Exactly. They record companies rule the "entertainment" industry (except for pRon for the most part). They fund everything from Friends to The Powder Puff Girls. If they lose their source of revenue to develop these "products" they are screwed.
Think of it this way, what would happen to Microsoft if they lost their income from Windows ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/17/203722 3&mode=thread&tid=109 ) ???
They would fail and the company would not be able to function because they don't have any way to fund any other activities.
The same goes for the record companies. If they lose their source of income they are screwed. And don't tell me about "Spiderman made 900 million", the movie cost like $200 million to make, so they made $500 million lets say, minus all the other stuff... who knows how much... but that is a blockbuster movie.... What about all those other 100 movies that cost the same amount of money to make... and didn't make HALF of their money back.... It's a gamble to them... hit REALLY big with ONE movie, have ten fail. It still leads to a profit to them.
But their real money makes are still music artists. Fund them a million to make an album (big artists) and sell 10 million CDs. Lets say the Label makes $5 a CD, $1 goes to the artist (big artists) , Label made $4 million off of a million dollar investment. Not bad huh? 4:1 return.... Spiderman 2:1.... How many Spidermans are there in a year? How many music artist sell 10 million albums? A lot.
Record companies are trying to save themselves from becoming a minimal industry. They will end up losing major artist in the next 5 years. They are all starting their own "label" to put out CD's. They still need the distribution channels to get those CD's into stores, but that is happening. Big stores know that is Aerosmith goes independent they still want those new CD's, so they buy them. They stores who sell the albums don't care where they come from... they just want to sell them.
We will end up seeing communites forming around genres of music that link them to the bands and then to their CD's. Who knows what form that will take. But you might find a cool band that is selling their CD for $8 online, and they still are making $7 after that $1 goes to the store it was sold in. So now a band can sell MANY times less CD's to make the same money as a "major" artist. Britney Spears sells 7 million albums, but only makes $1 off each one, Betsey Hangnail from who knows where sells 1 million and makes the same amount of money because she makes more on each CD.
So in the end, Sony is trying to keep from losing money to the "casual" pirate by keeping the masses from copying, keeping profits up. Only thing they never considered, lower prices and make pirate lose their reason to pirate. That's the ONLY way they will survive this. New formats, new protection, new ILLEGAL (thanks DMCA) hoops to jump through just to make an MP3 to play on your portable player. Copying CDs is bad I support bands I love. I pay the record companies money so my artists can continue to put out music. Do I like paying $15 for a CD that cost $2 to make, $1 to the artist, $3 to the store, and $9 to the fat cats, hell no. They do not have my sympathy or support. The artists do. And so for now, it's all I can do.
I think that Knoppix would be a good stating point.
Set up accounts for all the users(which most universities already do), and give them XXmb of storage for saving documents.
You can ad some scripts that would make their default that space. (moding the Knoppix CD)
That CD would be used to boot form on all the systems, you _could_ even skip using a hard drive in the system, but it would be slow without the swap file. Now all systems would have the SAME setup, same menus, everything.
Each user would have his/her own name and pw to get into the network and their storage.
When it is time to update the software you just send out new CD's to each user and they replace the old one. So lets say as the project continues you can make a more specific install with more or less programs, custom programs whatever. Do a test release to one floor in a dorm and see how it goes... tweak and tweak and tweak....
________________________________
Michael Alexander
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. They record companies rule the "entertainment" industry (except for pRon for the most part). They fund everything from Friends to The Powder Puff Girls. If they lose their source of revenue to develop these "products" they are screwed. Think of it this way, what would happen to Microsoft if they lost their income from Windows ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/17/203722 3&mode=thread&tid=109 ) ???
They would fail and the company would not be able to function because they don't have any way to fund any other activities.
The same goes for the record companies. If they lose their source of income they are screwed. And don't tell me about "Spiderman made 900 million", the movie cost like $200 million to make, so they made $500 million lets say, minus all the other stuff... who knows how much... but that is a blockbuster movie.... What about all those other 100 movies that cost the same amount of money to make... and didn't make HALF of their money back.... It's a gamble to them... hit REALLY big with ONE movie, have ten fail. It still leads to a profit to them.
But their real money makes are still music artists. Fund them a million to make an album (big artists) and sell 10 million CDs. Lets say the Label makes $5 a CD, $1 goes to the artist (big artists) , Label made $4 million off of a million dollar investment. Not bad huh? 4:1 return.... Spiderman 2:1.... How many Spidermans are there in a year? How many music artist sell 10 million albums? A lot.
Record companies are trying to save themselves from becoming a minimal industry. They will end up losing major artist in the next 5 years. They are all starting their own "label" to put out CD's. They still need the distribution channels to get those CD's into stores, but that is happening. Big stores know that is Aerosmith goes independent they still want those new CD's, so they buy them. They stores who sell the albums don't care where they come from... they just want to sell them.
We will end up seeing communites forming around genres of music that link them to the bands and then to their CD's. Who knows what form that will take. But you might find a cool band that is selling their CD for $8 online, and they still are making $7 after that $1 goes to the store it was sold in. So now a band can sell MANY times less CD's to make the same money as a "major" artist. Britney Spears sells 7 million albums, but only makes $1 off each one, Betsey Hangnail from who knows where sells 1 million and makes the same amount of money because she makes more on each CD.
So in the end, Sony is trying to keep from losing money to the "casual" pirate by keeping the masses from copying, keeping profits up. Only thing they never considered, lower prices and make pirate lose their reason to pirate. That's the ONLY way they will survive this. New formats, new protection, new ILLEGAL (thanks DMCA) hoops to jump through just to make an MP3 to play on your portable player. Copying CDs is bad I support bands I love. I pay the record companies money so my artists can continue to put out music. Do I like paying $15 for a CD that cost $2 to make, $1 to the artist, $3 to the store, and $9 to the fat cats, hell no. They do not have my sympathy or support. The artists do. And so for now, it's all I can do.
I think that Knoppix would be a good stating point. Set up accounts for all the users(which most universities already do), and give them XXmb of storage for saving documents. You can ad some scripts that would make their default that space. (moding the Knoppix CD) That CD would be used to boot form on all the systems, you _could_ even skip using a hard drive in the system, but it would be slow without the swap file. Now all systems would have the SAME setup, same menus, everything. Each user would have his/her own name and pw to get into the network and their storage. When it is time to update the software you just send out new CD's to each user and they replace the old one. So lets say as the project continues you can make a more specific install with more or less programs, custom programs whatever. Do a test release to one floor in a dorm and see how it goes... tweak and tweak and tweak.... ________________________________ Michael Alexander