I can see how placing them in a specific folder could be construed as an "intent to distribute". Haven't read the article, but it seems odd that it's the ripping that appears to be the issue for the RIAA, where sharing is really the only thing that the bad guys have any leg to stand on whatsoever.
That being said, I still think the RIAA should be thrown to the lions. Just because they're not 100% wrong all the time doesn't mean they should be given free reign to terrorize their customers.
Agreed; we should feed the major labels to the lions. Hence my point about iTMS selling independent artists stuff as well. I think artists that go that route get more, something like $0.25/song, but I do not know for certain. That would have been an interesting data point to include, as I believe that iTMS (and other similar services) *can* be a tool that benefits artists as you describe, rather than just the consumer, the distributor (in this case, iTMS) and the label.
However, I did not miss the point; I was making a complementary point which I have seen left out more than once in discussions of whether or not digital download sales are better than CD sales. My point is that while the benefits may be weighted towards the label, the artist does indeed get a benefit. Byrne makes a great point for working towards getting a bigger slice of a smaller pie, but in this particular case, while it may be a smaller slice of the pie, it is indeed a pie that otherwise would not exist.
That having been said, any label which treats their artists like chattel should, as I say, be thrown to the lions. And it'll happen. As soon as someone comes up with a socially driven music recommendation system that can't be heavily gamed, so that quality music does not get lost in the crowd, but rather is recommended to the people who are likely to enjoy it, without a Pepsi concert tour promotion or some shite like that. I know people are working on them: I sort of like Amie Street, but I'm not quite sure that there's one out there that makes it as easy as it should be to find (and thus promote) new music to people who don't know it's coming.
Jeez. In 1985, I was [doing things that I don't want described in detail on the Internet] and going to midnight showings of the Talking Heads concert movie, "Stop Making Sense." Is it possible that people born that year can now legally drink? Holy heck.
Seriously, though, go get a copy of the "Stop Making Sense" soundtrack. It's great music. "Burning Down the House" is one of the all-time great songs. The early eighties might have been rife with strangely dressed cookie-cutter synth bands, but a few good songs/albums did come out around when you were born. Ever hear of a little Irish band called U2?
...I have just one issue with the thing he mentioned about bands making less from iTunes than from a normal CD. I understand how the numbers work and I've seen the argument before, but there's one thing that he (and Weird Al et al) are missing from the equation.
And that is that iTunes (and their ilk) brought the power of the single-song purchase to millions of people who did not have it before. Before iTMS came out, I had not bought any music in several years, close to a decade. Mostly, because, while I love the concept of whole albums--I cut my teeth on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, for example--a lot of what comes out from the majors these days is indeed one or two good songs on an album of cr@p.
So since iTMS came out, I have bought at least 100 songs from albums that I never would have purchased. So those artists aren't getting $1.40 instead of $1.60 because I bought their album on iTMS; rather, they are getting $0.09 instead of $0.00 because I bought a song.
I know my $0.09 isn't much, but neither was my $1.60. And if there are millions of people like me--or even hundreds of thousands--I would guess that the introduction of the a la carte $0.99 song has been a boon for lots of artists.
Another thing to think about is that iTMS doesn't just sell artists from the majors; they also sell independents (search for "Cousin Isaac", a buddy of mine who sells a couple of albums via iTMS). I don't know the details of how that works, but it seems like there are opportunities for artists in some of Byrns' "control your own destiny" plans to take advantage of that infrastructure.
Good point. Additionally, the truth is, if you've bought anything from an Apple Store recently, you've experienced what they're doing. The person answering your questions can make the sale right where you're standing. Everything's obvious in retrospect, but I'll tell you, it's a whole new thing not to have to wait in a register line.
I bought a laptop a few weeks ago at the Apple Store, then went next door to Victoria's Secret to by the wife some flannel jammies, and the feel was totally different. 5 times as many people in the apple store, same ratio of assistants to customers, but at VS, 3/4 of the time there was in a line where most of the customers in the store were standing. Get those customers buying and out of there, and it's a better experience for everyone; I think that this is indeed a unique and interesting solution to the retail problem. And the same solution (3 registers at the back of the store) has been the solution since the dawn of time. Why shouldn't Apple be able to patent something that is so different from basically all other retail stores?
Absolutely. My point was that even with "outsourced" data storage, backup, etc, through the Amazon S3 service, it's still waaaaay under $200K.
Additionally, can't they do something these days with etched glass? Store them bits on glass, and unless you break them, you'll never lose the data. Make 100 copies, store them all over the world, make copies whenever one breaks.
Of course, this doesn't have to be done for all films. If I never see "House Sitter" again, it'll be too soon.
So that puts it at about 5.5 TB per hour on the outside (50 MB/F, 30 F/S, 3600 S/H), so my 10 TB was probably not all that generous, but rather just about right for a 90-minute movie.
So to make sure that we're covering 3 hour movies, let's go to 25 TB. That's still less than $50K per year, without a bulk discount, still significantly less than $200K.
With normal DVDs taking 4 GB, Hi Def DVDs taking maybe 10 GB, I figure 100 GB is probably a safe bet. If you want to save all the discarded takes and everything, maybe 1 TB. Just for the fun of it, let's make it ten times that, at 10 TB. Using a commercial service like AWS, 10 TB would cost $18,000 per year, and I think that's pretty generous.
Yep... Even their HD upgrades are not great, price wise. 4 GB RAM + 250 GB Hitachi HD for $300 or so at MacSales.com. This is about the same price as just getting the $250GB HD upgrade on the Apple BTO site.
In many ways, I suffer from Apple Fanboy-ism, but this is one area where I can't think of a good reason that Apple should be able to charge so much for their RAM. I just got a new MacBook and upgraded it to 4GB from a third party vendor for $109(!), and the real shame is that there's 1GB of perfectly good RAM (2x512MB) sitting on my desk that shouldn't have needed to be shipped. If I could have gotten my 4GB from Apple directly for a reasonable price, these things would have been used for more than the time it took to get my upgrade shipped and delivered.
Apple's prices are so high that I don't think that they are really all that interested in the margins; I think they just don't want to be part of the volatile DRAM retailing industry, so they're pricing themselves out of the market. If the occasional person decides to spend $800 instead of $100, they're happy to help out, but they don't want rely on RAM sales as a major part of their bottom line.
The best part about this is that even their laptops are now really easily upgradable. And the folks at the Apple store will tell you that it's fine to go with 3rd party RAM, but to just keep your original RAM in case there's a warrantee problem, as they'll blame the 3rd party stuff first if it's in there when you bring your machine in for work.
You know, I used to think this was a reasonable question, but I'm not sure it is any more. I've owned half a dozen macs over the last 15 years, and the first several were upgradable. Every time I got to the point where I had an application that required more gfx horsepower or a bigger processor, it turned out that for a small amount more, I could have gotten a much better overall machine, and I typically did.
The outstanding exception was my Sawtooth G4/866. I decided I wanted to get some more life out of it, so I upgraded it to just over a GB or RAM, got a super-hot gfx card so it would support Tiger's CoreImage effects, upgraded the processor to dual 1.6 GHz, added a USB 2.0 card and added another hard drive (sale at Fry's). $600 later, I was pretty happy for about 6 months, and then the Intel Macs came out, and even with integrated video, the low-end MacBooks kicked the pants off the machine I had just upgraded.
I'm not a big gamer, so maybe I'm not the right person to be replying to your message, but I think that the Apple philosophy is that their low-end systems are 'god enough' for current technology at the time that they are released. If you need something super-duper, get a higher end system that is upgradable, but chances are, it'll have the card in it by default that you were hoping to put in the cheaper system. I guess what I'm getting at is that for just about anything but gaming, which is constantly pushing the envelope of video capabilities, for many, if not most people, by the time you need a new video card, you can do even better by upgrading the whole system. Faster processors, busses, networking and all kinds of other features make the low-end Mac offerings worthwhile even if they're not upgradable.
My PPC G4 2x1.6GHz machine is currently acting as a very noisy (extra fan for the processor upgrade, extra fan on the new video card) file server. To be honest, I wish I could sell it for enough to get a Mac mini.
OK, I assume this has been pointed out before, but DNF also stands for "Did not finish", and is used in races to denote the place of a driver who never crossed the finish line.
When I saw DNF in your post and in a glance-through of the article, I thought you/they were using DNF to denote vaporware status to one of the products until I realized that you (and probably they) were specifically referring to Duke.
This makes me think that they never planned to finish DNF; this is all just a big joke, right from day one.
Since I was in a band in college, I don't really hear the CRTs any more. It kind of sucks; I think I've got a couple of KHz taken off the top end, so when I'm in a crowded bar or a party, voices lose their crispness. I see people talking to each other in what appear to be normal voices, and I can't imagine that they actually hear each other. If only my damn amp hadn't gone to eleven...
But I'm with you on the digital TV artifacting. I was watching CSI Las Vegas or some such the other day, and there was a scene in a disco club, where the camera was moving quickly along with the show's principals as the strobe lights were flashing. With each flash it took--it seemed to me--the better part of a second for all the compression blocks to dissolve away into an acceptable picture, and I thought to myself, does nobody else see and hate this? Most TV isn't quite that challenging to Comcast's compression algorhythms, but gee... WTF?!
Trust me, I got grounded plenty. Again, not the worst thing in the world. And if this kid was as snotty about using Firefox as I imagine him to have been, he probably deserved to be grounded, too.
When I was this kid's age, we had computer labs filled with Apple IIes and Commodore Pets. If a teacher had said to do something on the Apples and I (a Commodore fan back then) had refused and insisted on doing it on a Pet, the teacher probably would have had some right to give me detention.
In another few years, the Firefox/IE wars are going to sound reminiscent of the old Apple IIe/Commodore 64/Atari 800 wars. This kid was just being a punk, and he got punk'd.
Me, I'm no fan of IE, and truthfully, I don't think schools should be using non-FOSS software, as it helps promote the entrenched advantages that MS has. But if a kid wants to rail against MS software, he can do it in a productive way and get the rules changed, rather than being smarmy about having a "better" browser when IE would have been fine for his use.
And yes, I'd say the teacher probably should have been willing to listen, but gee, have you ever tried to teach 35 teenie boppers at one time? It's hard, hard work, and I, for one, stand behind the teachers who do that day in and day out, for far too little compensation.
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That being said, I still think the RIAA should be thrown to the lions. Just because they're not 100% wrong all the time doesn't mean they should be given free reign to terrorize their customers.
However, I did not miss the point; I was making a complementary point which I have seen left out more than once in discussions of whether or not digital download sales are better than CD sales. My point is that while the benefits may be weighted towards the label, the artist does indeed get a benefit. Byrne makes a great point for working towards getting a bigger slice of a smaller pie, but in this particular case, while it may be a smaller slice of the pie, it is indeed a pie that otherwise would not exist.
That having been said, any label which treats their artists like chattel should, as I say, be thrown to the lions. And it'll happen. As soon as someone comes up with a socially driven music recommendation system that can't be heavily gamed, so that quality music does not get lost in the crowd, but rather is recommended to the people who are likely to enjoy it, without a Pepsi concert tour promotion or some shite like that. I know people are working on them: I sort of like Amie Street, but I'm not quite sure that there's one out there that makes it as easy as it should be to find (and thus promote) new music to people who don't know it's coming.
Seriously, though, go get a copy of the "Stop Making Sense" soundtrack. It's great music. "Burning Down the House" is one of the all-time great songs. The early eighties might have been rife with strangely dressed cookie-cutter synth bands, but a few good songs/albums did come out around when you were born. Ever hear of a little Irish band called U2?
You do realize that the GP was a Talking Heads/David Byrn song reference, don't you?
And that is that iTunes (and their ilk) brought the power of the single-song purchase to millions of people who did not have it before. Before iTMS came out, I had not bought any music in several years, close to a decade. Mostly, because, while I love the concept of whole albums--I cut my teeth on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, for example--a lot of what comes out from the majors these days is indeed one or two good songs on an album of cr@p.
So since iTMS came out, I have bought at least 100 songs from albums that I never would have purchased. So those artists aren't getting $1.40 instead of $1.60 because I bought their album on iTMS; rather, they are getting $0.09 instead of $0.00 because I bought a song.
I know my $0.09 isn't much, but neither was my $1.60. And if there are millions of people like me--or even hundreds of thousands--I would guess that the introduction of the a la carte $0.99 song has been a boon for lots of artists.
Another thing to think about is that iTMS doesn't just sell artists from the majors; they also sell independents (search for "Cousin Isaac", a buddy of mine who sells a couple of albums via iTMS). I don't know the details of how that works, but it seems like there are opportunities for artists in some of Byrns' "control your own destiny" plans to take advantage of that infrastructure.
I bought a laptop a few weeks ago at the Apple Store, then went next door to Victoria's Secret to by the wife some flannel jammies, and the feel was totally different. 5 times as many people in the apple store, same ratio of assistants to customers, but at VS, 3/4 of the time there was in a line where most of the customers in the store were standing. Get those customers buying and out of there, and it's a better experience for everyone; I think that this is indeed a unique and interesting solution to the retail problem. And the same solution (3 registers at the back of the store) has been the solution since the dawn of time. Why shouldn't Apple be able to patent something that is so different from basically all other retail stores?
Additionally, can't they do something these days with etched glass? Store them bits on glass, and unless you break them, you'll never lose the data. Make 100 copies, store them all over the world, make copies whenever one breaks.
Of course, this doesn't have to be done for all films. If I never see "House Sitter" again, it'll be too soon.
So that puts it at about 5.5 TB per hour on the outside (50 MB/F, 30 F/S, 3600 S/H), so my 10 TB was probably not all that generous, but rather just about right for a 90-minute movie.
So to make sure that we're covering 3 hour movies, let's go to 25 TB. That's still less than $50K per year, without a bulk discount, still significantly less than $200K.
Sorry if I wasn't clear... an up-to-date mini! Better luck next time :)
Apple's prices are so high that I don't think that they are really all that interested in the margins; I think they just don't want to be part of the volatile DRAM retailing industry, so they're pricing themselves out of the market. If the occasional person decides to spend $800 instead of $100, they're happy to help out, but they don't want rely on RAM sales as a major part of their bottom line.
The best part about this is that even their laptops are now really easily upgradable. And the folks at the Apple store will tell you that it's fine to go with 3rd party RAM, but to just keep your original RAM in case there's a warrantee problem, as they'll blame the 3rd party stuff first if it's in there when you bring your machine in for work.
The outstanding exception was my Sawtooth G4/866. I decided I wanted to get some more life out of it, so I upgraded it to just over a GB or RAM, got a super-hot gfx card so it would support Tiger's CoreImage effects, upgraded the processor to dual 1.6 GHz, added a USB 2.0 card and added another hard drive (sale at Fry's). $600 later, I was pretty happy for about 6 months, and then the Intel Macs came out, and even with integrated video, the low-end MacBooks kicked the pants off the machine I had just upgraded.
I'm not a big gamer, so maybe I'm not the right person to be replying to your message, but I think that the Apple philosophy is that their low-end systems are 'god enough' for current technology at the time that they are released. If you need something super-duper, get a higher end system that is upgradable, but chances are, it'll have the card in it by default that you were hoping to put in the cheaper system. I guess what I'm getting at is that for just about anything but gaming, which is constantly pushing the envelope of video capabilities, for many, if not most people, by the time you need a new video card, you can do even better by upgrading the whole system. Faster processors, busses, networking and all kinds of other features make the low-end Mac offerings worthwhile even if they're not upgradable.
My PPC G4 2x1.6GHz machine is currently acting as a very noisy (extra fan for the processor upgrade, extra fan on the new video card) file server. To be honest, I wish I could sell it for enough to get a Mac mini.
When I saw DNF in your post and in a glance-through of the article, I thought you/they were using DNF to denote vaporware status to one of the products until I realized that you (and probably they) were specifically referring to Duke.
This makes me think that they never planned to finish DNF; this is all just a big joke, right from day one.
In Soviet Russia, the forest flattens the asteroids!
I welcome our new asteroid overlords.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
But I'm with you on the digital TV artifacting. I was watching CSI Las Vegas or some such the other day, and there was a scene in a disco club, where the camera was moving quickly along with the show's principals as the strobe lights were flashing. With each flash it took--it seemed to me--the better part of a second for all the compression blocks to dissolve away into an acceptable picture, and I thought to myself, does nobody else see and hate this? Most TV isn't quite that challenging to Comcast's compression algorhythms, but gee... WTF?!
Sounds like a good B2B solution, but won't anyone think of the customers?
When I was this kid's age, we had computer labs filled with Apple IIes and Commodore Pets. If a teacher had said to do something on the Apples and I (a Commodore fan back then) had refused and insisted on doing it on a Pet, the teacher probably would have had some right to give me detention.
In another few years, the Firefox/IE wars are going to sound reminiscent of the old Apple IIe/Commodore 64/Atari 800 wars. This kid was just being a punk, and he got punk'd.
Me, I'm no fan of IE, and truthfully, I don't think schools should be using non-FOSS software, as it helps promote the entrenched advantages that MS has. But if a kid wants to rail against MS software, he can do it in a productive way and get the rules changed, rather than being smarmy about having a "better" browser when IE would have been fine for his use.
And yes, I'd say the teacher probably should have been willing to listen, but gee, have you ever tried to teach 35 teenie boppers at one time? It's hard, hard work, and I, for one, stand behind the teachers who do that day in and day out, for far too little compensation.