. It's unfortunately impossible to have a healthy market under the invisible hand, because the invisible hand likes cheaters as long as they don't get caught, and the invisible hand REALLY loves parasites that don't really contribute anything, and any sort of scam or rip-off that earns profit without producing anything of value.
Maybe rather than getting worked up over the mechanisms of privacy abuses like turning collected personal data over to the government, it would be better to look at it in a broader sense. If something collects data on you, what are its responsibilities to you? The Libertarian view would be, it has no responsibilities other than what you can FORCE it to have (funny, I thought only governments had force, not individuals). The socialist view that I favor would suggest that it has as many responsibilities to you as you have to it- possibly quite a lot, depending on what's deemed acceptable for each party to do. Maybe what's needed is for corporations to have some, limited, responsibilities towards just individuals- for instance, it can see what stuff is selling, it can see how much insulin it needs to order for different stores' pharmacies, but it cannot use that information to identify pockets of diabetics and collude to jack up the prices unbearably in those areas.
Some of that should sound familiar, because we've always had some types of legislation to take care of that. However, it's worth repeating, because it's being forgotten.
Thankfully your opinion is not the only one that matters, but simply one among many :)
Honestly, you'd think that sort of thing _hadn't_ been extensively tried in Chile and damn near destroyed the country. It just doesn't work. The invisible hand is an article of faith- means 'there's nothing there'. In practice, and libertarian forms of government HAVE been tried in practice (by force- Chile), it just doesn't work.
Let's assume that Microsoft gets its way, that it genuinely does have the ability to make a majority of mp3 files 56K or whatever. To some extent this will proliferate WMA, but in addition it will simply proliferate 56K mp3 files: many people really don't seem to care.
So, rather than Napster being full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 128 with Xing, Napster (or its equivalent) will be full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 56K using an intentionally bad encoder- or at 128K with the same intentionally bad encoder, if people learn to change the registry key.
Meanwhile, some of us in the content producing and open source code writing arenas are busily producing content that can be encoded much better (LAME, with special settings to handle 'mastering' to mp3) from CD audio- and even that can be done much better than the industry's overcompressed, intentionally-full-of-errors-for-copy-protection efforts.
While there is still any channel for independent artistic expression- while it is still legal to make your own music and make mp3s of it and put them out there- the playing field is being tilted in two directions at once. It's being tilted legislatively away from indie content producers, and this is the obvious way. But! With all this cynical the-consumer-will-eat-slops-and-love-it thinking from the big corporations, the playing field of quality is being tilted TOWARD indies. I mean, when you can fool around with some synthesisers, maybe a bit of recording equipment, free audio software, and produce music that has audio quality that is _dramatically_ superior to the corporate product, there is something major happening, with major implications for the image of corporate entertainment. And you can- the fact that the big labels, that Microsoft _are_ capable of producing quality output does not mean they're going to, or that they want to. The labels are busy trying to out-loud each other on the increasingly ignored Top 40 radio stations- this is a well known scandal among mastering engineers. They're increasingly turning to cheap production methods like Pro Tools and _ignoring_ their ability to draw on really top of the line studios and talent. And Microsoft? Let me put it this way: "56K WMA built into the OS- 128K and up WMA available over .NET on a pay-per-encode basis!". This isn't 1998. Microsoft are NOT IN A POSITION to reproduce their previous successes with WMA- they have too much of a need to tie it in with .NET and this will get in the way of widespread adoption of it- the jaws of the trap are just too obvious this time, and the 'worse-is-better' alternative, mp3, is just too entrenched.
It's a very good, though very nerve-racking, time to be involved with Free software, with indie music and arts. Rarely in history have our enemies been so powerful, but rarely have they been so sloppy, contemptuous, and full of hubris.
Frankly, it is not time to weep. It is time to kick ass and take no prisoners.
It's hardly an open standard- mp3 has lots of its own problems. But with the incredible hostility towards it, in a way that keeps Fraunhofer from running amok. Balance of power :)
The cost is $25 a year (not month, year- about $2 a month), so I would have to resoundingly agree that it must be cheaper to buy all that disk storage than to dicker with the major labels :D
Ampcast is also sticking with their 'six cent payment to artists per download' though some of the artists actually would like Ampcast to drop that as well and just focus on stuff like the CD program they're coming out with (on the assumption that since nobody pays to download mp3s, getting paid for such downloads is stupid and liable to hurt the music service provider in the long run). However, there's a twist- Ampcast streaming has never paid a royalty, just the downloads- and with the CD program, artists will be sorta encouraged to make tracks 'streaming only'. All real geeks know this is meaningless- read an m3u file lately? ;) but it would certainly be meaningful in the sense of not having to cost Ampcast six cents a download.
I'm told BeSonic is delivering a new option to insist that page visitors pay to download files- I host on BeSonic at the moment but wasn't aware of this because naturally I consider the idea extremely silly :)
More on mp3.com- they have polarized their artist base (probably still the largest collection of artists in the industry- and the most spotty in quality) by establishing a Premium Artist program- in order to qualify for being paid anything, you pay them $20 a month (_not_ year). They have also started something called 'Back The Band': effectively, it is an auction for graffiti space on artist's band pages. If you bid highest and pay with your credit card, you can write "This band sucks!" on anyone's page if they are not Madonna. You can also write they LOVE your music and link to your own page- all they can do about such lies is outbid you or complain to management. Management prioritises paying artists more and causes 'free' artists to wait weeks for any response. The money from Back The Band is split- half goes to mp3.com and half goes to the artist whose page you deface. In theory it's for writing nice comments, but that illusion was very quickly dispelled when it went into action. Finally, mp3.com has expanded the class of music content to which it grabs perpetual rights- and subtly altered their contract to permit them to make changes and edit your actual music if they choose. This clears the way for 'Back The Tune', so that in future, you may get 50% of the money someone pays when they bid for the chance to place an audio clip of a fart onto the official mp3.com DAM CD of your album, or a commercial for them! It all makes a twisted kind of sense.
Any other status reports from music service provider customers?
You mean the new version of Office is made from corn syrup instead of sugar and hopefully nobody will notice? :D
The dot-com situation was crazy, and look what happened to _that_. The thing with situations that are crazy is that they're not necessarily self-sustaining, they break down... particularly if you don't prop 'em up by proclaiming, "Hey, crazy as it is, this is the reality!". It may be more temporary than you think....
So, are you going to keep it up or are you gonna follow our bad example? If things go much farther, it'll be you guys fighting to keep the world safe from us... though for the first time I'm aware of, the entities putting people in prison for ten years etc etc. are NOT GOVERNMENTS. So you'd be fighting us, not because America itself is inherently a bad country, but because we have too willingly become the private police force of agencies that seek to seize domination all over the world.
Damn. It really is our turn to wear the brown shirt, isn't it? How far will it go? It makes me ashamed to live where I do.
The simple fact (as you put it) is that I really don't trust the law to protect _MY_ interests. I think it is all too likely that the content control cartels will more or less make all 'copying' punishable by death or prison (review the punishments of the DMCA again), and completely fail to consider that there might be anybody in the world who would WANT to give their 'fans' or 'users' such freedoms to proliferate the material without pay to the creator, or profit to the distributor.
Because... the simple fact is, anyone doing this with permission of the content creator is not only operating outside the cartel, they are legitimizing that content creator as COMPETITION. What with the internet and all, such a cartel is potentially threatened, people could choose to buy or download something else. The only option for the cartel is to actually act as a government, and take on (indirectly) the ability and desire to punish, imprison, or kill people who do not obey it. And so we are getting legislation to do just that, and it's not a joke, and your assumption that a market exists (of cartel and non-cartel goods) is _wildly_ speculative. I don't approve of your making this suggestion: it's not your 'air supply' being cut off, it's mine. This is not your fight.
Again, the nasty part here is the way the cartel overrides, not consumer rights, but my rights as a potentially competing content producer. I think it would be tragic if, say, Audio CDs were outlawed and I could no longer legally produce them, but I think that is unlikely. By contrast, with the DMCA as precedent, it is quite likely and possible that legislation could be passed so that copying/mp3ing of the same Audio CDs gets _imprisonment_. In this context, I could attempt to extend permission for fans to copy MY OWN CDs, have them try to do so, and be responsible for seeing my own fans put IN PRISON for violating rules that I do not control and cannot override. And that is quite intolerable...
If I release a DVD with a statement on it that says "I as the copyright holder authorise using DeCSS on this DVD and ripping it and posting it on the internet", and my fan does that, can you guarantee that my fan does not go to prison for ten years? I think you can't make any such promises. I as the copyright holder am not the boss. It is the cartel getting ready to put people in prison, and it would be more than happy to have an excuse to put the fans of its competition in prison for ten years. I _dare_ you to find, in the DMCA or any of this legislation, anything to suggest that noncommercial copying and distribution can be authorised by the copyright holder even if desired...