...the interesting question that Jobs sidesteps here is, "In a world where music is increasingly downloaded, why do we need the traditional record companies at all?"
Why not just have Apple (or any online service) provide recording studio time and some advertising?
Jobs doesn't answer this because there is no answer. He hints at it, by saying that pretty soon the record companies won't be able to offer advances and survive (in which case, they are useless to the artist), but in general the best he can come up with for the record company's purpose is that "they pick winners." Hogwash. 1. He goes on to say that they lose money because they also pick losers, and 2. we all know as their audience that winners are not just picked, they are made. I mean, sure, record companies pick some winners -- because by definition, to be a winner you need a major label. They're serving as gatekeepers on the success of equally talented, but unsigned, artists, due to limits on advertising budgets and the disposable income of the music-buying public. What do they do for their artists? Record companies provide an advance, they provide tons of advertising and payola, and they skim off the top. That's it.
So the key to making iTunes, or any online service, popular with the Napster generation is simply this: guarantee us that the money isn't going to some crap record company, but instead to the artists we appreciate and love (and some to provide expenses and a reasonable profit, maybe 5%, to the new, more effective distribution system). Bottom line. Do that and we'll buy. Until then, screw it.
Soon, after all of the technical jobs are outsourced to other countries, the only way to get meaningful work here will be to attend an Ivy League school
For what it's worth, I went to an Ivy League school, graduated in May.
15% of my class was able to get jobs. I have one because a friend (who quit, fed up with this job and this company) hooked me up with her old job. In order to get her job I took a 25% pay cut off of her salary.
Don't assume that you're part of the home-free privileged classes just because of an Ivy degree. The only thing that ensures a life of privilege is money, measured in income-producing assets.
Of course, if you have the money already, what do you care if you get a "good" job or not? Besides, if you're really after money, you're better off joining a frat and having your drinking buddies get you a job as an investment banker. Qualifications mean nothing compared to knowing somebody on the inside.
There has been some work on something to solve this problem, where a phrase in language A was translated to some special "universal" code, and then finally to language B. The developers would then need to make the translator translate all languages to the universal code, and vice versa. The universal code could be whatever necessary to make the software as easily as possible be able to preserve the "meaning" of the sentence.
Well, at least one linguistic school believes that this is a realistic description of what humans do. See The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. (Man, I'm all over the Amazon links today.) He refers to it as "mentalese" -- the idea that our words are converted into a subverbal conceptual level.
The problem is that, if poorly implemented, this would instead bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the discreditable analytical-philosophy theory of how language works. People haven't been able to create a truly expressive value-free and concept-only language with which to communicate (try translating even a not-too-flowery author like Hemingway into logic propositions), and it would be people who would need to create the "universal idea set".
Unless, of course, there were a way for the machines to do it statistically...
On the contrary. Most idioms are built out of conceptual metaphoric models -- such that there are a finite (albeit rather large) number of learned associations that govern language use, as well as most abstract thought.
If you're interested in this topic, see Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (I don't get a kickback) which discusses the embodied mind and the metaphoric nature of human reasoning (as well as language). There may also be some discussion of this in Metaphors We Live By, by the same authors, though I've only read excerpts of that work & it is several years older.
Actually I've been reporting Yahoo!'s messages as spam as long as I've had the account (about 3 mos). They haven't seemed to get the point yet, alas...
I'm a little concerned by the "any kind of press is good press" argument -- are Michael Jackson's album sales going up this week? It seems like a lot of people saying "no, stop!!!" to generally conservative business decision makers does not further the cause of mainstream Linux adoption. (That's not everybody's goal, but the poster's reference to 'good press' suggests that s/he considers it to be one.)
And *nothing* can force the media to understand something. They'll choose to understand eventually, if given proper incentives, but media understanding is sort of an oxymoron:~)
What would be good is if we can finally get the GPL officially vetted by a judge, so people no longer have to worry about it being theoretical. Assuming the case ever goes anywhere.
As the hours passed in any given day approach 24, the probability of a Slashdot story regarding SCO being posted approaches one.
At such time as this story is posted, refreshing Slashdot is not necessary until work next morning, as no further productive news will be posted on that day.
When I was growing up, my family had a (somewhat tacky) large breadbox, wooden, with a roll-top like you see on old desks. It was pretty durable, but it was also a whole lot bigger (in terms of total volume) than the average desktop tower.
Needless to say I'm not too impressed at the breadbox-sized computer.
Could we at least use relatively standardized-ish sized objects for our impossibly vague comparisons??
Ummm... so will the next big news be that sticky notes "improve memory"?
Providing someone with an automatic reminder system (even if this one is subliminal, or less obvious to the person you're talking to than looking at an index card, etc) doesn't really increase your ability to remember, so much as provide a crib sheet for life. If that "improves memory" then so does taking a timeline into my history final.
See, this is an example of one major problem with our corporate culture -- bosses can't ask their own staff for help because they're afraid of showing weakness?
What, did they hire a pack of wolves?
We have to start accepting that 1. it's ok to make mistakes and 2. being all-powerful is overrated. How much nicer would the world be if executives could learn *those* lessons... (and also how to use excel.)
Hmmm... sounds like they've got a prime candidate for the role of Splinter in the up-and-coming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Part IV... or possibly an EVEN COOLER flyin' fightin' Yoda.
Can't wait until the USAF gets ahold of this though...
...to anybody who's ever done even semi-serious research (or language study w/ a dictionary). Having multiple books open at once & being able to look from one to the other is a great argument for more desk space. (And once again, we see the beauty of the paper interface.)
You wouldn't want to stick your Nutshell book in a desk drawer every time you looked back at the code on the screen, would you? So why have to hide the browser window?
In fact, most of the guys would go out of their way to help the women.
You sure that wasn't just a misguided attempt to show off their technical prowess as a rudimentary mating ritual?
Seriously though. Most of the guys in my CS classes usually just managed to make themselves look like idiots anyways, since the women were the ones who really knew what was going on by comparison & nobody appreciates people who assume them to be ignorant or in need of help...
IssueTrak, I should say. That's what my company uses anyway.
Not too sure why I'm plugging them, it's just what my company uses... But the software seems to work pretty well, is quite featureful, and offers pretty much everything you asked about, so if the existing recommendations don't do it for you (and you don't feel like rolling your own), ask them for a sales call. All with a web interface (yeah there's a surprise.)
This is precisely what happened when I used to mud a lot -- the people who try to go on and act as spoilers are people who convince themselves that they're playing a one-player game, basically; they don't take part in the communities and [usually] view those communities with great disrespect. They convince themselves that the community ties, social ties, and personality ties (created with characters) are unreal, which is why they can feel ok describing the graphic rape of another player and laugh it off as "just a game." They don't have the investment and can't see it the way other players do.
I think there's a larger point here too -- destructive forces usually come either from outside a community or from someone who has voluntarily withdrawn from that community. People within the friendship network cannot attack that network without attacking part of themselves, and are reluctant to do this. It's why real-world wars occur between groups that don't understand each other or have chosen to disassociate themselves from each other -- a necessary part of the process of "othering."
And this, like online democracy, is important because people are the same people in different media -- they just have different levels of investment in the community.
The online world provides us with a model for solving real social problems: don't increase the legal threat of punishment (for that depends on being caught) -- increase people's sense of belonging to a caring community, and threaten their feeling of status in that community if they violate its norms. That's the real way to solve real-life social problems.
The label pays for the recording/mixing/mastering of the CD, pays for the videos, TV commercials, a roomful of promoters get them TV and print interviews, the label pays for the website, CD pressing, artwork. They may spend up to a million dollars on a project. If it fails they absorb the loss, not the artist (if he can't repay the advance it is written off). But if it makes it big the artist makes big bucks.
I was under the impression that all of these things are recoupable expenses -- the label may front the money, but it comes back out of the artist's record sales. And the number of artists who actually make it big to make those big bucks is usually pretty darn low anyways...
But in any event, let me ask you a question -- how much should a record company make for taking a (relatively small) risk on recoupable expenses for a band that it can sell through marketing and control over the availability of alternatives? How much should a record company make for denying access to thousands of equally good would-be artists who can't get a record deal because they're not as easy to dangle in front of teeny-boppers?
And whatever happened to the basic premise of market capitalism: something is worth what others are willing to pay for it? You just have to accept that. A house is not worth what an appraiser says it is, nor what a buyer or seller says it is, nor what a bank says it is, it is worth the amount of money that is contracted to change hands. The same is true of every other good in a true free market. But there is no negotiation with a giant organization that fixes its price and says "take it or leave it." This is doubly ironic when they can make as many copies of their "goods for sale" as they wish with a microscopic marginal cost.
The answer to both our questions is "An artist, and a record company, should make exactly as much as the public is willing to pay them."
Right now the record company is setting a price. The public is answering with how much it is willing to pay -- "Less than the record companies charge." People would probably buy if they could negotiate cd prices, but for now their only alternative to get something more like their desired price is to make a free copy. And most probably think, correctly, that hey, the RIAA is just a bunch of extortionists anyway; if the artists get screwed, that's collateral damage.
Personally, as an academics-geek, I'm already uncomfortable enough with the idea of a single other expert with an opinion summarizing the existing knowledge about a field. A computer doing it would be just awful -- who knows what kind of ideological biases the programmers will have?
What I really want Google to be able to do is get me a mass of primary source material, convert from text to speech in a reasonable way (ie not get beaten by php and crappy web-page layouts), and speed it up to 3x so I can wade through it faster than I can read.
Of course, that would require real primary information, instead of mere summaries, to exist on the web, and that's the real bottleneck for using Google as a serious educational tool...
Slashdot Mirror
...the interesting question that Jobs sidesteps here is, "In a world where music is increasingly downloaded, why do we need the traditional record companies at all?"
Why not just have Apple (or any online service) provide recording studio time and some advertising?
Jobs doesn't answer this because there is no answer. He hints at it, by saying that pretty soon the record companies won't be able to offer advances and survive (in which case, they are useless to the artist), but in general the best he can come up with for the record company's purpose is that "they pick winners." Hogwash.
1. He goes on to say that they lose money because they also pick losers, and
2. we all know as their audience that winners are not just picked, they are made. I mean, sure, record companies pick some winners -- because by definition, to be a winner you need a major label. They're serving as gatekeepers on the success of equally talented, but unsigned, artists, due to limits on advertising budgets and the disposable income of the music-buying public. What do they do for their artists? Record companies provide an advance, they provide tons of advertising and payola, and they skim off the top. That's it.
So the key to making iTunes, or any online service, popular with the Napster generation is simply this: guarantee us that the money isn't going to some crap record company, but instead to the artists we appreciate and love (and some to provide expenses and a reasonable profit, maybe 5%, to the new, more effective distribution system). Bottom line. Do that and we'll buy. Until then, screw it.
... the ability to filter connections on port 80 based on the referring url.
Hooray for googlecache...
15% of my class was able to get jobs. I have one because a friend (who quit, fed up with this job and this company) hooked me up with her old job. In order to get her job I took a 25% pay cut off of her salary.
Don't assume that you're part of the home-free privileged classes just because of an Ivy degree. The only thing that ensures a life of privilege is money, measured in income-producing assets.
Of course, if you have the money already, what do you care if you get a "good" job or not? Besides, if you're really after money, you're better off joining a frat and having your drinking buddies get you a job as an investment banker. Qualifications mean nothing compared to knowing somebody on the inside.
The problem is that, if poorly implemented, this would instead bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the discreditable analytical-philosophy theory of how language works. People haven't been able to create a truly expressive value-free and concept-only language with which to communicate (try translating even a not-too-flowery author like Hemingway into logic propositions), and it would be people who would need to create the "universal idea set".
Unless, of course, there were a way for the machines to do it statistically...
On the contrary. Most idioms are built out of conceptual metaphoric models -- such that there are a finite (albeit rather large) number of learned associations that govern language use, as well as most abstract thought.
If you're interested in this topic, see Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (I don't get a kickback) which discusses the embodied mind and the metaphoric nature of human reasoning (as well as language). There may also be some discussion of this in Metaphors We Live By, by the same authors, though I've only read excerpts of that work & it is several years older.
Rings pretty hollow indeed.
And yet, ironically, it seems to be "good enough" for us Americans...
Welcome to the new diocese, Father. These upstanding lads are the choir...
Actually I've been reporting Yahoo!'s messages as spam as long as I've had the account (about 3 mos). They haven't seemed to get the point yet, alas...
I'm a little concerned by the "any kind of press is good press" argument -- are Michael Jackson's album sales going up this week? It seems like a lot of people saying "no, stop!!!" to generally conservative business decision makers does not further the cause of mainstream Linux adoption. (That's not everybody's goal, but the poster's reference to 'good press' suggests that s/he considers it to be one.)
:~)
And *nothing* can force the media to understand something. They'll choose to understand eventually, if given proper incentives, but media understanding is sort of an oxymoron
What would be good is if we can finally get the GPL officially vetted by a judge, so people no longer have to worry about it being theoretical. Assuming the case ever goes anywhere.
As the hours passed in any given day approach 24, the probability of a Slashdot story regarding SCO being posted approaches one.
At such time as this story is posted, refreshing Slashdot is not necessary until work next morning, as no further productive news will be posted on that day.
When I was growing up, my family had a (somewhat tacky) large breadbox, wooden, with a roll-top like you see on old desks. It was pretty durable, but it was also a whole lot bigger (in terms of total volume) than the average desktop tower.
Needless to say I'm not too impressed at the breadbox-sized computer.
Could we at least use relatively standardized-ish sized objects for our impossibly vague comparisons??
Ummm... so will the next big news be that sticky notes "improve memory"?
Providing someone with an automatic reminder system (even if this one is subliminal, or less obvious to the person you're talking to than looking at an index card, etc) doesn't really increase your ability to remember, so much as provide a crib sheet for life. If that "improves memory" then so does taking a timeline into my history final.
Where's your "no legitimate uses" argument now, RIAA?
Who's floundering? I thought most of us here were thriving on ignorance...?
See, this is an example of one major problem with our corporate culture -- bosses can't ask their own staff for help because they're afraid of showing weakness?
What, did they hire a pack of wolves?
We have to start accepting that 1. it's ok to make mistakes and 2. being all-powerful is overrated. How much nicer would the world be if executives could learn *those* lessons... (and also how to use excel.)
Hmmm... sounds like they've got a prime candidate for the role of Splinter in the up-and-coming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Part IV... or possibly an EVEN COOLER flyin' fightin' Yoda.
Can't wait until the USAF gets ahold of this though...
...to anybody who's ever done even semi-serious research (or language study w/ a dictionary). Having multiple books open at once & being able to look from one to the other is a great argument for more desk space. (And once again, we see the beauty of the paper interface.)
You wouldn't want to stick your Nutshell book in a desk drawer every time you looked back at the code on the screen, would you? So why have to hide the browser window?
You sure that wasn't just a misguided attempt to show off their technical prowess as a rudimentary mating ritual?
Seriously though. Most of the guys in my CS classes usually just managed to make themselves look like idiots anyways, since the women were the ones who really knew what was going on by comparison & nobody appreciates people who assume them to be ignorant or in need of help...
Not too sure why I'm plugging them, it's just what my company uses... But the software seems to work pretty well, is quite featureful, and offers pretty much everything you asked about, so if the existing recommendations don't do it for you (and you don't feel like rolling your own), ask them for a sales call. All with a web interface (yeah there's a surprise.)
Yes, my friend. I fear SCO really does have a "prick" function...
I think there's a larger point here too -- destructive forces usually come either from outside a community or from someone who has voluntarily withdrawn from that community. People within the friendship network cannot attack that network without attacking part of themselves, and are reluctant to do this. It's why real-world wars occur between groups that don't understand each other or have chosen to disassociate themselves from each other -- a necessary part of the process of "othering."
And this, like online democracy, is important because people are the same people in different media -- they just have different levels of investment in the community.
The online world provides us with a model for solving real social problems: don't increase the legal threat of punishment (for that depends on being caught) -- increase people's sense of belonging to a caring community, and threaten their feeling of status in that community if they violate its norms. That's the real way to solve real-life social problems.
But in any event, let me ask you a question -- how much should a record company make for taking a (relatively small) risk on recoupable expenses for a band that it can sell through marketing and control over the availability of alternatives? How much should a record company make for denying access to thousands of equally good would-be artists who can't get a record deal because they're not as easy to dangle in front of teeny-boppers?
And whatever happened to the basic premise of market capitalism: something is worth what others are willing to pay for it? You just have to accept that. A house is not worth what an appraiser says it is, nor what a buyer or seller says it is, nor what a bank says it is, it is worth the amount of money that is contracted to change hands. The same is true of every other good in a true free market. But there is no negotiation with a giant organization that fixes its price and says "take it or leave it." This is doubly ironic when they can make as many copies of their "goods for sale" as they wish with a microscopic marginal cost.
The answer to both our questions is "An artist, and a record company, should make exactly as much as the public is willing to pay them."
Right now the record company is setting a price. The public is answering with how much it is willing to pay -- "Less than the record companies charge." People would probably buy if they could negotiate cd prices, but for now their only alternative to get something more like their desired price is to make a free copy. And most probably think, correctly, that hey, the RIAA is just a bunch of extortionists anyway; if the artists get screwed, that's collateral damage.
Personally, as an academics-geek, I'm already uncomfortable enough with the idea of a single other expert with an opinion summarizing the existing knowledge about a field. A computer doing it would be just awful -- who knows what kind of ideological biases the programmers will have?
What I really want Google to be able to do is get me a mass of primary source material, convert from text to speech in a reasonable way (ie not get beaten by php and crappy web-page layouts), and speed it up to 3x so I can wade through it faster than I can read.
Of course, that would require real primary information, instead of mere summaries, to exist on the web, and that's the real bottleneck for using Google as a serious educational tool...
Banner at halflife2.net reads:
The Definitive Half Life Source
(ouch)