how does one GET successful using these new models.
many of the models for independent records, such as those created by King Crimson (DGM), Marillion, Peter Gabriel, Phish, et al, all work for those artists because they already have a large fan base from their days when they WERE on major labels, with major promotion budgets (or at least major touring budgets).
the independent approach (whether independent labels or downloads) can sustain an artist once they've reached a certain success level, but simply doesn't seem to work to actually GET one to become a national level (or even regional level above touring the same city or state) success to the point that the income from the music alone is self-sustaining. and by self-sustaining, i mean both in terms of the artist's own expenses and the cost of making the next recording.
he would have written a computer program to keep track of all the starbucks, and visit them in the chronological order that they were opened, and have that program keep track of all the messy details of any that closed or moved, etc.
(yes, a douglas adams reference to the infinitely prolongued guy who insulted the universe in alphabetical order)
with a gap in financial support in the tens of millions of dollars, the kerry campaign has had to save every penny it could, and free software and low-cost LAMP hosting is certainly one way to do that.
its the "no moving parts" thing that makes me prefer my 256 (total) nomad2 over any of the hard drive or cdrom based players.
in walking around or riding on planes, cars, the subway, etc, things bump around a LOT, and eventually one of those bumps will kill the hard drive, just like one of those bumps is all it takes to destroy a cd playing in your car (hence the reason many of us make copies of cds strictly for auto use).
so even though i have the disadvantage of having to plan out what i might want to hear in the next 4 hours, the safety of knowing i'm not going to lose a $150 hard drive because of one stupid pothole is more than enough for me to keep what i've got.
any digital protection system can be broken, no matter HOW complicated.
the one way that breaks ALL digital protection systems, and still leaves the content with decent audio, is to go through an analog phase. record from the output of your sound card into another computer via the analog lines, you only lose one analog generation (negligable given how lossy mp3 encoding was on the original content), and get a perfectly rippable copy on the other side with no history of any DRM preserved whatsoever.
so you DRM bastards: KNOCK IT OFF!
All DRM does is make the stupid feel empowered, the common person feel condescended to, and the pirates feel bored as to how easy it was to crack it...
the disconnect with disney was solely for financial reasons.
the deal with disney was kinda like a deal with a record company. disney provided seed cash, in return for "ownership" (technically speaking, exclusive monopoly rights in perpetuity; legal ownership remained in pixar's hands) of the films, plots, and characters for distribution and merchandising purposes. it also set a specific royalty rate for how much of the gross pixar would get (and that wasn't very high).
worked fine when pixar didn't have any cash, and didn't know if their films would be hits or not.
now, with pixar having more than enough cash from the IPO and the gross profits on monsters and nemo, pixar simply doesn't need that kind of relationship anymore. pixar has the seed capital it needs to fund its movies directly, and has no interest in any deal that sees it give up its rights under such terms.
pixar could reasonably accept a deal where buena vista distributes the movie, disney home video sells the dvd/video, and disney's toy department does the merchandise, IF the deal puts the majority of the gross into pixar, as they deserve for coming up with the material.
eisner refused to see it this way, and would only approve a deal that kept the lion's share of the profits to disney.
I see pixar in the right here. for disney to claim that they should take the majority of the profits simply because they did the manufacturing and distribution is absurd.
yeah...The Flower Kings did that with their NYC Official Bootleg, and Crimson have done that with some of the material from the 71/72 tours with the Islands/Earthbound band, creating cds of far better quality than the original Earthbound release.
Soundboard mixes are not representative of what an audience might hear. Those instruments which are naturally louder in the theatre are not likely to be as loud in the P.A. Panning is also likely to be more extreme in a theatre, where audiences on the right might not hear a carefully placed shaker on the left. But there are refreshingly different perspectives, also intriguing close-ups on drum kits and internal guitar panning, which would never get past the censorship of a studio and good taste. Which is maybe one reason why bootlegs are popular......
-- source, the liner notes for 1994's B'Boom live album.
In other words, it really depends on the venue, when getting a "Front of House" (FoH) mix. The guy mixing the sound for the PA is aware that he's hearing the on-stage monitors and amplifiers as well as the PA, so guitar and bass sounds tend to be quieter, and drums can be quite hollow.
When this mix is your only source, it can be devestating to the recording when looking for something that should be more professional, like the Dixie Dregs concert on the Steve Morse DVD, where the mix cut the guitar to almost nothing because Morse keeps a rather loud on-stage amp stack.
Arena and Stadium gigs aren't as affected by this as club and theater shows would be. Then again, bands that can afford to do stadium shows can afford to have a second mixer on site producing a high-quality recording of the show independent of the FoH mix.
"Do a good job, take your check home, and buy yourself something nice."
He used to say it to Jon Nathan-Turner quite a lot during the making of Five Doctors, and at convention appearances.
Basically that about sums it up. Go shopping. Watch (good) movies. Drink. Bitch about the job (usually boneheaded customers or pointy-haired managers) in semi-private posts on a LiveJournal. Build up social relationships where "no geeking out" (no mention of computers, the www, or jobs) is required.
that about covers it. in college, i gave up on radio when i found that the group Steely Dan could be played on the college station (they were "hip" enough), the oldies station (they were old enough), the pop station (they were pop enough for when the pop station decided to play something old), the classic-rock station, the adult-contemporary mellow-rock station, and finally (believe it or not) the country station when it decided to do crossover tracks.
add to that the fact that its mellow enough to be grocery-store muzak (the original releases, mind you), and that was it for me.
steely dan was & is the ultimate in bland music that can fit any "format" somebody decides to proscribe, and i gave up on non-talk radio within a month of making that discovery, 12 years ago.
I wonder what they think of internet radio, a competitor that is growing faster than satellite...
Internet radio isn't an issue to them, because they know that between the RIAA and ASCAP / Harry Fox Agency, the powers that be that own all the copyrights will eventually make it too expensive to run internet radio stations without ads, and from there, get rid of the specialist stations like all-prog or all-celtic and turn i-radio into the regular airwaves pushing for ratings.
finally, as they turn i-radio into a direct competitor for the freebies of on-air broadcasting, they win in the end when companies start complaining about bandwidth usage (on both servers and clients). why waste bandwidth to get something you can get over normal airwaves.
Could be Worse...
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I went to try to download a Flash plug-in from Macromedia for Mozilla (back before the plug-in auto-install stuff was standardized in 1.4), and found that the download page was, logically enough, a Flash animation that I couldn't actually view in order to get the plugin.
but in the long run, it may hurt them. To take an example from computer history, IBM gave it a run in the late 80s of having their customers buy their servers outright instead of leasing them as they had done for decades before. short term, it infused a LOT of cash into IBMs coffers in a relatively short time.
long term -- well, at some point, the last IBM leaser bought his machine, and suddenly (and the accountants simply did not predict this would ever happen) the sales bottomed out and flatlined. pretty dramatically too, as the machines were often plenty fast enough for what they were doing (much as PC hardware is today). IBMs recovery effort on that one cost them several thousand jobs, if I recall correctly.
So Versign is doing the same thing (heck, I think I said that here on/. when the 9 year options were first branded). They're effectively selling the names instead of leasing them, to create an influx of short-term cash, which will run out and not be replenished when the need to purchase domain names eases off.
One can predict that either Verisign expects to be in another line of business by the time that happens, or they're going to suffer greatly for it.
well, a guarenteed download/sale brings in "eyeballs", keeping their advertising rates high. if they can say to the advertisers "look how many people saw our site for...", they can keep the advertising money flowing to more than cover costs for hosting the popular product.
the little-guys downloads aren't common enough to warrent raising advertising costs for their specific pages to cover the expense of hosting.
Highlander is another that they keep re-releasing in different "special packages", with little indication of any additional footage since the original Director's Cut 10th Anniversary release.
or anybody who embedded multiple-language script files using BSF into their XML format?
not sure anybody actually DID it, but its been feasable for quite a while, and I think XSLT or some other XML format that I can't recall had BSF-support built in (besides the not-XML JSP tag, which is still damn close). Having BSF automatically gives it support for Javascript, BeanShell, and Python, among others.
..doesn't really matter anymore? Who *REALLY* needs SCO compatibility with the LAMP webapp systems Linux is mostly used for these days (and hell, there are so many other good apps with direct linux support, too).
SCO binary compatibility was done at a time when getting people to write for Linux was next to impossible. That is no longer the case as today, I'd say more companies and people write for Linux, or write code that's 100% source-portable, that it simply doesn't matter.
Get rid of SCO ABI support. Nobody uses it so its just bloat.
"push" is relative. Yes, Gollum danced around in celebration, but he didn't slip and fall the way the book and the Rankin/Bass film depect. Frodo attacked him one last time to get the ring, and in that fight, he fell adding (also not in the book) the tension of having Frodo almost fall as well.
1) The appendix gives enough of the plotline to support most of the films rendition (the "her fate is tied to the ring" b.s. from RotK is full of it, of course).
One of the issues (and I wrote about it here a year ago) is that in the book, much of Aragorn's growth from ranger to king happens before the hobbits ever meet him. he knows what he has to do, now its just a matter of finding the right time.
it actually makes for a relatively flat character on film, because film doesn't give enough room to build backstory without too many flashbacks, which isn't a good film device the way its a very expressive novel device. The alternative would require a "Lord of the Rings 1 1/2" (nee: The Lion King prequel coming out on video this month).
2) "working towards his destiny" -- again, there's much extending that in the appendices. Denathor had heard of him (though not as succinctly as the movie depicts) and developed an opinion of his perceived immaturity, a reputation that had to come from somewhere. Aragorn's angst at accepting his role is there, in backstory and in the appendix.
having aragorn grow to accept his destiny in "realtime" on screen makes for a much more interesting character on film.
The cliff crap in TTT I would rather have done without. There are better ways to show 1) that there was a 10000 orc army coming, and 2) that Eowyn has the hots for him.
3) most of the Faramir I could have lived without. Denethor on screen is much weaker than he should have been. Denethor in the book is a masterful politician. On screen he is a slothful wretch. In the book, we can build up a sympathy for the betrayal and pain he's faced; he's a complex character with conflict between his compassion for his people and the dread he's seen in the Palantir. In the film, we only feel anger at him for not trying harder to have some compassion at all.
He's a jerk on film. when he dies its, "finally, and good ridance", which is not the emotion Tolkien wanted us to feel.
4) i didn't mind the Sam changes as much; yes, Frodo comes out more affected by the ring than the books, but Sam himself isn't changed as such. He still had the decision of go back to Frodo or go forward with the ring himself; the additional option of going home alone doesn't really hurt the story.
I *DID* dislike that Gollum was "pushed" by Frodo into the lava instead of falling in by his own greed and carelessness. In the end, on film he wasn't the victim of his addiction as it should have been portrayed. Even the Rankin/Bass version got THAT part right.
Sure enough, some of those provisions of the new law are being tested against our constitutional rights via the court system.
On the other hand, there's enough legal education and know-how in the system right now (most Senators and a sizeable # of Congressmen are either lawyers or have been in service for a number of years) to have been able to make the decision that its unconstitutional and not even bothered to vote for or sign it in the first place.
Passing something with so many bluntly unconstitutional clauses, just to say "we're doing *something* (even if for now its the wrong thing)" is just plain poor leadership.
As far as i know, unless there are political reasons to not do it, like their boss (i.e., Ashcroft) says don't do it, they have no choice BUT to appeal.
It is the policy of the Justice Department to support the implementation and preservation of all laws in the book. If an appeal rules one defunct, then they must appeal to preserve it until told its "not a priority".
Trust me, to Ashcroft and Ridge, Patriot IS a priority.
Slashdot Mirror
When the artist makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When the record label makes a mistake, the artist pays for it." -- Robert Fripp
how does one GET successful using these new models.
many of the models for independent records, such as those created by King Crimson (DGM), Marillion, Peter Gabriel, Phish, et al, all work for those artists because they already have a large fan base from their days when they WERE on major labels, with major promotion budgets (or at least major touring budgets).
the independent approach (whether independent labels or downloads) can sustain an artist once they've reached a certain success level, but simply doesn't seem to work to actually GET one to become a national level (or even regional level above touring the same city or state) success to the point that the income from the music alone is self-sustaining. and by self-sustaining, i mean both in terms of the artist's own expenses and the cost of making the next recording.
he would have written a computer program to keep track of all the starbucks, and visit them in the chronological order that they were opened, and have that program keep track of all the messy details of any that closed or moved, etc.
(yes, a douglas adams reference to the infinitely prolongued guy who insulted the universe in alphabetical order)
with a gap in financial support in the tens of millions of dollars, the kerry campaign has had to save every penny it could, and free software and low-cost LAMP hosting is certainly one way to do that.
its the "no moving parts" thing that makes me prefer my 256 (total) nomad2 over any of the hard drive or cdrom based players.
in walking around or riding on planes, cars, the subway, etc, things bump around a LOT, and eventually one of those bumps will kill the hard drive, just like one of those bumps is all it takes to destroy a cd playing in your car (hence the reason many of us make copies of cds strictly for auto use).
so even though i have the disadvantage of having to plan out what i might want to hear in the next 4 hours, the safety of knowing i'm not going to lose a $150 hard drive because of one stupid pothole is more than enough for me to keep what i've got.
in particular, it praised the slimness of the sandisk cruzer for not "getting in the way" of other devices.
any digital protection system can be broken, no matter HOW complicated.
the one way that breaks ALL digital protection systems, and still leaves the content with decent audio, is to go through an analog phase. record from the output of your sound card into another computer via the analog lines, you only lose one analog generation (negligable given how lossy mp3 encoding was on the original content), and get a perfectly rippable copy on the other side with no history of any DRM preserved whatsoever.
so you DRM bastards: KNOCK IT OFF!
All DRM does is make the stupid feel empowered, the common person feel condescended to, and the pirates feel bored as to how easy it was to crack it...
it has translucents, which "fade" over a second or two (as opposed to all or nothing like eterm had).
the disconnect with disney was solely for financial reasons.
the deal with disney was kinda like a deal with a record company. disney provided seed cash, in return for "ownership" (technically speaking, exclusive monopoly rights in perpetuity; legal ownership remained in pixar's hands) of the films, plots, and characters for distribution and merchandising purposes. it also set a specific royalty rate for how much of the gross pixar would get (and that wasn't very high).
worked fine when pixar didn't have any cash, and didn't know if their films would be hits or not.
now, with pixar having more than enough cash from the IPO and the gross profits on monsters and nemo, pixar simply doesn't need that kind of relationship anymore. pixar has the seed capital it needs to fund its movies directly, and has no interest in any deal that sees it give up its rights under such terms.
pixar could reasonably accept a deal where buena vista distributes the movie, disney home video sells the dvd/video, and disney's toy department does the merchandise, IF the deal puts the majority of the gross into pixar, as they deserve for coming up with the material.
eisner refused to see it this way, and would only approve a deal that kept the lion's share of the profits to disney.
I see pixar in the right here. for disney to claim that they should take the majority of the profits simply because they did the manufacturing and distribution is absurd.
yeah...The Flower Kings did that with their NYC Official Bootleg, and Crimson have done that with some of the material from the 71/72 tours with the Islands/Earthbound band, creating cds of far better quality than the original Earthbound release.
-- source, the liner notes for 1994's B'Boom live album.
In other words, it really depends on the venue, when getting a "Front of House" (FoH) mix. The guy mixing the sound for the PA is aware that he's hearing the on-stage monitors and amplifiers as well as the PA, so guitar and bass sounds tend to be quieter, and drums can be quite hollow.
When this mix is your only source, it can be devestating to the recording when looking for something that should be more professional, like the Dixie Dregs concert on the Steve Morse DVD, where the mix cut the guitar to almost nothing because Morse keeps a rather loud on-stage amp stack.
Arena and Stadium gigs aren't as affected by this as club and theater shows would be. Then again, bands that can afford to do stadium shows can afford to have a second mixer on site producing a high-quality recording of the show independent of the FoH mix.
"Do a good job, take your check home, and buy yourself something nice."
He used to say it to Jon Nathan-Turner quite a lot during the making of Five Doctors, and at convention appearances.
Basically that about sums it up. Go shopping. Watch (good) movies. Drink. Bitch about the job (usually boneheaded customers or pointy-haired managers) in semi-private posts on a LiveJournal. Build up social relationships where "no geeking out" (no mention of computers, the www, or jobs) is required.
Its called life. Just keep living.
that about covers it. in college, i gave up on radio when i found that the group Steely Dan could be played on the college station (they were "hip" enough), the oldies station (they were old enough), the pop station (they were pop enough for when the pop station decided to play something old), the classic-rock station, the adult-contemporary mellow-rock station, and finally (believe it or not) the country station when it decided to do crossover tracks.
add to that the fact that its mellow enough to be grocery-store muzak (the original releases, mind you), and that was it for me.
steely dan was & is the ultimate in bland music that can fit any "format" somebody decides to proscribe, and i gave up on non-talk radio within a month of making that discovery, 12 years ago.
I wonder what they think of internet radio, a competitor that is growing faster than satellite...
Internet radio isn't an issue to them, because they know that between the RIAA and ASCAP / Harry Fox Agency, the powers that be that own all the copyrights will eventually make it too expensive to run internet radio stations without ads, and from there, get rid of the specialist stations like all-prog or all-celtic and turn i-radio into the regular airwaves pushing for ratings.
finally, as they turn i-radio into a direct competitor for the freebies of on-air broadcasting, they win in the end when companies start complaining about bandwidth usage (on both servers and clients). why waste bandwidth to get something you can get over normal airwaves.
I went to try to download a Flash plug-in from Macromedia for Mozilla (back before the plug-in auto-install stuff was standardized in 1.4), and found that the download page was, logically enough, a Flash animation that I couldn't actually view in order to get the plugin.
still milking it, yeah -- sell themselves off to somebody who finds out (the hard way) that they have no revenue potential after the sale...
is there any company that's really ethical in business at all?
but in the long run, it may hurt them. To take an example from computer history, IBM gave it a run in the late 80s of having their customers buy their servers outright instead of leasing them as they had done for decades before. short term, it infused a LOT of cash into IBMs coffers in a relatively short time.
/. when the 9 year options were first branded). They're effectively selling the names instead of leasing them, to create an influx of short-term cash, which will run out and not be replenished when the need to purchase domain names eases off.
long term -- well, at some point, the last IBM leaser bought his machine, and suddenly (and the accountants simply did not predict this would ever happen) the sales bottomed out and flatlined. pretty dramatically too, as the machines were often plenty fast enough for what they were doing (much as PC hardware is today). IBMs recovery effort on that one cost them several thousand jobs, if I recall correctly.
So Versign is doing the same thing (heck, I think I said that here on
One can predict that either Verisign expects to be in another line of business by the time that happens, or they're going to suffer greatly for it.
well, a guarenteed download/sale brings in "eyeballs", keeping their advertising rates high. if they can say to the advertisers "look how many people saw our site for ...", they can keep the advertising money flowing to more than cover costs for hosting the popular product.
the little-guys downloads aren't common enough to warrent raising advertising costs for their specific pages to cover the expense of hosting.
Highlander is another that they keep re-releasing in different "special packages", with little indication of any additional footage since the original Director's Cut 10th Anniversary release.
or anybody who embedded multiple-language script files using BSF into their XML format?
not sure anybody actually DID it, but its been feasable for quite a while, and I think XSLT or some other XML format that I can't recall had BSF-support built in (besides the not-XML JSP tag, which is still damn close). Having BSF automatically gives it support for Javascript, BeanShell, and Python, among others.
..doesn't really matter anymore? Who *REALLY* needs SCO compatibility with the LAMP webapp systems Linux is mostly used for these days (and hell, there are so many other good apps with direct linux support, too).
SCO binary compatibility was done at a time when getting people to write for Linux was next to impossible. That is no longer the case as today, I'd say more companies and people write for Linux, or write code that's 100% source-portable, that it simply doesn't matter.
Get rid of SCO ABI support. Nobody uses it so its just bloat.
"push" is relative. Yes, Gollum danced around in celebration, but he didn't slip and fall the way the book and the Rankin/Bass film depect. Frodo attacked him one last time to get the ring, and in that fight, he fell adding (also not in the book) the tension of having Frodo almost fall as well.
Spoiler warnings apply:
1) The appendix gives enough of the plotline to support most of the films rendition (the "her fate is tied to the ring" b.s. from RotK is full of it, of course).
One of the issues (and I wrote about it here a year ago) is that in the book, much of Aragorn's growth from ranger to king happens before the hobbits ever meet him. he knows what he has to do, now its just a matter of finding the right time.
it actually makes for a relatively flat character on film, because film doesn't give enough room to build backstory without too many flashbacks, which isn't a good film device the way its a very expressive novel device. The alternative would require a "Lord of the Rings 1 1/2" (nee: The Lion King prequel coming out on video this month).
2) "working towards his destiny" -- again, there's much extending that in the appendices. Denathor had heard of him (though not as succinctly as the movie depicts) and developed an opinion of his perceived immaturity, a reputation that had to come from somewhere. Aragorn's angst at accepting his role is there, in backstory and in the appendix.
having aragorn grow to accept his destiny in "realtime" on screen makes for a much more interesting character on film.
The cliff crap in TTT I would rather have done without. There are better ways to show 1) that there was a 10000 orc army coming, and 2) that Eowyn has the hots for him.
3) most of the Faramir I could have lived without. Denethor on screen is much weaker than he should have been. Denethor in the book is a masterful politician. On screen he is a slothful wretch. In the book, we can build up a sympathy for the betrayal and pain he's faced; he's a complex character with conflict between his compassion for his people and the dread he's seen in the Palantir. In the film, we only feel anger at him for not trying harder to have some compassion at all.
He's a jerk on film. when he dies its, "finally, and good ridance", which is not the emotion Tolkien wanted us to feel.
4) i didn't mind the Sam changes as much; yes, Frodo comes out more affected by the ring than the books, but Sam himself isn't changed as such. He still had the decision of go back to Frodo or go forward with the ring himself; the additional option of going home alone doesn't really hurt the story.
I *DID* dislike that Gollum was "pushed" by Frodo into the lava instead of falling in by his own greed and carelessness. In the end, on film he wasn't the victim of his addiction as it should have been portrayed. Even the Rankin/Bass version got THAT part right.
Sure enough, some of those provisions of the new law are being tested against our constitutional rights via the court system.
On the other hand, there's enough legal education and know-how in the system right now (most Senators and a sizeable # of Congressmen are either lawyers or have been in service for a number of years) to have been able to make the decision that its unconstitutional and not even bothered to vote for or sign it in the first place.
Passing something with so many bluntly unconstitutional clauses, just to say "we're doing *something* (even if for now its the wrong thing)" is just plain poor leadership.
As far as i know, unless there are political reasons to not do it, like their boss (i.e., Ashcroft) says don't do it, they have no choice BUT to appeal.
It is the policy of the Justice Department to support the implementation and preservation of all laws in the book. If an appeal rules one defunct, then they must appeal to preserve it until told its "not a priority".
Trust me, to Ashcroft and Ridge, Patriot IS a priority.