Hey! I thought about submitting this yesterday...I'm sure lot's of people did. It was all over the news. I refrained cuz I realized that everything I've submitted so far has been M$ bashing... so I'm determined not to submit anything else about M$. (Even if they never use any of my submissions anyway.) Like my Dad always said, "if can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
Ever wonder why MS is putting.NET ads on Slashdot?
heh, heh, that's funny, cuz when I went to the discussion of this article I got the MS Visual Studio.Net ad with the "webcam" of a "coder hard at work" and his reaction after he eliminated "50,000 lines of legacy code." Hard to believe that's not intentional...
Thought I'd give the Googling of Lockwood a shot and, sorry, but "Lawrence Lockwood is a dick" doesn't come up... yet. However, his name is on this suit from 1997. IANAL, but it has something to do with a guy trying to get money out of Chrysler cuz he invented the intermittent wiper. Funny, I didn't think a windshield wiper with a timer had to be invented.
Yeah... no mention of speed other than "tons of data"... how scientific. However, the other link in the post is to the UWB Working Group's FAQ and from their links list I found a great Scientific American article on the subject. It says that potential speeds are 100 to 500 Mbps and the range is 5 to 10 meters. Note that that range restriction, if I understand correctly, is due to current FCC restrictions. Nonetheless, that's a wide enough range to cover my tiny house. The article points out that a large chunk of the population in the developed world spends most of their day within ten meters of a wired internet access point.
Please don't be arrogant and silly enough to think that your precious songs are so valuable that you can't post them in their entirety and in good quality. So many bands seem to be afraid of giving something away, so they put up crappy rips of 30 secs of two of their songs. The crappy quality makes most people never want to hear your band again and no one wants to listen to part of a song repeatedly. If you put up several songs in their full glory, people might actually listen to them enough to get hooked and want more.
You should actually consider posting an entire album. If people can download a whole record and burn a cd, they're that much more likely to listen to it a lot. (Be sure to check your ISP's fees in case you start getting a lot of dwnlds. You might want to put your songs on some of the online services and p2p's mentioned in other posts.) You can still try to sell packaged cds, just bear in mind that if you get any following your music will get traded; plan on making your money from live shows and merch.
And really, you should think about your desire to sign to a major label. Why? So you can be a big rock star? Even if you do manage to polish the right knob, the vast majority of bands who sign to majors get dropped after one record or even worse, get stuck in a long contract with a label that doesn't want to put their stuff out.
And ultimately, hopefully, this era of artificial superstars is coming to an end. Think about it: the megastars are just created by the music industry and millions of willing suckers. Assuming that the RIAA doesn't manage to destroy the internet, their world is coming to an end. But don't cry for them... revel in the dawn of a new era, when musicans won't have to win the lottery to get their music heard. Just say no to major labels...
"Nonsense. Flash plugin files are practically a standard on the most popular platforms for web browsing, in a similar way to how TCP/IP became a standard despite non-approval by ISO."
I fear you have these two sentences reversed... the latter is the nonsense. Well, Flash may have become a defacto standard because a lot of people fell for the bells and whistles that it provides. However, proprietary tools should never be officially acknolwedged as a standard. The internet is an international community that must remain open to all nationalities, classes, races, etc. Therefore, official standards should always be based on open source code and open and accepted protocols.
Furthermore, comparing Flash to TCP/IP is moronic. One's a proprietary animation program the other is an open and extremely well documented set of protocols... apples and oranges. The acceptance of any company's proprietary software as a standard should be resisted. Inevitably, SVG or some other open web language will usurp Flash. And, really that shouldn't be that big a deal; Macromedia has and a great run with Flash and made plenty of money off of it. Maybe it's time for them to move on to a new technology market to corner.
Finally, If I were you, I'd do some long hard thinking about your attitude towards web browsers and standards in general. It is absolutely essential that no one company gain a 100% share of the browser market because then that company makes all the rules for how the web works and can charge everyone anything they want for admittance. A chilling thought. Wake up and smell the freedom of open source, bozo.
I didn't sleep a wink last night, I was so upset about the death of my beloved AG. With time, though, the emotions have given way to more rational thought. The potential significance of this agreement for the concepts of public domain and the intellectual commons are indeed chilling, as was eleoquently described by zylinder4: All ideas are off limit until you ascertain whether it is owned or not. Goodbye public domain.
And there's an interesting side effect of this that the RIAA undoubtedly didn't consider. I do freelance writing for regional newspapers, doing mostly short show previews. I try to stay aware of what's coming down the pike so I can track down promo materials. Inevitably, however, there are shows on the weekly list that I didn't know about and would like to write about but I have about 48 hours to track down materials. Audiogalaxy was my lifeline to finding a few songs by an act so that I could write about them...SO THAT I COULD GIVE THE BAND (AND THEREFORE THEIR RECORD LABEL) FREE PUBLICITY!! Now, I will likely blow off a lot of previews that I would have done in the days of AG.
Finally, I did want to point out, for all fans of Audiogalaxy out there that there is still a slight pulse at our beloved pages of blue. If you go to the page of any of the "hosted artists" and click on the little black mp3 logo, it will still download the song from their server. And it's http, so it's way faster than with the satellite. I know that pales in comparison to reading about a band and popping over to AG to download a few songs, but at least there's still some new acts to check out. (epitonic.com is a similar resource).
And remember, friends don't let friends buy new CD's (not by major labels anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Why not try kazaa lite? All the fun none of the spyware...
Hey! I thought about submitting this yesterday...I'm sure lot's of people did. It was all over the news. I refrained cuz I realized that everything I've submitted so far has been M$ bashing... so I'm determined not to submit anything else about M$. (Even if they never use any of my submissions anyway.) Like my Dad always said, "if can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
Ever wonder why MS is putting .NET ads on Slashdot?
heh, heh, that's funny, cuz when I went to the discussion of this article I got the MS Visual Studio .Net ad with the "webcam" of a "coder hard at work" and his reaction after he eliminated "50,000 lines of legacy code." Hard to believe that's not intentional...
Thought I'd give the Googling of Lockwood a shot and, sorry, but "Lawrence Lockwood is a dick" doesn't come up... yet. However, his name is on this suit from 1997. IANAL, but it has something to do with a guy trying to get money out of Chrysler cuz he invented the intermittent wiper. Funny, I didn't think a windshield wiper with a timer had to be invented.
He meant that AGP 8X is a waste of money cuz it's just a stopgap until PCI-X comes out... that you might as well just wait for PCI-X.
Har Har... Bobby doesn't pass the Bobby test!!
check it out...
geez... why didn't i wait until tomorrow to start this... it's gonna take hours
Yeah... no mention of speed other than "tons of data"... how scientific. However, the other link in the post is to the UWB Working Group's FAQ and from their links list I found a great Scientific American article on the subject. It says that potential speeds are 100 to 500 Mbps and the range is 5 to 10 meters. Note that that range restriction, if I understand correctly, is due to current FCC restrictions. Nonetheless, that's a wide enough range to cover my tiny house. The article points out that a large chunk of the population in the developed world spends most of their day within ten meters of a wired internet access point.
Please don't be arrogant and silly enough to think that your precious songs are so valuable that you can't post them in their entirety and in good quality. So many bands seem to be afraid of giving something away, so they put up crappy rips of 30 secs of two of their songs. The crappy quality makes most people never want to hear your band again and no one wants to listen to part of a song repeatedly. If you put up several songs in their full glory, people might actually listen to them enough to get hooked and want more.
You should actually consider posting an entire album. If people can download a whole record and burn a cd, they're that much more likely to listen to it a lot. (Be sure to check your ISP's fees in case you start getting a lot of dwnlds. You might want to put your songs on some of the online services and p2p's mentioned in other posts.) You can still try to sell packaged cds, just bear in mind that if you get any following your music will get traded; plan on making your money from live shows and merch.
And really, you should think about your desire to sign to a major label. Why? So you can be a big rock star? Even if you do manage to polish the right knob, the vast majority of bands who sign to majors get dropped after one record or even worse, get stuck in a long contract with a label that doesn't want to put their stuff out.
And ultimately, hopefully, this era of artificial superstars is coming to an end. Think about it: the megastars are just created by the music industry and millions of willing suckers. Assuming that the RIAA doesn't manage to destroy the internet, their world is coming to an end. But don't cry for them... revel in the dawn of a new era, when musicans won't have to win the lottery to get their music heard. Just say no to major labels...
Sorry. I was impassioned.
"Nonsense. Flash plugin files are practically a standard on the most popular platforms for web browsing, in a similar way to how TCP/IP became a standard despite non-approval by ISO."
I fear you have these two sentences reversed... the latter is the nonsense. Well, Flash may have become a defacto standard because a lot of people fell for the bells and whistles that it provides. However, proprietary tools should never be officially acknolwedged as a standard. The internet is an international community that must remain open to all nationalities, classes, races, etc. Therefore, official standards should always be based on open source code and open and accepted protocols.
Furthermore, comparing Flash to TCP/IP is moronic. One's a proprietary animation program the other is an open and extremely well documented set of protocols... apples and oranges. The acceptance of any company's proprietary software as a standard should be resisted. Inevitably, SVG or some other open web language will usurp Flash. And, really that shouldn't be that big a deal; Macromedia has and a great run with Flash and made plenty of money off of it. Maybe it's time for them to move on to a new technology market to corner.
Finally, If I were you, I'd do some long hard thinking about your attitude towards web browsers and standards in general. It is absolutely essential that no one company gain a 100% share of the browser market because then that company makes all the rules for how the web works and can charge everyone anything they want for admittance. A chilling thought. Wake up and smell the freedom of open source, bozo.
I didn't sleep a wink last night, I was so upset about the death of my beloved AG. With time, though, the emotions have given way to more rational thought. The potential significance of this agreement for the concepts of public domain and the intellectual commons are indeed chilling, as was eleoquently described by zylinder4: All ideas are off limit until you ascertain whether it is owned or not. Goodbye public domain.
And there's an interesting side effect of this that the RIAA undoubtedly didn't consider. I do freelance writing for regional newspapers, doing mostly short show previews. I try to stay aware of what's coming down the pike so I can track down promo materials. Inevitably, however, there are shows on the weekly list that I didn't know about and would like to write about but I have about 48 hours to track down materials. Audiogalaxy was my lifeline to finding a few songs by an act so that I could write about them...SO THAT I COULD GIVE THE BAND (AND THEREFORE THEIR RECORD LABEL) FREE PUBLICITY!! Now, I will likely blow off a lot of previews that I would have done in the days of AG.
Finally, I did want to point out, for all fans of Audiogalaxy out there that there is still a slight pulse at our beloved pages of blue. If you go to the page of any of the "hosted artists" and click on the little black mp3 logo, it will still download the song from their server. And it's http, so it's way faster than with the satellite. I know that pales in comparison to reading about a band and popping over to AG to download a few songs, but at least there's still some new acts to check out. (epitonic.com is a similar resource).
And remember, friends don't let friends buy new CD's (not by major labels anyway).
good night.
Send a message to the RIAA: DON'T BUY ANY NEW CDs! BOYCOTT THE MAJOR LABELS NOW! PASS IT ON!!
Send a message to the RIAA: STOP BUYING CDs! BOYCOTT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY NOW!
Right on! Send a message to the RIAA: STOP BUYING CDs! BOYCOTT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY NOW!