"Every American should hang their heads in shame over what we've allowed ourselves to become. Global assholes!"
America hasn't turned into global assholes, we started out that way. The country was founded on chattle slavery and continued as genocidal land grabbers. This was all done in the name of capitalism to benefit the wealthy same as it is now.
I understand your point and have said similar things myself. We're not talking about "two people making love" though, we're talking about men slapping, gagging, raping and whipping women gang style. I'm willing to bet George Carlin wouldn't approve of that for his kids. Would you approve of that for yours?
I'm with you. Get ready for the big Baccalaureate bubble to burst in another 5-6 years when all the grads with $120,000 dollars in debt and low paying "salary" jobs decide to walk away from that albatross.
Yeah this stuff sucks. The idea of being able to update your computer over the internet was great for about a month, but it's become obvious that what's not broken shouldn't be fixed. This reminds me that I need to turn off the auto updater for all my Macs. I'll check the updater now and then and just download the security patches (if they've been out for a couple of weeks). To tell the truth, I've never noticed any software update, that I didn't specifically seek out, giving me any positive results.
What do you mean we kemosabe. The record companies may be on the road to ruin but not music, music afficionados, or musicians. As long as the author is going to get all historical on us he should have told his daughter this:
Music and musicians have existed for tens of thousands of years. Music companies about 100. Modern popular music aimed at teenagers has existed about 50. When the first recording devices were created about 100 years ago many musicians were worried. They realized that their ability to make money by performing was in jeapardy. Sure enough, in our present day, musicians are beholden to recording companies to make their money. The ability to perform is secondary to the ability to market, distribute and produce recorded product. Tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech
As a local musician in the 70s and 80s I saw venues for live performance (the bar scene) completely dry up in favour of DJs. With the advent of rap, young folk no longer expected to see real musicians anymore. This was the logical consequence of having businessmen control an artistic endevour. The consolidation/death of the music industry as we know it is a good thing. Hopefully it will open up more venues for local talent to actually make some money without have to pay the toll at the music industry's gate.
It wasn't the consumer's idea to digitize the recordings, create the internet, or put cd drives with ripping software in computers. The scientists and businessmen came up with that. The recording industy is going to have to deal with the realities of our modern world. if they can't deal with it then tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech.
I agree. I've been using PS7 in our design office up until a couple of months ago. Didn't have any problems doing what I needed to do. In fact a lot of pro designers use older software. In the business world you usually have to make a pretty good case for increased productivity before you get to order the latest greatest, and let's not talk about what kind of hardware you may be using.
A couple of other things to consider:
If the "pointy headed bosses" find out you can teach using free, state of the art software, your funding is liable to dry right up. If the Gimp stops gimping or your web software is unsatisfactory, good luck getting them to open their pocketbooks after a couple of semesters of free riding.
With educational discounts that commercial software can be pretty cheap. At our university we got the Adobe design suite for $200 per seat. Students pay more but still they won't have to pay full price for quite awhile.
Those students that do want to pursue multimedia careers can still pick up that copy of PS7 on Ebay cheap. No reason they have to get the latest version. They'll be better prepared entering college or the business world. Those students that don't want to pursue multimedia careers may never adjust a photo again in life (a lot of people don't) why cater to them?
Adobe has the advantage of feedback from industry professionals in order to maintain and improve their software. There is a huge internet community with forums, plugins, downloadable actions, how tos, podcasts etc. Not to mention manuals of every type both paper and electronic, seminars, conferences you name it.
Teaching priciples is a good idea, but many times you need to figure out how to make the software do specific, complex tasks, in which case your knowledge of some open source software will be useless. Chances are said task was done the same in the older version of the software that you learned.
I think Radiohead went overboard. There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want". If you disagree with this conclusion than consider how you will respond when your employer or customers decide they will start paying you whatever they want to and if that's not enough for rent, too bad for you. It's no way to make a living.
How can you guys get on the internet and post that giving away content is not a valid business model. How much money is Slashdot making by giving away it's services? or Google? How about that teenage millionaire giving away Facebook backgrounds? How much did Mark Andreeson make giving away Netscape. You sound like Steve Ballmer crying about Linix.
Musicians were crying to the high heavens when music recording was invented. "We make our money playing live music" they said. "Who's going to pay to see us if they can listen to recordings at home?" Years later after they've allowed the recording industry to attach itself to "music" like a giant, bloodsucking parasite they can't contemplate getting along without it. Simmons is like a crack ho who can't put down the pipe. Hasn't everybody bought or downloaded all the KISS songs already? Why the hell is he putting our a box set? Don't all the true fans already have all the material already including the bootlegs? He should be giving away that moldy crap to drive viewers to his web site and TV show. Business man indeed.
Times are changing. It took some kid in a dorm room to hip the world to the idea of downloaded music. It will probably take another kid in another dorm room to show the suits how to make money at it.
Since you're speaking of comic books, let's remember that the shift in perception about the "adultness" of comics was preceded by a shift by comic creators about what kind of stories would be told. Starting in the 60s when Marvel started giving their characters personality, ie Peter Parker questioning whether he wanted to save the world or simply make money off of his skills. Before that the heroes were totally one dimensional characters.
This was followed by the advent of independant comics with the creators keeping the rights to their creations. This allowed a lot more ideas to be introduced into comics than the corporate bean counters would have ever allowed. We started to get true adult comics like Maus, the Watchmen and V for Vendetta.
I don't believe that games like Manhunt are adult simply because they're bloody or profane. In fact it's just the opposite, they're adolescent. Jiggling breasts, splattering blood, and verbal obsceneties are the kind of thing that titillated me back in my teens and the depictions of female characters (skinny with enormous breast) are same kind of images that attracted me to buy certain comics as a teenager.
Hollywood produces blood splattered horror flicks and trashy B-movies, sure, but it's the films like the Godfather, Shindlers List, Ghandi, etc that earn them what little respect they have.
Until game developers start gaining control over their creations, create story lines that make people think, cater to a larger audience than post pubescent males gaming will never gain respect.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The PS3 is actually selling quite well if you treat the Wii as an outlier. It's selling better than I expected it to, given the price point.
It always takes a year or so before a new console gets its first generation of games that actually know how to use the hardware. So why don't we give it another year before we write the PS3 off as a disaster. It's a disaster because Sony was the runaway market leader in the previous two generations and banked on the same happening this generation. They were planning to push BlueRay and become the media hub of our living rooms based on their domination of game consoles (the same strategy that Microsoft has)
Instead Nintendo came out of nowhere to be hot console to buy and Microsoft is eating into Sony's core demographic. They have allowed their competitors to gain mindshare and developers to focus on other platforms
Going from "leader of the pack" to competing with a loss leader like Xbox is a disaster.
I might pay for a license. But then again I might just borrow a copy from a friend. If I do pay, it will probably be through Ebay. i'll buy a cheap copy of XP used and none of my money will go to Billy boy. I just want to proof some websites in a Windows browser and maybe I'll run into the odd Windows program that's unavailable on the Mac. The version of the Windows OS in use is fairly meaningless as I'll be using parrallels.
By the way, what's the penalty for running the cheap version of Vista under virtualization, and how would anyone know?
Meanwhile, rapper DMX [wikipedia.org] uses lyrics such as "what these bitches want from a nigga", and "I fuck with these hoes from a distance", and we hear cash registers.
Good God!
White folks hear black folks degrade and embarass themselves they act as if we'd won the lottery. "boo hoo, they get to degrade and embarass themselves and when we try to degrade and embarass them, they get mad". If you want the same priveledge as black people, then degrade and embarass yourselves. You can talk about racist peckerwoods and bleach blond bimbos as much as you like.
Imus wasn't fired because he said "nappy headed hos", He was fired for a history of offensive, deragatory, bigoted commentary. These shock jocks like to push the envelope, sometimes it pushes back. Howard Stern eventually went down, as did (black jock) Star of the Star and Buckwild show.
But don't worry, He'll be back. If they can resurrect Mark Furman, they can resurrect Donny boy.
You certainly can't take everything Jobs said in his letter at face value. That letter was carefully vetted by Apple's lawyers, PR and marketing departments before it hit the web, believe me. What we're looking at is financial "theater", part of a high stakes game for a very lucrative prize; digital music distribution. Jobs' main concern to make money for his stake holders. If Apple's DRM lock in (which I think is highly overblown) is good for sales at this time he's going to milk it for all it's worth. If the wind changes and he feels he can increase sales by dropping DRM he will. That said, it's entirely possible that Jobs thinks he could sell more music if it were DRM free.
What's interesting to me is that Jobs called for DRM free downloads rather than licensing Fairplay. If Apple were to license its DRM, certainly all those MP3 makers and online stores that got screwed by Plays for Sure would jump on board. This would lead to a rather bizzaro world where Apple is freely licensing its software and MicroSoft is pushing a proprietary device. Seems to me this would give Apple more clout rather than less, and allow it to use some of those tactics that MS has been so successful with in the past. I mean, isn't that the conventional wisdom; license the software, take over the world?
i bought my iPod cause I'm a Mac user and Apple's is the only player that caters to Mac users. Without iTunes there would be no online store for Mac users at all. I also liked firewire. Before USB 2 people were forced to sync there portables with slow as dirt USB1, remember that?. AAC is a good, non proprietary upgrade to MP3. I refuse to use Winblows Media. Microsofts WMP for Mac blows chunks. Atrac, Real and the rest are proprietary. Ogg is compatible with what? At least iPod is cross platform (sorry Linex users).
The UI is functional, the prices are in line with other players and there is a plethora third party devices and tie ins. iPod in your car, on the plane, etc. I also carry my files back and forth to the job by using it's hard drive capabilty. You may not prefer the iPod but to pretend that those that do are all sheeple is just dumb.
I've been a Mac user for the last 14 years. I've gotten sick and tired of new tech that comes out and it's not compatible with my Mac. Somehow little 2% Apple has managed to grab a huge chunk of the digital music market with it's iPod and iTMS and I say great. If Apple hadn't created these products for Mac users who would have? Real? Microsoft?
For some reason Windows users, who have never had any trouble resisting Steve's "reality distortion field" in the past, went crazy for the iPod. To me that's the best indication of the quality of the product. Apple hasn't leveraged it's monopoly to make people buy it's iPod. The products were integrated from day one. You could say it built it's monopoly by integrating its products. In fact that's why we love Apple in the first place, because it products work together seamlessly.
As has been discussed on/. before, all DRM sucks. It doesn't matter whether it's Apple's, MS's or whoever. If you plan to build your music collection on low res, DRM downloads too bad for you. There is only one legitimate, uber compatible format in existance. MP3. It plays on my iPod, my car stereo, my DVD player etc. I bought one album on the iTMS just to see how it worked. Burned to CD and ripped back to MP3. The quality difference is hardly noticable. Even then, I saw the same album for sale, used at around the same price. Hmmn, full quality, no DRM, Liner notes and cover art. iTMS is for rubes.
So i say stick it too em Apple. Hard. No vasaline. If you can make tons of money, convert some iPod users to Mac, keep your company solvent and continue making Macintoshes for me to buy I'm all for it
Slashdot Mirror
"Every American should hang their heads in shame over what we've allowed ourselves to become. Global assholes!"
America hasn't turned into global assholes, we started out that way. The country was founded on chattle slavery and continued as genocidal land grabbers. This was all done in the name of capitalism to benefit the wealthy same as it is now.
Now THAT'S funny!
I understand your point and have said similar things myself. We're not talking about "two people making love" though, we're talking about men slapping, gagging, raping and whipping women gang style. I'm willing to bet George Carlin wouldn't approve of that for his kids. Would you approve of that for yours?
I'm with you. Get ready for the big Baccalaureate bubble to burst in another 5-6 years when all the grads with $120,000 dollars in debt and low paying "salary" jobs decide to walk away from that albatross.
Apple fanboi here.
...and loving it.
Yeah this stuff sucks. The idea of being able to update your computer over the internet was great for about a month, but it's become obvious that what's not broken shouldn't be fixed. This reminds me that I need to turn off the auto updater for all my Macs. I'll check the updater now and then and just download the security patches (if they've been out for a couple of weeks). To tell the truth, I've never noticed any software update, that I didn't specifically seek out, giving me any positive results.
BTW: I'm using QT 7.1
What do you mean we kemosabe. The record companies may be on the road to ruin but not music, music afficionados, or musicians. As long as the author is going to get all historical on us he should have told his daughter this:
Music and musicians have existed for tens of thousands of years. Music companies about 100. Modern popular music aimed at teenagers has existed about 50. When the first recording devices were created about 100 years ago many musicians were worried. They realized that their ability to make money by performing was in jeapardy. Sure enough, in our present day, musicians are beholden to recording companies to make their money. The ability to perform is secondary to the ability to market, distribute and produce recorded product. Tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech
As a local musician in the 70s and 80s I saw venues for live performance (the bar scene) completely dry up in favour of DJs. With the advent of rap, young folk no longer expected to see real musicians anymore. This was the logical consequence of having businessmen control an artistic endevour. The consolidation/death of the music industry as we know it is a good thing. Hopefully it will open up more venues for local talent to actually make some money without have to pay the toll at the music industry's gate.
It wasn't the consumer's idea to digitize the recordings, create the internet, or put cd drives with ripping software in computers. The scientists and businessmen came up with that. The recording industy is going to have to deal with the realities of our modern world. if they can't deal with it then tough shit for them. You can't stop the tech.
I agree. I've been using PS7 in our design office up until a couple of months ago. Didn't have any problems doing what I needed to do. In fact a lot of pro designers use older software. In the business world you usually have to make a pretty good case for increased productivity before you get to order the latest greatest, and let's not talk about what kind of hardware you may be using.
A couple of other things to consider:
If the "pointy headed bosses" find out you can teach using free, state of the art software, your funding is liable to dry right up. If the Gimp stops gimping or your web software is unsatisfactory, good luck getting them to open their pocketbooks after a couple of semesters of free riding.
With educational discounts that commercial software can be pretty cheap. At our university we got the Adobe design suite for $200 per seat. Students pay more but still they won't have to pay full price for quite awhile.
Those students that do want to pursue multimedia careers can still pick up that copy of PS7 on Ebay cheap. No reason they have to get the latest version. They'll be better prepared entering college or the business world. Those students that don't want to pursue multimedia careers may never adjust a photo again in life (a lot of people don't) why cater to them?
Adobe has the advantage of feedback from industry professionals in order to maintain and improve their software. There is a huge internet community with forums, plugins, downloadable actions, how tos, podcasts etc. Not to mention manuals of every type both paper and electronic, seminars, conferences you name it.
Teaching priciples is a good idea, but many times you need to figure out how to make the software do specific, complex tasks, in which case your knowledge of some open source software will be useless. Chances are said task was done the same in the older version of the software that you learned.
How can you guys get on the internet and post that giving away content is not a valid business model. How much money is Slashdot making by giving away it's services? or Google? How about that teenage millionaire giving away Facebook backgrounds? How much did Mark Andreeson make giving away Netscape. You sound like Steve Ballmer crying about Linix.
Musicians were crying to the high heavens when music recording was invented. "We make our money playing live music" they said. "Who's going to pay to see us if they can listen to recordings at home?" Years later after they've allowed the recording industry to attach itself to "music" like a giant, bloodsucking parasite they can't contemplate getting along without it. Simmons is like a crack ho who can't put down the pipe. Hasn't everybody bought or downloaded all the KISS songs already? Why the hell is he putting our a box set? Don't all the true fans already have all the material already including the bootlegs? He should be giving away that moldy crap to drive viewers to his web site and TV show. Business man indeed.
Times are changing. It took some kid in a dorm room to hip the world to the idea of downloaded music. It will probably take another kid in another dorm room to show the suits how to make money at it.
Since you're speaking of comic books, let's remember that the shift in perception about the "adultness" of comics was preceded by a shift by comic creators about what kind of stories would be told. Starting in the 60s when Marvel started giving their characters personality, ie Peter Parker questioning whether he wanted to save the world or simply make money off of his skills. Before that the heroes were totally one dimensional characters.
This was followed by the advent of independant comics with the creators keeping the rights to their creations. This allowed a lot more ideas to be introduced into comics than the corporate bean counters would have ever allowed. We started to get true adult comics like Maus, the Watchmen and V for Vendetta.
I don't believe that games like Manhunt are adult simply because they're bloody or profane. In fact it's just the opposite, they're adolescent. Jiggling breasts, splattering blood, and verbal obsceneties are the kind of thing that titillated me back in my teens and the depictions of female characters (skinny with enormous breast) are same kind of images that attracted me to buy certain comics as a teenager.
Hollywood produces blood splattered horror flicks and trashy B-movies, sure, but it's the films like the Godfather, Shindlers List, Ghandi, etc that earn them what little respect they have.
Until game developers start gaining control over their creations, create story lines that make people think, cater to a larger audience than post pubescent males gaming will never gain respect.
Instead Nintendo came out of nowhere to be hot console to buy and Microsoft is eating into Sony's core demographic. They have allowed their competitors to gain mindshare and developers to focus on other platforms
Going from "leader of the pack" to competing with a loss leader like Xbox is a disaster.
By the way, what's the penalty for running the cheap version of Vista under virtualization, and how would anyone know?
White folks hear black folks degrade and embarass themselves they act as if we'd won the lottery. "boo hoo, they get to degrade and embarass themselves and when we try to degrade and embarass them, they get mad". If you want the same priveledge as black people, then degrade and embarass yourselves. You can talk about racist peckerwoods and bleach blond bimbos as much as you like.
Imus wasn't fired because he said "nappy headed hos", He was fired for a history of offensive, deragatory, bigoted commentary. These shock jocks like to push the envelope, sometimes it pushes back. Howard Stern eventually went down, as did (black jock) Star of the Star and Buckwild show.
But don't worry, He'll be back. If they can resurrect Mark Furman, they can resurrect Donny boy.
What's interesting to me is that Jobs called for DRM free downloads rather than licensing Fairplay. If Apple were to license its DRM, certainly all those MP3 makers and online stores that got screwed by Plays for Sure would jump on board. This would lead to a rather bizzaro world where Apple is freely licensing its software and MicroSoft is pushing a proprietary device. Seems to me this would give Apple more clout rather than less, and allow it to use some of those tactics that MS has been so successful with in the past. I mean, isn't that the conventional wisdom; license the software, take over the world?
i bought my iPod cause I'm a Mac user and Apple's is the only player that caters to Mac users. Without iTunes there would be no online store for Mac users at all. I also liked firewire. Before USB 2 people were forced to sync there portables with slow as dirt USB1, remember that?. AAC is a good, non proprietary upgrade to MP3. I refuse to use Winblows Media. Microsofts WMP for Mac blows chunks. Atrac, Real and the rest are proprietary. Ogg is compatible with what? At least iPod is cross platform (sorry Linex users). The UI is functional, the prices are in line with other players and there is a plethora third party devices and tie ins. iPod in your car, on the plane, etc. I also carry my files back and forth to the job by using it's hard drive capabilty. You may not prefer the iPod but to pretend that those that do are all sheeple is just dumb.
For some reason Windows users, who have never had any trouble resisting Steve's "reality distortion field" in the past, went crazy for the iPod. To me that's the best indication of the quality of the product. Apple hasn't leveraged it's monopoly to make people buy it's iPod. The products were integrated from day one. You could say it built it's monopoly by integrating its products. In fact that's why we love Apple in the first place, because it products work together seamlessly.
As has been discussed on /. before, all DRM sucks. It doesn't matter whether it's Apple's, MS's or whoever. If you plan to build your music collection on low res, DRM downloads too bad for you. There is only one legitimate, uber compatible format in existance. MP3. It plays on my iPod, my car stereo, my DVD player etc. I bought one album on the iTMS just to see how it worked. Burned to CD and ripped back to MP3. The quality difference is hardly noticable. Even then, I saw the same album for sale, used at around the same price. Hmmn, full quality, no DRM, Liner notes and cover art. iTMS is for rubes.
So i say stick it too em Apple. Hard. No vasaline. If you can make tons of money, convert some iPod users to Mac, keep your company solvent and continue making Macintoshes for me to buy I'm all for it