I have been a professional software developer for 22 years. Over that time I've worked for 5 different companies, of varying sizes, the largest having maybe 100 employees.
Not once in all these years was there a single female software engineer working for any of those companies. Not a single one.
Anyway, from the single data point that is my personal experience, female software engineers seem to be about as common as unicorns. Even 12% seems way too high a figure.
I don't know why this is, but I think it's a shame.
I guess I'll wade in here with a perspective. I'm someone who has been violently opposed to any DRM in my music files, and never bought a single track from iTunes in my life. I'm also a Kindle owner who happily buys DRM'd books from Amazon all the time. How can this be?
The difference I guess is how I want to consume the two different types of media. I want to be able to play my music again and again, now, and 20 years from now, in my car, on my media player, on my 4 different PCs, and on my living room stereo. DRM basically makes this impossible, or so convoluted as to be impractical.
OTOH, I only want to read a book once. The only place that I want to read my eBook is on my Kindle. I buy a Kindle book, I read it on the Kindle, and I'm done with it. That fact that it's DRM'd never affects me. I don't care that I can't loan it or resell it later, these are just not big concerns for me. I'm willing to give up those things in exchange for the convenience of a lightweight electronic reader.
I'm also aware that Amazon has no choice, just as Apple had no choice when they first introduced iTunes. The DRM requirement is being driven by the publishers. If Amazon wants to get the big publishers on board today, there must be some kind of copy protection in place to satisfy the dinosaurs. Over time, I suspect this will change, just as it did with iTunes.
Didn't anyone notice the date on the article? It's 10 months old. So this throttling policy isn't "new" at all, it's supposedly been in effect already for almost a year.
I've been a Comcast customer the entire time. I frequently exceed the stated limits and have never noticed any throttling.
Your cables should last forever, don't worry about that. It's the electrons that need periodic replacement. A good rule of thumb is once every 3 months, or every 100 GB, whichever comes first.
The extreme fragility of ePaper displays is still somehow eInk's dirty little secret. They are WAY more fragile than typical laptop LCD screens. The Kindle forums are full of stories from people who have broken the screen while doing various benign things, like resting another book on top of it (while the Kindle was still inside its protective cover no less.) I personally cracked my Kindle screen simply by pressing on it lightly.
Re:Available for the Kindle on Amazon
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately the Kindle version costs almost as much as the hardcover edition. F that. I'll pay a price for the eBook that reflects that fact that no trees were cut down, no paper milled or printed, and nothing was boxed and shipped to a distributor and then to Amazon.
In the immortal words of George Carlin... have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a MANIAC!
Hell, if you trust Amazon not to lose your data (debatable) they'd only charge 1,843.20 cents a month to store your 12TB
I think you slipped a decimal place or two. 12TB is 12,288 GB, and S3 charges $0.15 per GB per month, so that makes it 1,843.20 dollars per month. Unless I'm missing something.
I think most people would be hard pressed to state local radio stations off the top of their head that aren't controlled by Clear Channel and thus the RIAA.
What evidence do you have that the RIAA controls Clear Channel? I'm honestly curious. Clear Channel is privately owned. If the RIAA was using monetary incentives to control what music Cheal Channel stations are playing, that would be payola. So the control mechanism, if it exists, must be something else. What is it?
Internet streaming is a distribution channel and the RIAA will not allow a distribution channel to exist that does not give them majority control via royalty schemes that force internet streamers to be no more than sharecroppers. If they can't control it they'll destroy it by imposing a usurious business model.
OK, but noncommercial radio is also a distribution channel which they don't control and (I argue) a much larger one currently than internet radio. Why aren't they trying to destroy public/noncommercial/indie radio as well?
I believe it is trying to destroy all of internet Radio.
So do I. I just said they're not trying to do it specifically because of Pandora. There seems to be a misunderstanding here. TFA is not about the music industry's crusade against Pandora. The royalties that are putting Pandora out of business apply to all internet radio stations. Pandora is merely collateral damage in a much larger war that the industry is waging against all unencrypted transmission of music over the internet. As has been pointed out, as late as 2005, Sony BMG was fined millions for payola to radio stations, "encouraging" them to play what THEY wanted played. http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2005/08/01/sony-bmg-fined-for-payola-to-the-tune-of-10-million/ [globalethics.org]
Yes. And isn't that interesting? So many people assert confidently here that the music industry owns and controls commercial radio. If that's the case, then why do they have to PAY those stations to play the music they want played?
I just started using Pandora recently. I looked into stream ripping, but it was more of a hassle than it was worth.
I've never tried to rip Pandora, so I can't speak to the difficulty involved. But for a tradional internet radio station that broadcasts a continuous mp3 stream receivable by programs such as Winamp, nothing could possibly be simpler than recording the stream with streamripper. Download, install, enter URL, done. Beyond that, automating the daily recording of your favorite show requires just the one additional step of a cron job, or a "Scheduled Task" under Windows.
Well, first, I believe it's an effort to nip internet radio before it competes o a massive scale. The competition is there, and making inroads...
That could be, and I can't prove it otherwise. I'll just say what I said before: I don't believe it. This is attributing a tremendous amount of foresight to an industry that has not otherwise been well known for its forward thinking.
Second, who do you think really controls terrestrial radio? Not to get all tinfoil-hattish, but the consolidation of terrestrial radio stations has really reduced the variety of radio that's available. The RIAA companies want homogenized radio, which maximizes their profits. Clear Channel et al deliver that. Advertisers want huge conglomerate radio station networks. Clear Channel et al deliver that.
I completely agree with this. Personally I stopped listending to commercial FM radio about 15 years ago. The "hogomonization" has produced a product that is so awful, so banal, so tedious, so vapid, that it is now seems actively painful to listen to it in even small doses. It's also interesting to note that the commercial FM radio industry has been steadily declining over the last decade or so, much the same way as CD sales have. I'm sure the extremely poor quality of product (not to mention the endless ads) is responsible.
As for the small, independent, and public stations that play whatever they want... what kind of market share do you think they have?
I don't know; I'm sure it's not much compared to commercial radio. But I'm NOT sure that the collective "market share" of indie radio is any smaller than the collective market share of internet radio. My gut says that indie radio nationwide probably still outdoes internet radio on a listener count basis. I guess I'd have to see some real studies on that to be persuaded otherwise. So I still assert that if the real reason for destroying internet radio is to stop the broadcast of "non-RIAA-approved" music, they would be going after indie radio as well.
Seriously, the power of the major labels derives from one thing only -- their ability to market their artists. Any threat to this ability could potentially kill their marketing power, and thus their business.
I agree with this in general. I just don't believe that this is the main reason they are trying to kill internet radio right now. There's a reason that current law forces internet radio stations to pay SoundExchange even for indie artists -- it's to kill off the the playtime of those indie artists.
Other Slashdotters with a lot more knowledge of SoundExchange than myself have already posted very detailed explanations of why SoundExchange exists and the purpose it serves. Those explanations generally do not include "killing indie arties" as the primary purpose for SoundExchange. This sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
I agree that Pandora, in its customization feature, offers something that traditional radio can't offer. I'm not a Pandora user, but my understanding though is that the "customization" is at the level of "play me more music like this", not "play me only music by the following 4 bands." So in that respect, it is still a venue whereby people are introduced to new music constantly. Which many people have pointed out here already.
But with all due respect, this fight is not about that. The music industry is not trying to destroy all of internet radio because of Pandora's customizable streams.
You mean that I can't record normal radio? And that I can't record YouTube (Where many record companies have music videos) ? Wrong.
Let's see...hmm....read my post again. Did I say you couldn't do that? Nope. Nice straw man, though.
Hint: it's all about relative difficulty. As we all know, due to the analog hole, if you are motivated enough, you can copy ANYTHING. But setting up an automated system to record an analog FM radio broadcast to your harddrive is a lot more work for the average joe than simply downloading and running streamripper. Add to that the fact that streamripper can parse mp3 tags in the broadcast stream and automatically split it up into individual music files ready for playback, and I suppose you can imagine how a the music industry could get their panties in a wad.
It's not just about stream-ripping. It's also about controlling the market. Internet radio destroys the ability of the major labels to determine what music gets played, which means that they lose the marketing oligopoly they currently hold.
I've heard this argument made many times before (mostly on Slashdot), and while it's tempting to believe it out of a general hatred for the major music labels, somehow I just don't buy it. I just don't believe that internet radio is really that powerful, that it really actually completely undermines the "market oligopoly" (as you put it) in some way that traditional radio (which includes thousands of small, independent, and public stations which already play whatever they want whenever they want with no input whatsoever from "the industry") can't do.
No one seems to be trying to defend or explain why Internet radio is being hit so much harder than satellite or broadcast.
The explanation is pretty simple. If you follow the history of the battle over internet radio royalties, you'll quickly see that it is all about stream ripping. The music industry is convinced that millions of people are "stealing" music by recording streaming radio with free tools like streamripper.
They initially attempted to get congress to pass legislation to force all internet broadcasters to use DRM in their streams. When this went nowhere, that's when they began the royalty assault. The plan is to simply force internet radio broadcasters out of business with exhorbitant royalties. Looks like it's working, too, with the demise of Pandora.
Please make note that there are ignorant LEFTIES as well
I agree that there are ignorant lefties, but what evidence do you have that the law enforcement officials involved are lefties? I scanned the TFA as best I could and could find no mention anywhere of the political affiliations. Note: just because MA is considered a "blue state" doesn't mean anything about these particular cops. I've lived in MA and believe me there were plenty of very right-leaning folks around.
Don't worry. I'm sure the porn industry is hard at work on new HD-proof cosmetic and surgical techniques. They ARE the ones supposedly responsible for most technological advances in the last few decades, right? I'm sure this problem will be solved pronto!
Well obviously in the case of movies, you still need a physical DVD to rip from. (I buy most of my music now in mp3 form from Amazon, haven't bought a physical CD in a long, long time.) But that wasn't my point and you know it. I'm talking about accessing your media library later, on demand, after the initial purchase and rip. With BluRay, you have no option but to hunt around for the physical disc, load it into a physical player, and wait however many minutes it takes to load up. And if you have more than one HDTV in the house, forget about choosing which room to watch it in, unless you buy multiple players or invest in a very expensive whole-house video distribution system.
Scanning this forum again, I see a lot of other people feel the same way I do. Once you get a HTPC/media server based solution up and running, you never, ever want to go back. And BluRay is nothing but a giant step backwards.
The industry keeps talking about bringing the TV and the PC closer together, and then they come out with something like BluRay which just pushes them further apart.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been a professional software developer for 22 years. Over that time I've worked for 5 different companies, of varying sizes, the largest having maybe 100 employees.
Not once in all these years was there a single female software engineer working for any of those companies. Not a single one.
Anyway, from the single data point that is my personal experience, female software engineers seem to be about as common as unicorns. Even 12% seems way too high a figure.
I don't know why this is, but I think it's a shame.
I guess I'll wade in here with a perspective. I'm someone who has been violently opposed to any DRM in my music files, and never bought a single track from iTunes in my life. I'm also a Kindle owner who happily buys DRM'd books from Amazon all the time. How can this be?
The difference I guess is how I want to consume the two different types of media. I want to be able to play my music again and again, now, and 20 years from now, in my car, on my media player, on my 4 different PCs, and on my living room stereo. DRM basically makes this impossible, or so convoluted as to be impractical.
OTOH, I only want to read a book once. The only place that I want to read my eBook is on my Kindle. I buy a Kindle book, I read it on the Kindle, and I'm done with it. That fact that it's DRM'd never affects me. I don't care that I can't loan it or resell it later, these are just not big concerns for me. I'm willing to give up those things in exchange for the convenience of a lightweight electronic reader.
I'm also aware that Amazon has no choice, just as Apple had no choice when they first introduced iTunes. The DRM requirement is being driven by the publishers. If Amazon wants to get the big publishers on board today, there must be some kind of copy protection in place to satisfy the dinosaurs. Over time, I suspect this will change, just as it did with iTunes.
Didn't anyone notice the date on the article? It's 10 months old. So this throttling policy isn't "new" at all, it's supposedly been in effect already for almost a year.
I've been a Comcast customer the entire time. I frequently exceed the stated limits and have never noticed any throttling.
Your cables should last forever, don't worry about that. It's the electrons that need periodic replacement. A good rule of thumb is once every 3 months, or every 100 GB, whichever comes first.
The extreme fragility of ePaper displays is still somehow eInk's dirty little secret. They are WAY more fragile than typical laptop LCD screens. The Kindle forums are full of stories from people who have broken the screen while doing various benign things, like resting another book on top of it (while the Kindle was still inside its protective cover no less.) I personally cracked my Kindle screen simply by pressing on it lightly.
Unfortunately the Kindle version costs almost as much as the hardcover edition. F that. I'll pay a price for the eBook that reflects that fact that no trees were cut down, no paper milled or printed, and nothing was boxed and shipped to a distributor and then to Amazon.
In the immortal words of George Carlin... have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a MANIAC!
Sadly, I think that you are probably right.
Hell, if you trust Amazon not to lose your data (debatable) they'd only charge 1,843.20 cents a month to store your 12TB
I think you slipped a decimal place or two. 12TB is 12,288 GB, and S3 charges $0.15 per GB per month, so that makes it 1,843.20 dollars per month. Unless I'm missing something.
Isn't the U.S. penny like 95% zinc? Hold on to your pennies, folks, they could be worth a lot someday!
Actually what mostly scares me is Republicans.
AIGH!!!
goddammit I spilt my coffee again...
...and I'm also extremely easy to startle.
Oh well, by this point I guess I should be used to being an anomaly in the data.
I think most people would be hard pressed to state local radio stations off the top of their head that aren't controlled by Clear Channel and thus the RIAA.
What evidence do you have that the RIAA controls Clear Channel? I'm honestly curious. Clear Channel is privately owned. If the RIAA was using monetary incentives to control what music Cheal Channel stations are playing, that would be payola. So the control mechanism, if it exists, must be something else. What is it?
Internet streaming is a distribution channel and the RIAA will not allow a distribution channel to exist that does not give them majority control via royalty schemes that force internet streamers to be no more than sharecroppers. If they can't control it they'll destroy it by imposing a usurious business model.
OK, but noncommercial radio is also a distribution channel which they don't control and (I argue) a much larger one currently than internet radio. Why aren't they trying to destroy public/noncommercial/indie radio as well?
I believe it is trying to destroy all of internet Radio.
So do I. I just said they're not trying to do it specifically because of Pandora. There seems to be a misunderstanding here. TFA is not about the music industry's crusade against Pandora. The royalties that are putting Pandora out of business apply to all internet radio stations. Pandora is merely collateral damage in a much larger war that the industry is waging against all unencrypted transmission of music over the internet.
As has been pointed out, as late as 2005, Sony BMG was fined millions for payola to radio stations, "encouraging" them to play what THEY wanted played. http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2005/08/01/sony-bmg-fined-for-payola-to-the-tune-of-10-million/ [globalethics.org]
Yes. And isn't that interesting? So many people assert confidently here that the music industry owns and controls commercial radio. If that's the case, then why do they have to PAY those stations to play the music they want played?
I just started using Pandora recently. I looked into stream ripping, but it was more of a hassle than it was worth.
I've never tried to rip Pandora, so I can't speak to the difficulty involved. But for a tradional internet radio station that broadcasts a continuous mp3 stream receivable by programs such as Winamp, nothing could possibly be simpler than recording the stream with streamripper. Download, install, enter URL, done. Beyond that, automating the daily recording of your favorite show requires just the one additional step of a cron job, or a "Scheduled Task" under Windows.
Well, first, I believe it's an effort to nip internet radio before it competes o a massive scale. The competition is there, and making inroads...
That could be, and I can't prove it otherwise. I'll just say what I said before: I don't believe it. This is attributing a tremendous amount of foresight to an industry that has not otherwise been well known for its forward thinking.
Second, who do you think really controls terrestrial radio? Not to get all tinfoil-hattish, but the consolidation of terrestrial radio stations has really reduced the variety of radio that's available. The RIAA companies want homogenized radio, which maximizes their profits. Clear Channel et al deliver that. Advertisers want huge conglomerate radio station networks. Clear Channel et al deliver that.
I completely agree with this. Personally I stopped listending to commercial FM radio about 15 years ago. The "hogomonization" has produced a product that is so awful, so banal, so tedious, so vapid, that it is now seems actively painful to listen to it in even small doses. It's also interesting to note that the commercial FM radio industry has been steadily declining over the last decade or so, much the same way as CD sales have. I'm sure the extremely poor quality of product (not to mention the endless ads) is responsible.
As for the small, independent, and public stations that play whatever they want... what kind of market share do you think they have?
I don't know; I'm sure it's not much compared to commercial radio. But I'm NOT sure that the collective "market share" of indie radio is any smaller than the collective market share of internet radio. My gut says that indie radio nationwide probably still outdoes internet radio on a listener count basis. I guess I'd have to see some real studies on that to be persuaded otherwise. So I still assert that if the real reason for destroying internet radio is to stop the broadcast of "non-RIAA-approved" music, they would be going after indie radio as well.
Seriously, the power of the major labels derives from one thing only -- their ability to market their artists. Any threat to this ability could potentially kill their marketing power, and thus their business.
I agree with this in general. I just don't believe that this is the main reason they are trying to kill internet radio right now.
There's a reason that current law forces internet radio stations to pay SoundExchange even for indie artists -- it's to kill off the the playtime of those indie artists.
Other Slashdotters with a lot more knowledge of SoundExchange than myself have already posted very detailed explanations of why SoundExchange exists and the purpose it serves. Those explanations generally do not include "killing indie arties" as the primary purpose for SoundExchange. This sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
I agree that Pandora, in its customization feature, offers something that traditional radio can't offer. I'm not a Pandora user, but my understanding though is that the "customization" is at the level of "play me more music like this", not "play me only music by the following 4 bands." So in that respect, it is still a venue whereby people are introduced to new music constantly. Which many people have pointed out here already.
But with all due respect, this fight is not about that. The music industry is not trying to destroy all of internet radio because of Pandora's customizable streams.
You mean that I can't record normal radio? And that I can't record YouTube (Where many record companies have music videos) ? Wrong.
Let's see...hmm....read my post again. Did I say you couldn't do that? Nope. Nice straw man, though.
Hint: it's all about relative difficulty. As we all know, due to the analog hole, if you are motivated enough, you can copy ANYTHING. But setting up an automated system to record an analog FM radio broadcast to your harddrive is a lot more work for the average joe than simply downloading and running streamripper. Add to that the fact that streamripper can parse mp3 tags in the broadcast stream and automatically split it up into individual music files ready for playback, and I suppose you can imagine how a the music industry could get their panties in a wad.
It's not just about stream-ripping. It's also about controlling the market. Internet radio destroys the ability of the major labels to determine what music gets played, which means that they lose the marketing oligopoly they currently hold.
I've heard this argument made many times before (mostly on Slashdot), and while it's tempting to believe it out of a general hatred for the major music labels, somehow I just don't buy it. I just don't believe that internet radio is really that powerful, that it really actually completely undermines the "market oligopoly" (as you put it) in some way that traditional radio (which includes thousands of small, independent, and public stations which already play whatever they want whenever they want with no input whatsoever from "the industry") can't do.
No one seems to be trying to defend or explain why Internet radio is being hit so much harder than satellite or broadcast.
The explanation is pretty simple. If you follow the history of the battle over internet radio royalties, you'll quickly see that it is all about stream ripping. The music industry is convinced that millions of people are "stealing" music by recording streaming radio with free tools like streamripper.
They initially attempted to get congress to pass legislation to force all internet broadcasters to use DRM in their streams. When this went nowhere, that's when they began the royalty assault. The plan is to simply force internet radio broadcasters out of business with exhorbitant royalties. Looks like it's working, too, with the demise of Pandora.
Please make note that there are ignorant LEFTIES as well
I agree that there are ignorant lefties, but what evidence do you have that the law enforcement officials involved are lefties? I scanned the TFA as best I could and could find no mention anywhere of the political affiliations. Note: just because MA is considered a "blue state" doesn't mean anything about these particular cops. I've lived in MA and believe me there were plenty of very right-leaning folks around.
Don't worry. I'm sure the porn industry is hard at work on new HD-proof cosmetic and surgical techniques. They ARE the ones supposedly responsible for most technological advances in the last few decades, right? I'm sure this problem will be solved pronto!
What do you rip FROM if you don't use CDs or DVDs
Well obviously in the case of movies, you still need a physical DVD to rip from. (I buy most of my music now in mp3 form from Amazon, haven't bought a physical CD in a long, long time.) But that wasn't my point and you know it. I'm talking about accessing your media library later, on demand, after the initial purchase and rip. With BluRay, you have no option but to hunt around for the physical disc, load it into a physical player, and wait however many minutes it takes to load up. And if you have more than one HDTV in the house, forget about choosing which room to watch it in, unless you buy multiple players or invest in a very expensive whole-house video distribution system.
Scanning this forum again, I see a lot of other people feel the same way I do. Once you get a HTPC/media server based solution up and running, you never, ever want to go back. And BluRay is nothing but a giant step backwards.
The industry keeps talking about bringing the TV and the PC closer together, and then they come out with something like BluRay which just pushes them further apart.