It's possibly that tightly sealed media could be much higher capacity than currently seen, but who's going to be the one who suggests to their boss that they should try doing something that has failed every other time it has been tried?
PlaY tried it. Remember them? They had a really neat technology - not bigger than CD but much, much smaller. It was self contained so you could toss a dozen in your pocket like coins. It was actually this close to being a killer technology, then they got too close to the RIAA and DRM'd themselves out of existence.
Hard drives are decent enough backup. They're now cheap enough to justify keeping a second drive just to duplicate everything on the first. But copying even 80Gb of data still takes damn forever, especially if the drives are in different boxes (I mean, if you're going to make a backup, you do want that backup protected in case of a power suply glitch... right?)
But a pocket full of sealed discs is a lot more convenient and error resistant than a case of CDs. Then again, the next generation commodity RAM is supposed to be magnetic, so maybe we'll finally get that convenient, portable storage in the form of actual solid state "coins!"
More relevant than this technology that is still many years away, I find much more interesting the part about the desktop industry moving to 2.5" drives. So in the next year or so we'll be able to buy very high density, fast drives that can fit in a pocket and already have serial interfaces! All we need are sata jacks on the front panel and the world moves one giant leap closer to true "plug-n-play" goodness. Mail order sneakernets just got even cheaper!
The trouble came because MP3.com was distributing music to which they did not hold the copyright. The trouble came because they sold out their own artists in an attempt to piggyback on the success of the old school publishers.
How about if I opened up an "online library" where I let anyone who could type in an ISBN number have access to the complete book?
There are so many holes in that system as to be completely obvious it is nothing but a feeble attempt at circumventing copyright. Ordinarily I really don't give a shit, and even support many such efforts - but in the case of MP3.COM I hold my nose in disgust, because its entire failure was due to their management betraying everything they purported to believe and (more importantly) betraying thousands of musicians who had aligned themselves with that message.
you can burn CDs with most of the services. You can even burn CDs from the Real networks craptastic site. You can then burn'em to MP3 or anything else you like. Hell, I've even used my capture card to rip Real video streams to videotape and back, or even just cap my desktop playing a clip and then burn it back to avi in veedub. Whoopee.
Holes - analog or otherwise - are not unique to itunes. All that is unique about itunes is the religious zeal behind the corporate parent.
MP3.com became what it is because they decided to start offering the "music locker" service, which essentially allowed them to co-opt any work by any major label - which, of course, led to them being sued and then owned by the very players they had portended to usurp.
Last I looked, CDbaby wasn't trying to co-opt Madonna and Linkin Park. CDBaby stands by its own artists and doesn't try to osmosize the copyrighted works of other studios.
And that's why CDBaby won't become another MP3.com.
MP3.com had a lot of promise. Then feearless leader decided they needed to offer Madonna because their own bands weren't going to make him rich, and thus began the beginning of the end.
MP3.com hasn't been "free" since even before the lawsuits... in fact, that's why they were sued.
Isn't the whole fucking point of this "new order" to avoid having to sign bands? What you want is what we've had for decades: a system where musicians who don't meet the marketing meddle of a few sharkskinned gatekeepers get quarrantined off into this "other place" where "the lesser bands go."
Fuck that. Anyone who doesn't sell will either become discouraged and get a real job, or will persevere until they become great.
There are how many bloggers out there?
The cream will rise to the top even without the old maids at the churn.
For forty dollars you can join the new label from Tom Misner and have an online distribution chain that carries over into a worldwide CD distribution system. CDBaby is cool, but this really seems more like you're paying them to broker a deal with the people who have, for the most part, completely fucked up the music industry for the last decade.
Not only that, but since 301 is a label with an established global infrastructure, there's a mechanism there to support an act no matter how popular it becomes. This guy is no small potatos.
I still do not grasp this fascination with "itunes." So what if it sold a lot of music to the fanboys stupid enough to pay all that money for a mac? I know a few people with macs and every single one of them would buy farts in a jar from uncle steve if only given the chance.
This is cool for cdbaby, although it would be much cooler to see them doing the online distribution themselves in a format (ie MP3 or OGG) that the truly free world embraces. Giving money to Listen.com or any of the "established" providers still means supporting the dino-co's that own them - and, thus, the RIAA - and there is no way in hell I (and many others) will ever do that... never again.
This is hardly "news." MS has been trying to break into the cable STB market for years and years and years. Back during the height of the java wars they announced a parnership with another big cable operator - MS was to "give away" something like 1 Million boxes, spread out over a few deployments, in a development partnership.
The only thing that ever came from that groundbreaking deal was of provoking the biggest players in the cable industry to form their own development alliance. These boxes were to use java and offer all kinds of gee-whiz features that would make cable tv so compelling everyone was going to throw away their (windows) peecees and mild bill would never again be so foolish as to try breaking into the cable hardware industry.
You see now how far it all got... on both sides of the aisle.
the "industry agreement" is that no DVD players will have RGB outputs - and this one doesn't have those, either. DVI is "secure" and component has been on players for ages. And it would be pretty well pointless to have a high rez player (as this one is obviously intended) that wouldn't support contemporary hi rez displays.
What's most funny is that no one today would likely think of "ripping" a DVD from a capture card, just because all it takes is a $50 DVD drive and a braindead piece of software. And yet the manufacturers stick by their "no RGB" guns as if it actually means something.
BTW my "DVD player" does have RGB outputs. It also has a macrovision-less s-vid output.
MP3.com had already tried to establish itself as its own "label." They had clearly declared themselves competitors to the RIAA labels and then, in a grab for mo' money, decided they would dance through what they thought to be a "loophole" wherein they would "cache" - and then stream - MP3s of CDs from any major label that the "client" could prove (by way of sticking a Cd in a drive) they owned.
contrast this with Amazon.com being one of the largest distributors in the world of books for all these publishers - it's the publisher's friend. Sure, they may do some things that threaten publishers (like their print on demand publishing) but Amazon didn't go out and try to co-opt all their business by providing unfettered access to any book a "client" could provide an ISBN number for.
This sounds like a fantastic service. If they were to provide a "fair use excerpt" from any book on any subject in response to a query, that would be one service that finally lives up to the promise of the internet. What remains to be seen is if it actually lives up to that promise, or if it becomes yet another "premium" subscription service that simply "embraces and extends" the widening information gap between those with money and credit - and those without.
Depending on which survey you listen to (and there are many) one in three to one in five girls are molested before they are 18. Of those, one third are molested by their own father or someone in immediate authority (ie stepfather, uncle, etc).
So... given that the numbers pretty much speak for themselves, how can you NOT agree that if anyone is to be "tracked" or otherwise given "special treatment" in these cases it should NOT be parents of girls? I mean, if you are going to single anyone out, who better than those who have access to, and power in the lives of, the most frequent victims?
The local TV station ran a fearmongering "special report" on the evening news outlining all the "dangers children face." They had policemen hang out at playgrounds and filmed them coaxing young girls into a minivan while their terrified mothers looked on. They talked about the "online predators" that will lure your children into real life meetings and then kill them. They talked about all these terrible fates that await any child not held under it's mother's wing 24 hours a day - in short, they talked about all sorts of terrible fates that, according to the FBI's own numbers, only a tiny number of children meet with each year.
Of course, what they didn't mention - and what is rarely mentioned in typical propoganda like this - is the fact that tens of thousands of children are molested each year by their own parents, or by a relative, or by a "friend" close to the family (teacher, coach, counselor, babysitter, etc). There is no "typical" when it comes to people who fuck children, and those rapists hanging about in the bushes represent a tiny, tiny sliver of the greater problem. Psychological studies have also revealed that at least (or as much as) a third of the adults convicted of molesting children are not pedophiles, but simply sexual opportunists.
Consider the most violent extreme in this example: of the 2100 children killed in 1997, 40% of the killers identified were family members, 45% by someone known to the child - and a whopping 15% (slightly over 300) were killed by strangers.
No, talking about the realities wouldn't do well at all because it would only make everyone much more aware that it's not "those people" doing these crimes, it's anyone you know and there's little way to tell until it's too late. Is your next door neighbor fucking his eight year old? How do you know? The trajic fact is that this witch hunt mentality does nothing at all to protect children and, in fact, only helps blind society at large to the truth; while "concerned parents" (sheep brainwashed by the evening news) go on worrying about the evil "pedophile" lurking in the bushes no one believes Mr. Johnson, the special ed. teacher next door would be fucking his little girl - he's just "not that type."
I find this project fascinating in that it would seem to be a solution on many levels, not just an app that runs over the internet. The way information is stored in redundant fashion, that growth ofd the network makes it more efficient AND more robust, that certain pathways become more specialized over time - it all strikes me as functioning very much like some grand brain. Of course it's "not there yet" but, unlike those who love to troll about how doggedly slow and unusable it is, I see research on this project as being exceedingly valuable also to realizing robust (and secure, as in privacy ensured) wireless mesh networks.
Dude... have you tried to ping www.riaa.org in the last several months? Last I looked (yesterday) they were up but incredibly slow; more often than that they have been down completely nearly the whole year. Ironically, the RIAA needs something like freenet just to keep its site from being DOS-ed to ashes.
Both of you kinda missed it. Contrary to the (ironically) mythic "debunking" found on the net, if you'll hit the library and consult old issues of of industry print like eetimes, etc. you'll find a pretty detailed recounting of the "licensing wars." The Beta vs. VHS battle was still raging pretty well until the technology went from "consumer electronics" to commodity electronics. Both wanted desperately to hold onto their IP, but Sony was far more steadfast than the Japan Victor corp, and soon low cost VHS VCRs were flowing like coffee beans.
And that is what sealed the fate of Beta. It wasn't just a question of not wanting to license, but not wanting to license production to cheap, mass market producers in hong kong and taiwann, that did the format in.
continue to do nothing. If you get sued, don't settle - but do get on the horn to your local TV station, your local newspapers - anyone who will listen. Once you have a bit of press a legal aid looking to make a name will find you. This won't be enough to win, but an aid will probably be able to find enough ways to put off litigation to keep things tied up in paperwork.
The only way this is going to get resolved is exactly what's happening now: the industry has to sue a few hundred (or a few thousand) joe beers and bobby bookworms. This will inevitably get some propogandized coverage on one of the buffoonish "news magazine" shows (most like either a sixty minutes music fluff piece or an NBC "Dateline special") which will, also inevitably, lead to plenty of backlash. At that point a different network will pick up the same story with a slightly different spin, which will lead to one or more senators getting called on the carpet to explain why johnny's mommy and daddy are being forced to give all johnny's tuition money to the RIAA over something so insipid as a bunch of Britney Spears singles.
I hate to say I told you so, but I did. This is the only way the issue is going to get settled, and it's been in the making for a very long time. This is the only way to get things done when you live under a corporatist - but reactionary - political regime.
Several years ago there was a fellow (I think it was a fellow) who wrote in a hi-fi magazine he had noticed coloring the edges of his CDs with a purple marker made them sound better. Then he discovered that just marking one of them had the same effect. So he concluded this must be due to some mysterious energy effect, and then decided to offer the effect for "license." All any audiophile need do to enjoy these benefits was pay him a modest sum evrey year and he would make sure one of the CDs in his collection had a purple edge "in the name of" the licensee! Sweet!
It seems SCO has decided to adopt this karmic business model - proving, yet again, P.T. Barnum was right.
I don't agree with everything Bush has done but he is a much better president then Clinton.
Hilarious. Yes, the US hasn't seen such a fantastic republican leader since Nixon.
And before you try to cast me in the same boat as all the others you think disagrees with "the agenda" I'll tell you I voted for reagan second time around, and I was all of 22. I've voted for both repubs and dems in the past but after this I will never help put another of the belligerent, bible thumping, "conservative" cocksuckers in office ever again.
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Apparently you have had much better reliability from CDRs than I or anyone I know...
PlaY tried it. Remember them? They had a really neat technology - not bigger than CD but much, much smaller. It was self contained so you could toss a dozen in your pocket like coins. It was actually this close to being a killer technology, then they got too close to the RIAA and DRM'd themselves out of existence.
Hard drives are decent enough backup. They're now cheap enough to justify keeping a second drive just to duplicate everything on the first. But copying even 80Gb of data still takes damn forever, especially if the drives are in different boxes (I mean, if you're going to make a backup, you do want that backup protected in case of a power suply glitch... right?)
But a pocket full of sealed discs is a lot more convenient and error resistant than a case of CDs. Then again, the next generation commodity RAM is supposed to be magnetic, so maybe we'll finally get that convenient, portable storage in the form of actual solid state "coins!"
More relevant than this technology that is still many years away, I find much more interesting the part about the desktop industry moving to 2.5" drives. So in the next year or so we'll be able to buy very high density, fast drives that can fit in a pocket and already have serial interfaces! All we need are sata jacks on the front panel and the world moves one giant leap closer to true "plug-n-play" goodness. Mail order sneakernets just got even cheaper!
It's "effectively ok" to share metallica tunes because they're "effectively" worthless, anyway.
How about if I opened up an "online library" where I let anyone who could type in an ISBN number have access to the complete book?
There are so many holes in that system as to be completely obvious it is nothing but a feeble attempt at circumventing copyright. Ordinarily I really don't give a shit, and even support many such efforts - but in the case of MP3.COM I hold my nose in disgust, because its entire failure was due to their management betraying everything they purported to believe and (more importantly) betraying thousands of musicians who had aligned themselves with that message.
Holes - analog or otherwise - are not unique to itunes. All that is unique about itunes is the religious zeal behind the corporate parent.
Last I looked, CDbaby wasn't trying to co-opt Madonna and Linkin Park. CDBaby stands by its own artists and doesn't try to osmosize the copyrighted works of other studios.
And that's why CDBaby won't become another MP3.com.
MP3.com had a lot of promise. Then feearless leader decided they needed to offer Madonna because their own bands weren't going to make him rich, and thus began the beginning of the end.
MP3.com hasn't been "free" since even before the lawsuits... in fact, that's why they were sued.
Fuck that. Anyone who doesn't sell will either become discouraged and get a real job, or will persevere until they become great.
There are how many bloggers out there?
The cream will rise to the top even without the old maids at the churn.
Not only that, but since 301 is a label with an established global infrastructure, there's a mechanism there to support an act no matter how popular it becomes. This guy is no small potatos.
Viva La revolucion!
I still do not grasp this fascination with "itunes." So what if it sold a lot of music to the fanboys stupid enough to pay all that money for a mac? I know a few people with macs and every single one of them would buy farts in a jar from uncle steve if only given the chance.
This is cool for cdbaby, although it would be much cooler to see them doing the online distribution themselves in a format (ie MP3 or OGG) that the truly free world embraces. Giving money to Listen.com or any of the "established" providers still means supporting the dino-co's that own them - and, thus, the RIAA - and there is no way in hell I (and many others) will ever do that... never again.
The only thing that ever came from that groundbreaking deal was of provoking the biggest players in the cable industry to form their own development alliance. These boxes were to use java and offer all kinds of gee-whiz features that would make cable tv so compelling everyone was going to throw away their (windows) peecees and mild bill would never again be so foolish as to try breaking into the cable hardware industry.
You see now how far it all got... on both sides of the aisle.
What's most funny is that no one today would likely think of "ripping" a DVD from a capture card, just because all it takes is a $50 DVD drive and a braindead piece of software. And yet the manufacturers stick by their "no RGB" guns as if it actually means something.
BTW my "DVD player" does have RGB outputs. It also has a macrovision-less s-vid output.
Duh...
contrast this with Amazon.com being one of the largest distributors in the world of books for all these publishers - it's the publisher's friend. Sure, they may do some things that threaten publishers (like their print on demand publishing) but Amazon didn't go out and try to co-opt all their business by providing unfettered access to any book a "client" could provide an ISBN number for.
This sounds like a fantastic service. If they were to provide a "fair use excerpt" from any book on any subject in response to a query, that would be one service that finally lives up to the promise of the internet. What remains to be seen is if it actually lives up to that promise, or if it becomes yet another "premium" subscription service that simply "embraces and extends" the widening information gap between those with money and credit - and those without.
So... given that the numbers pretty much speak for themselves, how can you NOT agree that if anyone is to be "tracked" or otherwise given "special treatment" in these cases it should NOT be parents of girls? I mean, if you are going to single anyone out, who better than those who have access to, and power in the lives of, the most frequent victims?
The local TV station ran a fearmongering "special report" on the evening news outlining all the "dangers children face." They had policemen hang out at playgrounds and filmed them coaxing young girls into a minivan while their terrified mothers looked on. They talked about the "online predators" that will lure your children into real life meetings and then kill them. They talked about all these terrible fates that await any child not held under it's mother's wing 24 hours a day - in short, they talked about all sorts of terrible fates that, according to the FBI's own numbers, only a tiny number of children meet with each year.
Of course, what they didn't mention - and what is rarely mentioned in typical propoganda like this - is the fact that tens of thousands of children are molested each year by their own parents, or by a relative, or by a "friend" close to the family (teacher, coach, counselor, babysitter, etc). There is no "typical" when it comes to people who fuck children, and those rapists hanging about in the bushes represent a tiny, tiny sliver of the greater problem. Psychological studies have also revealed that at least (or as much as) a third of the adults convicted of molesting children are not pedophiles, but simply sexual opportunists.
Consider the most violent extreme in this example: of the 2100 children killed in 1997, 40% of the killers identified were family members, 45% by someone known to the child - and a whopping 15% (slightly over 300) were killed by strangers. No, talking about the realities wouldn't do well at all because it would only make everyone much more aware that it's not "those people" doing these crimes, it's anyone you know and there's little way to tell until it's too late. Is your next door neighbor fucking his eight year old? How do you know? The trajic fact is that this witch hunt mentality does nothing at all to protect children and, in fact, only helps blind society at large to the truth; while "concerned parents" (sheep brainwashed by the evening news) go on worrying about the evil "pedophile" lurking in the bushes no one believes Mr. Johnson, the special ed. teacher next door would be fucking his little girl - he's just "not that type."
I find this project fascinating in that it would seem to be a solution on many levels, not just an app that runs over the internet. The way information is stored in redundant fashion, that growth ofd the network makes it more efficient AND more robust, that certain pathways become more specialized over time - it all strikes me as functioning very much like some grand brain. Of course it's "not there yet" but, unlike those who love to troll about how doggedly slow and unusable it is, I see research on this project as being exceedingly valuable also to realizing robust (and secure, as in privacy ensured) wireless mesh networks.
Dude... have you tried to ping www.riaa.org in the last several months? Last I looked (yesterday) they were up but incredibly slow; more often than that they have been down completely nearly the whole year. Ironically, the RIAA needs something like freenet just to keep its site from being DOS-ed to ashes.
So if MS has a patent on this, WTF do I have to use PGP disk in order to get this functionality?
And that is what sealed the fate of Beta. It wasn't just a question of not wanting to license, but not wanting to license production to cheap, mass market producers in hong kong and taiwann, that did the format in.
The only way this is going to get resolved is exactly what's happening now: the industry has to sue a few hundred (or a few thousand) joe beers and bobby bookworms. This will inevitably get some propogandized coverage on one of the buffoonish "news magazine" shows (most like either a sixty minutes music fluff piece or an NBC "Dateline special") which will, also inevitably, lead to plenty of backlash. At that point a different network will pick up the same story with a slightly different spin, which will lead to one or more senators getting called on the carpet to explain why johnny's mommy and daddy are being forced to give all johnny's tuition money to the RIAA over something so insipid as a bunch of Britney Spears singles.
I hate to say I told you so, but I did. This is the only way the issue is going to get settled, and it's been in the making for a very long time. This is the only way to get things done when you live under a corporatist - but reactionary - political regime.
It seems SCO has decided to adopt this karmic business model - proving, yet again, P.T. Barnum was right.
At least you seem aware you were born a sheep. I suppose that's the beginning of wisdom, 'tho on must wonder how long you've been toddling.
You are truly a dittohead. Just how many years has it been since you were able to think for yourself?
Hilarious. Yes, the US hasn't seen such a fantastic republican leader since Nixon.
And before you try to cast me in the same boat as all the others you think disagrees with "the agenda" I'll tell you I voted for reagan second time around, and I was all of 22. I've voted for both repubs and dems in the past but after this I will never help put another of the belligerent, bible thumping, "conservative" cocksuckers in office ever again.