I think this bit of history is lost on the Slashdot crowd, but Metallica originally signed a typical "we own your work" contract. Around the time of Master of Puppets, Metallica sued their label and won their copyrights back.
(there's a video out there, somewhere, of a younger Jaymz arguing with an EMI executive - long before they were swallowed up into Warner Music - saying "this contract shit is all about control. You want control? Well fuck you, you can't have any. If you want Metallica you lose control.")
They've owned the copyright and distribution rights to their music ever since, which has allowed them to do some pretty neat things, like releasing a remastered vinyl version of the pre-load albums, as well as a vinyl version of Death Magnetic. I'm not privy to the details of the contract, but I'm sure the wording is specific to sales, and not distribution.
The band also released the entire album, for free, on their own website. Fuck knows why they didn't just point a link to a TPB torrent and be done with it - maybe they just had too much bandwidth to spare that month.
While you're at it, Adobe, could you also consider fixing the streaming video issues in Firefox? There's no reason on this planet why Firefox's version of flash has to take up 99% CPU on a quad-core system to play video, while the IE version takes a measly 2% to play the same video.
Oh, and if you could do something - anything - about your 64bit linux support, that would be fantastic. Kill it if you must, or open source it, because your engineers are simply not talented enough to make it work.
Please? At the very least you'll have someone with an honest to god education who can proofread and write decent articles on your editorial staff, as opposed to... kdawson.
One of the biggest problems with TWC - at least in the NYC area - is line degradation. Customer service will insist that the box is malfunctioning, but if you do some basic line noise tests you'll probably notice a significant noise problem.
TWC won't do a damn thing about it. They'll claim to the heavens that it's Scientific Atlanta's problem, or that your house wiring needs to be replaced. You have to twist a managers arms for months before they admit that they don't see the need to replace/maintain the copper connection from their fiber loop to the home. I know that in my area, the same copper has been in use since the 1970's and the lack of maintenance shows: digital artifacts abound, some channels just don't come in, and two-way communication with the headend is fucked beyond belief (we had a month where we were charged over $200 for "on demand" movies - it was a backlog of all the on demand movies we had ordered over the past year, apparently the box was unable to communicate with TWC for the longest time, and was able to do so one day by some miracle).
Of course, if you have the Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, you're fucked. The software on the box has so many bugs it's completely unacceptable. They pass the box off as retail ready, but after 3 years on the market, it's STILL an alpha product at best.
Every few months there's talk of Time Warner as a whole going under, and it's with good reason: the entire company from the jackass that calls himself a CEO, to the child companies of AOL and Scientific Atlanta, down to some stupid CSR cunt in Wisconsin is incompetent.
anymore? I can assure that before the Internet, the music industry had the same "leaked albums" problem. Only they were combating street vendors in NYC, not some random torrent seeders.
Who the heck are these people using S3 cards nowadays? Why aren't they buying low-end (sub-$80) nvidia or ATI cards?
You get practically the same performance (although 3D performance is far and away better on comparable nVidia/ATI cards) for the same price, the same small heatsink/fan, and better driver support.
Is there a populous of severely brain damaged geeks out there that I don't know about? If so, are any of you female, because I've been feeling lonely lately.
when you're just starting out trying to get your content out there, you post it practically everywhere to get exposure.
At what point of growth do you go "fuck this small player" - I just don't understand. In the content industry you need as much exposure as you can get. Even if something comes along that's new and small, it's still a content delivery system so why not put your content on it?
Can anyone explain to me the mentality here? Anyone?
So now instead of the "making available" theory, we get to see the "assisting making available" theory.
I love how these lawyers think. If I gave a random guy in a wheelchair a push up a steep incline, and he had robbed a store sometime in the past, I would be an accessory to a crime.
Seriously, can't we just round up all of the lawyers, executives, and directors and just fucking kill them already?
Honestly, I truly believe that the entire editing staff of Slashdot just doesn't give a shit anymore. They're like a bunch of coked up fallen rock stars going through the motions until their next shipment of heroine comes in.
It's really sad to see the absolute shit that's posted here nowadays.
The current national duopoly is the result of two extremes screaming at each other for the past 70 years or so.
One said screams that we need to regulate everything and have the government put everything in order so that everything works one way.
The other side screams that we need to degregulate everything and let companies do what they want to do in order to make more money.
Well, we've got both right now. These companies - cable and copper providers - are both regulated and deregulated and we have, in effect, a system that simply looks at numbers and says "this is good" or "this is bad" - and now both sides are screaming even louder to regulate or deregulate.
You know what we really need? More options. It's not about regulating or deregulating an industry, it's about competition.
You can regulate the shit out of an industry so long as there is enough momentum to allow new players to move in and drive down prices. Without competition, over regulation becomes a burden on the business and the consumer - by forcing a business to comply with a standard of practice, they (the monopoly/duopoly/*opoly) will pass costs associated with regulation to the consumer, either in direct billing costs, reduced support overhead, or poor infrastructure maintenance.
You can have a completely deregulated industry as well, but you still need that competitive momentum in order to keep the consumer from being raped in the ass. In a completely deregulated environment, the *opoly turn into the local Barrons of the community and become the almighty gatekeepers of the industry.
In either environment, if you have real competition, consumers become valuable again (as opposed to the business commodity they are in the telco and entertainment industries).
In the end, I think the best fit for America is a mixture of deregulation and dynamic "as needed" regulation (as opposed to the blanket industry-wide regulation that's currently enforced), and a breakup of local monopolies.
You know, if you put "wonky processor" in the same area as "modern game AI" you're going to end up with CoD soldiers that end up blowing their own heads off because they walked into a wall.
The whole "cell is too hard to program for" bullshit was just a symptom of a larger industry-wide problem: education simply doesn't cover multi-threaded resource sharing nearly as well as it needs to.
I was speaking more about everything Sony has done since the walkman:
CD burners are too expensive and complicated, you say? Use our MD players, they record like a tape deck, but have the capacity of a CD in our proprietary format!
That digital camera too complicated? Use our sleek (if poorly engineered) alternative, they also use Memory Sticks (which you can only buy from us).
The Wii has motion sensitive controls? One word: Sixaxis.
In the same vein, if the Playstation 4 had three SKU's, with one of them being a "Playstation Lite" that's essentially a Wii with more processing power, I just wouldn't be surprised:
"Oh, Wii 2 not out yet? We've got the Playstation Lite, and it has the same motion sensitive controls!"
Really, through the past 20 years or so, Sony just sounds like a really rich cheap Chinese knockoff of everything else in the electronics market.
Unless, however, they plan on making the PS4 some super casual console that doesn't need a lot of oomph for their up and coming stick figure games.
Which wouldn't surprise me in the least, since Sony is more than willing to follow the pack leader to grab more marketshare and force their ill-conceived DRM laden formats on the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this bit of history is lost on the Slashdot crowd, but Metallica originally signed a typical "we own your work" contract. Around the time of Master of Puppets, Metallica sued their label and won their copyrights back.
(there's a video out there, somewhere, of a younger Jaymz arguing with an EMI executive - long before they were swallowed up into Warner Music - saying "this contract shit is all about control. You want control? Well fuck you, you can't have any. If you want Metallica you lose control.")
They've owned the copyright and distribution rights to their music ever since, which has allowed them to do some pretty neat things, like releasing a remastered vinyl version of the pre-load albums, as well as a vinyl version of Death Magnetic. I'm not privy to the details of the contract, but I'm sure the wording is specific to sales, and not distribution.
The band also released the entire album, for free, on their own website. Fuck knows why they didn't just point a link to a TPB torrent and be done with it - maybe they just had too much bandwidth to spare that month.
While you're at it, Adobe, could you also consider fixing the streaming video issues in Firefox? There's no reason on this planet why Firefox's version of flash has to take up 99% CPU on a quad-core system to play video, while the IE version takes a measly 2% to play the same video.
Oh, and if you could do something - anything - about your 64bit linux support, that would be fantastic. Kill it if you must, or open source it, because your engineers are simply not talented enough to make it work.
I love the "awesome bar" myself, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of the community in this community project gave Mozilla similar feedback.
I'll admit, the bar hasn't helped me find the really odd or obscure site I havn't visited in a while, but that's what bookmarks are for.
Please? At the very least you'll have someone with an honest to god education who can proofread and write decent articles on your editorial staff, as opposed to ... kdawson.
way to fail
One of the biggest problems with TWC - at least in the NYC area - is line degradation. Customer service will insist that the box is malfunctioning, but if you do some basic line noise tests you'll probably notice a significant noise problem.
TWC won't do a damn thing about it. They'll claim to the heavens that it's Scientific Atlanta's problem, or that your house wiring needs to be replaced. You have to twist a managers arms for months before they admit that they don't see the need to replace/maintain the copper connection from their fiber loop to the home. I know that in my area, the same copper has been in use since the 1970's and the lack of maintenance shows: digital artifacts abound, some channels just don't come in, and two-way communication with the headend is fucked beyond belief (we had a month where we were charged over $200 for "on demand" movies - it was a backlog of all the on demand movies we had ordered over the past year, apparently the box was unable to communicate with TWC for the longest time, and was able to do so one day by some miracle).
Of course, if you have the Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, you're fucked. The software on the box has so many bugs it's completely unacceptable. They pass the box off as retail ready, but after 3 years on the market, it's STILL an alpha product at best.
Every few months there's talk of Time Warner as a whole going under, and it's with good reason: the entire company from the jackass that calls himself a CEO, to the child companies of AOL and Scientific Atlanta, down to some stupid CSR cunt in Wisconsin is incompetent.
anymore? I can assure that before the Internet, the music industry had the same "leaked albums" problem. Only they were combating street vendors in NYC, not some random torrent seeders.
Didn't he die in a skiing accident?
Who the heck are these people using S3 cards nowadays? Why aren't they buying low-end (sub-$80) nvidia or ATI cards?
You get practically the same performance (although 3D performance is far and away better on comparable nVidia/ATI cards) for the same price, the same small heatsink/fan, and better driver support.
Is there a populous of severely brain damaged geeks out there that I don't know about? If so, are any of you female, because I've been feeling lonely lately.
Someone fix the summary before my brain melts.
when you're just starting out trying to get your content out there, you post it practically everywhere to get exposure.
At what point of growth do you go "fuck this small player" - I just don't understand. In the content industry you need as much exposure as you can get. Even if something comes along that's new and small, it's still a content delivery system so why not put your content on it?
Can anyone explain to me the mentality here? Anyone?
Well if you'd stop visiting that cancer filled shithole you wouldn't see any posts about her.
holy shit, it's RoFLKOPTr
Of course it was a terrible analogy. I was trying to make the idea of murdering executives sound less like crazy talk.
So now instead of the "making available" theory, we get to see the "assisting making available" theory.
I love how these lawyers think. If I gave a random guy in a wheelchair a push up a steep incline, and he had robbed a store sometime in the past, I would be an accessory to a crime.
Seriously, can't we just round up all of the lawyers, executives, and directors and just fucking kill them already?
Am I the last person on Earth to use a phone as - I don't know - a god damn phone?
Honestly, I truly believe that the entire editing staff of Slashdot just doesn't give a shit anymore. They're like a bunch of coked up fallen rock stars going through the motions until their next shipment of heroine comes in.
It's really sad to see the absolute shit that's posted here nowadays.
there it is
They still have a problem with determining how much force to use when picking up objects. I'd hate to have that same problem when jerking off.
Of course, I'd only have that problem if I has a prosthetic dick too.
The current national duopoly is the result of two extremes screaming at each other for the past 70 years or so.
One said screams that we need to regulate everything and have the government put everything in order so that everything works one way.
The other side screams that we need to degregulate everything and let companies do what they want to do in order to make more money.
Well, we've got both right now. These companies - cable and copper providers - are both regulated and deregulated and we have, in effect, a system that simply looks at numbers and says "this is good" or "this is bad" - and now both sides are screaming even louder to regulate or deregulate.
You know what we really need? More options. It's not about regulating or deregulating an industry, it's about competition.
You can regulate the shit out of an industry so long as there is enough momentum to allow new players to move in and drive down prices. Without competition, over regulation becomes a burden on the business and the consumer - by forcing a business to comply with a standard of practice, they (the monopoly/duopoly/*opoly) will pass costs associated with regulation to the consumer, either in direct billing costs, reduced support overhead, or poor infrastructure maintenance.
You can have a completely deregulated industry as well, but you still need that competitive momentum in order to keep the consumer from being raped in the ass. In a completely deregulated environment, the *opoly turn into the local Barrons of the community and become the almighty gatekeepers of the industry.
In either environment, if you have real competition, consumers become valuable again (as opposed to the business commodity they are in the telco and entertainment industries).
In the end, I think the best fit for America is a mixture of deregulation and dynamic "as needed" regulation (as opposed to the blanket industry-wide regulation that's currently enforced), and a breakup of local monopolies.
You know, if you put "wonky processor" in the same area as "modern game AI" you're going to end up with CoD soldiers that end up blowing their own heads off because they walked into a wall.
The numeric keypad is on the right ... how exactly does this work out?
The whole "cell is too hard to program for" bullshit was just a symptom of a larger industry-wide problem: education simply doesn't cover multi-threaded resource sharing nearly as well as it needs to.
I was speaking more about everything Sony has done since the walkman:
CD burners are too expensive and complicated, you say? Use our MD players, they record like a tape deck, but have the capacity of a CD in our proprietary format!
That digital camera too complicated? Use our sleek (if poorly engineered) alternative, they also use Memory Sticks (which you can only buy from us).
The Wii has motion sensitive controls? One word: Sixaxis.
In the same vein, if the Playstation 4 had three SKU's, with one of them being a "Playstation Lite" that's essentially a Wii with more processing power, I just wouldn't be surprised:
"Oh, Wii 2 not out yet? We've got the Playstation Lite, and it has the same motion sensitive controls!"
Really, through the past 20 years or so, Sony just sounds like a really rich cheap Chinese knockoff of everything else in the electronics market.
I can't wait to handle the consistently changing data in my DB applications.
Unless, however, they plan on making the PS4 some super casual console that doesn't need a lot of oomph for their up and coming stick figure games.
Which wouldn't surprise me in the least, since Sony is more than willing to follow the pack leader to grab more marketshare and force their ill-conceived DRM laden formats on the masses.