Personally I don't think this one works. Here's why:
The $1million dollar advance is the amount the company are willing to invest in breaking you into the market. This is recording costs, living costs, equipment costs, the manager's 20% and, by far the biggest of all, marketing costs. That;s what Jobs missed, I think. The marketing budget is included in the advance.
What a lot of artists don't realise is that most of the $1million they think they just got paid is already earmarked for someone else. The biggest rock band in the UK at the moment spent just 20,000 on their platinum selling No. 1 album. Even the bigger bands would have to sit around and think hard about ways to spend more than $100,000 on an album.
What a lot of artists also fail to appreciate fully is that the term is 'advance' and not payment. The whole way it works is that the artist will not see a penny in revenue from the company until their sales have paid back the advance.
I think a lot of the problem with records companies these days is that they're regularly chucking huge marketing budgets at mediocre acts that the the public wouldn't otherwise be interested in. They're selling music like movies.. hype it enough and enough people will buy the CD to make back the marketing budget. Pay-ola and all the rest don't help the bottom line much either.
With any luck the sea-change in music distribution & production that we're seeing now will help a few of the better bands and artists find audiences that the majors just wouldn't know how to pursuse and we'll have more choice as a result.
Here's a link to the text of The Manual - How to have a No.1 Record by a couple of guys who did just that a couple of times over here in the UK following this system. They also gained notoriety for allegedly burning 1million in a publicity stunt. Called the KLF... it's bit long in the tooth now but still very interesting and funny.
They already have joined component built with this method.. but not on the megascale we're used to in modern procesors.
I think circuitry built using this approach would have to be thought about in a fundementally different way.
Fairly obviously (I think) large scale structures like the processors we know and love today would be very dificult to create using this organic approach. A better approach might be to just go for creating very dense, very connected but essentially amorphous 'mats' of computing resource (neuron like units perhaps ??) and treating the whole thing as more like an FPGA than a traditional structured computing device. So the problem becomes not how to grow these things in a particular shape.. but how to persuade the shapeless mass to do something useful.
Would it possible to have these things assembled by protein structures that deliberately mutate at each assembly to provide binding sites that uniquely identify each processing element. That might be a start.
Flicking through the SDK docs it seems Windows app. developers.. hell.. maybe even the driver developers... are going to have to brush up either C# or Basic.NET.
As far as I can tell MS have tied all future app. development on Windows into proprietary languages...
'Street-teaming' is what we call it over here.. get a load of fan boys or whatever to post to chat rooms/msg boards etc about the film and hope a buzz develops. Also used extensively in the music industry.
A bit like the marketing strategy described in Gibsons last book 'Pattern Recognition' if you've read that.
And that final year course probably being the last time I encountered Z before reading this article today...
Should also be noted that Aston (at least when I was there) also thought Ada and Modula-2 to be useful teaching languages.. what marvellously transferrable skills those are...
And maybe you've never really worked in a real software house...
Number of times I've seen genuine, useful code reuse past the obvious stuff covered by STL I can count on the fingers of one person.. mostly it's just some idiot with a NIH attitude wanting to do it all himself and generally getting it functionally right but with a usability/obvious interface factor down in the low numbers.. number of times I've seen that happen is just untrue and I've been a pro now for 10 years...
I'm with the OO sucks guy for the most part.. I've never been anything but an OO type of guy but these days I\ve learnt not to waste too much time trying to make a non-OO problem fit into an OO pattern.. or to design an elegant class library for that'll never get re-used..
The world needs more pragmatic programmers and less people who think cause you have to be bright to do it you get to sit in some ivory goddamn reclining chair acheiving very little.. managers are not the problem... it's the vast amount of useless coders out there...
I've got to agree... 80% seems an obviously wrong figure. Note that the poll was sponsored by a maker of these cards and that the actual questions asked were not stated.
Wildy guessing I would say 60% of *those 1000 people who responded* were strongly in favour of a *non-compulsory, 100% error-free* card if it could be proved that it would *definitely* reduce social security fraud and speed up access to government services.
Well.. over this side of the pond privacy *is* a right. You might well be recorded most every minute of your public life but the minute you're back behind closed doors it is very hard for most European govts to secure reights to invade that space. Ditto bank accounts, phone logs etc etc. In the UK it's even illegal for most govt departments to share information on an individual amongst each other.
Your point about the original drug laws being racist in origin are particularly salient. Legislation was first introduced about the same time marijuana use began to spread into the population at large.. seems to be largely puritan government didn't want the white majority doing like the black folk do. Over here in the UK the first drug control laws were introduced round about the time the papers were full of 'Yellow Peril' scare stories about chinese immigrants using opium to corrupt our decent english women.
It can only be hoped that our current situation is merely one of temporary prohibition much like (but longer lived) the one that existed for alcohol in the States during the 20s. Let's hope that more and more of the world accept that whilst demand is there the drug war is utterly unwinnable and alternative approaches (such as those found in Holland, Switzerland and more recently the Lambeth district of London) are seriously considered. If 40 million americans are recreational drug users then surely that's a popular mandate. In any kind of democracy worth the name surely that's a powerful enough slice of the electorate to get things changed. Perhaps it's the ingrained, blindly moralstic standpoint of the media we have to worry about...
Incidentally.. quick calculation for you:
450 tons cocaine smuggled in to America every year (assume imperial tons).
(450 x 1016 x 1000) grammes/year. Here in the U.K. 1g pure cocaine fetches £60.
Serious point this and a pity I'm so late into the conversation but what about this for an idea..
Do you think the RIAA etc would toletate AG like services if the server only allowed MP3s etc *below* a certain quality to be shared. In my view this would have to be 128 kbps to be acceptable.
Restricting quality in this way allows the recording artists to have another great marketing tool at their disposal whilst still providing the incentive for the end consumer to go out and purchase the original media.
.. well, it doesn't apply does it. Remember that the DMCA, Patriot Act, Child protection Act etc only apply within the U.S.
Whilst most European governments (for instance) have ISP Log access laws in the case of criminal investigations your rights to online privacy (as most other kinds) are still pretty well protected and legislation has not proceeded further than these basic laws.
Over here in the U.K. we reacted to September 11th by modifying our own Anti-Terrorism Laws in a manner I suspect was intended to allow the immediate detainment of a small number of specific activists we already knew about but previously had no powers to pull in. Our particular multi-party system and the fact we have a generally liberal, libertarian government tends to mean we avoid laws that in any way could be considered draconian.
The DMCA would actually be near impossible to implement over here due to our fundamentally different legal treatment of intellectual property rights. You also tend to find that where big business goes up against the individual on this side of the pond that the little guy will often win. Corporations do not have the same rights as individuals over here.
As for the Child Protection Act.. the fact that we have have no constutionally enshrined rights to free speech might make you think that we're in constant danger of having any freedoms of speech quashed at the whim of our governments but it reality that doesn't happen. Europe, by and large, has left-leaning executive and legistlature so this sort of thing is less likely to occur. And the flip side of not having a freedom of speech act is that we also don't have nutcases bringing suits against the government arguing for their unalienable right to publish (whether manufactured or not) a bunch of kiddie porn.
And the conclusion.. remember the U.S. has boundaries and that the net doesn't. If you're worried about what's going on simply move your on-line activites elsewhere if not your butt.
I *totally* agree with your comments re: no reason to write in pure C++ any more.. i'm finding it incredibly frustrating at the moment going back to working in a pure C++ shop after coming from a far smarter 'mixed-mode' environment.. it just seems *so* labour intensive...
Actually.. does anyone out there use this kind of mixed-language mode of development succesfully.. I certainly have and was extremely impressed with the results.. or do we all still cling to the notion that pure C/C++ is the only 'pure' way to be ??
The FM certainly looks cool.. wouldn't of thought of *that* way of doing it..
Think you both slightly miss the point in that you're not considering the possibility of being able to DJ *purely* in the digital domain. If that requires picking up a feel for a new kind of control interface then so be it..
I had and idea for something similar to the DM2 a year or so back (damn, I wish I patented half the thing I thought of.. I notice no-ones done my 'air drumsticks' yet though).. I've always fancied inflicting my musical taste on a crowd but I'd rather spend the £1000 I'd need just to get the turntables and mixer on guitars.. plus I really haven't got the pateience to trawl goddamn records shops to build up the necessary collection of vinyl. So what I wanted was a control interface that effectively allowed me to cue and scratch MP3s... the DM2 looks like just that although is currently somewhat crippled by being only able to play 'approved' tracks..
Has anyone else out there had any similar thoughts in this vein ?? What would be the ideal set up for the purely digital DJ ?? Personally I think it's two 'decks', a mixer and a laptop/PC with two sound cards.. (for each channel of the mixer)..
Well.. yeah.. but games still pays substantially less than commercial.
My first couple of real development jobs were in games but the pay was abysmal and the industry dominated by chancers and cowboys so I moved over to commercial. 4 years later I'm getting a little bored with all this stuff and decided to have another look at the games industry. I actually find that the pay scale tops off at what I'm earning now with very few salaries coming anything near what I'd exepct to earn for a good, if dull, days work. I thought it might just be a British thing but when I checked the salary survey over on Gamasutra I find a similar situation stateside..
Plus at least in commercial I don't have to deal with the superior attitude of a bunch of mostly actually quite poor coders who think they're it 'cause they do games.. and earn about half what I do...
So.. my advice... commercial is crying out for good coders.. games is vastly oversubscribed.. go do a 9 to 5 for some dull company and spend the extra money and time you'll have on developing a raging coke habit...
You can be a citizen of any member state of the E.U. and have the automatic right to live and work in any other member state.
Military Service ? Yes it would.. but you're unlikely to be called for National Service unless you're under 25.. and as far as I can remember it's only Norway and Greece that do that in any real way.
It's kinda relative.. remember you don't have to pay for healthcare in most European states, for instance. You get better holidays, too. And we're a damn sight more civilised over here on balance.. we're happier and we live longer than US citizens.. even though we drink a hell of a lot more.
But it is comparatively expensive.. especially for rent. You have to remember we're old, old countries over here with not a lot of space left. I think London is amongst the top 3 most expensive places in the world to live, Paris is also kinda pricey, but the cities over here are *so* much more beautiful than most of the ones I've seen in the states.
The fact that you only seem to consider Python as a scripting language is possibly the reason you don't see the point of it..
Python occupies what I see as pretty unique point being very suitable for both knock-off scripts *and* real programs.. my main project at work here (Orchestream, London) is a software simulation of Cisco routing kit (CLI, SNMP agent etc etc).. not a trivial implementation by any means.. and entirely written in Python.
I've also used Python to provide scripting wrappers to our (C++) router drivers *and* use it daily to knock off useful one time scripts.. it's that exact flexibility in a relatively sructured (from a CompSci point of view) but still pragmatic language that I think makes Python so very powerful..
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I don't think this one works. Here's why:
The $1million dollar advance is the amount the company are willing to invest in breaking you into the market. This is recording costs, living costs, equipment costs, the manager's 20% and, by far the biggest of all, marketing costs. That;s what Jobs missed, I think. The marketing budget is included in the advance.
What a lot of artists don't realise is that most of the $1million they think they just got paid is already earmarked for someone else. The biggest rock band in the UK at the moment spent just 20,000 on their platinum selling No. 1 album. Even the bigger bands would have to sit around and think hard about ways to spend more than $100,000 on an album.
What a lot of artists also fail to appreciate fully is that the term is 'advance' and not payment. The whole way it works is that the artist will not see a penny in revenue from the company until their sales have paid back the advance.
I think a lot of the problem with records companies these days is that they're regularly chucking huge marketing budgets at mediocre acts that the the public wouldn't otherwise be interested in. They're selling music like movies.. hype it enough and enough people will buy the CD to make back the marketing budget. Pay-ola and all the rest don't help the bottom line much either.
With any luck the sea-change in music distribution & production that we're seeing now will help a few of the better bands and artists find audiences that the majors just wouldn't know how to pursuse and we'll have more choice as a result.
Here's a link to the text of The Manual - How to have a No.1 Record by a couple of guys who did just that a couple of times over here in the UK following this system. They also gained notoriety for allegedly burning 1million in a publicity stunt. Called the KLF... it's bit long in the tooth now but still very interesting and funny.
They already have joined component built with this method.. but not on the megascale we're used to in modern procesors.
I think circuitry built using this approach would have to be thought about in a fundementally different way.
Fairly obviously (I think) large scale structures like the processors we know and love today would be very dificult to create using this organic approach. A better approach might be to just go for creating very dense, very connected but essentially amorphous 'mats' of computing resource (neuron like units perhaps ??) and treating the whole thing as more like an FPGA than a traditional structured computing device. So the problem becomes not how to grow these things in a particular shape.. but how to persuade the shapeless mass to do something useful.
Would it possible to have these things assembled by protein structures that deliberately mutate at each assembly to provide binding sites that uniquely identify each processing element. That might be a start.
Totally with you on that.. wtf is he on about ? The BMG guy seems to be talking perfect sense.
At least the Communists have a clear choice: Arm & Hammer, surely.
Oh... ok then..
.NET compiler from ?
So from whom do I buy my C# or Basic
But the API is presented as C#.
Flicking through the SDK docs it seems Windows app. developers.. hell.. maybe even the driver developers... are going to have to brush up either C# or Basic .NET.
As far as I can tell MS have tied all future app. development on Windows into proprietary languages...
Ace..
'Street-teaming' is what we call it over here.. get a load of fan boys or whatever to post to chat rooms/msg boards etc about the film and hope a buzz develops. Also used extensively in the music industry.
A bit like the marketing strategy described in Gibsons last book 'Pattern Recognition' if you've read that.
And that final year course probably being the last time I encountered Z before reading this article today...
Should also be noted that Aston (at least when I was there) also thought Ada and Modula-2 to be useful teaching languages.. what marvellously transferrable skills those are...
t o b e
And maybe you've never really worked in a real software house...
Number of times I've seen genuine, useful code reuse past the obvious stuff covered by STL I can count on the fingers of one person.. mostly it's just some idiot with a NIH attitude wanting to do it all himself and generally getting it functionally right but with a usability/obvious interface factor down in the low numbers.. number of times I've seen that happen is just untrue and I've been a pro now for 10 years...
I'm with the OO sucks guy for the most part.. I've never been anything but an OO type of guy but these days I\ve learnt not to waste too much time trying to make a non-OO problem fit into an OO pattern.. or to design an elegant class library for that'll never get re-used..
The world needs more pragmatic programmers and less people who think cause you have to be bright to do it you get to sit in some ivory goddamn reclining chair acheiving very little.. managers are not the problem... it's the vast amount of useless coders out there...
The best are productive.. the best use python..
I've got to agree... 80% seems an obviously wrong figure. Note that the poll was sponsored by a maker of these cards and that the actual questions asked were not stated.
Wildy guessing I would say 60% of *those 1000 people who responded* were strongly in favour of a *non-compulsory, 100% error-free* card if it could be proved that it would *definitely* reduce social security fraud and speed up access to government services.
Well.. over this side of the pond privacy *is* a right. You might well be recorded most every minute of your public life but the minute you're back behind closed doors it is very hard for most European govts to secure reights to invade that space. Ditto bank accounts, phone logs etc etc. In the UK it's even illegal for most govt departments to share information on an individual amongst each other.
Lighten up some and you might enjoy life...
Moderate this the hell up everyone...
Your point about the original drug laws being racist in origin are particularly salient. Legislation was first introduced about the same time marijuana use began to spread into the population at large.. seems to be largely puritan government didn't want the white majority doing like the black folk do. Over here in the UK the first drug control laws were introduced round about the time the papers were full of 'Yellow Peril' scare stories about chinese immigrants using opium to corrupt our decent english women.
It can only be hoped that our current situation is merely one of temporary prohibition much like (but longer lived) the one that existed for alcohol in the States during the 20s. Let's hope that more and more of the world accept that whilst demand is there the drug war is utterly unwinnable and alternative approaches (such as those found in Holland, Switzerland and more recently the Lambeth district of London) are seriously considered. If 40 million americans are recreational drug users then surely that's a popular mandate. In any kind of democracy worth the name surely that's a powerful enough slice of the electorate to get things changed. Perhaps it's the ingrained, blindly moralstic standpoint of the media we have to worry about...
Incidentally.. quick calculation for you:
450 tons cocaine smuggled in to America every year (assume imperial tons).
(450 x 1016 x 1000) grammes/year.
Here in the U.K. 1g pure cocaine fetches £60.
That's £27 billion a year.
DEA budget last year: ~£1.3 billion year.
Who's going to win ?
Serious point this and a pity I'm so late into the conversation but what about this for an idea..
Do you think the RIAA etc would toletate AG like services if the server only allowed MP3s etc *below* a certain quality to be shared. In my view this would have to be 128 kbps to be acceptable.
Restricting quality in this way allows the recording artists to have another great marketing tool at their disposal whilst still providing the incentive for the end consumer to go out and purchase the original media.
Thick little puppy, aren't *you* ?
.. well, it doesn't apply does it. Remember that the DMCA, Patriot Act, Child protection Act etc only apply within the U.S.
Whilst most European governments (for instance) have ISP Log access laws in the case of criminal investigations your rights to online privacy (as most other kinds) are still pretty well protected and legislation has not proceeded further than these basic laws.
Over here in the U.K. we reacted to September 11th by modifying our own Anti-Terrorism Laws in a manner I suspect was intended to allow the immediate detainment of a small number of specific activists we already knew about but previously had no powers to pull in. Our particular multi-party system and the fact we have a generally liberal, libertarian government tends to mean we avoid laws that in any way could be considered draconian.
The DMCA would actually be near impossible to implement over here due to our fundamentally different legal treatment of intellectual property rights. You also tend to find that where big business goes up against the individual on this side of the pond that the little guy will often win. Corporations do not have the same rights as individuals over here.
As for the Child Protection Act.. the fact that we have have no constutionally enshrined rights to free speech might make you think that we're in constant danger of having any freedoms of speech quashed at the whim of our governments but it reality that doesn't happen. Europe, by and large, has left-leaning executive and legistlature so this sort of thing is less likely to occur. And the flip side of not having a freedom of speech act is that we also don't have nutcases bringing suits against the government arguing for their unalienable right to publish (whether manufactured or not) a bunch of kiddie porn.
And the conclusion.. remember the U.S. has boundaries and that the net doesn't. If you're worried about what's going on simply move your on-line activites elsewhere if not your butt.
A bit 'me too' but I figured I might as well..
I *totally* agree with your comments re: no reason to write in pure C++ any more.. i'm finding it incredibly frustrating at the moment going back to working in a pure C++ shop after coming from a far smarter 'mixed-mode' environment.. it just seems *so* labour intensive...
Actually.. does anyone out there use this kind of mixed-language mode of development succesfully.. I certainly have and was extremely impressed with the results.. or do we all still cling to the notion that pure C/C++ is the only 'pure' way to be ??
The FM certainly looks cool.. wouldn't of thought of *that* way of doing it..
Think you both slightly miss the point in that you're not considering the possibility of being able to DJ *purely* in the digital domain. If that requires picking up a feel for a new kind of control interface then so be it..
I had and idea for something similar to the DM2 a year or so back (damn, I wish I patented half the thing I thought of.. I notice no-ones done my 'air drumsticks' yet though).. I've always fancied inflicting my musical taste on a crowd but I'd rather spend the £1000 I'd need just to get the turntables and mixer on guitars.. plus I really haven't got the pateience to trawl goddamn records shops to build up the necessary collection of vinyl. So what I wanted was a control interface that effectively allowed me to cue and scratch MP3s... the DM2 looks like just that although is currently somewhat crippled by being only able to play 'approved' tracks..
Has anyone else out there had any similar thoughts in this vein ?? What would be the ideal set up for the purely digital DJ ?? Personally I think it's two 'decks', a mixer and a laptop/PC with two sound cards.. (for each channel of the mixer)..
Network management...
t o b e
Well.. yeah.. but games still pays substantially less than commercial.
My first couple of real development jobs were in games but the pay was abysmal and the industry dominated by chancers and cowboys so I moved over to commercial. 4 years later I'm getting a little bored with all this stuff and decided to have another look at the games industry. I actually find that the pay scale tops off at what I'm earning now with very few salaries coming anything near what I'd exepct to earn for a good, if dull, days work. I thought it might just be a British thing but when I checked the salary survey over on Gamasutra I find a similar situation stateside..
Plus at least in commercial I don't have to deal with the superior attitude of a bunch of mostly actually quite poor coders who think they're it 'cause they do games.. and earn about half what I do...
So.. my advice... commercial is crying out for good coders.. games is vastly oversubscribed.. go do a 9 to 5 for some dull company and spend the extra money and time you'll have on developing a raging coke habit...
t o b e
You can be a citizen of any member state of the E.U. and have the automatic right to live and work in any other member state.
Military Service ? Yes it would.. but you're unlikely to be called for National Service unless you're under 25.. and as far as I can remember it's only Norway and Greece that do that in any real way.
It's kinda relative.. remember you don't have to pay for healthcare in most European states, for instance. You get better holidays, too. And we're a damn sight more civilised over here on balance.. we're happier and we live longer than US citizens.. even though we drink a hell of a lot more.
But it is comparatively expensive.. especially for rent. You have to remember we're old, old countries over here with not a lot of space left. I think London is amongst the top 3 most expensive places in the world to live, Paris is also kinda pricey, but the cities over here are *so* much more beautiful than most of the ones I've seen in the states.
And we dress better...
And we're much better educated..
And better looking...
The fact that you only seem to consider Python as a scripting language is possibly the reason you don't see the point of it..
Python occupies what I see as pretty unique point being very suitable for both knock-off scripts *and* real programs.. my main project at work here (Orchestream, London) is a software simulation of Cisco routing kit (CLI, SNMP agent etc etc).. not a trivial implementation by any means.. and entirely written in Python.
I've also used Python to provide scripting wrappers to our (C++) router drivers *and* use it daily to knock off useful one time scripts.. it's that exact flexibility in a relatively sructured (from a CompSci point of view) but still pragmatic language that I think makes Python so very powerful..
Enforced spacing rules ??
Here.. have a tab.. '/t'.
t o b e