I'd give you a cookie had you also noticed that I mistakenly wrote the guy's name as "Getz," and not "Metz." Consequently, you'll just have to settle for a pat on the head.
Geez, if you're going to complain about people misquoting an article, perhaps you should read the posts more carefully and catch *all* the errors...
"Customers?" What "customers?" The P2P guys are getting stuff for FREE. Never underestimate the charm of FREE to the "Pringles-eating warez d00dz." They're also "sticking it to The Man," as well, and I've been informed there is some kind of charm to that, when you're a youngster, as well.
As for me personally, I tried the whole P2P thing a few years ago and quickly realized I had more money than time, but I was also probably three times the age of the average downloader.
Right now I'm listening to a playlist of Diana Krall, Keely Smith and K.D. Lang tracks. I'd wager that if a site offered "high-quality reliable downloads" of artists like this, exclusively, they'd do pretty well. I'd doubt the tracks would make their way onto the P2Ps in any great volume quickly.
A little later on, when I'm more awake, and I switch over to my Frontline Assembly/Bible of Dreams/Juno Reactor techno-goth-industrial playlist, I will be reflecting upon how common and popular stuff like that is on the P2Ps, and how artists in that genre shouldn't expect that any legitimate Website distribution will be more than online promotion for them in the immediate and mid-term future.
Different genres of music market in different ways. I would never in a hundred years imagine buying an opera online. Tracks from Queen's "A Night at the Opera?" Different story.
"Albums?" "Bunch of files?" Ye Gods, man, why? It's been years since music packaged as an "album" was meaningful. Unless your boys are the next King Krimson or Moody Blues, they -- and you -- should be focusing on distributing their work on a song-by-song basis.
"Artwork?" See above. Lyrics, sure. Give us a link from your Website. Band photo? Okay, fine, whatever. But artwork? Cute, but not a whole lot of value added, IMO. The odds of your band's tracks living on their own CD in my collection are tres slim.
Price? Competitive with iTunes. Less than a buck per song. Per Song Want the ability to preview each track I buy.
Format? I'm a 256kb/s Ogg man myself, but it's tough to argue for that against the vastly more popular MP3. You are aware that the second your avaerage customer downlaods a track from your site it will begin to swirl about the planet freely on P2P networks across which you will receive no compensation? I trust the bands have another surce of revenue (touring, day jobs) and aren't planning on getting rich from MP3 sales...? If your sales just about cover your prep and distribution costs, and you categorize the whole venture under "PR" or "Promotion," I'd say you would have a winner.
I've read a lot of what people call 'blogs.' My educated opinion is there ain't a whole lot of people outside of the proud authors looking to lay claim to any of that "content." I'd also guess that most of the authors will wish they themselves couldn't claim ownership in, say, five years from now.
Sure, they're smart, they've all clustered in Florida cuz of the gentle tax situation there. Turn the heat up at the federal level and they'll move off-shore with the cable-box-descrambler and porn-creditcard-scrubber guys.
No, it's not our responsibility to be editors, but a little help couldn't hurt anything.
Spoken with the youthful zeal of a subscriber whose never reported an egregious error to daddypants pre-publication, only to be ignored, and see a good thirty percent of the subsequent posts wail on off-topic about the [avoidable] error.
I've reached the conclusion that the/. editors are actually smarter than all of us, and knowingly post the dupes and wacky errors because we will all go on and on posting and talking about it anyway, like a bad Seinfeld episode, while they rack up pageviews because of, and not despite, their lack of effort.
timothy: "Hey, Rob, I was about to release this when that Robot guy send me this; he says 'Architecting' is not a verb. We use it that way in the subject of the release."
cmdr_taco: He's right. It's not. Drives me crazy when I hear people use it that way, too."
timothy: "So... change it....?"
cmdr_taco: "NO! Whaddyou, kidding? They'll go wacky bat-shit with this one. Good for a hundred Grammar-Nazi posts, easily. Then they'll be some poor ex-dot-com-er who'll try to say it *is* a word, and they'll all pile on for another thirty or fifty, at least."
timothy: "Wow! 150 posts, God-knows how many pageviews, just because we *don't* expend any effort to correct something? That's amazing..."
cmdr_taco: "You've a lot to learn about building a Web Community, young padawan..."
English is partially derived from Latin (and several other languages) and the plural of "virus" is indeed "virii", just as the singular form of "data" is "datum"
You are correct re "data," wrong re "virus." If the plural of "virus" in Latin was indeed "virii," I'd be fighting the good fight right along side you (I'm a big Latin and Roman-phile), but it's just wrong. "Virii" is not a word in any language, living or dead.
If you really want to get all technical, the strict plural of "virus" in Roman times was -- wait for it -- "virus" -- cuz it fell into that class of "collective" nouns like 'butter.'
But we don't have to worry about any of that now, because the English plural of "virus," both medical and IT-related, is "viruses," period full-stop end-of-story. Insistence upon using "virii" is just making geeks and Latin-philes look bad.
Lower your blood pressure. You'll kill yourself, and we need as many adults here as we can find.
SlashDot is kids. High School kids, College kids. If I had to guess, I'd say 80-85% of the posters on this board are under 24. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself, but on topics like this it's pointless to expect a great deal of depth or understanding. These topics are all No-Neck Libertarian Darwinists arm-wrestling Sensitive Socialist Artists, each side re-gurgitating the latest campus nu-speak in a 10-point courier bloodbowl/coming-of-age psycho-drama. Immortal True Believers, each and every one of them.
(Thank God there was no Internet or SlashDot (or computer games, for that matter) when I was in school or I'd still be there...)
"Drizzt?!" "Drizzt" is a "Fantasy-oriented name that is easily recognized from popular existing media" in the same class as Gandalf, Pikachu, and Godzilla?
That's an over-the-counter nasal decongestant, that's not a name!
"Drizzt?"
"I AM DRIZZT! Kneel before me, lest I smite you with my +3 Sword of Nasal Membrane Leakage!"
"Drizzt?" "Elric of Melnibone," "Thulsa-Doom," "The Gray Mouser"... now *these* are Fantasy Names! "Drizzt" is a sound-effect. Or, at most, a Silver Age superhero team's cute alien mascot.
Sorry for the rant; guess I'm just feeling a little "old-school" today...
Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?"
Of course! "As Phish goes, so goes the Music Industry," everybody knows that! As a matter of fact, they were discussing this very same trend during Phish's appearance last week on TRL.
In a related story from the same Styles page, Michael Crichton and J. K. Rowling have announced they are going to have their nipples pierced to better emulate their idol, Poppy Z. Brite.
What is "Anarchism?" Is it "anarchy, out-of-time?" A pipe-bomb throwing Roman Legionnaire? Martian colonists storming the Terran Governor's palace with torches and pitchforks?
There are a number of places online where you can sample and acquire music for a reasonable price. Apple's site is the most famous. Go there.
Also, there are at least 2 satellite music networks that offer in excess of a hundred channels of programming, including niche music that you will never hear on commercial radio. Subscriptions are something like ten bucks a month. Try these.
In the spectrum space below 91 FM lurk the non-commercial and college radio stations, which are often full of musical goodness. Try there.
But, i could still be raided at 6am and have my computer confiscated and get a criminal record and loose everything just for downloading music.
You're being silly. Take a deep breath. And it's "lose."
Why the quote marks, dude? They *did* break the law. You may not like the law, anymore than you like the speed limit, but it's still the law. Going after the P2P software guys was like going after the auto manufacturers because they enable speeding violations. And logic bombing an alleged transgressor's PC is just plain wrong. Going after the individual -- speeder or downloader -- is the right and fair way to do it.
If you don't like the law -- speed limit or copyright -- you can break it, and hope you don't get caught, obey it grudgingly, or speak out to your legislators to get it repealed.
The "Napster Era" is over, friend. We wanted to be able to sample and acquire music online at a fair price, and it is now available. We wanted the Powers That Be to lay off the P2P technology itself, and now that's happening, it seems.
Time to move on. You want to do 90 in a 55 MPH zone, that is your prerogative. I do it myself occasionally. It's just not a news story, or a movement, or a cause celebre, any more, and that's fine.
Huh? I live with my wife and four kids. While we are generally greatly entertained by our XBox games and DVDs, there are enough books, magazines, balls, scale models, and hockey sticks around here to ensure that fighting over "tube time" is almost non-existent.
DVD's like the extended edition of "Fellowship of the Ring" already won't play on legal set-top hardware like the XBox
Is this that "FUD" stuff I keep reading about here? My extended LOTR:FOTR plays great on my XBox. Everything does, actually. I tossed my DVD player over a year ago.
I'm not really sure, AC. If it bothers you, though, I got a bunch of Rorschach ink blots I can send you to analyze and we can work through this together.
There is nothing Wired would like more than a little controversy, something that paints them as "rebel/cool." Once upon a time, with their iconoclastic subject matter and interviewees, lower-east-side-art-school-drop-out color schemes and layouts, all close on a decade ago, Wired was 'da bomb.' They were tekno/geek/cool, just around the time when it was becoming "cool" to be "geek." Their claim to that cache is long past.
Wired has become, to use their own parlance, "Tired."
This is not to say they are doing badly. The mag is still jammed full of advertising; it's just that the advertisers are the same ones who buy in Time and People.
So, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if this code stunt is a cry for attention. At the very least I'm sure they'll get a buzz going on places like SlashDot.
If my local library refuses to carry a particular title, then what do I do?
Seriously? Talk to your local librarian and make a request. Very frequently the tome you seek may be stacked not at your local branch but will be available within the greater library system of which your local library is a part. It may take a little extra time to get it, but keep reminding yourself that you will be reading it for free.
I'm not seeing it that way. The cost of print publication has dropped dramatically in the past ten years, but the retail price of books has not. It's similar to the vinyl-CD transition in the music business. I don't see the number of libraries growing (regrettably), so the print industry's maintenance costs for their library "accounts" would be reduced. Moreover, all the library expansion I have seen is in the area of computer access, not stack space. At this moment in time, and for the foreseeable future, libraries seem to most serve the unwired poor and elderly, and no amount of print industry or local governmental soft-shoe is going to pry the free hardbacks out of their hands any time soon.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "Power to the People! Stick It to The Man! Corporations R D SuXXors!" and all that, but unless you're truly paranoid or a bitter unpublished author wannabe, it's kinda hard to paint the Book Industry with the same brush used for the Music Business.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd give you a cookie had you also noticed that I mistakenly wrote the guy's name as "Getz," and not "Metz." Consequently, you'll just have to settle for a pat on the head.
Geez, if you're going to complain about people misquoting an article, perhaps you should read the posts more carefully and catch *all* the errors...
Sure sounded good, though, no?
"Fuzzy-Seattle-Populist-WiFi-Free-Node in slugfest! versus Big-Greedy-Sports-Cable-Corporate-Luddites."
Wow! I was getting all set for a Thousand-Post-Pile-On before I read the article.
Damn shame, this reality. Always getting in the way of a good story...
But soon it will be on everyones minds, just like recycling cans.
Yeah, it's a wonder we can get to sleep at night...
Who's gonna have happier customers?
"Customers?" What "customers?" The P2P guys are getting stuff for FREE. Never underestimate the charm of FREE to the "Pringles-eating warez d00dz." They're also "sticking it to The Man," as well, and I've been informed there is some kind of charm to that, when you're a youngster, as well.
As for me personally, I tried the whole P2P thing a few years ago and quickly realized I had more money than time, but I was also probably three times the age of the average downloader.
Right now I'm listening to a playlist of Diana Krall, Keely Smith and K.D. Lang tracks. I'd wager that if a site offered "high-quality reliable downloads" of artists like this, exclusively, they'd do pretty well. I'd doubt the tracks would make their way onto the P2Ps in any great volume quickly.
A little later on, when I'm more awake, and I switch over to my Frontline Assembly/Bible of Dreams/Juno Reactor techno-goth-industrial playlist, I will be reflecting upon how common and popular stuff like that is on the P2Ps, and how artists in that genre shouldn't expect that any legitimate Website distribution will be more than online promotion for them in the immediate and mid-term future.
Different genres of music market in different ways. I would never in a hundred years imagine buying an opera online. Tracks from Queen's "A Night at the Opera?" Different story.
"Albums?" "Bunch of files?" Ye Gods, man, why? It's been years since music packaged as an "album" was meaningful. Unless your boys are the next King Krimson or Moody Blues, they -- and you -- should be focusing on distributing their work on a song-by-song basis.
"Artwork?" See above. Lyrics, sure. Give us a link from your Website. Band photo? Okay, fine, whatever. But artwork? Cute, but not a whole lot of value added, IMO. The odds of your band's tracks living on their own CD in my collection are tres slim.
Price? Competitive with iTunes. Less than a buck per song. Per Song Want the ability to preview each track I buy.
Format? I'm a 256kb/s Ogg man myself, but it's tough to argue for that against the vastly more popular MP3. You are aware that the second your avaerage customer downlaods a track from your site it will begin to swirl about the planet freely on P2P networks across which you will receive no compensation? I trust the bands have another surce of revenue (touring, day jobs) and aren't planning on getting rich from MP3 sales...? If your sales just about cover your prep and distribution costs, and you categorize the whole venture under "PR" or "Promotion," I'd say you would have a winner.
"Content" Ownership?
I've read a lot of what people call 'blogs.' My educated opinion is there ain't a whole lot of people outside of the proud authors looking to lay claim to any of that "content." I'd also guess that most of the authors will wish they themselves couldn't claim ownership in, say, five years from now.
Sure, they're smart, they've all clustered in Florida cuz of the gentle tax situation there. Turn the heat up at the federal level and they'll move off-shore with the cable-box-descrambler and porn-creditcard-scrubber guys.
the people are punished
By whom? Interpol? The UN?
Would that spammers were as US-centric as Slashdot...
Linux is about freedom.
Actually, Linux is about the cheapest OS I've found to reliably run the half-dozen PCs I've got networked in my house.
The "freedom" thing is cute, though, don't let me discourage you...
No, it's not our responsibility to be editors, but a little help couldn't hurt anything.
/. editors are actually smarter than all of us, and knowingly post the dupes and wacky errors because we will all go on and on posting and talking about it anyway, like a bad Seinfeld episode, while they rack up pageviews because of, and not despite, their lack of effort.
Spoken with the youthful zeal of a subscriber whose never reported an egregious error to daddypants pre-publication, only to be ignored, and see a good thirty percent of the subsequent posts wail on off-topic about the [avoidable] error.
I've reached the conclusion that the
timothy: "Hey, Rob, I was about to release this when that Robot guy send me this; he says 'Architecting' is not a verb. We use it that way in the subject of the release."
cmdr_taco: He's right. It's not. Drives me crazy when I hear people use it that way, too."
timothy: "So... change it....?"
cmdr_taco: "NO! Whaddyou, kidding? They'll go wacky bat-shit with this one. Good for a hundred Grammar-Nazi posts, easily. Then they'll be some poor ex-dot-com-er who'll try to say it *is* a word, and they'll all pile on for another thirty or fifty, at least."
timothy: "Wow! 150 posts, God-knows how many pageviews, just because we *don't* expend any effort to correct something? That's amazing..."
cmdr_taco: "You've a lot to learn about building a Web Community, young padawan..."
English is partially derived from Latin (and several other languages) and the plural of "virus" is indeed "virii", just as the singular form of "data" is "datum"
You are correct re "data," wrong re "virus." If the plural of "virus" in Latin was indeed "virii," I'd be fighting the good fight right along side you (I'm a big Latin and Roman-phile), but it's just wrong. "Virii" is not a word in any language, living or dead.
If you really want to get all technical, the strict plural of "virus" in Roman times was -- wait for it -- "virus" -- cuz it fell into that class of "collective" nouns like 'butter.'
But we don't have to worry about any of that now, because the English plural of "virus," both medical and IT-related, is "viruses," period full-stop end-of-story. Insistence upon using "virii" is just making geeks and Latin-philes look bad.
There's a bunch of folks in Tibet been wondering the same thing...
Lower your blood pressure. You'll kill yourself, and we need as many adults here as we can find.
SlashDot is kids. High School kids, College kids. If I had to guess, I'd say 80-85% of the posters on this board are under 24. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself, but on topics like this it's pointless to expect a great deal of depth or understanding. These topics are all No-Neck Libertarian Darwinists arm-wrestling Sensitive Socialist Artists, each side re-gurgitating the latest campus nu-speak in a 10-point courier bloodbowl/coming-of-age psycho-drama. Immortal True Believers, each and every one of them.
(Thank God there was no Internet or SlashDot (or computer games, for that matter) when I was in school or I'd still be there...)
Drizzt
"Drizzt?!" "Drizzt" is a "Fantasy-oriented name that is easily recognized from popular existing media" in the same class as Gandalf, Pikachu, and Godzilla?
That's an over-the-counter nasal decongestant, that's not a name!
"Drizzt?"
"I AM DRIZZT! Kneel before me, lest I smite you with my +3 Sword of Nasal Membrane Leakage!"
"Drizzt?" "Elric of Melnibone," "Thulsa-Doom," "The Gray Mouser"... now *these* are Fantasy Names! "Drizzt" is a sound-effect. Or, at most, a Silver Age superhero team's cute alien mascot.
Sorry for the rant; guess I'm just feeling a little "old-school" today...
Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?"
Of course! "As Phish goes, so goes the Music Industry," everybody knows that! As a matter of fact, they were discussing this very same trend during Phish's appearance last week on TRL.
In a related story from the same Styles page, Michael Crichton and J. K. Rowling have announced they are going to have their nipples pierced to better emulate their idol, Poppy Z. Brite.
libertarian socialism
That high-pitched keening sound you hear is Ayn Rand twirling about in her interment...
What is "Anarchism?" Is it "anarchy, out-of-time?" A pipe-bomb throwing Roman Legionnaire? Martian colonists storming the Terran Governor's palace with torches and pitchforks?
Help me out here...
There are a number of places online where you can sample and acquire music for a reasonable price. Apple's site is the most famous. Go there.
Also, there are at least 2 satellite music networks that offer in excess of a hundred channels of programming, including niche music that you will never hear on commercial radio. Subscriptions are something like ten bucks a month. Try these.
In the spectrum space below 91 FM lurk the non-commercial and college radio stations, which are often full of musical goodness. Try there.
But, i could still be raided at 6am and have my computer confiscated and get a criminal record and loose everything just for downloading music.
You're being silly. Take a deep breath. And it's "lose."
"broke the law"
Why the quote marks, dude? They *did* break the law. You may not like the law, anymore than you like the speed limit, but it's still the law. Going after the P2P software guys was like going after the auto manufacturers because they enable speeding violations. And logic bombing an alleged transgressor's PC is just plain wrong. Going after the individual -- speeder or downloader -- is the right and fair way to do it.
If you don't like the law -- speed limit or copyright -- you can break it, and hope you don't get caught, obey it grudgingly, or speak out to your legislators to get it repealed.
The "Napster Era" is over, friend. We wanted to be able to sample and acquire music online at a fair price, and it is now available. We wanted the Powers That Be to lay off the P2P technology itself, and now that's happening, it seems.
Time to move on. You want to do 90 in a 55 MPH zone, that is your prerogative. I do it myself occasionally. It's just not a news story, or a movement, or a cause celebre, any more, and that's fine.
You must live alone.
Huh? I live with my wife and four kids. While we are generally greatly entertained by our XBox games and DVDs, there are enough books, magazines, balls, scale models, and hockey sticks around here to ensure that fighting over "tube time" is almost non-existent.
DVD's like the extended edition of "Fellowship of the Ring" already won't play on legal set-top hardware like the XBox
Is this that "FUD" stuff I keep reading about here? My extended LOTR:FOTR plays great on my XBox. Everything does, actually. I tossed my DVD player over a year ago.
I'm not really sure, AC. If it bothers you, though, I got a bunch of Rorschach ink blots I can send you to analyze and we can work through this together.
There is nothing Wired would like more than a little controversy, something that paints them as "rebel/cool." Once upon a time, with their iconoclastic subject matter and interviewees, lower-east-side-art-school-drop-out color schemes and layouts, all close on a decade ago, Wired was 'da bomb.' They were tekno/geek/cool, just around the time when it was becoming "cool" to be "geek." Their claim to that cache is long past.
Wired has become, to use their own parlance, "Tired."
This is not to say they are doing badly. The mag is still jammed full of advertising; it's just that the advertisers are the same ones who buy in Time and People.
So, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if this code stunt is a cry for attention. At the very least I'm sure they'll get a buzz going on places like SlashDot.
Oh, wait....
If my local library refuses to carry a particular title, then what do I do?
Seriously? Talk to your local librarian and make a request. Very frequently the tome you seek may be stacked not at your local branch but will be available within the greater library system of which your local library is a part. It may take a little extra time to get it, but keep reminding yourself that you will be reading it for free.
Dear Bunky,
I'm not seeing it that way. The cost of print publication has dropped dramatically in the past ten years, but the retail price of books has not. It's similar to the vinyl-CD transition in the music business. I don't see the number of libraries growing (regrettably), so the print industry's maintenance costs for their library "accounts" would be reduced. Moreover, all the library expansion I have seen is in the area of computer access, not stack space. At this moment in time, and for the foreseeable future, libraries seem to most serve the unwired poor and elderly, and no amount of print industry or local governmental soft-shoe is going to pry the free hardbacks out of their hands any time soon.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "Power to the People! Stick It to The Man! Corporations R D SuXXors!" and all that, but unless you're truly paranoid or a bitter unpublished author wannabe, it's kinda hard to paint the Book Industry with the same brush used for the Music Business.