The music industry must die and be reborn
on
Sony Admits MP3 Error
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· Score: 5, Informative
Here's the honest truth. The music industry deserves to die, so that it can be reborn. The fight over DRM is simply the spasms of an organisation committing darwinistic suicide. Eventually they will have all their music fully DRM'd, and nobody will buy any of it. And on that day we should all crack open a bottle of champagne. Here's why:
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
Anyone who doesn't understand the significance of this just hasn't thought hard enough about it yet.
All of these sites are in beta (or alpha) right now and are hard to get your head round if you're not an insider, but what they are doing is genuinely revolutionary. They are turning a certain portion of the internet into a self-organizing topology.
Search engines are essentially perspectives onto the network topology. Google lets you view it from one direction, yahoo from another. Tagging lets you view it from yet another, but blogs+bookmarks+images leverages the whole thing enormously.
My (aged) mother has an iMac which she loves and which she bought herself after she got fed up with the mac I gave her. Then she decided she needed another 'puter so she bought a low-end Dell because it was cheap. Result, misery. The reason is not because she's stupid, not because she can't transfer from OS X to XP (she had no problem) but because she really can't work out where all this spyware and virus shit is coming from or what to do about it. Try fixing that over the Atlantic. She would never buy something like this.
She will, however, buy a mini mac in a heartbeat. Or I will buy it for her.
First, because they clearly acted unethically, which is the really big idiocy. I run my own company and rule number one is due diligence. I am not going to screw myself by doing something that could bite me in the ass further down the line.
It's astonishing how many investment guys simply don't get this. I have literally had my own investment guy sit there and tell me that a particular investment 'cannot lose', in the presence of his lawyer -- who looked very uncomfortable and was forced to intervene by saying "Look, you cannot say that".
Second, anyone who uses unencrypted email on a server they do no control, ESPECIALLY if it belongs to someone they are screwing, deserves to spend the rest of their productive years flipping burgers, or possibly stamping licence plates.
I think they can smell burning in the server room at the Observer...
A case of insecure browsing Exploring missed opportunities in the Microsoft antitrust suit
By ANDREW CHIN
CHAPEL HILL -- United States v. Microsoft, the most celebrated antitrust case in a generation, quietly ended its six-year run Wednesday, as the Supreme Court's deadline to file a final appeal passed without a whimper from any of the parties. Little comfort can be taken from the legal system's silence.
Now, there will be no final ruling on whether Microsoft illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows. Internet Explorer will continue its chokehold on the World Wide Web. Even worse, the law of competition in the software industry will remain unclear and unstable.
The government wasted its best opportunity to avoid this result three years ago, when the incoming Bush Justice Department, in a stunning reversal, decided to drop its "tying" claim. Still, the road not taken -- pressing Microsoft to offer a neutral choice of Web browsers for use with Windows -- started to look a lot more appealing this summer, when Internet Explorer's security flaws made national headlines.
Many commentators, including the Department of Homeland Security's computer emergency readiness team and even Microsoft's own online magazine, Slate, recommended that Windows users switch to a more secure Web browser.
But switching can be difficult. Windows users who want to access a document on the Web are sometimes required to use Internet Explorer, flaws and all, even if they have chosen a different product for that purpose. Given the inconvenience of using two different products for the same purpose, many Windows users do not bother to try other browsers. By tilting Windows users toward Internet Explorer in this and other ways over the past nine years, Microsoft has ensured that many consumers are using a less secure browser than they would if offered a neutral choice, and prevented other software companies from competing for these customers on the merits.
The Clinton Justice Department proved all of these facts at trial. Yet the lower courts did not move to restore freedom of competition in the market for Web browsers, because they found Microsoft's appeal for freedom more compelling.
According to Microsoft, antitrust law should never require changes to the design of software products, because this will chill the freedom of programmers to innovate. One such innovation was in writing the shared blocks of code that support both operating system and Web browsing functions in Windows. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Microsoft's argument might make sense if its freedom to design software products ended when the last line of code was written. But a software product does not consist of code. If it did, you would own the Windows code on your computer and could sell copies of that code with impunity.
Actually, what you own is a license consisting of certain legal rights derived from Microsoft's copyright in the Windows code, together with the technological ability to use the code with your computer in the exercise of those rights. (Similarly, when you buy a movie on a Region 1 DVD, you acquire a license to view it at your home in the United States or Canada, and the technological ability to play the DVD in those countries but not others.)
As the sole author of the license contract, Microsoft enjoys considerable freedom in defining the extent to which consumers are able to use the Windows code.
But freedom of contract is expressly limited by the antitrust laws. The courts therefore had authority to order Microsoft to license and distribute its software so as to offer a neutral choice of Web browser. Microsoft could easily have done so without undoing its programming innovations.
Instead, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals created a special antitrust immunit
Like I say, no individual backup is critical, so I could care less. My strategy is basically that I can lose ALL of my backups except one and still be okay.
If I lose them all then probably the world has ended.
However I seriously doubt that Google bothers to check accounts in the way you describe. The cost of having an employee do this would far outweigh the savings, not to mention the PR disaster that would follow.
Hm... good point. In fact I've only given away one gmail account to a stranger and I checked them out first as far as I could.
I don't use the gmail account for any critical backup... in fact my whole strategy is that there should be no such thing as a critical backup... but it is a VERY convenient tool. For example, an account that you forward all 'your password is' emails to.
I dunno about anyone else but I USE this stuff. I gave all my gmail invites to myself so I now have many Gmail accounts, which are all used for the same thing... offsite backup.
The 100 G account would be great for backing up digital images, something that is extremely hard to do otherwise (bit rot on CDs, DVDs and even naked hard drives, which is what I use now). Yeah, I take a lot of pictures.
I just got notified that because I purchased extra.mac storage, mine has been upped to 1.2 Gb. Hooray!
You cannot have too many backup strategies. I use.mac for all keychains (containing serial numbers, passwords and private banking details), plus current 'work' folder... then I have a Retrospect backup to a remote FTP server for my boot drive, plus a nightly mirror onto a second hard drive. You CANNOT have too much of this stuff.
The day I walked into my office and my HD was dead, I saved the entire accumulated cost of all this by being able to boot up from the second drive within seconds and carry on working.
Yet another underwhelming use of VR goggle technology. I can remember when I was working in TV this stuff, along with *cough* interactive video *cough* was going to take over the world. Along with that Philips CD-i player.
VR goggles have their uses but they are mostly for applications where you are already wearing goggles. Me and my snow buddies have been speculating for ages about a pair of VR ski goggles that would use sonar or radar to overlay a contour map of the hill when you were flying down in low contrast conditions... handy for avoiding the death cookies.
Re:Last time I checked,
on
P2P Web searches
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· Score: 1, Informative
Correctamundo! In fact the google search is a very efficient way of searching sites. Wikipedia uses this to great advantage if your keyword search fails. A big advantage is that frequent googlers have a good sense of how to word the query for maximum valid results.
I am just about to put a 50,000 message mailing list archive online and the search facility will be Google, which is far better than any of the other solutions I've investigated.
Yes, that is very true and rather worrying. My wife had been involved in live trapping of deer mice in the exact spot where we were camping (Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada) as part of a research project into Hantavirus. We didn't discover it was a deer mouse until the repair shop finally disassembled the entire heating and A/C system to locate the carcass. Fortunately hantavirus is still pretty rare and the shop told me they did a thorough cleaning of all the components. Short of immersing everything in bleach it is hard to know quite what more one could do.
Read the fricken post before you start patronising me, you git.
The only thing I have a problem with is the description of that multi-step process as 'simple' in a context where single-step installers are available.
Good lord, I hope they've got further than that. The Magnetic Scrolls parser could do that in 1986. I know coz I worked for them briefly. I subsequently wrote a much better parser in Prolog, which is absolutely the best language for prototyping parsers because the Backus-Naur notation transcribes almost directly into a Prolog implementation, which is extremely neat.
In fact parsing is probably the easiest bit of writing a text adventure. If you can specify the kinds of sentences you'd like to be able to understand and write that into a grammar, you can write a parser for it. Much more difficult is writing the representational system that actually drives the thing.
Seriously... well, unless you count my brief employment as a rocket scientist at the Propellants, Explosives and Rocket Motor Establishment.
I did a whole game for Magnetic Scrolls called REACH FOR THE MOON, which unfortunately never got published as far as I know.
They were a very fun company to work for. I think I did the whole thing on a Sinclair Spectrum which they shipped out to me. It paid surprisingly well, too.
Yeah, the SCO principals are currently DREAMING of being bought out by Big Blue. That's why they trailed the whole idea at the end of the release. Nudge, nudge.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you read on, read this article by Steve Albini (one of the best known producers in the world) about the reality of the economics of the music industry. If anything it understates the degree to which the music industry is broken.
I'm a musician as are many of my friends. Musicians, or the vast majority of them anyway, do not make music to make money but to make music. Historically of course, it was ever thus. Before the means of recording music, there WAS no recording industry. The vast majority of great music in history was written without the RIAA's help and without the 'protection' of copyright. It didn't seem to bother Beethoven.
The small minority of professional musicians mostly make their money from live performances (cruise ships, bars etc). A small minority of the small minority of professional musicians make money from recording, but a large part of this is non-consumer oriented such as film soundtracks, game scores, stings, jingles, ads and so on.
The current inflection of the recorded music industry benefits only the major corporations and a few bands who have enough leverage to make deals that actually result in money. The vast majority of bands who record make little or no money.
If we were drowning in a sea of great music produced by the members of the RIAA I would be the first to defend them, but we aren't. We're drowning in garbage, and thousands of good bands languish unsigned and unproduced. You only have to watch American Idol to see how the process works.
Fortunately now the innards of a pro recording studio can reside on your home PC or Mac, and raison d'etre of the major studios no longer exists. Musicians can go back to doing what they have always done -- making music. Once the recording industry finally dies, those who make great music will earn lots of money from live performances and direct-pay-downloads spread by viral word-of-mouth.
If you think I'm wrong, consider this: poetry. Pretty much nobody makes any money out of poetry. But it still gets written. The same is true of music. The sooner the industry dies, the better.
Anyone who doesn't understand the significance of this just hasn't thought hard enough about it yet.
All of these sites are in beta (or alpha) right now and are hard to get your head round if you're not an insider, but what they are doing is genuinely revolutionary. They are turning a certain portion of the internet into a self-organizing topology.
Search engines are essentially perspectives onto the network topology. Google lets you view it from one direction, yahoo from another. Tagging lets you view it from yet another, but blogs+bookmarks+images leverages the whole thing enormously.
This is groundreakingly important stuff.
My (aged) mother has an iMac which she loves and which she bought herself after she got fed up with the mac I gave her. Then she decided she needed another 'puter so she bought a low-end Dell because it was cheap. Result, misery. The reason is not because she's stupid, not because she can't transfer from OS X to XP (she had no problem) but because she really can't work out where all this spyware and virus shit is coming from or what to do about it. Try fixing that over the Atlantic. She would never buy something like this.
She will, however, buy a mini mac in a heartbeat. Or I will buy it for her.
These people are in charge of your money, folks.
They are idiots for two reasons.
First, because they clearly acted unethically, which is the really big idiocy. I run my own company and rule number one is due diligence. I am not going to screw myself by doing something that could bite me in the ass further down the line.
It's astonishing how many investment guys simply don't get this. I have literally had my own investment guy sit there and tell me that a particular investment 'cannot lose', in the presence of his lawyer -- who looked very uncomfortable and was forced to intervene by saying "Look, you cannot say that".
Second, anyone who uses unencrypted email on a server they do no control, ESPECIALLY if it belongs to someone they are screwing, deserves to spend the rest of their productive years flipping burgers, or possibly stamping licence plates.
On second thoughts... never mind.
A SAW ("Squad Automatic Weapon") is a machine gun but I don't know what MEMS is.
Your gun shoots you.
(if your fingerprints don't match, that is)
It's not a troll, it's the fucking article, you halfwit
I think they can smell burning in the server room at the Observer...
A case of insecure browsing
Exploring missed opportunities in the Microsoft antitrust suit
By ANDREW CHIN
CHAPEL HILL -- United States v. Microsoft, the most celebrated antitrust case in a generation, quietly ended its six-year run Wednesday, as the Supreme Court's deadline to file a final appeal passed without a whimper from any of the parties. Little comfort can be taken from the legal system's silence.
Now, there will be no final ruling on whether Microsoft illegally tied Internet Explorer to Windows. Internet Explorer will continue its chokehold on the World Wide Web. Even worse, the law of competition in the software industry will remain unclear and unstable.
The government wasted its best opportunity to avoid this result three years ago, when the incoming Bush Justice Department, in a stunning reversal, decided to drop its "tying" claim. Still, the road not taken -- pressing Microsoft to offer a neutral choice of Web browsers for use with Windows -- started to look a lot more appealing this summer, when Internet Explorer's security flaws made national headlines.
Many commentators, including the Department of Homeland Security's computer emergency readiness team and even Microsoft's own online magazine, Slate, recommended that Windows users switch to a more secure Web browser.
But switching can be difficult. Windows users who want to access a document on the Web are sometimes required to use Internet Explorer, flaws and all, even if they have chosen a different product for that purpose. Given the inconvenience of using two different products for the same purpose, many Windows users do not bother to try other browsers. By tilting Windows users toward Internet Explorer in this and other ways over the past nine years, Microsoft has ensured that many consumers are using a less secure browser than they would if offered a neutral choice, and prevented other software companies from competing for these customers on the merits.
The Clinton Justice Department proved all of these facts at trial. Yet the lower courts did not move to restore freedom of competition in the market for Web browsers, because they found Microsoft's appeal for freedom more compelling.
According to Microsoft, antitrust law should never require changes to the design of software products, because this will chill the freedom of programmers to innovate. One such innovation was in writing the shared blocks of code that support both operating system and Web browsing functions in Windows. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Microsoft's argument might make sense if its freedom to design software products ended when the last line of code was written. But a software product does not consist of code. If it did, you would own the Windows code on your computer and could sell copies of that code with impunity.
Actually, what you own is a license consisting of certain legal rights derived from Microsoft's copyright in the Windows code, together with the technological ability to use the code with your computer in the exercise of those rights. (Similarly, when you buy a movie on a Region 1 DVD, you acquire a license to view it at your home in the United States or Canada, and the technological ability to play the DVD in those countries but not others.)
As the sole author of the license contract, Microsoft enjoys considerable freedom in defining the extent to which consumers are able to use the Windows code.
But freedom of contract is expressly limited by the antitrust laws. The courts therefore had authority to order Microsoft to license and distribute its software so as to offer a neutral choice of Web browser. Microsoft could easily have done so without undoing its programming innovations.
Instead, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals created a special antitrust immunit
Like I say, no individual backup is critical, so I could care less. My strategy is basically that I can lose ALL of my backups except one and still be okay.
If I lose them all then probably the world has ended.
However I seriously doubt that Google bothers to check accounts in the way you describe. The cost of having an employee do this would far outweigh the savings, not to mention the PR disaster that would follow.
Hm ... good point. In fact I've only given away one gmail account to a stranger and I checked them out first as far as I could.
I don't use the gmail account for any critical backup... in fact my whole strategy is that there should be no such thing as a critical backup... but it is a VERY convenient tool. For example, an account that you forward all 'your password is' emails to.
I dunno about anyone else but I USE this stuff. I gave all my gmail invites to myself so I now have many Gmail accounts, which are all used for the same thing ... offsite backup.
.mac storage, mine has been upped to 1.2 Gb. Hooray!
.mac for all keychains (containing serial numbers, passwords and private banking details), plus current 'work' folder... then I have a Retrospect backup to a remote FTP server for my boot drive, plus a nightly mirror onto a second hard drive. You CANNOT have too much of this stuff.
The 100 G account would be great for backing up digital images, something that is extremely hard to do otherwise (bit rot on CDs, DVDs and even naked hard drives, which is what I use now). Yeah, I take a lot of pictures.
I just got notified that because I purchased extra
You cannot have too many backup strategies. I use
The day I walked into my office and my HD was dead, I saved the entire accumulated cost of all this by being able to boot up from the second drive within seconds and carry on working.
It was a factual error in the article.
You'd rather I didn't correct it?
Plutonium also has a very long half life. I assume you wouldn't eat it for breakfast.
200,000 years is NOT far longer than any radioactivity will last.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
Nuclear waste is considered hazardous for at least 10x the half life. So I129 is hazardous for, um, about 157 million years.
So, er, which press release did you read again?
Yet another underwhelming use of VR goggle technology. I can remember when I was working in TV this stuff, along with *cough* interactive video *cough* was going to take over the world. Along with that Philips CD-i player.
VR goggles have their uses but they are mostly for applications where you are already wearing goggles. Me and my snow buddies have been speculating for ages about a pair of VR ski goggles that would use sonar or radar to overlay a contour map of the hill when you were flying down in low contrast conditions... handy for avoiding the death cookies.
Don't Diebold machines run Windows? Woohoo!
Correctamundo! In fact the google search is a very efficient way of searching sites. Wikipedia uses this to great advantage if your keyword search fails. A big advantage is that frequent googlers have a good sense of how to word the query for maximum valid results.
I am just about to put a 50,000 message mailing list archive online and the search facility will be Google, which is far better than any of the other solutions I've investigated.
Yes, that is very true and rather worrying. My wife had been involved in live trapping of deer mice in the exact spot where we were camping (Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada) as part of a research project into Hantavirus. We didn't discover it was a deer mouse until the repair shop finally disassembled the entire heating and A/C system to locate the carcass. Fortunately hantavirus is still pretty rare and the shop told me they did a thorough cleaning of all the components. Short of immersing everything in bleach it is hard to know quite what more one could do.
Febreze is the key.
It really works on dead things.
I got this tip from a ratcatcher called Sid, who cleaned out a dead raccoon from our crawl space. It worked.
I just used it to nullify the odour of a deer mouse that crawled into my truck's AC and helpfully died.
Go Febreze!
I couldn't give a flying fuck how safe YOU feel driving that speed. It's the poor schmuck you run into I worry about.
Kid runs out into road. Splat.
Guy pulls out of sideroad. Crunch.
And you ARE the guy who tailgates me for nineteen miles at 70 MPH at night with your lights on full beam when there's no passing lane, right?
Read the fricken post before you start patronising me, you git. The only thing I have a problem with is the description of that multi-step process as 'simple' in a context where single-step installers are available.
Good lord, I hope they've got further than that. The Magnetic Scrolls parser could do that in 1986. I know coz I worked for them briefly. I subsequently wrote a much better parser in Prolog, which is absolutely the best language for prototyping parsers because the Backus-Naur notation transcribes almost directly into a Prolog implementation, which is extremely neat.
In fact parsing is probably the easiest bit of writing a text adventure. If you can specify the kinds of sentences you'd like to be able to understand and write that into a grammar, you can write a parser for it. Much more difficult is writing the representational system that actually drives the thing.
Seriously... well, unless you count my brief employment as a rocket scientist at the Propellants, Explosives and Rocket Motor Establishment.
I did a whole game for Magnetic Scrolls called REACH FOR THE MOON, which unfortunately never got published as far as I know.
They were a very fun company to work for. I think I did the whole thing on a Sinclair Spectrum which they shipped out to me. It paid surprisingly well, too.
Yeah, the SCO principals are currently DREAMING of being bought out by Big Blue. That's why they trailed the whole idea at the end of the release. Nudge, nudge.
The secret is not to take the towel.