I've had a lot of conversations about viability of business models and subscription fees and technological means of keeping p2p music trading alive.
And I hate what the record co's do in terms of commodotizing and exploiting art on the one hand, and justifying their anti-piracy on the grounds that we shouldn't be stealing from these poor, hard-working folks who are pouring out their souls to us.
But i'll go on record as saying that if there's one group of people who can solve this problem today (although not really retroactively) it's the artists themselves. They need to decide, now, that they're going to market and distribute themselves, that they don't need to be on TRL, that they don't think that garnering 13% of gross sales is fair, that while they're in it for the money, they're rock and roll stars, for god's sake, and there's lots of ways to make money that don't involve telling your fans all the things they can't do.
The house-negro-field-negro paradigm applies here quite powerfully (although, of course, I make no pretensions that ip rights as they relate to music are in the same league of injustices as black slavery in america). Artists have depended on record deals for a long time. It's what they've strived to get, it's the measure of success, and it sure would be nice to get to ride in a limousine rather than shlepping our crap around in this van. They've come to identify the music industry's interests as their own. And by keeping the supply of success low, the industry has kept demand high among those working hard out in the field.
And just as this paradigm was invoked to make people see how pathetic it was to be happy being a house-slave, although it was understandable, the best, and simplest way to make all of this argument and litigation go away is for the *artists* to stand up and walk out. They don't, cause they like cash, and who doesn't? But they're getting the table scraps, comparatively, and they thank and defend the industry in return. It's sort of sad.
There's nothing to argue over if the artists themselves realize that they've got a monopoly on whatever it is they do, and that they don't need to sell the rights to distribute in order to be heard, or in order to make money (although lots of smart people are trying to figure out the best way to do this). The record companies are being jerks, but at least they're doing it in their own interest. The artists, they're doing it because they're too lazy, stupid, and well-trained to see what a shitty situation they're in.
and i'm asking, not being rhetorical. i mean, the issues relating to 'editorial content' and altered reality, i mean, these are fictional shows, so from a certain standpoint, it's all altered reality and editorial content.
as it stands, advertising already has a much more insidious impact on the determination of the content of the shows that we watch than adding a few coke cans represents. putting a pizza hut box in friends is a clear endorsement of pizza hut -- is this honestly worse for its digital fabrication than, say, behind the scenes deals to decide what they should wear on the basis of the gap's agenda, or giving plot vetos to large conservative corporations like P&G?
if you aren't going into this with your eyes open, you're setting yourself up. if you aren't watching with the understanding that TV's job is to deliver audiences to advertisers, you'll miss the point every time.
now, what if dan rather starts putting up fake billboards in 'documentary' footage? that's the real question, and i know it's been done, but what about, for example, changing all signs to read in english when reporting from other countries? where's the slippery slope here? i'm not really sure.
this is pretty effed up, tho, i'll say that much. makes my head spin a little.
I work there, doing data in the magazine area -- they're switching us, slowly, but they haven't taken away our ability get pop3 -- i keep the netscape mail client pointed at my personal isp's mail server open all day. to go to yesterday's question of whether son-aol meant that all ps2 owners are now lusers, the answer is no, but all time warner employees now are;)
I think you're right on here -- the cube seems less like a computer than the ps2, in the same way that aol seems like real internet access. ps2 users will probably be more interested in their own isps than gamecube owners would be.
There's three problems here, tho. First is exactly the non-computerness of the GC -- it's got no hard-drive, and i've read nothing of one, and last i checked, there's been no decision on modem v broadband. add this to the fact that us launch has been pushed to november, and gc isn't really a partner, yet.
Problem two, and this isn't really a problem, is that there's no reason AOL can't still go after the cube. Lots of game developers release on multiple platforms, there's no reason to suppose that non-game app developers for consoles won't do the same.
Finally, there's nintendo itself. You know how they are, what with their licensing and their stranglehold on developers and insane paranoia about the control they have on their product, its software library, and their brand. I love them, really i do, but i can't imagine trying to work with them to release an application.
Sony's the easy initial win. Maybe AOL will go after gamecube later, but they've got a year before that even becomes an issue.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm as creeped out as anyone -- last i checked, there are only like six companies left in the world, and they own all of the information, delivery infrastructure, and platforms, right? AOL and Sony -- esp when you consider that AOL/TW already has its own gigantic content base, and Sony already has one, and, well, that's got to be a sizable percentage of available viewing/listening/playing material under one (loosely-knit) roof.
But I'd like to cut short any 'omigod, it's the corporate newworldorder supermegahyperconglomerate that's evil and will probably outlaw mp3, free speech, and free beer' talk. What, is Sony going to go with my local isp? Are they going to predispose their console to play well with Prodigy? Come on -- this just makes sense. For their box to compete with XBox, they need a standard, simple, widely-accepted, powerful brand as their internet access tool. AOL has like 90 % of the universe, probably including your mom, so condescend all you want, this was a no-brainer.
So, again, don't get me wrong, every time something like this happens, it feels a little dirty, but if you believe that computers and consoles are becoming more and more alike, you believe that AOL must partner with a console manufacturer. XBox is out of the question, cause of MSN, and the gamecube is out, because Nintendo doesn't play well with 3d parties. So Sony it is. This is just another OEM deal, like Dell or Gateway or anything else. It would have been hopelessly naive to suppose that consoles would remain immune to the AOL invasion just because they sit under our tvs -- they've got hard-drives(well, ok, maybe by end of year), they'll have modems (someday), they're fair game.
The issue isn't whether you want live music to pay a certain way -- I'm sure that you would. The issue is whether, as a consumer and a music-lover, I should care if artists can't make money from resuiduals or album sales. And frankly, I don't. In fact, one can only wonder if the quality of the music to which we're exposed might not *increase* if the only people who were in it were in it because they want to be.
Which is not to say that I think that there's anything wrong with wanting to play music for a living -- i wanted to be a racecar driver. But that doesn't mean that you get to do it. I'd like to get rich working the counter at a wendy's; who cares?
So what I'm saying is, attempts by 'artists' or large corporations to instill fear in the listening public that we'll get no more music if we don't behave ourselves, i mean, they simply don't scare me very much. Will production values drop as musicians cease to be able to spend $500k to make an album? Yeah, but who cares? I don't feel like subsidising that anymore. I want music, and i want as much of it as possible, and i want it from people who mean it.
People get tired of touring all the time, as you clearly articulate, but every person who leaves that lifestyle to raise a family makes room for some 18 year old who wants into it. There's no shortage of those, so why am i worried again, or even sympathetic that you don't get to be a rich rock star?
"if you don't make anything off of what you do, why continue to do it? "
Now, i'm not going to go full out 'artists don't do it for the $$$'. But they don't. There's a song on the new NOFX album to this effect.
Artists should get paid. But if this is the only reason you're getting into music, perhaps you should think about some other line of work? There's no shortage of starving artists, there's no shortage of bands working for tips -- the assertion that music stops in the absence of residuals is a silly one.
Which, again, is not to say that musicians shouldn't get paid -- just that the 'why do it for free' argument shows that you've never done it.
i agree with the notion that computers are seldom the best way to learn about a subject -- between libraries, museums, other students, and teachers, i think that computers pale in most circumstances.
the only real exception to this rule, i think, is that computers are the best way to learn about computers, and the internet. and i think that this is an important excpetion given that we all spend ten hours a day in front of them.
further, i think that the real question is 'if a kid hasn't got a computer, what else don't they have?' and i think that the answer, more often than not, is going to be 'decent libraries, well-paid teachers, the money for field trips'. in such a case, i do think that computer-aided research is a) better than nothing, and b) maybe the cheapest way to provide lots and lots of info, on a per-student basis.
i dunno. i'm torn, cause i think that a lot of this 'computers will revolutionize how kids learn' is hype, and dangerous hype, at that. still and all, it's tough to argue with the fact that if you don't know how to use a computer to a certain minimal level of competency, you're at a major disadvantage to those of us who do -- a disadvantage that grows each day as your peers pull further and further away due to the increased ubiquity (redundant?) of computers.
My girlfriend's brother did his phd at the MIT Medialab on this very subject. Check his stuff out at um, this, which is more or less exctly what you're talking about. He was in the "Machine Listening Group".
Yeah, the content has made for more linearity, but that's not the only way it could have turned out.
The concern has been with jamming as much stuff (in this case, it's polygons, but you bring up content generally) into a game as possible, and you fall into the trap of thinking that quantity can make up for quality or organization.
I tend to agree though. Many so-called RPG's are simply story books that you get walked through by your PC or console.
Transparency doesn't rule out latent effects on the way that we function. A DVD that doesn't openly act like a DVD player still discourages us from going to the movies. A streaming-video display in the shape of a book that lets us watch streaming news programs just as we might read a newspaper still discourages us from reading. A technology that finds things for us, regardless of how behind-the-scenes it is, devalues the process of going out looking for things ourselves.
To your point, a car that looks like something other than a box still pollutes, drives us out of neighborhoods and into suburbs, and shouldn't be driven drunk.
Now, none of these things are necessarily bad, or wholly bad, i've just chosen to harp on a couple of the negative impacts to illustrate the danger of assuming that out-of-sight and out-of-mind means that these technologies are now wholly benign. I think that you can hide these things, embed them, but the effects that they have upon the way that we live and interact with one another cannot be hidden, and it's this effect of which we must be cognizant if we're to pre-empt any negative impact that a technology might have on us.
OK, I'm now doing this for a living, and I can honestly say that it's an effing nightmare wading through the various 'unbiased' sources and trying to figure out what their traffic numbers have to do with mine.
As an illustration of the issue, last month, my co's site showed 4 million unique visitors on @Plan, and somewhere around 60 % of that number according to Media Metrix. I look at Doubleclick, at @Plan, and we've got an ETL and analysis process in place that we've built in place, and none of them box very well.
I've had good results matching our internal #s with those we get back from IPro (IPro basically performs an ETL and canned reporting process on your weblogs), which is encouraging.
At the end of the day, however, the message that I get from management is that no one outside the co. cares how accurate my numbers are or anyone else's aren't -- Media Metrix is all anyone trusts, and when it comes to selling ads or getting investments, I can go through the weblogs by hand and verify my numbers 50 times, and it simply won't matter. Which sucks, but it's the way it goes.
Basically, the question I'm suggesting you ask yourself, and with which I've had to come to terms over the past couple months, is whether you're coming up with numbers for the purpose af actual usage analysis, or whether you're doing PR for your company. Now, both are important and have their uses, but you can't really make an informed decision about how you should be measuring your traffic until you figure out who it is that you're trying to impress.
This weekend alone, I found 2 40x cd roms, a 15", and a couple of (almost certainly useless) hd's in the trash. the only hardware i buy anymore is stuff that's kind of specialized (ie, it's pretty tought to find non-winmodems in people's trash). i'm just finishing putting together the parts for a pair of M.A.M.E. cocktail tables, and all i've purchased is a nice set of speakers and two k6-2's to replace p166s.
Point, of course, is that as computers are perceieved (rightly, from a usability standpoint) as being indivisible units, closed and glued shut, by most folks, when they chuck them, they're probably getting rid of tons of stuff that's still perfectly good. They don't know the difference, they don't care to take the trouble to take shit apart and re-use it, and who'd blame them?
I think that the idea that manufacturers being held responsible for this might be scary, but that it's not too far from the mark -- in fact, these are people who make their $ on the basis of people upgrading. They've got a stake in people's chucking their old hardware, and as such, they have an ethical (if not legal) responsibility here to attempt, in the process of gouging consumers by selling them the next greatest thing, not to produce too much more trash than is necessary.
Of course, you're right, but if you add the assumption (which she may or may not be making) that she has 0 chance of getting her money, the action takes on an entirely different tenor.
In fact, as you point out, she's really shot herself in the foot if Universal cuts her a check -- they'll have made the artists complicit.
very good point --
in fact, i remember a few weeks back,/.ers getting very indignant about this exact point, and for this exact reason.
if this is the best napster can do (and it's not) then i think we'd all be better off if they lose.
unfortunately, i think you hit the nail on the head.
what we really need is (and this nauseates me) someone famous and smart to come out on tv about this. you know? get someone who just doesn't give a f*&K, like jesse ventura or bill nye or wozniak or clint eastwood or somebody -- someone trustworthy, intelligent, and not really beholden to the mpaa -- to come out, explain this in 30 seconds, and get it on tv.
once this happens, and it works, the pressure will be on others to do the same or risk looking like lapdogs and greedy jack-asses. ooh, will smith'd be good -- we need somebody rich enough not to care, or whose reputation is enough to stand up to the fact that they'll probably get fired over this. that's why i said eastwood.
anyone got any better ideas? we need a spokesperson, cause our moms and dads and idiot cousins still think this is about stealing.
the thing is, we spend so much time in the slash-cave that we forget that cnn is still referring to this thing as a 'dvd-copying program'. nobody gets it.
this is re: w.j.au's article on x-box's supposedly inevitable hegemony.
i found this article trite, cliched, and pretty surprisingly party-line. the majority of the powerful quotations came from gates or bachus, and often were either dodgy or plain inaccurate.
while indeed a closed, pc-ish box which eliminates the need to cater to some pre-defined but unknown lowest-common-denominator will eliminate the headaches that pc developers feel, most of au's points re: console developing are in contrast to the facts, and demonstrate a real misunderstanding of the market.
consider the statement he chooses to quote re: x-box vs. nintendo. ""Nintendo has traditionally done really well with a particular type of consumer," says Bachus. "Six-to-12-year-olds, let's say. Younger gamers... We're going after an 18-year-old guy away at college for the first time. ""
In the first place, this statement is inaccurate -- nintendo's goldeneye/perfect dark franchises represent the entire console fps market, dominating this favorite of the college-age demographic, and outselling Unreal Tournament and Q3A combined.
In the second place, a quote indicating that the XBox is going to ignore the demographic which has resulted in Nintendo's stranglehold on 5 of the top 10 sales spots for the last two years hardly indicates an enlightened 3d-party development strategy. Dismissing a console as a competitor by indicating that you're willing to settle for 2d place is hardly the attitude worthy of the supposed owner of the console space, as au asserts MS will be.
Microsoft's console will succeed in certain areas, but where it fails, it will do so because of the fundamental differences between console and pc gamers - many of them illustrated quite clearly in this article. Console gamers don't want the marginally-useful improvements a PC can provide in terms of graphics cards and data storage. They don't want to play civilization, they want to blow things up, race, and collect pocket monsters. The power that XBox brings to the table is a marginal increase over the playstation2, dreamcast, and gamecube that simply doesn't matter to the old or the young within the console market. (And at the end of the day, one wonders how PC gamers are going to deal with the stunning loss of resolution they'll experience over their pcs.)
The mature gaming audience isn't a monolith -- do we have proof that console rpg players want to play an everquest-type game? Do we think that players of UT will be attracted by a split-screen console shooter? No, we don't. And for the individuals who are attracted to consoles' simplicity, what does this storage capacity buy you? You don't care what box you're on, as long as your favorite developer is there, and, as yet, MS has shown little evidence of its hegemony over the developers, with all of them (except the ones MS has bought) slated to develop for sega or sony.
So Au, rest assured, soon we'll be able to play age of empires 50 on a console with 1/3 the resolution of a pc, without worrying about our graphics card compatability (although how soon this will be is at issue, considering MS). But what does this have to do with pokemon, zelda, mario, joanna dark, cloud strife, gran turismo, phantasy star online, and tv resolution? Your article gives far too much weight, I think, to the XBox's admitted advantages over the PC, and dismisses quite unfairly and out-of-hand its severe disadvantages in software, support, and perception in comparison to the consoles that currently own the market.
but this isn't the way that things turned out. cute little rustic communities where people relate to their neighbors because they like them, a bunch of subsitence farmers -- it was a nice idea, but the big fat commercially-driven community where we relate to one another not out of social desire but economic need, *that's* what actually happened.
technology means i don't have to speak to my neighbors, and that's not unamerican. the notion that jefferson's republican ideal is somehow more american than hamilton's urban model for what makes us great is silly, and unfounded. tech destroyed your relationship with your neighbor? sure, maybe, but it also made you a million new neighbors.
i dunno. seems to me that the argument that tech make it possible to relate to those to whom we choose to relate, rather than those to whom we've got a physical proximinty, and therefore degrades the quality of our relations with others, is at odds with common sense.
i think that you'd have to be pretty head-in-the-sand to miss the point that organizing information adds value to that information. collecting, taxonomizing, and presenting a decent history of computing is a very worthwhile task, i think, and one which adds to the potential for truly understanding what has happened in recent years. geeks miss this point cause we can find whatever we need to function, and so assume that things are organized as well as they need to be.
but this is not to say that we might not gain from having them organized in a more thoughtful manner.
How much of the defeat do you attribute to the judge's association of DeCSS with "a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located"? Was this decision in large part, small part, or no part about the prosecution's demonizing of hackers, rather than the (supposedly) relevant impact of DeCSS on fair-use?
more important than whether the point was raised would be whether it's relevant.
might we all be dancing happily right now if the defendants were, say, freemasons? or devout episcopalians?
the point, i suppose, is that such an affiliation on the part of the defendant (forget the fact that the judge seems to have made this up) should weigh little in terms of the legality of the tool. this belies judgie's predisposition to view hackers as snotty disrespectful punks.
moronmoronmoronmoron. and rather disingenuous. what we as techies ought to do is boycott doing work for government agencies, and the courts especially. god knows there are tons of jobs, freelance and otherwise, for IT's -- why not cut them off for a while? let kaplan do the DBA work over there for a while -- heck, do you think he even put the docs into pdf by himself?
this is mean, and petty, but it's a perfectly valid way to return the disrespect that he's shown to hackers. I know, i know, it's just a dream, but i've got this image of big louie trying to figure out how to configure a ppp connection -- you know, hands hovering shakily over the keyboard, big old-person glasses, motionless except for a big vein pulsating in his forehead. effing genius. i write code. i pay my taxes. this guy insulted law-abiding coders everywhere, and he can *ahem* kiss my upstanding, law-abiding ass.
first things first -- put your money where your mouth is, and post your papers on your sites, tonight. devalue this thing.
but wait, there's more:
look, www.contentvillefree.com is available. So here's what we do, and i'll pay the $35 if i can get some help building it.
I buy it. You mail me your thesis, to which you've attached the gpl that refers to content, just to be safe. I post the thesis. Then, we put a link to contentvilleFree on all of our pages, we word-of-mouth, hey, maybe some or the more daring out there even break contentville and re-direct it to our site.
Then, contentville is worthless. Why would anyone pay them when they can get the same info for free? We'll allow for micropayments or paypal or something. Suckers.
Then, and this is the best part, I get sued. And i go on tv, and i tell everyone how much Time-Warner wants creators of IP to get paid, unless the creator isn't paying *them* 50% of album sales. Then, see, they don't mind.
I'll close down the site, of course, cause i've got a job and better things to do, but it gets this on tv.
I only need a couple of papers to get myself sued. I can get them up within the week. Let me know if you have any interest in either helping or contributing a paper. They're so effing good at manipulating images, i think that it's time that we brought it to them, poor, exploited academic style -- "it's my life's work -- i can't pay my rent -- and time-warner's charging $29.95 for it! so sad, so sad!" tv will love it.
seriously. shit. i've got some vacation time coming. i'll get sued.
Yes. That's right. Free is one thing. Stealing and re-selling is another -- or are you making a lot of money on the side by making stuff available on napster?
I think that what people are upset about is not the stealing, the consensus seems to be that universities own these anwyay, but the fact that time-warner is profiting from the free information to which they've added no value. in fact, this is very much in line with the notion that, say, elektra profits from (potentially) free information (music) without adding much, if any, value.
it's really all the same -- they think that distribution is worth today the same that it was when people didn't have the type of access that the internet provides.
More specifically, that rock/paper/scissors contest is great, and you can even rewrite the code for the competition part in perl or python to make things easier for the childrens.
For a more didactic take, instead of R/P/S, you could have them write an MPAA/The Law/Johansen program, which is the same thing, but with an engaging topical lesson.
this comment shows a complete misunderstanding of the few exceptions which the courts have made in regards to free speech.
the one of importance here has to do with clear and present danger. in fact, america could well have limited (amongst its own population) speech re: codes -- speaking about these codes probably would have seriously compromised america's national security in a direct and obvious manner.
no such exception occurs in the case of a particular company or consortium's codes. crack CSS and who gets killed again? who invades?
further, the us doesn't claim to be able to squash free speech in *other* nations, as your hypothetical seems to have germany doing in great britain's direction.
so, this is a really, really unsuitable analogy. doesn't apply at all. apples and oranges.
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And I hate what the record co's do in terms of commodotizing and exploiting art on the one hand, and justifying their anti-piracy on the grounds that we shouldn't be stealing from these poor, hard-working folks who are pouring out their souls to us.
But i'll go on record as saying that if there's one group of people who can solve this problem today (although not really retroactively) it's the artists themselves. They need to decide, now, that they're going to market and distribute themselves, that they don't need to be on TRL, that they don't think that garnering 13% of gross sales is fair, that while they're in it for the money, they're rock and roll stars, for god's sake, and there's lots of ways to make money that don't involve telling your fans all the things they can't do.
The house-negro-field-negro paradigm applies here quite powerfully (although, of course, I make no pretensions that ip rights as they relate to music are in the same league of injustices as black slavery in america). Artists have depended on record deals for a long time. It's what they've strived to get, it's the measure of success, and it sure would be nice to get to ride in a limousine rather than shlepping our crap around in this van. They've come to identify the music industry's interests as their own. And by keeping the supply of success low, the industry has kept demand high among those working hard out in the field.
And just as this paradigm was invoked to make people see how pathetic it was to be happy being a house-slave, although it was understandable, the best, and simplest way to make all of this argument and litigation go away is for the *artists* to stand up and walk out. They don't, cause they like cash, and who doesn't? But they're getting the table scraps, comparatively, and they thank and defend the industry in return. It's sort of sad.
There's nothing to argue over if the artists themselves realize that they've got a monopoly on whatever it is they do, and that they don't need to sell the rights to distribute in order to be heard, or in order to make money (although lots of smart people are trying to figure out the best way to do this). The record companies are being jerks, but at least they're doing it in their own interest. The artists, they're doing it because they're too lazy, stupid, and well-trained to see what a shitty situation they're in.
as it stands, advertising already has a much more insidious impact on the determination of the content of the shows that we watch than adding a few coke cans represents. putting a pizza hut box in friends is a clear endorsement of pizza hut -- is this honestly worse for its digital fabrication than, say, behind the scenes deals to decide what they should wear on the basis of the gap's agenda, or giving plot vetos to large conservative corporations like P&G?
if you aren't going into this with your eyes open, you're setting yourself up. if you aren't watching with the understanding that TV's job is to deliver audiences to advertisers, you'll miss the point every time.
now, what if dan rather starts putting up fake billboards in 'documentary' footage? that's the real question, and i know it's been done, but what about, for example, changing all signs to read in english when reporting from other countries? where's the slippery slope here? i'm not really sure.
this is pretty effed up, tho, i'll say that much. makes my head spin a little.
I work there, doing data in the magazine area -- they're switching us, slowly, but they haven't taken away our ability get pop3 -- i keep the netscape mail client pointed at my personal isp's mail server open all day. to go to yesterday's question of whether son-aol meant that all ps2 owners are now lusers, the answer is no, but all time warner employees now are ;)
I think you're right on here -- the cube seems less like a computer than the ps2, in the same way that aol seems like real internet access. ps2 users will probably be more interested in their own isps than gamecube owners would be.
There's three problems here, tho. First is exactly the non-computerness of the GC -- it's got no hard-drive, and i've read nothing of one, and last i checked, there's been no decision on modem v broadband. add this to the fact that us launch has been pushed to november, and gc isn't really a partner, yet.
Problem two, and this isn't really a problem, is that there's no reason AOL can't still go after the cube. Lots of game developers release on multiple platforms, there's no reason to suppose that non-game app developers for consoles won't do the same.
Finally, there's nintendo itself. You know how they are, what with their licensing and their stranglehold on developers and insane paranoia about the control they have on their product, its software library, and their brand. I love them, really i do, but i can't imagine trying to work with them to release an application.
Sony's the easy initial win. Maybe AOL will go after gamecube later, but they've got a year before that even becomes an issue.
But I'd like to cut short any 'omigod, it's the corporate newworldorder supermegahyperconglomerate that's evil and will probably outlaw mp3, free speech, and free beer' talk. What, is Sony going to go with my local isp? Are they going to predispose their console to play well with Prodigy? Come on -- this just makes sense. For their box to compete with XBox, they need a standard, simple, widely-accepted, powerful brand as their internet access tool. AOL has like 90 % of the universe, probably including your mom, so condescend all you want, this was a no-brainer.
So, again, don't get me wrong, every time something like this happens, it feels a little dirty, but if you believe that computers and consoles are becoming more and more alike, you believe that AOL must partner with a console manufacturer. XBox is out of the question, cause of MSN, and the gamecube is out, because Nintendo doesn't play well with 3d parties. So Sony it is. This is just another OEM deal, like Dell or Gateway or anything else. It would have been hopelessly naive to suppose that consoles would remain immune to the AOL invasion just because they sit under our tvs -- they've got hard-drives(well, ok, maybe by end of year), they'll have modems (someday), they're fair game.
The issue isn't whether you want live music to pay a certain way -- I'm sure that you would. The issue is whether, as a consumer and a music-lover, I should care if artists can't make money from resuiduals or album sales. And frankly, I don't. In fact, one can only wonder if the quality of the music to which we're exposed might not *increase* if the only people who were in it were in it because they want to be.
Which is not to say that I think that there's anything wrong with wanting to play music for a living -- i wanted to be a racecar driver. But that doesn't mean that you get to do it. I'd like to get rich working the counter at a wendy's; who cares?
So what I'm saying is, attempts by 'artists' or large corporations to instill fear in the listening public that we'll get no more music if we don't behave ourselves, i mean, they simply don't scare me very much. Will production values drop as musicians cease to be able to spend $500k to make an album? Yeah, but who cares? I don't feel like subsidising that anymore. I want music, and i want as much of it as possible, and i want it from people who mean it.
People get tired of touring all the time, as you clearly articulate, but every person who leaves that lifestyle to raise a family makes room for some 18 year old who wants into it. There's no shortage of those, so why am i worried again, or even sympathetic that you don't get to be a rich rock star?
"if you don't make anything off of what you do, why continue to do it? "
Now, i'm not going to go full out 'artists don't do it for the $$$'. But they don't. There's a song on the new NOFX album to this effect.
Artists should get paid. But if this is the only reason you're getting into music, perhaps you should think about some other line of work? There's no shortage of starving artists, there's no shortage of bands working for tips -- the assertion that music stops in the absence of residuals is a silly one.
Which, again, is not to say that musicians shouldn't get paid -- just that the 'why do it for free' argument shows that you've never done it.
i agree with the notion that computers are seldom the best way to learn about a subject -- between libraries, museums, other students, and teachers, i think that computers pale in most circumstances.
the only real exception to this rule, i think, is that computers are the best way to learn about computers, and the internet. and i think that this is an important excpetion given that we all spend ten hours a day in front of them.
further, i think that the real question is 'if a kid hasn't got a computer, what else don't they have?' and i think that the answer, more often than not, is going to be 'decent libraries, well-paid teachers, the money for field trips'. in such a case, i do think that computer-aided research is a) better than nothing, and b) maybe the cheapest way to provide lots and lots of info, on a per-student basis.
i dunno. i'm torn, cause i think that a lot of this 'computers will revolutionize how kids learn' is hype, and dangerous hype, at that. still and all, it's tough to argue with the fact that if you don't know how to use a computer to a certain minimal level of competency, you're at a major disadvantage to those of us who do -- a disadvantage that grows each day as your peers pull further and further away due to the increased ubiquity (redundant?) of computers.
My girlfriend's brother did his phd at the MIT Medialab on this very subject. Check his stuff out at um, this, which is more or less exctly what you're talking about. He was in the "Machine Listening Group".
Yeah, the content has made for more linearity, but that's not the only way it could have turned out.
The concern has been with jamming as much stuff (in this case, it's polygons, but you bring up content generally) into a game as possible, and you fall into the trap of thinking that quantity can make up for quality or organization.
I tend to agree though. Many so-called RPG's are simply story books that you get walked through by your PC or console.
I don't think that this matters --
Transparency doesn't rule out latent effects on the way that we function. A DVD that doesn't openly act like a DVD player still discourages us from going to the movies. A streaming-video display in the shape of a book that lets us watch streaming news programs just as we might read a newspaper still discourages us from reading. A technology that finds things for us, regardless of how behind-the-scenes it is, devalues the process of going out looking for things ourselves.
To your point, a car that looks like something other than a box still pollutes, drives us out of neighborhoods and into suburbs, and shouldn't be driven drunk.
Now, none of these things are necessarily bad, or wholly bad, i've just chosen to harp on a couple of the negative impacts to illustrate the danger of assuming that out-of-sight and out-of-mind means that these technologies are now wholly benign. I think that you can hide these things, embed them, but the effects that they have upon the way that we live and interact with one another cannot be hidden, and it's this effect of which we must be cognizant if we're to pre-empt any negative impact that a technology might have on us.
OK, I'm now doing this for a living, and I can honestly say that it's an effing nightmare wading through the various 'unbiased' sources and trying to figure out what their traffic numbers have to do with mine.
As an illustration of the issue, last month, my co's site showed 4 million unique visitors on @Plan, and somewhere around 60 % of that number according to Media Metrix. I look at Doubleclick, at @Plan, and we've got an ETL and analysis process in place that we've built in place, and none of them box very well.
I've had good results matching our internal #s with those we get back from IPro (IPro basically performs an ETL and canned reporting process on your weblogs), which is encouraging.
At the end of the day, however, the message that I get from management is that no one outside the co. cares how accurate my numbers are or anyone else's aren't -- Media Metrix is all anyone trusts, and when it comes to selling ads or getting investments, I can go through the weblogs by hand and verify my numbers 50 times, and it simply won't matter. Which sucks, but it's the way it goes.
Basically, the question I'm suggesting you ask yourself, and with which I've had to come to terms over the past couple months, is whether you're coming up with numbers for the purpose af actual usage analysis, or whether you're doing PR for your company. Now, both are important and have their uses, but you can't really make an informed decision about how you should be measuring your traffic until you figure out who it is that you're trying to impress.
Right on!
This weekend alone, I found 2 40x cd roms, a 15", and a couple of (almost certainly useless) hd's in the trash. the only hardware i buy anymore is stuff that's kind of specialized (ie, it's pretty tought to find non-winmodems in people's trash). i'm just finishing putting together the parts for a pair of M.A.M.E. cocktail tables, and all i've purchased is a nice set of speakers and two k6-2's to replace p166s.
Point, of course, is that as computers are perceieved (rightly, from a usability standpoint) as being indivisible units, closed and glued shut, by most folks, when they chuck them, they're probably getting rid of tons of stuff that's still perfectly good. They don't know the difference, they don't care to take the trouble to take shit apart and re-use it, and who'd blame them?
I think that the idea that manufacturers being held responsible for this might be scary, but that it's not too far from the mark -- in fact, these are people who make their $ on the basis of people upgrading. They've got a stake in people's chucking their old hardware, and as such, they have an ethical (if not legal) responsibility here to attempt, in the process of gouging consumers by selling them the next greatest thing, not to produce too much more trash than is necessary.
Hi there,
Of course, you're right, but if you add the assumption (which she may or may not be making) that she has 0 chance of getting her money, the action takes on an entirely different tenor.
In fact, as you point out, she's really shot herself in the foot if Universal cuts her a check -- they'll have made the artists complicit.
very good point -- in fact, i remember a few weeks back, /.ers getting very indignant about this exact point, and for this exact reason.
if this is the best napster can do (and it's not) then i think we'd all be better off if they lose.
yeah --
unfortunately, i think you hit the nail on the head.
what we really need is (and this nauseates me) someone famous and smart to come out on tv about this. you know? get someone who just doesn't give a f*&K, like jesse ventura or bill nye or wozniak or clint eastwood or somebody -- someone trustworthy, intelligent, and not really beholden to the mpaa -- to come out, explain this in 30 seconds, and get it on tv.
once this happens, and it works, the pressure will be on others to do the same or risk looking like lapdogs and greedy jack-asses. ooh, will smith'd be good -- we need somebody rich enough not to care, or whose reputation is enough to stand up to the fact that they'll probably get fired over this. that's why i said eastwood.
anyone got any better ideas? we need a spokesperson, cause our moms and dads and idiot cousins still think this is about stealing.
the thing is, we spend so much time in the slash-cave that we forget that cnn is still referring to this thing as a 'dvd-copying program'. nobody gets it.
this is re: w.j.au's article on x-box's supposedly inevitable hegemony.
... We're going after an 18-year-old guy away at college for the first time. ""
i found this article trite, cliched, and pretty surprisingly party-line. the majority of the powerful quotations came from gates or bachus, and often were either dodgy or plain inaccurate.
while indeed a closed, pc-ish box which eliminates the need to cater to some pre-defined but unknown lowest-common-denominator will eliminate the headaches that pc developers feel, most of au's points re: console developing are in contrast to the facts, and demonstrate a real misunderstanding of the market.
consider the statement he chooses to quote re: x-box vs. nintendo. ""Nintendo has traditionally done really well with a particular type of consumer," says Bachus. "Six-to-12-year-olds, let's say. Younger gamers
In the first place, this statement is inaccurate -- nintendo's goldeneye/perfect dark franchises represent the entire console fps market, dominating this favorite of the college-age demographic, and outselling Unreal Tournament and Q3A combined.
In the second place, a quote indicating that the XBox is going to ignore the demographic which has resulted in Nintendo's stranglehold on 5 of the top 10 sales spots for the last two years hardly indicates an enlightened 3d-party development strategy. Dismissing a console as a competitor by indicating that you're willing to settle for 2d place is hardly the attitude worthy of the supposed owner of the console space, as au asserts MS will be.
Microsoft's console will succeed in certain areas, but where it fails, it will do so because of the fundamental differences between console and pc gamers - many of them illustrated quite clearly in this article. Console gamers don't want the marginally-useful improvements a PC can provide in terms of graphics cards and data storage. They don't want to play civilization, they want to blow things up, race, and collect pocket monsters. The power that XBox brings to the table is a marginal increase over the playstation2, dreamcast, and gamecube that simply doesn't matter to the old or the young within the console market. (And at the end of the day, one wonders how PC gamers are going to deal with the stunning loss of resolution they'll experience over their pcs.)
The mature gaming audience isn't a monolith -- do we have proof that console rpg players want to play an everquest-type game? Do we think that players of UT will be attracted by a split-screen console shooter? No, we don't. And for the individuals who are attracted to consoles' simplicity, what does this storage capacity buy you? You don't care what box you're on, as long as your favorite developer is there, and, as yet, MS has shown little evidence of its hegemony over the developers, with all of them (except the ones MS has bought) slated to develop for sega or sony.
So Au, rest assured, soon we'll be able to play age of empires 50 on a console with 1/3 the resolution of a pc, without worrying about our graphics card compatability (although how soon this will be is at issue, considering MS). But what does this have to do with pokemon, zelda, mario, joanna dark, cloud strife, gran turismo, phantasy star online, and tv resolution? Your article gives far too much weight, I think, to the XBox's admitted advantages over the PC, and dismisses quite unfairly and out-of-hand its severe disadvantages in software, support, and perception in comparison to the consoles that currently own the market.
Sorry,
but this isn't the way that things turned out. cute little rustic communities where people relate to their neighbors because they like them, a bunch of subsitence farmers -- it was a nice idea, but the big fat commercially-driven community where we relate to one another not out of social desire but economic need, *that's* what actually happened.
technology means i don't have to speak to my neighbors, and that's not unamerican. the notion that jefferson's republican ideal is somehow more american than hamilton's urban model for what makes us great is silly, and unfounded. tech destroyed your relationship with your neighbor? sure, maybe, but it also made you a million new neighbors.
i dunno. seems to me that the argument that tech make it possible to relate to those to whom we choose to relate, rather than those to whom we've got a physical proximinty, and therefore degrades the quality of our relations with others, is at odds with common sense.
right on!
i think that you'd have to be pretty head-in-the-sand to miss the point that organizing information adds value to that information. collecting, taxonomizing, and presenting a decent history of computing is a very worthwhile task, i think, and one which adds to the potential for truly understanding what has happened in recent years. geeks miss this point cause we can find whatever we need to function, and so assume that things are organized as well as they need to be.
but this is not to say that we might not gain from having them organized in a more thoughtful manner.
How much of the defeat do you attribute to the judge's association of DeCSS with "a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located"? Was this decision in large part, small part, or no part about the prosecution's demonizing of hackers, rather than the (supposedly) relevant impact of DeCSS on fair-use?
more important than whether the point was raised would be whether it's relevant.
might we all be dancing happily right now if the defendants were, say, freemasons? or devout episcopalians?
the point, i suppose, is that such an affiliation on the part of the defendant (forget the fact that the judge seems to have made this up) should weigh little in terms of the legality of the tool. this belies judgie's predisposition to view hackers as snotty disrespectful punks.
moronmoronmoronmoron. and rather disingenuous. what we as techies ought to do is boycott doing work for government agencies, and the courts especially. god knows there are tons of jobs, freelance and otherwise, for IT's -- why not cut them off for a while? let kaplan do the DBA work over there for a while -- heck, do you think he even put the docs into pdf by himself?
this is mean, and petty, but it's a perfectly valid way to return the disrespect that he's shown to hackers. I know, i know, it's just a dream, but i've got this image of big louie trying to figure out how to configure a ppp connection -- you know, hands hovering shakily over the keyboard, big old-person glasses, motionless except for a big vein pulsating in his forehead. effing genius. i write code. i pay my taxes. this guy insulted law-abiding coders everywhere, and he can *ahem* kiss my upstanding, law-abiding ass.
first things first -- put your money where your mouth is, and post your papers on your sites, tonight. devalue this thing.
but wait, there's more:
look, www.contentvillefree.com is available. So here's what we do, and i'll pay the $35 if i can get some help building it.
I buy it. You mail me your thesis, to which you've attached the gpl that refers to content, just to be safe. I post the thesis. Then, we put a link to contentvilleFree on all of our pages, we word-of-mouth, hey, maybe some or the more daring out there even break contentville and re-direct it to our site.
Then, contentville is worthless. Why would anyone pay them when they can get the same info for free? We'll allow for micropayments or paypal or something. Suckers.
Then, and this is the best part, I get sued. And i go on tv, and i tell everyone how much Time-Warner wants creators of IP to get paid, unless the creator isn't paying *them* 50% of album sales. Then, see, they don't mind.
I'll close down the site, of course, cause i've got a job and better things to do, but it gets this on tv.
I only need a couple of papers to get myself sued. I can get them up within the week. Let me know if you have any interest in either helping or contributing a paper. They're so effing good at manipulating images, i think that it's time that we brought it to them, poor, exploited academic style -- "it's my life's work -- i can't pay my rent -- and time-warner's charging $29.95 for it! so sad, so sad!" tv will love it.
seriously. shit. i've got some vacation time coming. i'll get sued.
Yes. That's right. Free is one thing. Stealing and re-selling is another -- or are you making a lot of money on the side by making stuff available on napster?
I think that what people are upset about is not the stealing, the consensus seems to be that universities own these anwyay, but the fact that time-warner is profiting from the free information to which they've added no value. in fact, this is very much in line with the notion that, say, elektra profits from (potentially) free information (music) without adding much, if any, value.
it's really all the same -- they think that distribution is worth today the same that it was when people didn't have the type of access that the internet provides.
More specifically, that rock/paper/scissors contest is great, and you can even rewrite the code for the competition part in perl or python to make things easier for the childrens.
For a more didactic take, instead of R/P/S, you could have them write an MPAA/The Law/Johansen program, which is the same thing, but with an engaging topical lesson.
this comment shows a complete misunderstanding of the few exceptions which the courts have made in regards to free speech.
the one of importance here has to do with clear and present danger. in fact, america could well have limited (amongst its own population) speech re: codes -- speaking about these codes probably would have seriously compromised america's national security in a direct and obvious manner.
no such exception occurs in the case of a particular company or consortium's codes. crack CSS and who gets killed again? who invades?
further, the us doesn't claim to be able to squash free speech in *other* nations, as your hypothetical seems to have germany doing in great britain's direction.
so, this is a really, really unsuitable analogy. doesn't apply at all. apples and oranges.