Facinating, I read your links and CDBaby does seem to be a great way for musicians to make the transistion from being a Pub band to semi pro or pro status. Your Site and Concept sell themselves well.
If I wanted to get listed on Itunes purely to get listed provided I didnt use samples and was completely original didn't do a cover of an existing song I could be there for pretty much the cost of my time producing 2 cd's and 55 dollars (pretty much vanity publishing but for music). might never get downloaded but hey I am published...
For those musicians that want to get further then there is still a lot of work to be done. unlikely that someone will download your song by chance. I guess a musician could try p2p and give away some songs.
legally covers you can't give them away since you have to pay the publishers for a licience although it does seem that if i covered "what becomes of the broken hearted" and only ever got 10 downloads on Itunes then I would owe the publishers 90 cents.
I wonder what my liability would be if a few 1000 copys of my performance of this song got downloaded free on p2p. If it was deliberate on my part or just released by my "Fan".
Samples/mixes seem to be another huge minefield that will incur an overhead. mixes might never be legal and samples seem to have a dollar value that assumes a minimum quantity of 500 to 2500 copys.
if your making sales it also seems likely that tax will be paid somewhere and it also means making accounts your friendly song publisher will want to ensure you really only did get 10 downloads.
however given all that I don't think CDBaby can be held accountable for the taxman the publishers or that fox fella for taking a slice from your sales.
The only negative I could see was a comment about cdbaby taking a fixed price from a Cd Sale
" Author: gdZiemann Posted: June 6, 2003 at 7:46 PM EDT Well, I've been writing to Apple for months before they started iMusic.
MacWarehouse has called me three times in the 2-3 weeks to update their records. They keep talking about their Apple "champs."
You know, I really have nothing against CD Baby. I think they're a great deal for a lot of artists still basically going the traditional route.
But if I use them, it will double my $5 retail price, because they charge $4 per unit. I'm not doubling my price to get in the club, so I can cut the price back to $5 on iMusic.
It might be the yellow brick road, but that damn witch is still hanging around. "
Derek can you explain what this guy is talking about?
do you take submissions by people other than musicians say i heard a good local band or a bad one for that matter and organised getting thier unpublished recordings to you. would you deal with me as thier representative or would they have to come direct to you?
sorry if this takes away some of the wow factor from cdbaby but i would be interested to see your reply. please correct any inaccuracys in my understanding of what cdbaby is about and the reality of publishing via cdbaby to itunes ect.
I think copyright violation is just the club to use on google and not the real reason.
from what i can tell google indexes both copyright in print books and public domain and orphaned works.
for an in print book google is great for publishers - bigger audiences for their catalog more sales. This is the upside and they like amazon for this reason.
however the biggest fear is the public domain given 3 books about a subject 2 in print (extracts available) and a third freely available, which book will you look at first. Isnt it obvious the public domain book will get looked at first if its not good enough or suitable then the published in print book gets a look in.
project gutenburg is great but in googles site you get the whole cake one place to start your search. amazon knows nothing of public domain gutenburg knows nothing of copyrighted books bringing both area's to the search engine on the same page its great for all us readers. Google doesn't sell books so it doesnt harm them if a sale is made or not.
there are parallels here with downloadable music sites like itunes no public domain there either is there?
Publishers know there is a limit to what we can consume and if we consume the free stuff then there is a smaller market for the stuff we pay for.
personally when i study i like to use the pdf in parallel with a paper copy. A computer to search and a piece of paper to read.
Finally if it wasn't for greed the publishers could make a quiet killing by offering pdf copys immediately of any of thier back catalogue and printing when demand has made it profitable. nice to be able to presell a print run
Actually getting stoned is pretty much self medicating things get stressful you get stoned.
Do you think you make your best choices when drunk? generally thats conter balanced with periods of being sober but if it wasn't...
so you think someone who is stoned is making the best choices in life for themselves? maybe they are but thinking about the long term is probably not something they are thinking about. Maybe if they read this they will be.
who am I to say that getting stoned long term wasn't a good choice for me? someone who has done it. your mileage may vary.
you know we seem to pretty much agree, especially on the politics, and regulation.
personally i am in favour of informed choice, which isn't achieved by the "authoritys" or by people saying its harmless either.
When it comes down to it the balance does depend on the individual, I think it was a mistake I made in my life to smoke so much and for so long. I don't think It's harmed me physically intellectually or emotionally thou I just might be a bit further on in life if i hadnt got stoned so much.
In hindsight I think i smoked a little too much for far too long. but i am positive about one thing you really are wasting your life if you can't bring yourself to do something positive for someone else and its pretty hard to do that sat on your arse stoned.
and yes that is probably a conclusion i made while sitting on my arse getting stoned. Your right changed prioritys:)
Define damage. Your different through having spent any length of time smoking but damaged no.
Your right when you say it's your choices which make your life difficult. however honestly can you say that getting stoned regularly doesn't cause a lot of people to put off making choices.
No you can't blame the plant as its your choice to get stoned. drifting through life is a side effect of being regularly stoned.
This is the real problem with cannabis use, not cannabis damaging your intellect.
Does cannabis have a benificial effect well i think this is a question best answered by people who made thier choices in thier teens early 20's and are now living with the concequences.
smoking at 13 i feel sorry for your messed up childhood.
I can only speak about the people I know or Knew and my own experience.
habitual use of any drug is harmful. If you can't manage without using any recreational drug for lets say a month then you need to look at why this is. Change your life make choices try and have a benificial effect in your community.
Try and do something positive that helps others. It'll raise your self worth at least you will be contributing something to society and giving your life a point.
I think my personal experience, does support the studys findings. Thinking round problems, having an open mind thats something thats recognisable among smokers. The inability to effect a choice is also pretty recognisable too. creative thinking thats fairly easy to recognise in a smoker or ex smoker.
Increased anxiety depression, if your going to move forward with your life and stop smoking thats something you will have to live with if you want to progress.
being stoned doesn't help motivation at all letting life drift by is the biggest side effect of smoking dope.
long term damage is the lost years where you could have been building a successful life. I don't think your intelligence is damaged by smoking I am studying now and my grades have never been so high but then I don't get high more than a handful of times a year and when I do I just feel more resolve to work harder. We all need some stress relief if its chemically induced make sure it is a minor part of your life.
now the crunch point is would I make the same choices i made in my teens, if i could advise myself what would i say to try and convince me to make other choices.
well I think i would tell myself to drink less, work harder on getting my grades party when its appropriate not every weekend. Make the best of any situation. I think one of the best resources out there that I wish I had discovered years ago is the open university
www.open.ac.uk
study in your own time the fee's are affordable if you don't earn enough they may even be free. I had 18 months of unemployment years of crappy jobs that just helped me drink at the weekends I could have had my degree years ago and without a huge debt.
There are people studying with the OU from all over the world and its cheap and you can study as much or as little as you want.
In short Try and make sure that there is something positive in your life and even if your a factory robot, no significant other living in a crap hole do something to help others and your self worth will rise and your life will improve. Drugs might help you get by but they are just prolonging the agony.
hmm interesting but, my mobile phone operator would consider an 0844 number outside of my price plan ( swine since I get 2 hours of calls to uk mobiles and land lines in my contract). so it would cost me significantly more about 40 pence a minute using my mobile to access this service.
I dont have a landline so that limits me to payphones. however I do have one question if i am using a payphone to make these calls would i be charged twice once by bt to connect to the access number and then by budgetcom
ie would budget com charge me 1p a minute and bt then charge me 5p a minute making the call cost 6p a minute.
or in the case of my mobile 40 odd pence a minute. (still cheaper than using my cell phone direct thou)
A Partial reply to your arguements, VOIP is cheap for making international calls at any time of day about 2 cents a minute from uk to any phone in the usa, and generally 2 cents a minute to a landline anywhere else. and 20cents a minute to most cell phones. it does vary a bit but in general thats the cost.
now my mobile operator in the uk wants closer to a dollar a minute (70p) a minute to call ireland for example so the skype rate is quite good - some phone cards are comparable to skype rates.
however this handset is expensive, but there is an alternative a cellphone. namely an mdaIII (xdaIIi ect). this is a cellphone pda with built in wireless networking running windows mobile 2003 and skype has a client.
so for me cell phone contract for my national calls and skype for my international calls.
in theory any open wireless access point could be used to make the jump on to skype.
so in conclusion yes this handset is expensive and my handset does all it does and more (but you really need to use a headset to cancel echo's).
finally why would you want to rely on voip alone? its not a replacement telephone service its a complimentary service similar to your telephone service and doesn't have 911 services or an operator. why would you buy broadband to specifically run this service?
makes no sense to me but if you have broadband already it also makes sense to use it.
Its been years since i saw any ads like this but if i remember correctly they were color made of card and advertised cigerettes american branded. so perhaps it was an america practice, rather than an english one.
however its always been common to see a list of other books by the same author or series or publisher, some times with an excerpt to tempt you.
never annoyed me as it just gave me a few idea's on what next to read.
Anyone remember a time when compilation albums actually were worth buying. usually a percentage of songs and artists you already liked. with the original album the recordings were from. you got introduced to bands you wouldnt have heard of otherwise and actually went out and bought thier albums. these days its filler and more filler, ever play the cliche game name a band thats on a compalation album and guess the track...
I take it you don't know that coke and pepsi supply fridges to cafes ect. The deal is we give you a fridge and you don't put our competitors products in it.
it's like the myth of a pub being a free house in the uk. yes the brewery doesn't own the pub but quite often they do help finance a mortgage to allow the owner to buy the pub usually with a proviso that so much beer is bought from the brewery.
these are cases which are supplier controlled.
on the otherhand supermarkets usually control the deal they get from farmers and packhouses.
how many suppliers do you think are told to produce x for a supermarket produce it and then get told actually we don't want so much. the production is done and often its a case of unload the truck and either rework it or dump it. rework means relabel so your best by date was the 17th that product now gets packaged in best by the 18th.
who's master in this deal hitachi or appple i dont know but if hitachi can't supply much more than apple require without building more lines. then apple will get the production. commonsense really especially if the other customer is trying to compete with apple.
I think your wrong on the reasons for the RIAA to be zealous on file sharing.
Publishers create an artificial scarcity, They supply what they think you will buy. Truth is there is a lot of free music around with no publisher or out of copyright. p2p gets you access to that free music. Teenagers buy in to the this is cool RIAA promoted crap because they know no better. itunes is acceptable because they sell music in parallel to this if you look at the difference between google print and amazon amazon sell books google print sells books via links and gives away the free alternative. given 3 alternatives 2 commercial and 1 free which do you read first? who gets a law suit?
open office msoffice when the drm becomes too strong which one will you use?
you know really its the commercial pirated music which is poisoning the well of p2p.
there already exists a method in some p2p programs for flagging fakes howabout a blue flag for freely copyable. or something else for commercial stuff that shouldnt be shared. if the RIAA can go on p2p and identify people downloading its members music. then surely that would suggest they can identify the music too. then that gives a p2p user choice download the commercial stuff and risk getting sued or try out the free stuff.
ok people ask yourselves this question. When you want to do something on your computer and you havent a suitable program what do you look for? something to buy or something thats free and available.
personally i always add the words open source to my searches because free brings up free demo free trial save disabled or crippled in some way.
you get it now its not ripping off the commercial stuff that worries publishers its people using a free alternative.
So If I get this right you basically lost your sites because of torrents of copyrighted material.
So could you host torrents of non copyrighted material? It means more work granted since you cannot automatically link to a torrent because it may be copyrighted and get you fined jailed or whatever.
However by putting that filter in place ie the torrents you host are legal, you then become a site which is attractive to those who do not want to be burnt by the RIAA or similar.
little Johnny can download from your site without getting his parents in a lawsuit. you can get the traffic for your site and your ads viewed.
after all its not the torrents that make you money but the traffic to your site.
you see the problem was you blocked ALL MP3s then you blocked all movies then all tvshows and lost all your content.
what if you could sell legal downloads and giveaway free downloads. say like an itunes with a public domain section. your music site has it all then for profit and for free downloads. your ad revenue is good whatever people want.
it is making public domain and orphaned works available which scares the authors guild so much.
Really we have an artificial scarcity of books, music and film. Think about it we are limited in what we are able to consume by what we are able to buy and this is great for publishers.
Amazons model doesnt go against this artificial scarcity model because they are only indexing what you can buy! in fact you may well buy from them.
Google is doing something which all publishers fear. making available a free alternative that is easy to get hold of and use.
why buy a published for money work when there is a free alternative? especially one which is good enough.
it's almost comparable to the office- open office situation. If open-office gains good enough status. Microsofts office sales plummit. Right now open office 2 is very close to being accepted as good enough. When you think about it Microsoft is pushing it in this direction too. The harder you make it to pirate, illegally copy the legitimate microsoft office the more likely someone is going to decide, well i would like to run ms office but i can't afford to buy it and using a pirated version is going to get me in trouble.
hmm whats this open office...
its going to be the same with vista, copy protected to the eyeballs. Microsofts genuine advantage program is going to see to it pirated copys are going to be a problem to use. maybe linux will be the only alternative for high end hardware...
music its a similar game, imagine google music the RIAA would have kittens. free music easily available and they cant sue! honestly think about it. its not pirating commercial published music which is a problem for the RIAA its making all the free stuff widely available. the commercial stuff thats lost, thats in the profit margins.
Why doesn't Itunes have a FREE section? why no public domain works, maybe because there is no profit in it for them. maybe this is the real problem with P2P it makes it possible to share PD Music freely and at no cost to the consumer or provider who are the same thing.
maybe this is the real problem for publishers a free alternative.
We really are in the early days of file sharing, we still have this common herd mentality. which we grow out of as we get older. maybe some of slashdots older readers will concur that their taste in music has become broader and the top 10 has taken a lower place in thier musically experience. IT ISN'T that the music today is worse than what we were listening too when we were teenagers but that we are aware of other music that suits our own personal tastes better.
Take a look at your own back catalogue stuff you bought 20 years ago. How much do you still genuinely like, play ?
If I can realise this, surely this is what the publishing industry realises too and you can see the real motivation behind thier actions.
Think clearly, and you see that its not so much sharing copyrighted work which is a problem for publishers its. 1)A freely available alternative. 2)A Discerning consumer base- will not pay for turkeys. 3)Consumers having individual tastes and desires.
In Sheffield Uk there is a large complex of flats which has an interesting hotwater and heating system. You see this is all powered by trash.
The council runs a large incinerator in which the fuel is garbage collected from around the city cans are picked out by magnets and are recycled and I think there is some other recycling done but finally what is burnable is burnt and used to provide a cut price heating and hotwater scheme.
obviously there are benefits for the people living in the flats (generally poorer members of the community) there is also the benefit that garbage going into landfill is reduced.
but you dont get paid for your trash in sheffield.
ok first I will apologise for the grammar, i use it loosely I know.
First of all I wasn't refering to any slaughter.. I was refering to the natural suffering which occurs in human life such as cancer arthritis sterility and many other things which if we are lucky happen to somebody else.
I think it is fairly obvious that many avenues of research have been explored with varying degree's of success. working in any field of research knowing what has been done before can help avoid repeating past mistakes and that older research can be reevaluated due to advances made since the original papers were published.
The prime advantage that google print has over anything in existance now is the ability to rapidly assess what has been done before. If your familiar with going through abstracts attempting to find existing work which supports your research its a long and drawn out task. (Last time I did this it took over 2 months for the articles i thought would help to arrive and even then they were barely relevant).
research papers are published as a requirement for many degree's often in very limited numbers of each paper but many thousands of them.
Is it not obvious to you that google is attempting to provide a resource that will speed up research and hopefully reduce the development time of many inventions drugs and cures that will change the quality of life for many people suffering in the world today.
In plain terms what I am saying is that with google print research and development time could be reduced and more effective. bringing forth new drugs and inventions which will reduce suffering in the world. you might argue that these advances will be made eventually however if that advance could be made earlier it could be the difference between a loved one dying or living and or the quality of life for them being significantly improved. at worst the advance might never be made.
Can you not see how incredible a resource having mankinds published knowledge available on your desktop is-and this is potentially what we could have with google print.
now as an author you would prefer for google to approach you and ask if you would like to be included and also it seems you have other works planned which you would also like to be asked about.
so should google ask you and millions of other authors for permission to allow the public to view extracts?
google does give you the option of saying I don't want to be included leave my works out of this so if you care enough to be bothered then simply google will not index them a simple email confirming who you are and the works in question and the world need never know you published anything through google anyway.
There are very few organisations capable of undertaking a project of this magnitude so dont expect 100's of clones of google print to popup indexing your work.
however lets look at another situation. perhaps your grandfather was a doctor and he published in his 20's a paper on a particular subject can you expect the publishing house to still have a current address for him assuming he is still alive of course where he can be contacted. Can you not see that contacting every author individually is an impossible task.
perhaps i am mistaken in believing that most people would prefer to have some good come from thier work rather than having it rot on a few shelves if preserved at all and never read.
by making google jump through hoops to satisfy a particular authors ego. your locking away a huge amount of knowledge which it would be impossible to check if their is a copyright maintained on it. I think if you want to earn some revenue on something you wrote fine just make sure your contactable. you can quickly google for your own name to see if anythings listed for you.
if you have a legitimate claim to any work listed you can ensure their is a method in place to allow your work to be purchased. probably will be easy to tell if someone has plagarised your work too. come to th
this bunch of around 8000 authors need to be sent a message staff@authorsguild.org is the contact email address
Print.google.com is important for all of us because it means access to the worlds published printed knowledge of everything (except micky mouse of course). Think of how valuble this could be for people researching into anything
the ability to call up the whole of mankinds published knowledge or at least extracts from documents on any subject all the research papers. this site could be the most important ever!
And an organisation of around 8000 people thinks they should stop google maybe when they see thier relatives ill dying and suffering they should remember their contribution to the pain and misery in this world.
fuckem boycott thier works refuse to acknowledge they published anything. Let them know you are not going to buy read or acknowledge their existance because they have contributed the smallest drop of knowledge to humanity so I don't think we will miss them.
they must feel the negative effects of thier actions holding the worlds knowledge hostage is a crime against humanity and this is what they are attempting.
what kind of resolution is this camera phone going to have? ocr to be successful really needs 600 dpi and most current generation phones work on 640 by 480 at best so would require 1 inch to fill the screen and 20cm is not close enough for that.
even moving around its going to be quite a feat to scan an a4 sized document and ocr it.
you can use a captured image as a brush, or just pick colors from the image.
I don't know if there is a way to average out a color from a group of pixels and the package I use doesnt record a pixels source.
I do like the idea of recording sound and video and maintaining the link between the source and the final picture.
Thats purely a question of using a package which works in this way.
What could be interesting to see developed is something like MIDI for artists. ie a live recording of the picture being created starting from a blank canvas to the final image.
now that could be an innovative and viable product. don't we all feel a sense of awe watching an artist produce something bueatiful from nothing.
The ability to go back to a point in a pictures creation and decide to do it differently from that point on or cut and paste on the timeline so if theres a 'bad' section it can be edited out the sequence or perhaps moving of a section of the original by an offset of a few pixels or use a different brush or colour.
Wouldn't this be a great and innovative open source project. the file format would have to be something similar to midi and open so anybody could make a player or editor.
I use a Pda Phone with a Paint package to achieve a similar effect.
The phone has a camera built in so I can take a shot of where I am Load this a background layer and then proceed to draw on a new layer with the stylus on the touch screen.
Its a very natural way to draw. The alternatives such as a mouse or tablet simply dont give the direct feedback drawing on a touch screen does.
the pda is pocket sized so makes drawing anywhere simple and discrete along with a battery life that will allow you to sit for hours drawing, its a great tool for anyone who likes to draw.
I wasn't keen on the earlier versions of open office mainly because it seemed a bit clunky using a horrible file requester for one. The latest beta's thou they are nice. you don't have to fight with writer, there is no need. you can stop lists getting automatically bulleted you can select a block of text and create a tab where you want it and get rid of any others. honestly open office writer is nice to work with.
Of course anything i write in it will have to be tested in word if its going to be shared. but if you've got word why bother with open office? simply because open office is better for creating and formating documents than word is. If i dont have to fight the word processor, I am more productive and a lot less stressed.
If you havent tried a recent beta of open office try it for a day and see how easy it is to use.
I just downloaded the latest beta for open office and heres what I am hoping for no autoformating!
I have a number of issues with word which i am hoping open office will solve. I have been working on a long time project converting a book via ocr. Its contents have a number of tables of sorts a number of translation exercises. a few dual colummn sections for volcabulary.
I am not an expert in word by any means and i have broken up my project into chapter / lesson sized chunks. word just isn't nice with over a 100 pages in a document. first annoying niggle with tables. Automatically Changing the first letter of the first word in a cell to a Capital letter just by scrolling down through the table. (I know ctrl z will cancel words automatic formatting) locking the section helps but it does mean locking out me as well as word.
numbered exercises eg translate: 1). this sentence. 2).Another sentence. become 1). this sentence.
2). 2).Another sentence. when i split the line and yet again i have to press ctrl z.
random generation of tabs, how do you get rid of them in word.
I seem to spend more time correcting words half arsed formating attempts than I do actually getting the words into the document in the first place. I use paste special and select plain text for pasting as it saves even more mangled styles.
what I hope I will get from open office is a word processor which puts me in command. I know there seems to be a premise that open office should function in the same way as word, I am just hoping its not too much like word.
I welcome any word users out there to tell me how to stop the auto capitalisation in cells the automatic bulleting of lists and how to get rid of a stop put in by word or stop it creating it in the first place. one more thing which would be useful would be how to create a footnote on a page that stays on the page at the bottom even if i choose to add more text to the page and references to previous pages that will refer to the correct page even though page 97 on the original may now be page 108. or else where if i choose a different font style or size.
I know some users need to collaborate on documents track changes ect. I just want a word processor that does what I tell it to do.
you forgot windows ce (2003 version) skype and skype out + wireless networking = mobile skype in your pocket (your coverage may vary). free calls in the urban jungle maybe:)
I don't know how well skype would work over gprs or how cost effective either i think my provider will let me have 3 meg download for £5 if i buy as a bolt on £7.50 a meg if i just use it.
it's the international and cross platform aspects of skypes service which sell it to me. calls i couldn't afford are affordable. but
skype out is a bit random with its success rates like throw a 6 to talk for anything from a minute upwards and expect for the connection to break at any time and need to redial.
skype in buys you a national number for your friends to call. (send me a text I will call you back and use the free minutes i get on my mobile phone contract).
my mobile is a pda phone (blue angel, mda III, xda IIS, ect) with wireless built in its great for skype out within the confines of the limits of my wireless router (or someone elses)
skype out fills in the gaps in my mobile phone contract but for mobile calls its still a significant cost £12 an hour compared to £1.20 an hour for a call to a land line (usa excepted both $1.20 an hour).
skype calls are fragile often you have a call broken by a skype failure headphones are essential on the skype using end or your friends will get echoed at for the price i do like skype for anymore i wouldnt.
For rupert murdoch to buy skype that would stop me using it. OK he figured we got our tv too cheaply and worked out people would pay £30 a month and accept advertising too. If the model stays as it is for skype its useable just start shoving additional fee's and adverts at me no thanks.
so saying give me an alternative system mac windows linux and pda compatable that lets me call anywhere at skype like rates you could get me as a customer open source would be even better (and getting through nat is essential).
when you think about windows and shortcuts in windows, there are a few things which could be done better if the user had a say in the matter. I don't know if there is such a hack but heres what i think would be ideal from a users perspective.
no 1 tab ordering. more often than not users work on a subset of widgets within a window what that subset will be is probably down to the task in hand.
if you could set the tab ordering to suit the work you had in hand. so the six items out of 30 on a page you use if you could make them the first 6 tab items when needed.
2ndly list boxes user set defaults i spend all day scrolling up and down through multiple options that are usually aranged alphabetically if i could set default values on a page to what i usually require i would be a lot more productive.
user setting of shortcuts to buttons especially for buttons with no shortcut. finally menus at the top of windows not on the line below. Shouldnt it be possible to hide the title bar and allow users to slam to the top of the screen for a menu instead of overshooting.
finally how about a user assignable copy and paste key hmm maybe caps lock one press to start to copy a block and one press to paste it else where.
how about just letting the function keys be assigned to particular options on a window F1 to F6 could bring in my default values to the items i want to change.
intelligent autocomplete for everything kinda like open office guessing your words for you imagine it for numbers too so when i am entering 5 numbers with the same area code then it would guess the next digit.
windows are only a mechanism to allow an application respond to a widget where the widget is its tab order pretty much unimportant to the application. could make quite a difference to the users thou.
well explained and interesting, If I remember correctly the amiga used to work in a similar fashion slam mouse to top bring up menu's and select. to be completely honest the title bar is in the wrong place and holds for me just 3 buttons. thats a waste of space and like you say counter preductive.
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Facinating, I read your links and CDBaby does seem to be a great way for musicians to make the transistion from being a Pub band to semi pro or pro status.
...
Your Site and Concept sell themselves well.
If I wanted to get listed on Itunes purely to get listed provided I didnt use samples and was completely original didn't do a cover of an existing song I could be there for pretty much the cost of my time producing 2 cd's and 55 dollars (pretty much vanity publishing but for music).
might never get downloaded but hey I am published
For those musicians that want to get further then there is still a lot of work to be done. unlikely that someone will download your song by chance. I guess a musician could try p2p and give away some songs.
legally covers you can't give them away since you have to pay the publishers for a licience although it does seem that if i covered "what becomes of the broken hearted" and only ever got 10 downloads on Itunes then I would owe the publishers 90 cents.
I wonder what my liability would be if a few 1000 copys of my performance of this song got downloaded free on p2p. If it was deliberate on my part or just released by my "Fan".
Samples/mixes seem to be another huge minefield that will incur an overhead.
mixes might never be legal and samples seem to have a dollar value that assumes a minimum quantity of 500 to 2500 copys.
if your making sales it also seems likely that tax will be paid somewhere and it also means making accounts your friendly song publisher will want to ensure you really only did get 10 downloads.
however given all that I don't think CDBaby can be held accountable for the taxman the publishers or that fox fella for taking a slice from your sales.
The only negative I could see was a comment about cdbaby taking a fixed price from a Cd Sale
http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/6830
" Author: gdZiemann
Posted: June 6, 2003 at 7:46 PM EDT
Well, I've been writing to Apple for months before they started iMusic.
MacWarehouse has called me three times in the 2-3 weeks to update their records. They keep talking about their Apple "champs."
You know, I really have nothing against CD Baby. I think they're a great deal for a lot of artists still basically going the traditional route.
But if I use them, it will double my $5 retail price, because they charge $4 per unit. I'm not doubling my price to get in the club, so I can cut the price back to $5 on iMusic.
It might be the yellow brick road, but that damn witch is still hanging around.
"
Derek can you explain what this guy is talking about?
do you take submissions by people other than musicians
say i heard a good local band or a bad one for that matter and organised getting thier unpublished recordings to you. would you deal with me as thier representative or
would they have to come direct to you?
sorry if this takes away some of the wow factor from cdbaby but i would be interested to see your reply.
please correct any inaccuracys in my understanding of what cdbaby is about and the reality of publishing via cdbaby to itunes ect.
I think copyright violation is just the club to use on google and not the real reason.
from what i can tell google indexes both copyright in print books and public domain and orphaned works.
for an in print book google is great for publishers - bigger audiences for their catalog more sales. This is the upside and they like amazon for this reason.
however the biggest fear is the public domain given 3 books about a subject 2 in print (extracts available) and a third freely available, which book will you look at first. Isnt it obvious the public domain book will get looked at first if its not good enough or suitable then the published in print book gets a look in.
project gutenburg is great but in googles site you get the whole cake one place to start your search. amazon knows nothing of public domain gutenburg knows nothing of copyrighted books bringing both area's to the search engine on the same page its great for all us readers. Google doesn't sell books so it doesnt harm them if a sale is made or not.
there are parallels here with downloadable music sites like itunes no public domain there either is there?
Publishers know there is a limit to what we can consume and if we consume the free stuff then there is a smaller market for the stuff we pay for.
personally when i study i like to use the pdf in parallel with a paper copy. A computer to search and a piece of paper to read.
Finally if it wasn't for greed the publishers could make a quiet killing by offering pdf copys immediately of any of thier back catalogue and printing when demand has made it profitable. nice to be able to presell a print run
We want books we make do with electronic copies.
Actually getting stoned is pretty much self medicating things get stressful you get stoned.
Do you think you make your best choices when drunk? generally thats conter balanced with periods of being sober
but if it wasn't...
so you think someone who is stoned is making the best choices in life for themselves? maybe they are but thinking about the long term is probably not something they are thinking about. Maybe if they read this they will be.
who am I to say that getting stoned long term wasn't a good choice for me? someone who has done it. your mileage may vary.
you know we seem to pretty much agree, especially on the politics, and regulation.
:)
personally i am in favour of informed choice, which isn't achieved by the "authoritys" or by people saying its harmless either.
When it comes down to it the balance does depend on the individual, I think it was a mistake I made in my life to smoke so much and for so long. I don't think It's harmed me physically intellectually or emotionally thou I just might be a bit further on in life if i hadnt got stoned so much.
In hindsight I think i smoked a little too much for far too long. but i am positive about one thing you really are wasting your life if you can't bring yourself to do something positive for someone else and its pretty hard to do that sat on your arse stoned.
and yes that is probably a conclusion i made while sitting on my arse getting stoned. Your right changed prioritys
Define damage.
Your different through having spent any length of time smoking but damaged no.
Your right when you say it's your choices which make your life difficult. however honestly can you say that getting stoned regularly doesn't cause a lot of people to put off making choices.
No you can't blame the plant as its your choice to get stoned. drifting through life is a side effect of being regularly stoned.
This is the real problem with cannabis use, not cannabis damaging your intellect.
Does cannabis have a benificial effect well i think this is a question best answered by people who made thier choices in thier teens early 20's and are now living with the concequences.
smoking at 13 i feel sorry for your messed up childhood.
I can only speak about the people I know or Knew and my own experience.
habitual use of any drug is harmful. If you can't manage without using any recreational drug for lets say a month then you need to look at why this is. Change your life make choices try and have a benificial effect in your community.
Try and do something positive that helps others. It'll raise your self worth at least you will be contributing something to society and giving your life a point.
I think my personal experience, does support the studys findings. Thinking round problems, having an open mind thats something thats recognisable among smokers. The inability to effect a choice is also pretty recognisable too. creative thinking thats fairly easy to recognise in a smoker or ex smoker.
Increased anxiety depression, if your going to move forward with your life and stop smoking thats something you will have to live with if you want to progress.
being stoned doesn't help motivation at all letting life drift by is the biggest side effect of smoking dope.
long term damage is the lost years where you could have been building a successful life. I don't think your intelligence is damaged by smoking I am studying now and my grades have never been so high but then I don't get high more than a handful of times a year and when I do I just feel more resolve to work harder. We all need some stress relief if its chemically induced make sure it is a minor part of your life.
now the crunch point is would I make the same choices i made in my teens, if i could advise myself what would i say to try and convince me to make other choices.
well I think i would tell myself to drink less, work harder on getting my grades party when its appropriate not every weekend. Make the best of any situation. I think one of the best resources out there that I wish I had discovered years ago is the open university
www.open.ac.uk
study in your own time the fee's are affordable if you don't earn enough they may even be free. I had 18 months
of unemployment years of crappy jobs that just helped me drink at the weekends I could have had my degree years ago and without a huge debt.
There are people studying with the OU from all over the world and its cheap and you can study as much or as little as you want.
In short Try and make sure that there is something positive in your life and even if your a factory robot, no significant other living in a crap hole do something to help others and your self worth will rise and your life will improve. Drugs might help you get by but they are just prolonging the agony.
hmm interesting but, my mobile phone operator would consider an 0844 number outside of my price plan ( swine since I get 2 hours of calls to uk mobiles and land lines in my contract). so it would cost me significantly more
about 40 pence a minute using my mobile to access this service.
I dont have a landline so that limits me to payphones.
however I do have one question if i am using a payphone to make these calls would i be charged twice once by bt to connect to the access number and then by budgetcom
ie would budget com charge me 1p a minute and bt then charge me 5p a minute making the call cost 6p a minute.
or in the case of my mobile 40 odd pence a minute.
(still cheaper than using my cell phone direct thou)
A Partial reply to your arguements,
VOIP is cheap for making international calls at any time of day about 2 cents a minute from uk to any phone in the usa,
and generally 2 cents a minute to a landline anywhere else.
and 20cents a minute to most cell phones. it does vary a bit but in general thats the cost.
now my mobile operator in the uk wants closer to a dollar a minute (70p) a minute to call ireland for example so the skype rate is quite good - some phone cards are comparable to skype rates.
however this handset is expensive, but there is an alternative a cellphone. namely an mdaIII (xdaIIi ect).
this is a cellphone pda with built in wireless networking running windows mobile 2003 and skype has a client.
so for me cell phone contract for my national calls and skype for my international calls.
in theory any open wireless access point could be used to make the jump on to skype.
so in conclusion yes this handset is expensive and my handset does all it does and more (but you really need to use a headset to cancel echo's).
finally why would you want to rely on voip alone? its not a replacement telephone service its a complimentary service similar to your telephone service and doesn't have 911 services or an operator.
why would you buy broadband to specifically run this service?
makes no sense to me but if you have broadband already it also makes sense to use it.
Its been years since i saw any ads like this but if i remember correctly they were color made of card and advertised cigerettes american branded. so perhaps it was an america practice, rather than an english one.
however its always been common to see a list of other books by the same author or series or publisher, some times with an excerpt to tempt you.
never annoyed me as it just gave me a few idea's on what next to read.
Anyone remember a time when compilation albums actually were worth buying. usually a percentage of songs and artists you already liked. with the original album the recordings were from. you got introduced to bands you wouldnt have heard of otherwise and actually went out and bought thier albums. these days its filler and more filler, ever play the cliche game name a band thats on a compalation album and guess the track...
hasn't advertising gone down hill...
I take it you don't know that coke and pepsi supply fridges to cafes ect. The deal is we give you a fridge and you don't put our competitors products in it.
it's like the myth of a pub being a free house in the uk. yes the brewery doesn't own the pub but quite often they do help finance a mortgage to allow the owner to buy the pub usually with a proviso that so much beer is bought from the brewery.
these are cases which are supplier controlled.
on the otherhand supermarkets usually control the deal they get from farmers and packhouses.
how many suppliers do you think are told to produce x for a supermarket produce it and then get told actually we don't want so much. the production is done and often its a case of unload the truck and either rework it or dump it. rework means relabel so your best by date was the 17th that product now gets packaged in best by the 18th.
who's master in this deal hitachi or appple i dont know but if hitachi can't supply much more than apple require without building more lines. then apple will get the production. commonsense really especially if the other customer is trying to compete with apple.
I think your wrong on the reasons for the RIAA to be zealous on file sharing.
Publishers create an artificial scarcity, They supply what they think you will buy. Truth is there is a lot of free music around with no publisher or out of copyright. p2p gets you access to that free music.
Teenagers buy in to the this is cool RIAA promoted crap because they know no better.
itunes is acceptable because they sell music
in parallel to this
if you look at the difference between google print and amazon
amazon sell books
google print sells books via links and gives away the free alternative.
given 3 alternatives 2 commercial and 1 free which do you
read first? who gets a law suit?
open office msoffice when the drm becomes too strong which one will you use?
you know really its the commercial pirated music which is poisoning the well of p2p.
there already exists a method in some p2p programs for flagging fakes howabout a blue flag for freely copyable.
or something else for commercial stuff that shouldnt be shared. if the RIAA can go on p2p and identify people downloading its members music. then surely that would suggest they can identify the music too. then that gives a p2p user choice download the commercial stuff and risk getting sued or try out the free stuff.
ok people ask yourselves this question. When you want to do something on your computer and you havent a suitable program what do you look for? something to buy or something thats free and available.
personally i always add the words open source to my searches because free brings up free demo free trial save disabled or crippled in some way.
you get it now its not ripping off the commercial stuff that worries publishers its people using a free alternative.
the rest is just a smoke screen.
So If I get this right you basically lost your sites because of torrents of copyrighted material.
So could you host torrents of non copyrighted material?
It means more work granted since you cannot automatically link to a torrent because it may be copyrighted and get you fined jailed or whatever.
However by putting that filter in place ie the torrents you host are legal, you then become a site which is attractive to those who do not want to be burnt by the RIAA or similar.
little Johnny can download from your site without getting his parents in a lawsuit. you can get the traffic for your site and your ads viewed.
after all its not the torrents that make you money but the traffic to your site.
you see the problem was you blocked ALL MP3s then you blocked all movies then all tvshows and lost all your content.
what if you could sell legal downloads and giveaway free downloads. say like an itunes with a public domain section. your music site has it all then for profit and for free downloads. your ad revenue is good whatever people want.
just a thought
I think you have hit the nail on the head.
it is making public domain and orphaned works available which scares the authors guild so much.
Really we have an artificial scarcity of books, music and film. Think about it we are limited in what we are able to consume by what we are able to buy and this is great for publishers.
Amazons model doesnt go against this artificial scarcity model because they are only indexing what you can buy!
in fact you may well buy from them.
Google is doing something which all publishers fear.
making available a free alternative that is easy to get hold of and use.
why buy a published for money work when there is a free alternative? especially one which is good enough.
it's almost comparable to the office- open office situation. If open-office gains good enough status. Microsofts office sales plummit. Right now open office 2 is very close to being accepted as good enough. When you think about it Microsoft is pushing it in this direction too. The harder you make it to pirate, illegally copy the legitimate microsoft office the more likely someone is going to decide, well i would like to run ms office but i can't afford to buy it and using a pirated version is going to get me in trouble.
hmm whats this open office...
its going to be the same with vista, copy protected to the eyeballs. Microsofts genuine advantage program is going to see to it pirated copys are going to be a problem to use. maybe linux will be the only alternative for high end hardware...
music its a similar game, imagine google music the RIAA would have kittens. free music easily available and they cant sue! honestly think about it. its not pirating commercial published music which is a problem for the RIAA its making all the free stuff widely available. the commercial stuff thats lost, thats in the profit margins.
Why doesn't Itunes have a FREE section? why no public domain works, maybe because there is no profit in it for them. maybe this is the real problem with P2P it makes it possible to share PD Music freely and at no cost to the consumer or provider who are the same thing.
maybe this is the real problem for publishers a free alternative.
We really are in the early days of file sharing, we still have this common herd mentality. which we grow out of as we get older. maybe some of slashdots older readers will concur that their taste in music has become broader and the top 10 has taken a lower place in thier musically experience. IT ISN'T that the music today is worse than what we were listening too when we were teenagers but that we are aware of other music that suits our own personal tastes better.
Take a look at your own back catalogue stuff you bought 20 years ago. How much do you still genuinely like, play ?
If I can realise this, surely this is what the publishing industry realises too and you can see the real motivation behind thier actions.
Think clearly, and you see that its not so much sharing copyrighted work which is a problem for publishers its.
1)A freely available alternative.
2)A Discerning consumer base- will not pay for turkeys.
3)Consumers having individual tastes and desires.
In Sheffield Uk there is a large complex of flats which has an interesting hotwater and heating system.
You see this is all powered by trash.
The council runs a large incinerator in which the fuel is garbage collected from around the city cans are picked out by magnets and are recycled and I think there is some other recycling done but finally what is burnable is burnt and used to provide a cut price heating and hotwater scheme.
obviously there are benefits for the people living in the flats (generally poorer members of the community) there is also the benefit that garbage going into landfill is reduced.
but you dont get paid for your trash in sheffield.
ok first I will apologise for the grammar, i use it loosely I know.
First of all I wasn't refering to any slaughter.. I was refering to the natural suffering which occurs in human life such as cancer arthritis sterility and many other things which if we are lucky happen to somebody else.
I think it is fairly obvious that many avenues of research have been explored with varying degree's of success. working in any field of research knowing what has been done before can help avoid repeating past mistakes and that older research can be reevaluated due to advances made since the original papers were published.
The prime advantage that google print has over anything in existance now is the ability to rapidly assess what has been done before. If your familiar with going through abstracts attempting to find existing work which supports your research its a long and drawn out task. (Last time I did this it took over 2 months for the articles i thought would help to arrive and even then they were barely relevant).
research papers are published as a requirement for many degree's often in very limited numbers of each paper but many thousands of them.
Is it not obvious to you that google is attempting to provide a resource that will speed up research and hopefully reduce the development time of many inventions drugs and cures that will change the quality of life for many people suffering in the world today.
In plain terms what I am saying is that with google print research and development time could be reduced and more
effective. bringing forth new drugs and inventions which
will reduce suffering in the world. you might argue that these advances will be made eventually however if that advance could be made earlier it could be the difference between a loved one dying or living and or the quality of life for them being significantly improved. at worst the advance might never be made.
Can you not see how incredible a resource having mankinds published knowledge available on your desktop is-and this is potentially what we could have with google print.
now as an author you would prefer for google to approach you and ask if you would like to be included and also it seems you have other works planned which you would also like to be asked about.
so should google ask you and millions of other authors for permission to allow the public to view extracts?
google does give you the option of saying I don't want to be included leave my works out of this so if you care enough to be bothered then simply google will not index them a simple email confirming who you are and the works in question and the world need never know you published anything through google anyway.
There are very few organisations capable of undertaking a project of this magnitude so dont expect 100's of clones of google print to popup indexing your work.
however lets look at another situation. perhaps your grandfather was a doctor and he published in his 20's a paper on a particular subject can you expect the publishing house to still have a current address for him assuming he is still alive of course where he can be contacted. Can you not see that contacting every author individually is an impossible task.
perhaps i am mistaken in believing that most people would prefer to have some good come from thier work rather than having it rot on a few shelves if preserved at all and never read.
by making google jump through hoops to satisfy a particular authors ego. your locking away a huge amount of knowledge which it would be impossible to check if their is a copyright maintained on it. I think if you want to earn some revenue on something you wrote fine just make sure your contactable.
you can quickly google for your own name to see if anythings listed for you.
if you have a legitimate claim to any work listed you can ensure their is a method in place to allow your work to be purchased. probably will be easy to tell if someone has plagarised your work too.
come to th
this bunch of around 8000 authors need to be sent a message
staff@authorsguild.org
is the contact email address
Print.google.com is important for all of us because it means access to
the worlds published printed knowledge of everything (except micky mouse
of course).
Think of how valuble this could be for people researching into anything
the ability to call up the whole of mankinds published knowledge or at
least extracts from documents on any subject all the research papers.
this site could be the most important ever!
And an organisation of around 8000 people thinks they should stop google
maybe when they see thier relatives ill dying and suffering they should
remember their contribution to the pain and misery in this world.
fuckem boycott thier works refuse to acknowledge they published anything.
Let them know you are not going to buy read or acknowledge their
existance because they have contributed the smallest drop of knowledge
to humanity so I don't think we will miss them.
they must feel the negative effects of thier actions holding the worlds
knowledge hostage is a crime against humanity and this is what they are attempting.
what kind of resolution is this camera phone going to have? ocr to be successful
really needs 600 dpi and most current generation phones work on 640 by 480 at best
so would require 1 inch to fill the screen and 20cm is not close enough for that.
even moving around its going to be quite a feat to scan an a4 sized document and ocr it.
you can use a captured image as a brush, or just pick colors
from the image.
I don't know if there is a way to average out a color
from a group of pixels and the package I use doesnt
record a pixels source.
I do like the idea of recording sound and video and
maintaining the link between the source and the final
picture.
Thats purely a question of using a package which works
in this way.
What could be interesting to see developed is something like
MIDI for artists. ie a live recording of the picture being
created starting from a blank canvas to the final image.
now that could be an innovative and viable product.
don't we all feel a sense of awe watching an artist produce
something bueatiful from nothing.
The ability to go back to a point in a pictures creation
and decide to do it differently from that point on or cut
and paste on the timeline so if theres a 'bad' section it
can be edited out the sequence or perhaps moving
of a section of the original by an offset of a few pixels or use a
different brush or colour.
Wouldn't this be a great and innovative open source project.
the file format would have to be something similar to midi and open
so anybody could make a player or editor.
I use a Pda Phone with a Paint package to achieve a similar effect.
The phone has a camera built in so I can take a shot of where I am
Load this a background layer and then proceed to draw on a new layer
with the stylus on the touch screen.
Its a very natural way to draw. The alternatives such as a mouse or tablet
simply dont give the direct feedback drawing on a touch screen does.
the pda is pocket sized so makes drawing anywhere simple and discrete along with a battery life that will allow you to sit for hours drawing, its a great tool for anyone who likes to draw.
I wasn't keen on the earlier versions of open office mainly because it seemed a bit clunky using a horrible file requester for one.
The latest beta's thou they are nice.
you don't have to fight with writer, there is no need.
you can stop lists getting automatically bulleted you can select a block of text and create a tab where you want it and get rid of any others.
honestly open office writer is nice to work with.
Of course anything i write in it will have to be tested in word if its going to be shared.
but if you've got word why bother with open office?
simply because open office is better for creating and formating documents than word is. If i dont have to fight the word processor, I am more productive and a lot less stressed.
If you havent tried a recent beta of open office try it for a day and see how easy it is to use.
I'm converted are you ?
I just downloaded the latest beta for open office and heres what I am hoping for
no autoformating!
I have a number of issues with word which i am hoping open office will solve.
I have been working on a long time project converting a book via ocr. Its contents have a number of tables of sorts a number of translation exercises. a few dual colummn sections for volcabulary.
I am not an expert in word by any means and i have broken up my project into chapter / lesson sized chunks. word just isn't nice with over a 100 pages in a document.
first annoying niggle with tables. Automatically Changing the first letter of the first word in a cell to a Capital letter just by scrolling down through the table. (I know ctrl z will cancel words automatic formatting) locking the section helps but it does mean locking out me as well as word.
numbered exercises eg translate:
1). this sentence. 2).Another sentence.
become
1). this sentence.
2). 2).Another sentence.
when i split the line and yet again i have to press ctrl z.
random generation of tabs, how do you get rid of them in word.
I seem to spend more time correcting words half arsed formating attempts
than I do actually getting the words into the document in the first place.
I use paste special and select plain text for pasting as it saves even more mangled styles.
what I hope I will get from open office is a word processor which puts me in command. I know there seems to be a premise that open office should function in the same way as word, I am just hoping its not too much like word.
I welcome any word users out there to tell me how to stop the auto capitalisation in cells the automatic bulleting of lists and how to get rid of
a stop put in by word or stop it creating it in the first place.
one more thing which would be useful would be how to create a footnote on a page
that stays on the page at the bottom even if i choose to add more text to the page and references to previous pages that will refer to the correct page even though page 97 on the original may now be page 108. or else where if i choose a different font style or size.
I know some users need to collaborate on documents track changes ect. I just want a word processor that does what I tell it to do.
you forgot windows ce (2003 version)
skype and skype out + wireless networking = mobile skype
in your pocket (your coverage may vary).
free calls in the urban jungle maybe:)
I don't know how well skype would work over gprs or how cost effective either
i think my provider will let me have 3 meg download for £5 if i buy as a bolt on
£7.50 a meg if i just use it.
it's the international and cross platform aspects of skypes service which sell it to me.
calls i couldn't afford are affordable.
but
skype out is a bit random with its success rates like throw a 6 to talk for anything from a minute upwards and expect for the connection to break at any time and need to redial.
skype in buys you a national number for your friends to call. (send me a text I will call you back and use the free minutes i get on my mobile phone contract).
my mobile is a pda phone (blue angel, mda III, xda IIS, ect) with wireless built
in its great for skype out within the confines of the limits of my wireless router (or someone elses)
skype out fills in the gaps in my mobile phone contract but for mobile calls its still a significant cost £12 an hour compared to £1.20 an hour for a call to a land line (usa excepted both $1.20 an hour).
skype calls are fragile often you have a call broken by a skype failure headphones are essential on the skype using end or your friends will get echoed at for the price i do like skype for anymore i wouldnt.
For rupert murdoch to buy skype that would stop me using it. OK he figured we got our tv too cheaply and worked out people would pay £30 a month and accept advertising too. If the model stays as it is for skype its useable just start shoving additional fee's and adverts at me no thanks.
so saying give me an alternative system mac windows linux and pda compatable that lets me call anywhere at skype like rates you could get me as a customer open source would be even better (and getting through nat is essential).
when you think about windows and shortcuts in windows, there are a few
things which could be done better if the user had a say in the matter.
I don't know if there is such a hack but heres what i think would be ideal
from a users perspective.
no 1 tab ordering.
more often than not users work on a subset of widgets within a window
what that subset will be is probably down to the task in hand.
if you could set the tab ordering to suit the work you had in hand.
so the six items out of 30 on a page you use if you could make them the first 6 tab items when needed.
2ndly list boxes user set defaults i spend all day scrolling up and down through multiple options that are usually aranged alphabetically if i could set default values on a page to what i usually require i would be a lot more productive.
user setting of shortcuts to buttons especially for buttons with no shortcut.
finally menus at the top of windows not on the line below. Shouldnt it be possible to hide the title bar and allow users to slam to the top of the screen for a menu instead of overshooting.
finally how about a user assignable copy and paste key hmm maybe caps lock one press to start to copy a block and one press to paste it else where.
how about just letting the function keys be assigned to particular options on a window F1 to F6 could bring in my default values to the items i want to change.
intelligent autocomplete for everything kinda like open office guessing your words for you imagine it for numbers too so when i am entering 5 numbers with the same area code then it would guess the next digit.
windows are only a mechanism to allow an application respond to a widget where the widget is its tab order pretty much unimportant to the application.
could make quite a difference to the users thou.
well posted sir,
well explained and interesting, If I remember correctly the amiga used to work in a similar fashion slam mouse to top bring up menu's and select. to be completely honest the title bar is in the wrong place and holds for me just 3 buttons.
thats a waste of space and like you say counter preductive.