Former Catholic here - it is difficult to impossible to exercise choice in the Catholic faith when one is raised in it, as any deviation from orthodoxy results in the promise of a Nice Hot BBQ with you as the main course. If one does manage to do so (I did), then actually disentangling oneself from the clammy embrace of the church is another battle. My mother made me go to church - I tried to bail out of first communion and confirmation, and I refused to continue as an alter boy (phew! good thing, too... that was the 1970's and early 80's, when the church was still DELIBERATELY CONCEALING ACTIONS OF KNOWN PEDOPHILES AS A MATTER OF OFFICIAL POLICY AND THREATENING ANY PARISHIONER WHO COMPLAINED TO ANYONE OUTSIDE THE CHURCH WITH EXCOMMUNICATION see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6765175 for one example).
I finally got out by getting my mom to agree I could stop going to church if I made my confirmation. I believe this qualifies as 'duress'. I didn't realize the irony until later.
I found even at that time that while there were some good people in the church, the church itself had absolutely no basis for authority other than the fear they used to force its followers into line - I cannot count the number of times the priest would come up with some crackpot notion of 'how things should be in the home', particularly with regard to the place of women, and people in the congregation would discuss the subject rabidly afterward, yet it never occurred to them that the church was so wrong that they should think of leaving, and if the church was wrong on that score, what else could they be wrong on?
Oh, right - as the Catholic who posted about Gallileo noted, a Catholic CANNOT interpret scripture on their own. I forgot that.
Any organization that actually says "you cannot think for yourself, else you are damned" deserves no respect from me, and any organization religious, commercial or civil that actively protects child molesters as a matter of policy deserves to have any tax-exempt status it enjoys revoked and have the management prosecuted under RICO. Think about it - if a large US corporation concealed an employee pedophilia ring, what would happen?
Finally, to those in the Catholic church who would claim that the amount of abuse in the church is the same as in other organizations, so it is not as big a deal as people have made it - the church put itself out as an authority AND put all it's clergy (and laity, really) in positions of trust - like a teacher, but more so. The Catholic church also claims to be a moral bastion. You can't claim that on the one hand, then claim that it is ok to wallow with the Sodomites, statistically speaking.
If you are Catholic, and read this, you can get better - the first step is to leave. It is really less painful than you might think, and you won't miss it much. Your Catholic friends and family who may cut you from their lives will pretty quickly appear to you as they really are - I think of it as 'Taliban lite'. And not all of them will cut you off - just the idiots.
One warning about ITIL implementation (I work for a consultancy who does ITIL work from time to time) - there are a LOT of software packages out there that stick 'ITIL' in the promo language on the box, and some less-than-competent consultants will try to sell you an 'ITIL solution'. They do not exist. ITIL is a process and methodology - don't let your managers get sucked in to the easy, out of the box fix, 'cause it does not exist.
ITIL as a framework however is pretty kick-ass. Takes a lot of work to do it properly though, but as parent noted, it can be done in increments to spread the pain and provide some 'quick wins' to show progress.
Your post raises a point I think is often ignored - 'how to get people to pay attention'. Today, with all the RIAA and 'piracy' issues rampaging through the musical universe (not industry - I would argue that someone recording in their home to distribute themselves is so far removed from the 'industry' that there should be a distinction made) there is little discussion of how to actually succeed as a musician - which I'll define as 'the ability to derive enough income from ones' music to continue to create and perform it'. That may mean full- or part-time.
I am familiar with three examples I find useful: Depeche Mode (very much 'in the industry'), Queensryche (kinda in the industry, certainly successful) and Umphreys' McGee, a midwestern regional 'jam band' who are also successful. What do these three have in common?
1. They all own most if not all of their material. Queensryche is rarely heard on the radio, but they've been selling albums and touring since at least the mid-1980's. 2. They use their music to drive concert attendance (BFO!) - and this is the primary driver for revenue, at least for Umphrey's and I suspect the other two as well. 3. The 'major labels' participate in these three artists financially to a lesser extent than they do in other artists' revenue streams - and percentage wise, from what I can tell, inversely proportional to the bands' mainstream popularity (i.e., Depeche Mode pays the most, Umphrey's pays least).
The point is, artists with talent can attract a fan base and have been doing so since before the internet was available for public use (Queensryche and Depeche Mode). Fans love the bands and support them. While it might have taken them longer to build that base (Queensryche) or that base may not hit the levels of 'celebrity' bands (Umphry's), the model works and is sustainable, as long as the bands are working to give fans what they want.
Arguing that the big record companies are essential to 'success' in the music industry is like arguing that 'going public' is crucial to success in the 'business industry' (awkward semi-redundant phrase, but I hope you see what I mean) - it is absolutely not crucial, and in fact may do more harm than good, depending on the situation. For every artist that works well in the 'big player' music industry model (Britney Spears) there are many that simply would not work - pick any band whose sound is sufficiently unique or different that it won't appeal to 60% of the 15-24 demographic. Want to know why many people cry that 'pop music sucks' ? Because it wasn't created to appeal to them - it is created to appeal to the average listener. If a band can make music that appeals to 1% of the US population (say, 300 million as a rough estimate) for a listener base of 3 million people, and only 10 percent of those listeners buy a CD, that's 300,000 CDs - not too shabby! Add live shows, and you have a pretty decent revenue stream - and it is all yours!
The trick is to get out and actually do it - musicians I know tell me they 'don't want to do all the things that a record company does' - book gigs, deal with royalty payments, accounting, promotion, etc. They want to just 'do their thing' which is fine, but that is why and how record companies rape them. As for playing live, maybe my city (Chicago) is somehow different, but there are literally dozens of opportunities to get out and play live every day - I am looking at the Chicago Reader music section (January 24 edition) under 'Music' - pages 29 to 58 are all music listings. Want to get people's attention in this town? Take those pages, write down the phone numbers of the clubs and call until someone tells you they have an open mic night or a hole in their calendar. Do this every week for a year, and bring CD's and T-shirts to sell and see what happens. It is hard work, but no harder than starting ones' own business - because that is essentially what you are doing - and it is a lot more fun. At least it should be...
First, kudos to you for persistance and achievement!
Second, I submit you are an excellent example of how difficult it is for a scientist (from the article) to really describe accurately, in 'laymans terms' what a particular gene does or does not effect. Genes are not necessarily 'on-off' switches (my understanding, though I am not a doctor or geneticist). There is also evidence out there of people who despite apparent 'damage' to their genes or even to the physical structure of their brains, manage to find 'workaraounds' to let them lead full lives.
It is a hopeful sign that people are more flexible and able to adapt to adversity than we may realize - hopefully the 'PHB' gene referred to in the original post is not as potent as the post suggests.
BTW - enjoy the 'alternative viewpoint' you have - it may be inconvenient at times, but at least you are aware of it, and can, I hope, adapt as you see fit - and it has, as you indicate, some advantages. Who knows - your genetic (I assume 'generic' was a typo) disability may have some advantage you have yet to uncover - increased persistance perhaps?:)
...to the fact that.torrent activity for their shows went through the roof when they pulled out of iTunes, taking their shows and affiliates with them. I know people (cough) who used to happily pay $1.99 an episode for Law and Order, Project Runway and Battlestar Galactica who discovered that those shows were available 'free'. Considering the only other option was buy a Tivo and / or upgrade cable to get Bravo and SciFi - what do you think they did? They would certainly go back to paying the $1.99 if the option were available.
Germany has, AFAIK, an excellent guild system, and 'the trades' as we call them in the states are represented at the corporate boardroom level (VW is my example reference - my uncle and grandfather worked there for decades). Their vocational training was great, and the relationships between skilled labor and management was better than in the US. The downside - I asked a friend of the family (in Germany) why he didn't install screens in his kitchen, since in the spring, insects would fly in through the open window and closing them meant losing the nice spring air. His reply - "Because it would cost me $400 to get a 'windowmaster' in here to install each screen...' As he explained it, the downside to their system is that labor is uniformly more expensive in every area of life. I told him in the US it was different - we could cheerfully pay next to nothing for shoddy work if we so chose, and in fact, the US has been building houses in just that mode for decades.
He was not impressed - he'd rather have bugs in his marmalade.
A scientist who pursues belief will find things increasingly difficult unless s/he manages to either broaden his/her take on god, or find a branch of science to pursue where there is either too little data for a 'definitive' answer or an area so new that there is little danger of explaining too many unknowns. Isaac Newton was a man of faith, but in his day, the sphere of human knowledge was small enough that it would be far easier to maintain faith-based explanations for natural phenomena. The more we know, the more we can explain, and the less 'evidence' there is of the classic Abrahamic god. Of course, if you are a Buddhist, this won't phase you, but if you are Catholic, you may suffer extreme cognitive dissonance over time and leave the church screaming and swearing... not that I know anyone like that or anything... but to the point, thinking like a scientist will, over time, push out 'traditional' faith in the mind - it can't do otherwise, as long as traditional faith tries to explain things it was not meant to. Faith is for the faithful alone - the rest of us are happy with science and philosophy, thanks very much.
Read this thread with only passing interest until you wrote "...running for a long session of Telengard (loaded from a cassette drive.)"
Then it all came thundering back - I had an Atari 800, my cousin had a C64 (and a VIC 20) and we were at perpetual war over who had the better machine with cooler games (nothing truly changes, does it?)
We did agree on one thing - any game you had to spend 15 minutes loading off a cassette HAD to be great...:)
Consider how bad the prequels were. Three overlong, dragging, exposition-heavy, leaden-dialogue-laden messes.
Now imagine if they were one film, covering the periods II-III with I only seen a few times in flashbacks to when Anakin first met the Jedi ("We didn't come here to free slaves..."). Leave off 90% of Anakins' lines. Leave the brooding. Leave off the clone sequences, except that the soon-to-be emperor ordered up an army. You have a coup, and a trained Jedi (Anakin) who as he has grown up has had as his central life-issue, "Why did I take up with these self-righteous bastards who are so hooked on my being obedient and 'selfless' that they made me leave my mother rotting in slavery?" Such an individual might be seduced by one such as Palpitane, who promises power to live a life 'of consequence, or conscience...'
They jumped the shark when they planned the prequels as they did.
I could not care less about Vetereans day - and I'm an American USMC veteran (six years active duty, combat, got all the fruit salad to wear, thanks...). A Federal Day off (in the US) is worth nothing to me. I would be happy if the civilian leadership (that's you, voters) would bother to learn from history and maybe learn about the world outside the US borders, so there might be fewer Vets in need of remembrance or memorial and more walking around pulling air and enjoying the good life we seem to take for granted and by right.
Why should Google placing a helmet or other cartoon on their home page mean anything, and why should I care?
Wind Waker routinely takes a beating in reviews and discussions for all the time 'wasted' sailing around the world. Did anyone else out there besides me find that part of the game actually fun and that it contributed greatly to the feeling of immersion and non-linearity? Why or why not?
How did Hourglass change / improve on this, if indeed it did - assuming you think the sailing bit needed 'improving'.
Yes. In the US, anyway. Consider: basic financial literacy SUCKS in this country. Television and radio are saturated with bankruptcy firms who offer to 'help' people file or get out of debt by 'negotiating' with credit card companies. People pay >100% APR to use payday loan shops instead of banks. The mortgage industry hiccoughs and people lose their homes because they lacked the basic mathematical skills to compute a mortgage payment, then test same mortgage offer with different interest rates. And hey, let's not forget losing the ability to figure out what car is a better buy once financial incentives are taken into account, plus insurance and gas mileage.
In the US, >50% of small businesses fail within the first three years. Of those that fail, >90% fail because of poor cash flow management. Please note, that does not mean they didn't make money, it means that the owners lacked the financial skills to properly budget and project expenditures.
In a nation that is so 'free market' oriented and in love with capitalism, we don't understand how it works worth a damn at the citizen level.
Maybe you live in a place where you trust your leadership to make all the financial decisions for you, and if that works for you, great.
Another thing that is only implied by the above - only by understanding the economy and the things that impact it at the citizen level can citizens make intelligent decisions about where to spend their cash and where to put votes to allocate public cash. Wonder why the US government sucks at spending money (running deficits, cannot adequately budget capital improvements to national infrastructure, moving funds and resources to disaster stricken areas...) ? The answer is that we as citizens are failing our most basic responsibility in a democracy (or democratic republic) - to actually govern responsibly.
Tossing out math skills undermines the ability to actually make crucial civic decisions and results in a nation of idiots, ruled by those who can best impress the idiots.
Just a pipe dream - Prince can't get anything moved in major record stores, which are dying anyway as Best Buy uses CDs as loss leaders to get people in the door, but his back catalog (which you will NEVER find in Best Buy, because the audience is perceived to be too limited to justify the inventory cost) gets carried in indy CD stores - the kind who buy and sell used CDs - who stage a comeback by filling a niche the majors have ignored for years. As more artists at Princes level start to see the level of support and freedom (artistically) these stores allow them, more of them allow their back catalog - which the majors deemed to unprofitable, since Best Buy and the like won't buy them, and discount them to death if they do - to go the indy route.
Okay, sorry - it's a beautiful Saturday, and I started drinking early...
IANAL either, but I had to take a bunch of business law classes, so, this being/., I'll tell you what I understand to be true (but could be wrong about):
1. No one was slandered per se - M$ made a very vague conjecture, they did not allege a particular party committed a crime. Even if they did, I suspect it would be difficult to sue for slander - you'd have to show what M$ said was false and they knew it when they said it.
2. Don't know, other than that no one outside M$ knows what M$ products do or do not contain code-wise. As such, it would be difficult to detail them. You might notice people on this site discuss that particular subject at great length. If you mean just claimed patents, see original post Linus' comment - M$ have not specified the patents, so there is nothing to analyze.
3. What grounds would these lawyers looking for easy to win cases have to sue? Further, what would they do to earn money while M$ dragged the proceedings through the courts? Hell, the SCO trial 'shoulda been' easy, and look how long it has dragged on, and how much it has cost!
Regarding MBA admission 'requirements' - I have yet to see a program that required experience. I worked for a program (Univ. of Illinois Champaign-Urbana) and they had no such requirement, and there were several peers of mine who went straight into programs at Northwestern (Kellogg), Stanford and University of Chicago. Maybe Harvard, Yale and other top tier schools have such requirements, or maybe lower down the scale, but while they may *prefer* such students, I've never seen evidence of a 'requirement'.
Then again, I have firsthand knowledge of only 4-5 schools - a statistically insignificant sample of MBA programs, I will admit.
Just a note on project management - I have found that PM classes were only useful to me at the grad level after I had some work experience. YMMV, but I liken it to all the undergrad business majors I went to school with (I'm BS in Finance) who went straight into an MBA program after getting their undergrad - they got little out of it except the letters after their name. I found it critical to my learning 'Management' to have some context. Depending on your school, you may be taught by professors who have never run a major project - they just have PhDs' in PM. Theory can't help you unless you have a context in which to apply it - and work experience gives you context for the classes. PM isn't like CS - like most 'soft' skills.
Management is an art and a skill - a craft even, for those who really pursue it. Few do. My suggestion - take a class or two if your schedule permits, but don't go whole hog. You want to know enough so when you see project problems arise, and you will, you'll have some perspective on how to troubleshoot - or at least save some of your sanity.
Just my $.02 - good luck to grandparent!
Since you asked, the writer responds...
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I added that to indicate I would be writing 'Emacs' in the rest of the review, instead of 'GNU Emacs' because I expected some pedantic./-ers to hammer me if I just started out calling it 'Emacs'. RMS is rather picky about language, and he has a few supporters here.
You are correct, except that a corporate entity generally seeks revenue maximization. In the US, we measure this in terms of Net Income. To maximize, corporations frequently engage in several strategies that benefit them in the short run but which are detrimental in the long run: 1. Externalizing costs ("If I dump these PCBs in the river, I don't have to pay to clean them up, so my product costs will remain low...") 2. Monopoly-maintenance ("I know a good idea will eventually seep out and be used by everyone, but if I can prevent that for a few years, I can reap above-market prices for derived products...") 3. Sticking to core competencies ("If it doesn't contribute directly to revenue, it is an overhead cost I should eliminate...") You can blame only one thing for this - the incentives of the public equities market, which provides economic incentives for the above. If you have a 401K or invest in the stock market (and yes, I do), it is your fault. The market is an aggregate of all participants - if Americans (and I am one) do not believe basic science is a worthy pursuit, then we will pay the price for that. I would gladly invest in companies that do research - or better, TAX ME and pay for it. Seriously, I would gladly pay higher taxes if by doing so I could help keep basic research going, assuming we could de-politicize the program process (another argument for another day...)
I still have a fully-functioning Tangerine iBook (G3 300). Ran everything from OS 9.1 through 10.2 on it. Finally, retired it and fidget with OpenBSD on it - which I am still trying to get to work.
Only issues I ever had were, original 6GB HD was way too small - had to replace it with a 20GB and that was a PITA to do (outside warrantee, and you have to remove almost everything from the case to get to the HD) and the battery stopped taking a charge after 5 yrs. Not an uncommon problem, from what I've read, but not unique to Macs, either.
Bought the iBook in Spring, 1999. Ironically, when I retired it from active use, I moved to a $400 IBM Thinkpad 600SE running RH8 (then) / Fedora Core 3 (now) - the ThinkPad was actually two years older than the iBook, from what I can tell. The thing is two years older than the iBook, but the screen is a little larger and the keyboard is still great. iBook keyboard sucks and is impossible to replace (i.e., no third-party keyboard replacements that I can find, and with only one USB port, limited options for external solutions).
I would try to do a speed comparison, but I'm not that much of a masochist. They both work great, so I don't care.
My big lesson - that $400 TP did 90% of what the $1,200 iBook did. If I could have gotten the audio working, I would call it a 100% replacement, but TP Linux audio drivers have several issues, many of which were fixed by community geeks, but which were way beyond my n00b-ness to implement.
Oh, and I actually had women come up to me in the coffee shops to tell me the iBook was a 'cute computer'. Not kidding. The battery blew about that time, so I started toting the IBM 'black brick' and the embarrassment stopped.:)
I may have to upgrade to a PIII pretty soon - the PIII laptops are hitting the used market under $500 now, but my wife will kill me.
BTW - I was working in OpenOffice / MS Office for Mac, websurfing, ripping CDs, emailing, and trying to figure out how to use Emacs and gcc to write C code. Anyone who says a user at that level needs something cutting edge costing $2,400 is trying to sell you something... er, probably laptops costing $2,400. In my experience, business users are on an ego trip when they 'go big' on a laptop.
I agree. I would buy an Apple PDA in a second if I was convinced they were making a 'serious' one. I can only hope that in some basement in Cupertino, a small, secret band of developers toils away, preparing to re-enter the market.
They're probably waiting for people to forget the Newton, which was by all accounts (okay, all accounts of the community that still hacks them) a great piece of hardware, but a marketplace bomb.
Okay, a little OT, but here's a question for the group - temp employees don't seem to get to go to outings, company parties, etc. and this seems to upset some people.
Is there anyone out there who actually likes office parties / outings / 'mandatory fun' events / 'team building' dreck? I work for a bank, and I cringe every time I hear the words 'office party' and thank my good karma that I have had 'legit' excuses to skip the last few events.
Has anyone out there ever actually 'networked' effectively at one of those things? I went to everything for years based on the idea that it might help my career. Nada - and I'm not a total dork (or so my wife tells me...)
1. The Apple retail shop in Chicago uses this as a way to offer customers an 'opt out' of waiting in line, and you can buy anything, as long at its with a credit card. 2. As a victim of identity theft, those tinfoil-hats who worry about wi-fi snooping - a far greater threat is the clerk at the super-discount tech store (cough) COMPUSA (cough) who simply takes the credit card receipt for your newly-purchased stack of blank CDs and pulls it from his/her drawer at clock-out time, then writes down the number and (if they are sharp) even the 'security code' from the back of the card. Then, they purchase $9,600 in video equipment and downloadable software from Avid and Sony, and even if Visa is right on them, the purchases are complete before the victim arrives home to find a "we detected unusual activity on your account..." message on his answering machine. Lose sleep over the 9 months it will take to get that mess straightened out. Oh, and guess what - the US attorneys office won't prosecute, not will the state or local cops. Even the store dropped the thing. I couldn't even trick the Visa people into telling me where some of the contraband was shipped to (they set up an alternate ship-to adress, thanks to a stupid Visa service operator, which is how Visa ultimately had to admit that *I* had not bought all that software and hardware and was just trying to dodge paying) so I could ask the cops to pay the thief a visit. It never occurred to them that a Mac/Linux/OpenBSD guy would have no use at all for Windows video-editing software. Damages under $10k are not worth going after, apparently. 3. Apple does not compete in embedded systems like handheld credit-card processors, so it is no surprise their units don't run Mac OS. Yes, there are *nix/BSD strains that probably do, but I bet Apple just bought off-the-shelf system. Would it even make sense for them to develop a whole new line of products in an industry they don't even choose to compete in, just so they could use their own stuff? I think that would by way to 'not invented here' for them.
If your corporate strategy includes the word...
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Size Does Matter
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"Innovation", you are screwed. Innovation is creativity applied to preexisting knowledge (my short definition). Telling your employees "innovate NOW" is like telling a comedian "say something funny RIGHT NOW". A rare few can do it. In large organizations, with established bureaucracies, cliques, etc., and especially the ingrained fear of failure that having a culture of employee abuse and ill-regard engenders, like EA (by all accounts I've read), I can't imagine how they could innovate, even assuming management still understands the meaning of the word, which based on press and employee accounts, it appears they do not.
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Former Catholic here - it is difficult to impossible to exercise choice in the Catholic faith when one is raised in it, as any deviation from orthodoxy results in the promise of a Nice Hot BBQ with you as the main course. If one does manage to do so (I did), then actually disentangling oneself from the clammy embrace of the church is another battle. My mother made me go to church - I tried to bail out of first communion and confirmation, and I refused to continue as an alter boy (phew! good thing, too... that was the 1970's and early 80's, when the church was still DELIBERATELY CONCEALING ACTIONS OF KNOWN PEDOPHILES AS A MATTER OF OFFICIAL POLICY AND THREATENING ANY PARISHIONER WHO COMPLAINED TO ANYONE OUTSIDE THE CHURCH WITH EXCOMMUNICATION see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6765175 for one example).
I finally got out by getting my mom to agree I could stop going to church if I made my confirmation. I believe this qualifies as 'duress'. I didn't realize the irony until later.
I found even at that time that while there were some good people in the church, the church itself had absolutely no basis for authority other than the fear they used to force its followers into line - I cannot count the number of times the priest would come up with some crackpot notion of 'how things should be in the home', particularly with regard to the place of women, and people in the congregation would discuss the subject rabidly afterward, yet it never occurred to them that the church was so wrong that they should think of leaving, and if the church was wrong on that score, what else could they be wrong on?
Oh, right - as the Catholic who posted about Gallileo noted, a Catholic CANNOT interpret scripture on their own. I forgot that.
Any organization that actually says "you cannot think for yourself, else you are damned" deserves no respect from me, and any organization religious, commercial or civil that actively protects child molesters as a matter of policy deserves to have any tax-exempt status it enjoys revoked and have the management prosecuted under RICO. Think about it - if a large US corporation concealed an employee pedophilia ring, what would happen?
Finally, to those in the Catholic church who would claim that the amount of abuse in the church is the same as in other organizations, so it is not as big a deal as people have made it - the church put itself out as an authority AND put all it's clergy (and laity, really) in positions of trust - like a teacher, but more so. The Catholic church also claims to be a moral bastion. You can't claim that on the one hand, then claim that it is ok to wallow with the Sodomites, statistically speaking.
If you are Catholic, and read this, you can get better - the first step is to leave. It is really less painful than you might think, and you won't miss it much. Your Catholic friends and family who may cut you from their lives will pretty quickly appear to you as they really are - I think of it as 'Taliban lite'. And not all of them will cut you off - just the idiots.
If I could count on everyone on 'an internet' being able to reverse a doubly linked list, I would know the following:
:)
1. The internet really was full of terribly bright people;
2. I would not be among them. I need to work on that...
One warning about ITIL implementation (I work for a consultancy who does ITIL work from time to time) - there are a LOT of software packages out there that stick 'ITIL' in the promo language on the box, and some less-than-competent consultants will try to sell you an 'ITIL solution'. They do not exist. ITIL is a process and methodology - don't let your managers get sucked in to the easy, out of the box fix, 'cause it does not exist.
ITIL as a framework however is pretty kick-ass. Takes a lot of work to do it properly though, but as parent noted, it can be done in increments to spread the pain and provide some 'quick wins' to show progress.
Your post raises a point I think is often ignored - 'how to get people to pay attention'. Today, with all the RIAA and 'piracy' issues rampaging through the musical universe (not industry - I would argue that someone recording in their home to distribute themselves is so far removed from the 'industry' that there should be a distinction made) there is little discussion of how to actually succeed as a musician - which I'll define as 'the ability to derive enough income from ones' music to continue to create and perform it'. That may mean full- or part-time.
I am familiar with three examples I find useful: Depeche Mode (very much 'in the industry'), Queensryche (kinda in the industry, certainly successful) and Umphreys' McGee, a midwestern regional 'jam band' who are also successful. What do these three have in common?
1. They all own most if not all of their material. Queensryche is rarely heard on the radio, but they've been selling albums and touring since at least the mid-1980's.
2. They use their music to drive concert attendance (BFO!) - and this is the primary driver for revenue, at least for Umphrey's and I suspect the other two as well.
3. The 'major labels' participate in these three artists financially to a lesser extent than they do in other artists' revenue streams - and percentage wise, from what I can tell, inversely proportional to the bands' mainstream popularity (i.e., Depeche Mode pays the most, Umphrey's pays least).
The point is, artists with talent can attract a fan base and have been doing so since before the internet was available for public use (Queensryche and Depeche Mode). Fans love the bands and support them. While it might have taken them longer to build that base (Queensryche) or that base may not hit the levels of 'celebrity' bands (Umphry's), the model works and is sustainable, as long as the bands are working to give fans what they want.
Arguing that the big record companies are essential to 'success' in the music industry is like arguing that 'going public' is crucial to success in the 'business industry' (awkward semi-redundant phrase, but I hope you see what I mean) - it is absolutely not crucial, and in fact may do more harm than good, depending on the situation. For every artist that works well in the 'big player' music industry model (Britney Spears) there are many that simply would not work - pick any band whose sound is sufficiently unique or different that it won't appeal to 60% of the 15-24 demographic. Want to know why many people cry that 'pop music sucks' ? Because it wasn't created to appeal to them - it is created to appeal to the average listener. If a band can make music that appeals to 1% of the US population (say, 300 million as a rough estimate) for a listener base of 3 million people, and only 10 percent of those listeners buy a CD, that's 300,000 CDs - not too shabby! Add live shows, and you have a pretty decent revenue stream - and it is all yours!
The trick is to get out and actually do it - musicians I know tell me they 'don't want to do all the things that a record company does' - book gigs, deal with royalty payments, accounting, promotion, etc. They want to just 'do their thing' which is fine, but that is why and how record companies rape them. As for playing live, maybe my city (Chicago) is somehow different, but there are literally dozens of opportunities to get out and play live every day - I am looking at the Chicago Reader music section (January 24 edition) under 'Music' - pages 29 to 58 are all music listings. Want to get people's attention in this town? Take those pages, write down the phone numbers of the clubs and call until someone tells you they have an open mic night or a hole in their calendar. Do this every week for a year, and bring CD's and T-shirts to sell and see what happens. It is hard work, but no harder than starting ones' own business - because that is essentially what you are doing - and it is a lot more fun. At least it should be...
First, kudos to you for persistance and achievement!
:)
Second, I submit you are an excellent example of how difficult it is for a scientist (from the article) to really describe accurately, in 'laymans terms' what a particular gene does or does not effect. Genes are not necessarily 'on-off' switches (my understanding, though I am not a doctor or geneticist). There is also evidence out there of people who despite apparent 'damage' to their genes or even to the physical structure of their brains, manage to find 'workaraounds' to let them lead full lives.
It is a hopeful sign that people are more flexible and able to adapt to adversity than we may realize - hopefully the 'PHB' gene referred to in the original post is not as potent as the post suggests.
BTW - enjoy the 'alternative viewpoint' you have - it may be inconvenient at times, but at least you are aware of it, and can, I hope, adapt as you see fit - and it has, as you indicate, some advantages. Who knows - your genetic (I assume 'generic' was a typo) disability may have some advantage you have yet to uncover - increased persistance perhaps?
Best of luck to you!
The might have, and noticed that Amazon Unbox does not support Macs or Linux, nor does it stock Project Runway...
Thanks though - good thought.
...to the fact that .torrent activity for their shows went through the roof when they pulled out of iTunes, taking their shows and affiliates with them. I know people (cough) who used to happily pay $1.99 an episode for Law and Order, Project Runway and Battlestar Galactica who discovered that those shows were available 'free'. Considering the only other option was buy a Tivo and / or upgrade cable to get Bravo and SciFi - what do you think they did? They would certainly go back to paying the $1.99 if the option were available.
Germany has, AFAIK, an excellent guild system, and 'the trades' as we call them in the states are represented at the corporate boardroom level (VW is my example reference - my uncle and grandfather worked there for decades). Their vocational training was great, and the relationships between skilled labor and management was better than in the US. The downside - I asked a friend of the family (in Germany) why he didn't install screens in his kitchen, since in the spring, insects would fly in through the open window and closing them meant losing the nice spring air. His reply - "Because it would cost me $400 to get a 'windowmaster' in here to install each screen...' As he explained it, the downside to their system is that labor is uniformly more expensive in every area of life. I told him in the US it was different - we could cheerfully pay next to nothing for shoddy work if we so chose, and in fact, the US has been building houses in just that mode for decades.
He was not impressed - he'd rather have bugs in his marmalade.
A scientist who pursues belief will find things increasingly difficult unless s/he manages to either broaden his/her take on god, or find a branch of science to pursue where there is either too little data for a 'definitive' answer or an area so new that there is little danger of explaining too many unknowns. Isaac Newton was a man of faith, but in his day, the sphere of human knowledge was small enough that it would be far easier to maintain faith-based explanations for natural phenomena. The more we know, the more we can explain, and the less 'evidence' there is of the classic Abrahamic god. Of course, if you are a Buddhist, this won't phase you, but if you are Catholic, you may suffer extreme cognitive dissonance over time and leave the church screaming and swearing... not that I know anyone like that or anything... but to the point, thinking like a scientist will, over time, push out 'traditional' faith in the mind - it can't do otherwise, as long as traditional faith tries to explain things it was not meant to. Faith is for the faithful alone - the rest of us are happy with science and philosophy, thanks very much.
Read this thread with only passing interest until you wrote "...running for a long session of Telengard (loaded from a cassette drive.)"
:)
Then it all came thundering back - I had an Atari 800, my cousin had a C64 (and a VIC 20) and we were at perpetual war over who had the better machine with cooler games (nothing truly changes, does it?)
We did agree on one thing - any game you had to spend 15 minutes loading off a cassette HAD to be great...
Good times...
Consider how bad the prequels were. Three overlong, dragging, exposition-heavy, leaden-dialogue-laden messes.
Now imagine if they were one film, covering the periods II-III with I only seen a few times in flashbacks to when Anakin first met the Jedi ("We didn't come here to free slaves..."). Leave off 90% of Anakins' lines. Leave the brooding. Leave off the clone sequences, except that the soon-to-be emperor ordered up an army. You have a coup, and a trained Jedi (Anakin) who as he has grown up has had as his central life-issue, "Why did I take up with these self-righteous bastards who are so hooked on my being obedient and 'selfless' that they made me leave my mother rotting in slavery?" Such an individual might be seduced by one such as Palpitane, who promises power to live a life 'of consequence, or conscience...'
They jumped the shark when they planned the prequels as they did.
I could not care less about Vetereans day - and I'm an American USMC veteran (six years active duty, combat, got all the fruit salad to wear, thanks...). A Federal Day off (in the US) is worth nothing to me. I would be happy if the civilian leadership (that's you, voters) would bother to learn from history and maybe learn about the world outside the US borders, so there might be fewer Vets in need of remembrance or memorial and more walking around pulling air and enjoying the good life we seem to take for granted and by right.
/Rant
Why should Google placing a helmet or other cartoon on their home page mean anything, and why should I care?
Sorry, it is *that* day.
Wind Waker routinely takes a beating in reviews and discussions for all the time 'wasted' sailing around the world. Did anyone else out there besides me find that part of the game actually fun and that it contributed greatly to the feeling of immersion and non-linearity? Why or why not?
How did Hourglass change / improve on this, if indeed it did - assuming you think the sailing bit needed 'improving'.
Just curious.
SR
Yes. In the US, anyway. Consider: basic financial literacy SUCKS in this country. Television and radio are saturated with bankruptcy firms who offer to 'help' people file or get out of debt by 'negotiating' with credit card companies. People pay >100% APR to use payday loan shops instead of banks. The mortgage industry hiccoughs and people lose their homes because they lacked the basic mathematical skills to compute a mortgage payment, then test same mortgage offer with different interest rates. And hey, let's not forget losing the ability to figure out what car is a better buy once financial incentives are taken into account, plus insurance and gas mileage.
In the US, >50% of small businesses fail within the first three years. Of those that fail, >90% fail because of poor cash flow management. Please note, that does not mean they didn't make money, it means that the owners lacked the financial skills to properly budget and project expenditures.
In a nation that is so 'free market' oriented and in love with capitalism, we don't understand how it works worth a damn at the citizen level.
Maybe you live in a place where you trust your leadership to make all the financial decisions for you, and if that works for you, great.
Another thing that is only implied by the above - only by understanding the economy and the things that impact it at the citizen level can citizens make intelligent decisions about where to spend their cash and where to put votes to allocate public cash. Wonder why the US government sucks at spending money (running deficits, cannot adequately budget capital improvements to national infrastructure, moving funds and resources to disaster stricken areas...) ? The answer is that we as citizens are failing our most basic responsibility in a democracy (or democratic republic) - to actually govern responsibly.
Tossing out math skills undermines the ability to actually make crucial civic decisions and results in a nation of idiots, ruled by those who can best impress the idiots.
Sorry. Rant off.
Just a pipe dream - Prince can't get anything moved in major record stores, which are dying anyway as Best Buy uses CDs as loss leaders to get people in the door, but his back catalog (which you will NEVER find in Best Buy, because the audience is perceived to be too limited to justify the inventory cost) gets carried in indy CD stores - the kind who buy and sell used CDs - who stage a comeback by filling a niche the majors have ignored for years. As more artists at Princes level start to see the level of support and freedom (artistically) these stores allow them, more of them allow their back catalog - which the majors deemed to unprofitable, since Best Buy and the like won't buy them, and discount them to death if they do - to go the indy route.
Okay, sorry - it's a beautiful Saturday, and I started drinking early...
Prince is finished. Long live Prince.
IANAL either, but I had to take a bunch of business law classes, so, this being /., I'll tell you what I understand to be true (but could be wrong about):
1. No one was slandered per se - M$ made a very vague conjecture, they did not allege a particular party committed a crime. Even if they did, I suspect it would be difficult to sue for slander - you'd have to show what M$ said was false and they knew it when they said it.
2. Don't know, other than that no one outside M$ knows what M$ products do or do not contain code-wise. As such, it would be difficult to detail them. You might notice people on this site discuss that particular subject at great length. If you mean just claimed patents, see original post Linus' comment - M$ have not specified the patents, so there is nothing to analyze.
3. What grounds would these lawyers looking for easy to win cases have to sue? Further, what would they do to earn money while M$ dragged the proceedings through the courts? Hell, the SCO trial 'shoulda been' easy, and look how long it has dragged on, and how much it has cost!
Lawyers, commentary?
Regarding MBA admission 'requirements' - I have yet to see a program that required experience. I worked for a program (Univ. of Illinois Champaign-Urbana) and they had no such requirement, and there were several peers of mine who went straight into programs at Northwestern (Kellogg), Stanford and University of Chicago. Maybe Harvard, Yale and other top tier schools have such requirements, or maybe lower down the scale, but while they may *prefer* such students, I've never seen evidence of a 'requirement'.
Then again, I have firsthand knowledge of only 4-5 schools - a statistically insignificant sample of MBA programs, I will admit.
Just a note on project management - I have found that PM classes were only useful to me at the grad level after I had some work experience. YMMV, but I liken it to all the undergrad business majors I went to school with (I'm BS in Finance) who went straight into an MBA program after getting their undergrad - they got little out of it except the letters after their name. I found it critical to my learning 'Management' to have some context. Depending on your school, you may be taught by professors who have never run a major project - they just have PhDs' in PM. Theory can't help you unless you have a context in which to apply it - and work experience gives you context for the classes. PM isn't like CS - like most 'soft' skills.
Management is an art and a skill - a craft even, for those who really pursue it. Few do. My suggestion - take a class or two if your schedule permits, but don't go whole hog. You want to know enough so when you see project problems arise, and you will, you'll have some perspective on how to troubleshoot - or at least save some of your sanity.
Just my $.02 - good luck to grandparent!
I added that to indicate I would be writing 'Emacs' in the rest of the review, instead of 'GNU Emacs' because I expected some pedantic ./-ers to hammer me if I just started out calling it 'Emacs'. RMS is rather picky about language, and he has a few supporters here.
You are correct, except that a corporate entity generally seeks revenue maximization. In the US, we measure this in terms of Net Income. To maximize, corporations frequently engage in several strategies that benefit them in the short run but which are detrimental in the long run:
1. Externalizing costs ("If I dump these PCBs in the river, I don't have to pay to clean them up, so my product costs will remain low...")
2. Monopoly-maintenance ("I know a good idea will eventually seep out and be used by everyone, but if I can prevent that for a few years, I can reap above-market prices for derived products...")
3. Sticking to core competencies ("If it doesn't contribute directly to revenue, it is an overhead cost I should eliminate...")
You can blame only one thing for this - the incentives of the public equities market, which provides economic incentives for the above. If you have a 401K or invest in the stock market (and yes, I do), it is your fault. The market is an aggregate of all participants - if Americans (and I am one) do not believe basic science is a worthy pursuit, then we will pay the price for that. I would gladly invest in companies that do research - or better, TAX ME and pay for it. Seriously, I would gladly pay higher taxes if by doing so I could help keep basic research going, assuming we could de-politicize the program process (another argument for another day...)
I still have a fully-functioning Tangerine iBook (G3 300). Ran everything from OS 9.1 through 10.2 on it. Finally, retired it and fidget with OpenBSD on it - which I am still trying to get to work.
:)
Only issues I ever had were, original 6GB HD was way too small - had to replace it with a 20GB and that was a PITA to do (outside warrantee, and you have to remove almost everything from the case to get to the HD) and the battery stopped taking a charge after 5 yrs. Not an uncommon problem, from what I've read, but not unique to Macs, either.
Bought the iBook in Spring, 1999. Ironically, when I retired it from active use, I moved to a $400 IBM Thinkpad 600SE running RH8 (then) / Fedora Core 3 (now) - the ThinkPad was actually two years older than the iBook, from what I can tell. The thing is two years older than the iBook, but the screen is a little larger and the keyboard is still great. iBook keyboard sucks and is impossible to replace (i.e., no third-party keyboard replacements that I can find, and with only one USB port, limited options for external solutions).
I would try to do a speed comparison, but I'm not that much of a masochist. They both work great, so I don't care.
My big lesson - that $400 TP did 90% of what the $1,200 iBook did. If I could have gotten the audio working, I would call it a 100% replacement, but TP Linux audio drivers have several issues, many of which were fixed by community geeks, but which were way beyond my n00b-ness to implement.
Oh, and I actually had women come up to me in the coffee shops to tell me the iBook was a 'cute computer'. Not kidding. The battery blew about that time, so I started toting the IBM 'black brick' and the embarrassment stopped.
I may have to upgrade to a PIII pretty soon - the PIII laptops are hitting the used market under $500 now, but my wife will kill me.
BTW - I was working in OpenOffice / MS Office for Mac, websurfing, ripping CDs, emailing, and trying to figure out how to use Emacs and gcc to write C code. Anyone who says a user at that level needs something cutting edge costing $2,400 is trying to sell you something... er, probably laptops costing $2,400. In my experience, business users are on an ego trip when they 'go big' on a laptop.
I agree. I would buy an Apple PDA in a second if I was convinced they were making a 'serious' one. I can only hope that in some basement in Cupertino, a small, secret band of developers toils away, preparing to re-enter the market.
They're probably waiting for people to forget the Newton, which was by all accounts (okay, all accounts of the community that still hacks them) a great piece of hardware, but a marketplace bomb.
Okay, a little OT, but here's a question for the group - temp employees don't seem to get to go to outings, company parties, etc. and this seems to upset some people.
Is there anyone out there who actually likes office parties / outings / 'mandatory fun' events / 'team building' dreck? I work for a bank, and I cringe every time I hear the words 'office party' and thank my good karma that I have had 'legit' excuses to skip the last few events.
Has anyone out there ever actually 'networked' effectively at one of those things? I went to everything for years based on the idea that it might help my career. Nada - and I'm not a total dork (or so my wife tells me...)
1. The Apple retail shop in Chicago uses this as a way to offer customers an 'opt out' of waiting in line, and you can buy anything, as long at its with a credit card.
2. As a victim of identity theft, those tinfoil-hats who worry about wi-fi snooping - a far greater threat is the clerk at the super-discount tech store (cough) COMPUSA (cough) who simply takes the credit card receipt for your newly-purchased stack of blank CDs and pulls it from his/her drawer at clock-out time, then writes down the number and (if they are sharp) even the 'security code' from the back of the card. Then, they purchase $9,600 in video equipment and downloadable software from Avid and Sony, and even if Visa is right on them, the purchases are complete before the victim arrives home to find a "we detected unusual activity on your account..." message on his answering machine. Lose sleep over the 9 months it will take to get that mess straightened out. Oh, and guess what - the US attorneys office won't prosecute, not will the state or local cops. Even the store dropped the thing. I couldn't even trick the Visa people into telling me where some of the contraband was shipped to (they set up an alternate ship-to adress, thanks to a stupid Visa service operator, which is how Visa ultimately had to admit that *I* had not bought all that software and hardware and was just trying to dodge paying) so I could ask the cops to pay the thief a visit. It never occurred to them that a Mac/Linux/OpenBSD guy would have no use at all for Windows video-editing software. Damages under $10k are not worth going after, apparently.
3. Apple does not compete in embedded systems like handheld credit-card processors, so it is no surprise their units don't run Mac OS. Yes, there are *nix/BSD strains that probably do, but I bet Apple just bought off-the-shelf system. Would it even make sense for them to develop a whole new line of products in an industry they don't even choose to compete in, just so they could use their own stuff? I think that would by way to 'not invented here' for them.
"Innovation", you are screwed. Innovation is creativity applied to preexisting knowledge (my short definition). Telling your employees "innovate NOW" is like telling a comedian "say something funny RIGHT NOW". A rare few can do it. In large organizations, with established bureaucracies, cliques, etc., and especially the ingrained fear of failure that having a culture of employee abuse and ill-regard engenders, like EA (by all accounts I've read), I can't imagine how they could innovate, even assuming management still understands the meaning of the word, which based on press and employee accounts, it appears they do not.