Mozilla just keeps getting better and better... With all the features it has, it's well on it's way to becoming the super user's uber browser. I had to tweak one of the "secret features" a few weeks ago. (Port 1080 is denied unless you explicitly tell the browser that it's OK to access) The info I found, referred me to the about:config screen. When I saw it I was very impressed at how much potential there is for using this browser in so many different ways. The only thing they need on Linux now is the "Quick Start" or whatever they call it launcher program. That way you will only have to wait a fraction of a second for Mozilla to appear. I think this could be implemented by having another Mozilla componenet that you can run at X login. It doesn't actually display any output, it just loads the base elements of Mozilla needed to launch any Mozilla app. That would be EXTREMELY cool...
--
For my comments on the new difficulties in first posting and the "broken-ness" of metamoderation, go here:
Electronics Surplus in Cleveland Ohio is OK...
on
Great Surplus Stores?
·
· Score: 1
It's in a section of town known as "Slavic Village", just south of downtown Cleveland. Not as much fun as a lot of the places other people are describing, but I've found a good deaal of odd equipment there. One time I needed a power supply for my laptop and they happened to have an old power supply for a rooftop antenna rotor that was the right voltage. Ran just fine with the laptop and only cost me about $13. They've also had things like old reel-to-reel tape drives, VT100 terminals, and some pretty freaky medical looking shit. It's much better for electronic components though when you need to get your circuit design on... Kind of wish there was a cooler place in Clevo though.
...there are quite a few of the old guard from DEC who were on board when the Alpha was developed now working at AMD. I'd love to see AMD break away completely from the x86 clone and make something completely unique along the lines of Crusoe. Build it with next generation technology in mind. Imagine not having a Wintel box but instead having a LinMicro. Would be VERY cool. Oh yeah... get rid of the DRM crap as well.
The point that the music industry seems to NOT understand is that they could make so much more money by selling music in electronic format. The ridiculous things they are doing to try and recoup the money that they claim to be losing to piracy is not helping them. They would be better off accepting the fact that some numbnuts out there are always going to pirate music, but honest customers will pay. The people who tend to spend a lot on music (like myself) don't want copies. They want the genuine item. DRM or no DRM, people like us are the people who buy the most stuff. The teenies who buy Britney and X-Tina can be suckered into cool "packaging" for their image. If you make an electronic format player with a display on the front that actually displays the album art (no longer locked into the square format that CDs and records have had) then the files will sell like hotcakes. Add "cool" flash animation and you're set with the disposable youth crowd. For serious music collectors, offer the music in a higher bitrate at a higher cost. Believe me, those folks will pay for it readily. But no... those dopes are trying to preserve a dying business model without investigating the possible future models. Oh well, their loss.
...that touched on the same topic. Only the movie was kind of depressing. I wish I could remember the name of it. It was an old 70s movie. Basically this brilliant computer scientist has some kind of accident which causes him to have seizures that make him criminally violent. He winds up killing his wife and it lands him in prison. All of this happens before the movie starts and is expounded during the credits. However, throughout the movie he winds up looking more like a late 60s playboy with a leer that would make Jenna Jamison feel dirty. Anyway... my point here... He is the subject of an experimental brain implant that is supposed to prevent the seizures. Initially, the chip implant is successful. His seizures stop. But as the scientists monitor his progress, they notice that his brain starts making adjustments on it's own to bypass the behavior of the chip. In a way the chip is excercising his brain chemistry to make the seizures much stronger and longer. He escapes from the lab, kills a prostitute and then begins going after other people. The basic idea here is that this kind of thing doesn't work. Now... me being the pseudo-scientist that I am, I tend to disagree with that view. I think this is just the start of the inevitable conclusion: Man and machine MUST merge in order for both forms of life to evolve. Machines need our imperfection and we need their endurance and precision.
Actually you have no idea about what I'm like. I don't think America is a free country at all. It's vastly different from what it used to be when I was a kid (1970s). This country is full of creeps that are only interested in making profit to the detriment of the rest of the world. Our commander-in-thief being one of the biggest creeps here. I, personally, say a lot about them inhibiting a lot of my rights... But I also know that the only way to make a difference and change things is either:
A. Become a politician and hope you don't get corrupted or killed along the way. B. One man "civil war" and put a gun to the politicians you don't like or agree with.
Since I have no real interest in politics and I don't care to get assasinated by the crazed right-wingers or incarcerated, I won't do either.
Anyway... you can bleat all you want, I'm no sheep. I use Linux, I vote with my pocket book (typically left for me since I'm not a rich man), I buy globally since American made stuff tends to be worth shit, and if I could, I'd vote socialist because it's the only system that makes sense. Go back from whence you came troll...
In Australia there are vast expanses of land with no speed limit. That is the way it should be because the chances of injuring anyone are extremely small and the land to travel over is vast. In the US there isn't a lot of land like that at all, so reasonable speed limits (55-65 MPH) are necessary in a majority of the country. The speed limits are increased (75 MPH approx 120 km/h) when there is a need for it (such as the big western states like NM and TX) This also makes sense. What you illustrate above sounds like selfish whining to me. 18 km is not that big of a distance even if there aren't any cars on it. The only time the US ever raises the speed limit to dangerous levels is when there is something more like a 40-50km stretch. Now that makes more sense. In areas that aren't as big as that the lower speed limit makes sense, not to mention it's fuel efficient (65 MPH is the general sweet spot).
If the speed limit says 110 km/h, then you must drive 110 km/h and no faster. The only exceptions should be emergencies (woman in labor, serious injury, etc...). If you are late for a fucking meeting, then screw it. Meetings are never important enough to put other people's lives at risk. I don't care how "safely" you can drive at 140 km/h, you are still breaking the law and deserve to be ticketed until your license is revoked. We'd have a lot less problems if people just stuck to following all the rules in this world...
Or... Osama Bin Laden. After all, isn't that who we should be doggedly pursuing post Sept. 11th? Whatever happened to that whole thing anyway? All I seem to be hearing about is Saddam-this, Saddam-that.
I wonder if Echelon is just a fake like the research for nuclear powered air fighters during and after WWII? The supposed research back then spent a huge amount of money over the course of about four years and came up empty handed. Later on, it was revealed that this was just a convenient way for some companies to funnel money out of the government and into private hands. No research ever actually took place, just a lot of cheap show and blow to satisfy a few of the curious.
Based on my non-scientific calculations... The number of people that have said "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!" has been said is so large that it approaches infinity. ie. it's a constantly growing number with no certain end, a lot like Pi. This is true especially since people are likely to be saying this for a long time to come. Given that assumption, it's fairly safe to say that a cluster of all those "idiots", as you put it, would be quite powerful. No matter what their level of intelligence, the sheer processing power would be pretty enormous! Infinitely enormous, in fact. With this in mind, I think what you have proposed is extremely dangerous. A few years ago on Slashdot this story suggested that as processing power increases, and CPU size decreases, CPUs generate more heat. The idea being that eventually a laptop could become a small sun, or even a black hole might apply to this cluster as well. That would be pretty damn scary! So, to the original poster above; Congrats dude. You've just suggested creating a device that could threaten the entire planet. Depending on which side of the fence I'm on, (I won't say which) you're a terrorist, or... a redeemer. As my friend Gordon would say, "Yup. The volcano for all of them (them being his enemies -ed.) as soon as I take over the world."
I live in Cleveland Ohio. My wife and I took two trips out west two years in a row. In 2000, we went out west to Carlsbad NM via US 40. All along the way, I found nothing. Granted, that wireless access really hadn't burst onto the mainstream scene yet. In 2001, we took another trip out west to Glacier National Park via US 80 and 90, and again there was no wireless access anywhere. Not only was wireless access non-existant, but large parts of the west barely even have dial-up access.
My boss and I have often discussed why it is that broadband combined wireless haven't taken off in places like hotels and rest stops. At this point they are VERY inexpensive and it wouldn't be hard to implement at all even for those organizations with little money. On many of my trips around the US, I've found that broadband and wireless are only available in the most expensive accomodations (A Radisson in Massachusetts for instance). We did happen to stay in a Comfort Inn in PA once that actually had ethernet in the room (LodgeNet was the ISP) that gave decent speeds for a reasonable price ($4.99 for 24 hours. Of course, Radisson's wireless access was free of charge). But, that was a 1 in 25 experience in terms of frequency of occurence.
Just last month we took a trip to Australia and found that what appears to be common there are coin-op internet access stations nearly everywhere. Again, I didn't find any wireless or wired access in any of the hotels we stayed in (Mostly "Flag" hotels. Also a few Ibis). I was able to get dial-up with Telstra Bigpond, but 28.8-42K feels pretty slow these days.
I think the problem is that a lot of hotels, rest areas, airports, etc... think that this stuff is really expensive. So... it's time for all you WiFi hacktivists to get out there and spread that word that wireless is here, broadband is here and they are both reasonably priced. In fact a lot of those hotels could cut down on their outside lines and use that money for the DSL line or two to give their customres high speed access.
Oh well... just a few thoughts on this subject, but not much else to say.
Actually, there is a hierarchy to the way Windows starts up its services because there are dependencies. And, you can change the order of startup to some extent if you know how to work in the registry.
This example perfectly illustrates what linus was having problems with when Ingo suggested that users just nice X up. It hides the problem, but doesn't actually fix it. Windows XP plays tricks on users to make them think that it's faster than Win2K or even NT. It loads the GUI earlier than the previous OSes, but there is still a lot of shit happening on the system in the background when you first get to the desktop (services starting, background apps loading, etc...). This is what causes the delay in response to clicking on the Start button. To prove this to a friend with Linux, I set X to start up a lot earlier and disabled a few of the non-critical services in the init scripts and compiled a custom kernel. Total APPARENT boot time from "Joe User's" perspective was about 30 seconds. I have to wonder if it would be a hell of a lot faster with this new patch. The thing is that these changes DON'T actually make the system faster at all. It's pretty much the same as before, but the end-user experience is that it APPEARS faster. That seems to be what a lot of people miss in this discussion.
My Ensoniq Mirage DSK8 digital sampler. I got it in 1985 and still use it as my main controller keyboard today. Pretty cool system built around a Motorola 6805 CPU. While it doesn't quite have the specs of my modern gear, it's got its charm. I can still coax some mean sounds out of it too. Plus the digitally controlled analog filters in it rock. I made mods on it to pass other signals through the filter network.
The type of music does make a difference. I mostly listen to electonica/dance music. Since a lot of that stuff is based on fairly pure, artificial waveforms, it compresses extremely well. The few jazz and classical albums I have definitely exhibit more artifact. This is due to the enharmonic nature of some of the instruments used. For example, the strings in a lot of classical will really exhibit artifact if encoded at 128K. I was only able to encode at 192 for less artifact and 384 for almost no artifact at all. In jazz, ride cymbals tend to be the culprit. For music that uses distorted guitar, many of the same artifacts apply (Something by Ministry or KMFDM will illustrate this).
But, I still contend that even on a regular stereo 99% of average listeners will not hear a difference. It's just the same as people who can't tell the difference between FM radio, cassette, and CD. If people COULD hear the difference, FM radio would have been long gone as well as cassette. But they are still with us.
Not that I am disagreeing with you... but only about 1% of the public can tell the difference between CD-Audio and a 128K MP3. I can hear the difference and I have a few friends who can. But most of my family can't. My co-workers can't. And I'm willing to bet it's the same with you. Trying to argue that a lossy format doesn't sound as good as the original CD would be a hard sell to the people selling the music. Sure, they can probably tell the difference too, but they realize that 99% of the folks out there WILL pay $1 per track.
Exactly. If any of these services want to succeed they need to realize that targeting small audiences IS financially viable with electronic distribution. The main complaint a lot of record companies seemed to have in the past was the problem of maintaining stock for things that don't sell a lot. With digital distribution, this problem no longer exists since you don't need to have 35,000 copies of an album by VanDerGraff Generator for instance. You have one which is duped and has a one time unlock code inserted so that it can be burned to CD by the user.
BTW... I went to a Mr. Bungle concert back in the early 90s in Cleveland. Very cool show. I wish I knew who the opening band was though. They were awesome too.
Once the 90s hit and grunge came on the scene, the music biz has gone downhill. It became harder and harder to find decent music (I tend to prefer electronic music) and by the mid 90s, well nigh impossible. Of course this is all from the perspective of a US citizen (the country with the worst music on radio).
When I first found MP3s back in 1995, my first thought was that this would be the music format of the future. Not MP3 per se, but digital files with no tangible presence. It occured to me that if music was delivered this way, we could have a la carte music distribution. You could just buy the songs you wanted and burn them to a CD.
If this is the model that Apple uses, AND they eventually have (or someone else) have a wide variety of music, then the model is sure to be a hit. They can satisfy everyone from the low brow Eminem, Missy Elliot, Bristina fans to the fey Bare Naked Ladies, Train and Dave Matthews fans, to the highly cutlured but inaccessible David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Stephin Merrit fans.
The key to this whole thing is going to be selection. If any of these companies limit themselves to small catalogs, no one is going to buy. Even if they wind up only selling the "sure bets" like Ugliera and Mathers, those fans already have more than enough of that on MTV. We need one big company with one huge catalog to take a big gamble. I'm certain it would pay off.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla just keeps getting better and better... With all the features it has, it's well on it's way to becoming the super user's uber browser. I had to tweak one of the "secret features" a few weeks ago. (Port 1080 is denied unless you explicitly tell the browser that it's OK to access) The info I found, referred me to the about:config screen. When I saw it I was very impressed at how much potential there is for using this browser in so many different ways. The only thing they need on Linux now is the "Quick Start" or whatever they call it launcher program. That way you will only have to wait a fraction of a second for Mozilla to appear. I think this could be implemented by having another Mozilla componenet that you can run at X login. It doesn't actually display any output, it just loads the base elements of Mozilla needed to launch any Mozilla app. That would be EXTREMELY cool...
-- For my comments on the new difficulties in first posting and the "broken-ness" of metamoderation, go here:
http://slashdot.org/~Trolling4Dollars/journal/2699 5
Oh yeah... I forgot to include the link:
http://www.electronicsurplus.com
It's in a section of town known as "Slavic Village", just south of downtown Cleveland. Not as much fun as a lot of the places other people are describing, but I've found a good deaal of odd equipment there. One time I needed a power supply for my laptop and they happened to have an old power supply for a rooftop antenna rotor that was the right voltage. Ran just fine with the laptop and only cost me about $13. They've also had things like old reel-to-reel tape drives, VT100 terminals, and some pretty freaky medical looking shit. It's much better for electronic components though when you need to get your circuit design on... Kind of wish there was a cooler place in Clevo though.
Yes. That was the movie. Thanks! :)
Naked post!!!! I am absolutely and totally naked!!!!!!
...there are quite a few of the old guard from DEC who were on board when the Alpha was developed now working at AMD. I'd love to see AMD break away completely from the x86 clone and make something completely unique along the lines of Crusoe. Build it with next generation technology in mind. Imagine not having a Wintel box but instead having a LinMicro. Would be VERY cool. Oh yeah... get rid of the DRM crap as well.
The point that the music industry seems to NOT understand is that they could make so much more money by selling music in electronic format. The ridiculous things they are doing to try and recoup the money that they claim to be losing to piracy is not helping them. They would be better off accepting the fact that some numbnuts out there are always going to pirate music, but honest customers will pay. The people who tend to spend a lot on music (like myself) don't want copies. They want the genuine item. DRM or no DRM, people like us are the people who buy the most stuff. The teenies who buy Britney and X-Tina can be suckered into cool "packaging" for their image. If you make an electronic format player with a display on the front that actually displays the album art (no longer locked into the square format that CDs and records have had) then the files will sell like hotcakes. Add "cool" flash animation and you're set with the disposable youth crowd. For serious music collectors, offer the music in a higher bitrate at a higher cost. Believe me, those folks will pay for it readily. But no... those dopes are trying to preserve a dying business model without investigating the possible future models. Oh well, their loss.
...that touched on the same topic. Only the movie was kind of depressing. I wish I could remember the name of it. It was an old 70s movie. Basically this brilliant computer scientist has some kind of accident which causes him to have seizures that make him criminally violent. He winds up killing his wife and it lands him in prison. All of this happens before the movie starts and is expounded during the credits. However, throughout the movie he winds up looking more like a late 60s playboy with a leer that would make Jenna Jamison feel dirty. Anyway... my point here... He is the subject of an experimental brain implant that is supposed to prevent the seizures. Initially, the chip implant is successful. His seizures stop. But as the scientists monitor his progress, they notice that his brain starts making adjustments on it's own to bypass the behavior of the chip. In a way the chip is excercising his brain chemistry to make the seizures much stronger and longer. He escapes from the lab, kills a prostitute and then begins going after other people. The basic idea here is that this kind of thing doesn't work. Now... me being the pseudo-scientist that I am, I tend to disagree with that view. I think this is just the start of the inevitable conclusion: Man and machine MUST merge in order for both forms of life to evolve. Machines need our imperfection and we need their endurance and precision.
Actually you have no idea about what I'm like. I don't think America is a free country at all. It's vastly different from what it used to be when I was a kid (1970s). This country is full of creeps that are only interested in making profit to the detriment of the rest of the world. Our commander-in-thief being one of the biggest creeps here. I, personally, say a lot about them inhibiting a lot of my rights... But I also know that the only way to make a difference and change things is either:
A. Become a politician and hope you don't get corrupted or killed along the way.
B. One man "civil war" and put a gun to the politicians you don't like or agree with.
Since I have no real interest in politics and I don't care to get assasinated by the crazed right-wingers or incarcerated, I won't do either.
Anyway... you can bleat all you want, I'm no sheep. I use Linux, I vote with my pocket book (typically left for me since I'm not a rich man), I buy globally since American made stuff tends to be worth shit, and if I could, I'd vote socialist because it's the only system that makes sense. Go back from whence you came troll...
YHBT
In Australia there are vast expanses of land with no speed limit. That is the way it should be because the chances of injuring anyone are extremely small and the land to travel over is vast. In the US there isn't a lot of land like that at all, so reasonable speed limits (55-65 MPH) are necessary in a majority of the country. The speed limits are increased (75 MPH approx 120 km/h) when there is a need for it (such as the big western states like NM and TX) This also makes sense. What you illustrate above sounds like selfish whining to me. 18 km is not that big of a distance even if there aren't any cars on it. The only time the US ever raises the speed limit to dangerous levels is when there is something more like a 40-50km stretch. Now that makes more sense. In areas that aren't as big as that the lower speed limit makes sense, not to mention it's fuel efficient (65 MPH is the general sweet spot).
If the speed limit says 110 km/h, then you must drive 110 km/h and no faster. The only exceptions should be emergencies (woman in labor, serious injury, etc...). If you are late for a fucking meeting, then screw it. Meetings are never important enough to put other people's lives at risk. I don't care how "safely" you can drive at 140 km/h, you are still breaking the law and deserve to be ticketed until your license is revoked. We'd have a lot less problems if people just stuck to following all the rules in this world...
Or... Osama Bin Laden. After all, isn't that who we should be doggedly pursuing post Sept. 11th? Whatever happened to that whole thing anyway? All I seem to be hearing about is Saddam-this, Saddam-that.
I wonder if Echelon is just a fake like the research for nuclear powered air fighters during and after WWII? The supposed research back then spent a huge amount of money over the course of about four years and came up empty handed. Later on, it was revealed that this was just a convenient way for some companies to funnel money out of the government and into private hands. No research ever actually took place, just a lot of cheap show and blow to satisfy a few of the curious.
Based on my non-scientific calculations... The number of people that have said "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!" has been said is so large that it approaches infinity. ie. it's a constantly growing number with no certain end, a lot like Pi. This is true especially since people are likely to be saying this for a long time to come. Given that assumption, it's fairly safe to say that a cluster of all those "idiots", as you put it, would be quite powerful. No matter what their level of intelligence, the sheer processing power would be pretty enormous! Infinitely enormous, in fact. With this in mind, I think what you have proposed is extremely dangerous. A few years ago on Slashdot this story suggested that as processing power increases, and CPU size decreases, CPUs generate more heat. The idea being that eventually a laptop could become a small sun, or even a black hole might apply to this cluster as well. That would be pretty damn scary! So, to the original poster above; Congrats dude. You've just suggested creating a device that could threaten the entire planet. Depending on which side of the fence I'm on, (I won't say which) you're a terrorist, or... a redeemer. As my friend Gordon would say, "Yup. The volcano for all of them (them being his enemies -ed.) as soon as I take over the world."
I live in Cleveland Ohio. My wife and I took two trips out west two years in a row. In 2000, we went out west to Carlsbad NM via US 40. All along the way, I found nothing. Granted, that wireless access really hadn't burst onto the mainstream scene yet. In 2001, we took another trip out west to Glacier National Park via US 80 and 90, and again there was no wireless access anywhere. Not only was wireless access non-existant, but large parts of the west barely even have dial-up access.
My boss and I have often discussed why it is that broadband combined wireless haven't taken off in places like hotels and rest stops. At this point they are VERY inexpensive and it wouldn't be hard to implement at all even for those organizations with little money. On many of my trips around the US, I've found that broadband and wireless are only available in the most expensive accomodations (A Radisson in Massachusetts for instance). We did happen to stay in a Comfort Inn in PA once that actually had ethernet in the room (LodgeNet was the ISP) that gave decent speeds for a reasonable price ($4.99 for 24 hours. Of course, Radisson's wireless access was free of charge). But, that was a 1 in 25 experience in terms of frequency of occurence.
Just last month we took a trip to Australia and found that what appears to be common there are coin-op internet access stations nearly everywhere. Again, I didn't find any wireless or wired access in any of the hotels we stayed in (Mostly "Flag" hotels. Also a few Ibis). I was able to get dial-up with Telstra Bigpond, but 28.8-42K feels pretty slow these days.
I think the problem is that a lot of hotels, rest areas, airports, etc... think that this stuff is really expensive. So... it's time for all you WiFi hacktivists to get out there and spread that word that wireless is here, broadband is here and they are both reasonably priced. In fact a lot of those hotels could cut down on their outside lines and use that money for the DSL line or two to give their customres high speed access.
Oh well... just a few thoughts on this subject, but not much else to say.
Actually, there is a hierarchy to the way Windows starts up its services because there are dependencies. And, you can change the order of startup to some extent if you know how to work in the registry.
This example perfectly illustrates what linus was having problems with when Ingo suggested that users just nice X up. It hides the problem, but doesn't actually fix it. Windows XP plays tricks on users to make them think that it's faster than Win2K or even NT. It loads the GUI earlier than the previous OSes, but there is still a lot of shit happening on the system in the background when you first get to the desktop (services starting, background apps loading, etc...). This is what causes the delay in response to clicking on the Start button. To prove this to a friend with Linux, I set X to start up a lot earlier and disabled a few of the non-critical services in the init scripts and compiled a custom kernel. Total APPARENT boot time from "Joe User's" perspective was about 30 seconds. I have to wonder if it would be a hell of a lot faster with this new patch. The thing is that these changes DON'T actually make the system faster at all. It's pretty much the same as before, but the end-user experience is that it APPEARS faster. That seems to be what a lot of people miss in this discussion.
My Ensoniq Mirage DSK8 digital sampler. I got it in 1985 and still use it as my main controller keyboard today. Pretty cool system built around a Motorola 6805 CPU. While it doesn't quite have the specs of my modern gear, it's got its charm. I can still coax some mean sounds out of it too. Plus the digitally controlled analog filters in it rock. I made mods on it to pass other signals through the filter network.
I have a 0K SCSI drive. I'm not too impressed with it.
The type of music does make a difference. I mostly listen to electonica/dance music. Since a lot of that stuff is based on fairly pure, artificial waveforms, it compresses extremely well. The few jazz and classical albums I have definitely exhibit more artifact. This is due to the enharmonic nature of some of the instruments used. For example, the strings in a lot of classical will really exhibit artifact if encoded at 128K. I was only able to encode at 192 for less artifact and 384 for almost no artifact at all. In jazz, ride cymbals tend to be the culprit. For music that uses distorted guitar, many of the same artifacts apply (Something by Ministry or KMFDM will illustrate this).
But, I still contend that even on a regular stereo 99% of average listeners will not hear a difference. It's just the same as people who can't tell the difference between FM radio, cassette, and CD. If people COULD hear the difference, FM radio would have been long gone as well as cassette. But they are still with us.
Not that I am disagreeing with you... but only about 1% of the public can tell the difference between CD-Audio and a 128K MP3. I can hear the difference and I have a few friends who can. But most of my family can't. My co-workers can't. And I'm willing to bet it's the same with you. Trying to argue that a lossy format doesn't sound as good as the original CD would be a hard sell to the people selling the music. Sure, they can probably tell the difference too, but they realize that 99% of the folks out there WILL pay $1 per track.
Exactly. If any of these services want to succeed they need to realize that targeting small audiences IS financially viable with electronic distribution. The main complaint a lot of record companies seemed to have in the past was the problem of maintaining stock for things that don't sell a lot. With digital distribution, this problem no longer exists since you don't need to have 35,000 copies of an album by VanDerGraff Generator for instance. You have one which is duped and has a one time unlock code inserted so that it can be burned to CD by the user.
BTW... I went to a Mr. Bungle concert back in the early 90s in Cleveland. Very cool show. I wish I knew who the opening band was though. They were awesome too.
Once the 90s hit and grunge came on the scene, the music biz has gone downhill. It became harder and harder to find decent music (I tend to prefer electronic music) and by the mid 90s, well nigh impossible. Of course this is all from the perspective of a US citizen (the country with the worst music on radio).
When I first found MP3s back in 1995, my first thought was that this would be the music format of the future. Not MP3 per se, but digital files with no tangible presence. It occured to me that if music was delivered this way, we could have a la carte music distribution. You could just buy the songs you wanted and burn them to a CD.
If this is the model that Apple uses, AND they eventually have (or someone else) have a wide variety of music, then the model is sure to be a hit. They can satisfy everyone from the low brow Eminem, Missy Elliot, Bristina fans to the fey Bare Naked Ladies, Train and Dave Matthews fans, to the highly cutlured but inaccessible David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Stephin Merrit fans.
The key to this whole thing is going to be selection. If any of these companies limit themselves to small catalogs, no one is going to buy. Even if they wind up only selling the "sure bets" like Ugliera and Mathers, those fans already have more than enough of that on MTV. We need one big company with one huge catalog to take a big gamble. I'm certain it would pay off.
Damn Funny m'boy!!! I nearly missed it, but then caught it a second later. I was laughing uncontrollably a second after that.
Poetry... Pure poetry.