Even Bill Gates knows this: you'll get more bang for your buck if you give people in third world countries food, water and decent health care, then decent places to live, then decent jobs, transportation, education, basic human rights, THEN television and the internet. Otherwise I fail to see the purpose of this other than a novelty act so some people can get their project in the paper.
Beyond the sci-fi and action elements of the Matrix it's neat how they are working more of the religios and philisophical elements into the canon... quite a bit of it going on in this short... the Boddhavista sitting on the lotus, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That being said, I was expecting this episode to be a bit more cynical (if that can be imagined, it's pretty dark already)... I always thought it would be a mind bender to learn that the humans voluntarily hooked themselves up to the Matrix because living that way would be preferrable to the burned out wasteland they created through war.
There are three types of people posting on this thread.
1: The cheap bastards who at no price except for free, will music be cheap enough. These people are impossible to satisfy with a realistic business model.
2: The vast majority, who just care about price. DRM is acceptable as long as it's wussy and if the price is cheap enough, who cares. A little bit of inconvenience due to DRM is no big deal if the price is low enough (and mind you, the DRM on these AAC files is pretty wussy).
3: A loud minority for whom a purchase from the iTunes store is a political one, that feel supporting any DRM is supporting the powers that be, the music industry, the RIAA, etc. These are the types of people for whom any purchase can be a political statement. The types of people who berate you for shopping at WalMart or eating a hamburger because it supports the corrupt meat-packing industry. They have a point, but they are in the minority... most people don't sit and go through a checklist trying to figure out which product is doing the most harm to which people before they go out to the grocery store and shop.
The money is at #2. #1 will never be satisfied and #3 will never shut up. Go get the money, Apple.
I think a lot of the arrogance / greed of the.commers can be attributed to the speed at which they got "rich", not any personal character flaws of those people. I am of the school that power corrupts and riches are no different. You give anybody a pile of money nearly instantly and I guess the majority of them have trouble handling it. Take a look at recent lottery winners and a lot of them say it makes their lives miserable. Now take a million bucks and dole it out at a more realistic rate, like an allowance, and you get much saner handling of said money.
I remember back in the 80's every body who was working on the assembly lines making cars was freaking out because the jobs were moving to asia, namely, Japan. People thought the US would be owned by Japan in a decade.
I take two things from that experience. First, bitching about your job being lost to someone somewhere else for less is futile. It's gone, the company holds the keys to your job, not you. Corporate America cares only about profit and if you and your union job costs ten times what a worker in some third world country will charge; too bad for you. This will never change; politics is corrupt. Hate to break it to you but it's time to move onto a new line of work. So be flexible. Don't expect you'll have one career your whole life. Second, the mighty can and will fall and there is always something else that will rise to take the place of the old. Right now people are scared that India or China will become some economic powerhouse and rule the world... like the Japanese were supposed to. Didn't happen. Some people are predicting the US economy will run out of steam like we were supposed to in the 80's, or end up like Japan today. I wouldn't bet on it. A turnaround will come from somewhere. Just be ready to work when it happens.
It's funny how many people, who went to college in the hopes of getting a white collar job are now second guessing for whatever reason and thinking maybe they'd be better off being a carpenter or assembly line worker because of unions. Well... those jobs aren't all that, either. They are murder on your body, working in dangerous areas, noisy areas, and there's just as much corruption and back stabbing and business politics crap as any other profession. The primary reason why people think these other jobs are better is because of the union.
What we really need, which I don't get why people can't put two and two together and see, is a freaking tech worker's union. But there are enough people still clinging to the options dream that this obvious solution will be really hard to advertise.
Part of the web revolution was supposed to be low overhead. Guess what, low overhead also means less workers. There's simply no reason, when you're focused on-line, to hire a marketing guru, HR guru, caterer, DJ, masseuse and all that other useless crap the.coms got into. What's being found out is these days you have one guy doing five different jobs and he'll do it, because he's paranoid about getting laid off. Did you know all the cool logos that change every day at Google are done by one person? Back in the day, you would have hired an entire design department, each person earning 70K to do that. Seriously. Times have changed... for the better, in some ways.
There isn't going to be a second boom like 1999. The collapse took out all the smaller weaker companies and we're pretty much left with the survivors: Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, heck toss Microsoft, AOL, Dell, Apple in there. Now it's just time for the big companies to pick and choose what stragglers that are still left treading water (which, implies they have something worth owning) and buy 'em. We're just going to see the bigger companies get bigger. Sometime in the next century there will be another speculative boom but I'll doubt it'll be web-based. Anybody pumping net stocks today probably lost a crap load the last time 'round and is bitterly trying to make up what they lost... or they're just dumb.
South Koreans are also avid gamers. They show competitions on TV for crying out loud. And of course to play these games competitively you gotta have broadband or go to one of these cybercafes. One could say these games are a killer app for broadband. Meanwhile, here in the US you've got people who think 56K is fast enough because all they do online is send email. Others can't get broadband because they live in the sticks or just aren't willing to pay for it. Lasty there's the group of holdouts who think the net is a big waste of time... especially those durn games. What's my point... well I'll bet TV didn't take off until entire families saw stuff like I Love Lucy that you nearly HAD to see every week in order to feel like you're part of modern society. A show or event that everybody felt obligated to participate in. In Korea it's games. Here in America we just have email. The average joe doesn't see any big benefit to broadband.
Take a listen, it sounds like crap. Now the production might be top notch, but the lyrics, the writing, the singing are pretty awful. The song itself blows.
Recording technology is just a tool. It's a good tool, but give it to an amateur hack and it won't enable them to produce masterpieces. Pretty good, average or above average music, but if they can't sing or write a decent lyric or a melody, Pro Tools won't help them.
Okay, so there are plug ins that will help bend your vocal lines into shape and slap a bunch of reverb on them, and enable you to edit to the nano second and splice together all your imperfect tracks to make one perfect one, but get someone who can actually sing and they can bang out a track like that in one take.
What Pro-Tools has no capabality of which is the most important element of a song is still the vocal element. You can synthesize instruments up the wazoo but I have yet to meet a plug-in that could write a song, write a melody, write a lyric and imitate the human voice. Maybe that's the next step.
1. Kill off some major crew members. Replace them with more interesting ones. Why does every Trek have to have the same people for years on end. Takes the fun out of things because you know nobody is in any real danger out there.
2. I have yet to see anything in Trek that matches the trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. That had nothing to do with space, aliens, or missions. That was three friends dealing with each other's personality quirks. It's the key to any hit show. Get some memorable, alive characters and you got a series.
3. Look at what Smallville is doing with the Superman canon. Now that, although I am loathe to admit it, is interesting. You CAN fill out back story and not resort to time travel and Borg. You just have to get good characters, interesting yet familliar situations and run with it.
4. Get some new writers. The Berman team is like the Eagles playing the same damned song over and over again for a decade. Every song they write sounds like one written before.
This series would have been so much better if it predated encounters with aliens and space travel, and spent a few seasons building up to that. I would have loved to have seen a season devoted to humans getting used to the idea of Vulcans and Klingons running around, used to the idea of space travel. They blew these opportunities from the first show, with the Vulcans already hanging around. Gone is the sense of DISCOVERY. The crew on the Enterprise has that totally glazed over Star Trek "been there done that" look about them, and the should be freaking out over the newness of everything!
Actually, I think you are an "elitist indy music prig"... no offense, but since you have the Sleater-Kinney, Hives and the White Stripes on there, you do have pretty one step left of mainstream tastes.
I will totally admit, I don't like most music. That's why buying songs BY THE SONG is so great. I cannot remember the last time I heard a CD where I liked ALL of the songs. Even my favorite albums I dislike 1 or 2 of the songs and could do without them. The vast majority of music produced today is crap, seriously, and the average "good" has two or three songs I can stand to listen to more than a few times. And I certainly don't think I'm alone in this department. That's why CD sales are down, because so much music made these days is pure, unadultrated kaka. And as for the bands that are unsigned? Don't even let me start... it's worse.
Sounds like, since you care about quality and synching with the cd database, that you'd be better off buying the original CD from the record store for 16 bucks. And, obviously, you're not getting your stuff for free from P2P because, you care about the CDDB service, quality and tags... those P2P servinces must really piss you off.
So, just keep buying your CDs from Sam Goody or Amazon or wherever... bet you still have a bunch of LPs in your collection too, eh? Wonder when those are coming back.
Not good arguments. If you really want a cd to carry around, burn your apple bought tracks to a cd. If you really want the liner notes, cd case, and album art, then hey be my guest and go buy yourself a cd. If you're old enough to remember though, when CDs first came out, people bitched that the covers were too small, nobody would buy tiny liner notes and cover art. My point is, what is more portable than a computer file. When you really get into mp3s you'll see how wasteful even a CD is. It's too damned big, heavy, and those cases are a hindrance!
99 cents is the right price. I feel totally comfortable blowing 99 cents multiple times for music. 99 cents is the cost of a cheap hamburger at McDonald's. And, most pop music today is about as disposable and meaningful as a hamburger at McDonalds. And as for quality, this is unimportant to me as well. We're talking about pop music here, not the Taj Mahal or the Mona Lisa. It's disposable, useless fluff. Of course I would want better quality if it were offered, but will hearing Whitesnake or New Kids on The Block in better quality improve the music any?
Next I notice one great benefit of buying music this way is you don't get a jewel case or liner notes. That's right, you heard me correct. I actually don't use either. Pretty much every CD I've bought in the past year has been immediately ripped into iTunes, the CD with liner notes stuffed in an envelope and the jewel case tossed. The CD essentially only exists for me as a backup medium. I can't remember the last time I even felt the need to look at the disc jacket. Saving the time of me chucking the box and the materials is easily worth 99 cents, and the 9.99 for an album is a steal. I hope to never set foot in a record store again, nor pay Amazon to ship me a bunch of crap I will never use, including the CD.
Secondly, one thing that is awesome about the new version of iTunes is the Rendevous capability. I crack open my iBook, and the entire library of mp3s on my main Mac appears. Holy cow... now I can have one copy of my entire library and serve it up without lifting a finger.
Then, I read you can do the same thing, over the net. Meaning, I can be at work on my mac and have access to my entire mp3 library. Holy cow again.
I can hardly wait until they slap Airport on an iPod and do the same thing. Can you imagine just walking down the street and a new playlist shows up on your iPod from some guy walking buy you... arrrgh I'm foaming at the mouth.
The unspoken truth of the matter: recorded music itself has been de-valued. Nobody sees one song as worth 99 cents, let alone 50 cents anymore. All the years of free music online has led the average under 30 year old to come up with the obvious conclusion that music should be free; damn the record labels, damn the artist... the record labels are crooks anyways, and the artists ought to make their money some other way, like concerts or T-shirt sales.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it's the reality of the music biz today and I don't think this download service is gonna fly with a price point of 99 cents. And, I do think that's a shame.
Am I missing something here.
You are allowed to burn songs to a cd. So, what's to stop you from just doing this, then handing said CD to your friend who rips the CD into mp3 format?
If there is no catch to this obvious loophole, then hey I'm all over this service:).
Some obvious things I noticed as evidence why this guy is totally out of touch with reality:
He says DVDs are timeless, they don't wear out. Uh, we just had some articles out about "DVD rot". He also asks who will produce the content... and that an album costs hundreds of thousands to produce and a movie $80mil. Uh, I can name quite a number of excellent movies made for a lot less than $80mil as well as albums that could have been recorded at home for crying out loud. Maybe the industry needs to cut costs.
He wonders why a person doesn't see it wrong to walk into a video store and shoplift a DVD, but would dowload the same movie off the net. Here's a clue for you, because in shoplifting the physical media still exists. When you download something, yeah, it's wrong, but it's a copy. To compare physical theft to copying means you're missing a critical concept. People just don't see "copying" as bad as outright theft for this reason.
This guy is totally reactionary, instead of honestly trying to understand why the music biz is in the situation it's in and work with the consumers. Treating consumers like criminals just legitimizes bad behavior on our part, seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
I found it hilarious. Here they are with no electricity and that's supposed to be representative of useful information they can't live without?
Even Bill Gates knows this: you'll get more bang for your buck if you give people in third world countries food, water and decent health care, then decent places to live, then decent jobs, transportation, education, basic human rights, THEN television and the internet. Otherwise I fail to see the purpose of this other than a novelty act so some people can get their project in the paper.
Beyond the sci-fi and action elements of the Matrix it's neat how they are working more of the religios and philisophical elements into the canon ... quite a bit of it going on in this short ... the Boddhavista sitting on the lotus, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That being said, I was expecting this episode to be a bit more cynical (if that can be imagined, it's pretty dark already) ... I always thought it would be a mind bender to learn that the humans voluntarily hooked themselves up to the Matrix because living that way would be preferrable to the burned out wasteland they created through war.
There are three types of people posting on this thread.
1: The cheap bastards who at no price except for free, will music be cheap enough. These people are impossible to satisfy with a realistic business model.
2: The vast majority, who just care about price. DRM is acceptable as long as it's wussy and if the price is cheap enough, who cares. A little bit of inconvenience due to DRM is no big deal if the price is low enough (and mind you, the DRM on these AAC files is pretty wussy).
3: A loud minority for whom a purchase from the iTunes store is a political one, that feel supporting any DRM is supporting the powers that be, the music industry, the RIAA, etc. These are the types of people for whom any purchase can be a political statement. The types of people who berate you for shopping at WalMart or eating a hamburger because it supports the corrupt meat-packing industry. They have a point, but they are in the minority ... most people don't sit and go through a checklist trying to figure out which product is doing the most harm to which people before they go out to the grocery store and shop.
The money is at #2. #1 will never be satisfied and #3 will never shut up. Go get the money, Apple.
I think a lot of the arrogance / greed of the .commers can be attributed to the speed at which they got "rich", not any personal character flaws of those people. I am of the school that power corrupts and riches are no different. You give anybody a pile of money nearly instantly and I guess the majority of them have trouble handling it. Take a look at recent lottery winners and a lot of them say it makes their lives miserable. Now take a million bucks and dole it out at a more realistic rate, like an allowance, and you get much saner handling of said money.
But when I want my grass mowed, some guy in India ain't gonna be able to do that for me. :)
I remember back in the 80's every body who was working on the assembly lines making cars was freaking out because the jobs were moving to asia, namely, Japan. People thought the US would be owned by Japan in a decade.
I take two things from that experience. First, bitching about your job being lost to someone somewhere else for less is futile. It's gone, the company holds the keys to your job, not you. Corporate America cares only about profit and if you and your union job costs ten times what a worker in some third world country will charge; too bad for you. This will never change; politics is corrupt. Hate to break it to you but it's time to move onto a new line of work. So be flexible. Don't expect you'll have one career your whole life. Second, the mighty can and will fall and there is always something else that will rise to take the place of the old. Right now people are scared that India or China will become some economic powerhouse and rule the world ... like the Japanese were supposed to. Didn't happen. Some people are predicting the US economy will run out of steam like we were supposed to in the 80's, or end up like Japan today. I wouldn't bet on it. A turnaround will come from somewhere. Just be ready to work when it happens.
It's funny how many people, who went to college in the hopes of getting a white collar job are now second guessing for whatever reason and thinking maybe they'd be better off being a carpenter or assembly line worker because of unions. Well ... those jobs aren't all that, either. They are murder on your body, working in dangerous areas, noisy areas, and there's just as much corruption and back stabbing and business politics crap as any other profession. The primary reason why people think these other jobs are better is because of the union.
What we really need, which I don't get why people can't put two and two together and see, is a freaking tech worker's union. But there are enough people still clinging to the options dream that this obvious solution will be really hard to advertise.
Part of the web revolution was supposed to be low overhead. Guess what, low overhead also means less workers. There's simply no reason, when you're focused on-line, to hire a marketing guru, HR guru, caterer, DJ, masseuse and all that other useless crap the .coms got into. What's being found out is these days you have one guy doing five different jobs and he'll do it, because he's paranoid about getting laid off. Did you know all the cool logos that change every day at Google are done by one person? Back in the day, you would have hired an entire design department, each person earning 70K to do that. Seriously. Times have changed ... for the better, in some ways.
Correct, the key is figuring out which jobs are going to stay here and which can be done elsewhere.
There isn't going to be a second boom like 1999. The collapse took out all the smaller weaker companies and we're pretty much left with the survivors: Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, heck toss Microsoft, AOL, Dell, Apple in there. Now it's just time for the big companies to pick and choose what stragglers that are still left treading water (which, implies they have something worth owning) and buy 'em. We're just going to see the bigger companies get bigger. Sometime in the next century there will be another speculative boom but I'll doubt it'll be web-based. Anybody pumping net stocks today probably lost a crap load the last time 'round and is bitterly trying to make up what they lost ... or they're just dumb.
South Koreans are also avid gamers. They show competitions on TV for crying out loud. And of course to play these games competitively you gotta have broadband or go to one of these cybercafes. One could say these games are a killer app for broadband. Meanwhile, here in the US you've got people who think 56K is fast enough because all they do online is send email. Others can't get broadband because they live in the sticks or just aren't willing to pay for it. Lasty there's the group of holdouts who think the net is a big waste of time ... especially those durn games. What's my point ... well I'll bet TV didn't take off until entire families saw stuff like I Love Lucy that you nearly HAD to see every week in order to feel like you're part of modern society. A show or event that everybody felt obligated to participate in. In Korea it's games. Here in America we just have email. The average joe doesn't see any big benefit to broadband.
Take a listen, it sounds like crap. Now the production might be top notch, but the lyrics, the writing, the singing are pretty awful. The song itself blows.
Recording technology is just a tool. It's a good tool, but give it to an amateur hack and it won't enable them to produce masterpieces. Pretty good, average or above average music, but if they can't sing or write a decent lyric or a melody, Pro Tools won't help them.
Okay, so there are plug ins that will help bend your vocal lines into shape and slap a bunch of reverb on them, and enable you to edit to the nano second and splice together all your imperfect tracks to make one perfect one, but get someone who can actually sing and they can bang out a track like that in one take.
What Pro-Tools has no capabality of which is the most important element of a song is still the vocal element. You can synthesize instruments up the wazoo but I have yet to meet a plug-in that could write a song, write a melody, write a lyric and imitate the human voice. Maybe that's the next step.
1. Kill off some major crew members. Replace them with more interesting ones. Why does every Trek have to have the same people for years on end. Takes the fun out of things because you know nobody is in any real danger out there. 2. I have yet to see anything in Trek that matches the trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. That had nothing to do with space, aliens, or missions. That was three friends dealing with each other's personality quirks. It's the key to any hit show. Get some memorable, alive characters and you got a series. 3. Look at what Smallville is doing with the Superman canon. Now that, although I am loathe to admit it, is interesting. You CAN fill out back story and not resort to time travel and Borg. You just have to get good characters, interesting yet familliar situations and run with it. 4. Get some new writers. The Berman team is like the Eagles playing the same damned song over and over again for a decade. Every song they write sounds like one written before.
This series would have been so much better if it predated encounters with aliens and space travel, and spent a few seasons building up to that. I would have loved to have seen a season devoted to humans getting used to the idea of Vulcans and Klingons running around, used to the idea of space travel. They blew these opportunities from the first show, with the Vulcans already hanging around. Gone is the sense of DISCOVERY. The crew on the Enterprise has that totally glazed over Star Trek "been there done that" look about them, and the should be freaking out over the newness of everything!
Actually, I think you are an "elitist indy music prig" ... no offense, but since you have the Sleater-Kinney, Hives and the White Stripes on there, you do have pretty one step left of mainstream tastes.
I will totally admit, I don't like most music. That's why buying songs BY THE SONG is so great. I cannot remember the last time I heard a CD where I liked ALL of the songs. Even my favorite albums I dislike 1 or 2 of the songs and could do without them. The vast majority of music produced today is crap, seriously, and the average "good" has two or three songs I can stand to listen to more than a few times. And I certainly don't think I'm alone in this department. That's why CD sales are down, because so much music made these days is pure, unadultrated kaka. And as for the bands that are unsigned? Don't even let me start... it's worse.
Sounds like, since you care about quality and synching with the cd database, that you'd be better off buying the original CD from the record store for 16 bucks. And, obviously, you're not getting your stuff for free from P2P because, you care about the CDDB service, quality and tags ... those P2P servinces must really piss you off.
So, just keep buying your CDs from Sam Goody or Amazon or wherever ... bet you still have a bunch of LPs in your collection too, eh? Wonder when those are coming back.
Not good arguments. If you really want a cd to carry around, burn your apple bought tracks to a cd. If you really want the liner notes, cd case, and album art, then hey be my guest and go buy yourself a cd. If you're old enough to remember though, when CDs first came out, people bitched that the covers were too small, nobody would buy tiny liner notes and cover art. My point is, what is more portable than a computer file. When you really get into mp3s you'll see how wasteful even a CD is. It's too damned big, heavy, and those cases are a hindrance!
If you are paranoid about your hard drive crashing and your songs getting lost, guess what, you can burn a cd of your Apple bought songs.
99 cents is the right price. I feel totally comfortable blowing 99 cents multiple times for music. 99 cents is the cost of a cheap hamburger at McDonald's. And, most pop music today is about as disposable and meaningful as a hamburger at McDonalds. And as for quality, this is unimportant to me as well. We're talking about pop music here, not the Taj Mahal or the Mona Lisa. It's disposable, useless fluff. Of course I would want better quality if it were offered, but will hearing Whitesnake or New Kids on The Block in better quality improve the music any?
Next I notice one great benefit of buying music this way is you don't get a jewel case or liner notes. That's right, you heard me correct. I actually don't use either. Pretty much every CD I've bought in the past year has been immediately ripped into iTunes, the CD with liner notes stuffed in an envelope and the jewel case tossed. The CD essentially only exists for me as a backup medium. I can't remember the last time I even felt the need to look at the disc jacket. Saving the time of me chucking the box and the materials is easily worth 99 cents, and the 9.99 for an album is a steal. I hope to never set foot in a record store again, nor pay Amazon to ship me a bunch of crap I will never use, including the CD.
Secondly, one thing that is awesome about the new version of iTunes is the Rendevous capability. I crack open my iBook, and the entire library of mp3s on my main Mac appears. Holy cow ... now I can have one copy of my entire library and serve it up without lifting a finger.
Then, I read you can do the same thing, over the net. Meaning, I can be at work on my mac and have access to my entire mp3 library. Holy cow again.
I can hardly wait until they slap Airport on an iPod and do the same thing. Can you imagine just walking down the street and a new playlist shows up on your iPod from some guy walking buy you... arrrgh I'm foaming at the mouth.
The Apple Music Store: I'ts cool.
The unspoken truth of the matter: recorded music itself has been de-valued. Nobody sees one song as worth 99 cents, let alone 50 cents anymore. All the years of free music online has led the average under 30 year old to come up with the obvious conclusion that music should be free; damn the record labels, damn the artist ... the record labels are crooks anyways, and the artists ought to make their money some other way, like concerts or T-shirt sales.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but it's the reality of the music biz today and I don't think this download service is gonna fly with a price point of 99 cents. And, I do think that's a shame.
Am I missing something here. You are allowed to burn songs to a cd. So, what's to stop you from just doing this, then handing said CD to your friend who rips the CD into mp3 format? If there is no catch to this obvious loophole, then hey I'm all over this service :).
Reasons: You are serving files, not receiving them, and, said files are only 1 - 6 megs. That's my vote.
Some obvious things I noticed as evidence why this guy is totally out of touch with reality:
He says DVDs are timeless, they don't wear out. Uh, we just had some articles out about "DVD rot". He also asks who will produce the content ... and that an album costs hundreds of thousands to produce and a movie $80mil. Uh, I can name quite a number of excellent movies made for a lot less than $80mil as well as albums that could have been recorded at home for crying out loud. Maybe the industry needs to cut costs.
He wonders why a person doesn't see it wrong to walk into a video store and shoplift a DVD, but would dowload the same movie off the net. Here's a clue for you, because in shoplifting the physical media still exists. When you download something, yeah, it's wrong, but it's a copy. To compare physical theft to copying means you're missing a critical concept. People just don't see "copying" as bad as outright theft for this reason.
This guy is totally reactionary, instead of honestly trying to understand why the music biz is in the situation it's in and work with the consumers. Treating consumers like criminals just legitimizes bad behavior on our part, seriously.