I'd be inclined to agree, if it were not for the fact that it seems that at least half their stories seem to be "oh look, an aircraft carrier in a Google Earth desert" or "cor, look at 'em hooters reflected in that pic on eBay". They obviously pay some poor idiot to trawl eBay's sadder listings every day.
While I appreciate my own blog isn't exactly highbrow, I'm not pretending that it's anything else. The Register is pretending to be a tech news source but is in fact most of the time as tech centered as The News of the World. Sadly, mostly without pictures of the TnA.
And in this particular case your argument fails - this "analyst" report is just a biased piece of PR - ALL analysts reports always are. Nobody hires an analyst to find out Truth, they hire them to prove a truth. This is Press Release Journalism - as almost all journalism is.
Re:Must just be the majors. The indies are thrivin
on
iTunes Sales 'Collapsing'
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's also worth noting, that especially where the back catalogue is from a time before CDs, 90% of tracks on any vinyl album were filler and B-sides that no-one ever wanted to listen to, but had to because they were on the album.
There are dozens if not hundreds of bands where I like one song and one song only. Now it's possible to get just that one song and not pay for crap I will never listen to. The records companies are now reaping their just rewards for bad seeds they sewed 30 or 40 years ago.
The time for record companies to die is overdue. Please only buy music second hand, or directly from the artists.
I'm not an American, but I do not agree with your post. Somewhere within your post there is a valid point, but you missed it by focusing your ad hominem attack on the US.
Firstly, as other posters have said, watch The Colbert Report. It is intelligent and brilliant satire, the purpose of his invented words is satire, and is also valuable and necessary commentary on the manipulation of words by the (often right-wing extremist) media such as Fox News. It is also very funny.
As to nature of manipulation of words, the biggest culprit is the advertising, promotion and marketing industry. They are closely followed by News Corp (owned by Murdoch - who is Australian, not American.) Please see the documentary "Outfoxed" if you have not done so. Bear mind that Murdoch's claws extend far beyond the US, they also own TV and Newspapers in Australia, South Africa, China, and in the UK (The Sun, The Times, Sky, and recently part of ITV).
Much of the advertising and promotion industry is international, and UK agencies play a significant part in that - Saatchi and Saatchi as one example.
Evidence of ad manipulation exists in words such as "free", "diet", "low fat", "extra" and many, many, many more. That's universal and also exists in other languages other than English.
One of the most beautiful and wonderful things about English is it's ability to be bent and stretched and often broken without losing it's meaning, in fact it often gains depth and poetry from such manipulation.
If you were to go back in time to the 16th Century I'm certain Ye Olde Slashe Dotte would have a culpatory post by M'lord Scumptious listing his bile at the disgraceful disregard for Her Most Noble Majestie's Englishe by that upstart proletarian Mr Shakespeare.
Seriously if you can understand it, it works. Grammar Nazis, you can all burn forever in Hell. We can blame Dr Samuel Johnson for introducing language fascism, which remains utterly unnecessary to humanity.
And finally, if you have a chance, do read Bill Bryson's book, "Made in America" for an eye-opening history of how American English is, in fact, more correct in many cases.
Oh, and PS, if you believe the Americans have no love of language I can only assume you have never read Steinbeck.
I would have thought that phishing and eBay / Criagslist fraud was the quickest and easiest way of making money for criminals. The tech ability for phishing doesn't need to be that high.
What I've often wondered though is, why do phishers just go for the harder targets like eBay, Paypal and Banks? Since a significant proportion of sites these days require a login and password, and that many people will simply use the same login and password, why not phish for some forum or news site, where users are off guard and more likely to fall for the phish? Then you take their login and password and plug in into sites like eBay etc. Seems a piece of cake to me, and more effective.
Not quite. You need to model it more fully. Yes, there is opportunity cost in not receiving money form other advertisers. However, they can gain tax benefits from reassigning large quantities of revenue that would otherwise be taxable profit to Adwords campaigns.
It's pretty much win win. I'm fine with it personally, it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to me that a company would promote itself using it's own products. Especially when in many cases their products are the best in their class. For me the only caveat I have over Adwords is the click fraud issue which I feel is a significant one. I use Adwords, and every time I set up a campaign I wonder if I'm just donating money to Google.
Your points are mostly non issues as far as I can see.
1. Who's going to keep videos seeded?
This service is designed for professionals and serious indie filmmakers. Even a minimalist indie film has about 10 people who have a vested interest in the success of the movie. And their moms and friends and whatever... Prostudios have a webserver set up with the files stored there and a perpetual seed. No problem.
2. Like it or not, Youtube is often used in workplace camaraderie.
If you don't work in the movie industry and you are downloading full feature length movies from YouTube in your workplace, your chances of a pink slip are really really high - that's just a tip. This is a different animal. YouTube can even be used for trailers on Zudeo. You can download by opening those ports on your home pc without issue (assuming you have a non-fascist ISP admittedly)
3. Will the bandwidth usage be acceptable for the average user
Azureus aside, which is a monstrous resource hog IMHO, The bandwidth is controllable with most BT clients, and you are aware of the file size when starting the torrent. There are some great BT clients out there that make it easy to use. With YouTube you never know when something will load if the servers or your connection is running slow. Plus, you have to use Flash, which again IMHO should be driven off the Internet as fast as possible.
4. Zudeo breaks up your workflow by launching an external program.
I have Flashblock installed for a reason. Flash is a third party program. Torrents can run nicely and quietly in the background.
5. Perhaps the most important point of all: Bittorrent cannot stream files.
Ok, so that is a fairly genuine point, but it just means you have to have a little patience and do a little planning. Other than pr0n, I'd imagine that most people aren't going to need a movie right there and then.
How are content creators supposed to support themselves? I mean writers, actors, singers. I know the current system is useless, but how do we replace it and still have content be worth something so that creators can make a living?
It's not about the creatives, it's about their agents. Perhaps a better question is, why are some content creatives more protected than others - how can we generate income for artists without parasites skimming their pound of flesh?
For example, most painters and sculptors cannot expect to make a decent living in their lifetimes, nor can many classical composers and musicians, and nor poets nor authors. What makes the agents of pop and rock musicians and film and TV actors and producers so special that that they can bully and threaten others to protect their (sometimes dubious quality) work. Most signed bands are in debt to their agencies for years, most of their money goes to people who have no talent and have never contributed one single thing to the creative advancement of humanity.
I have no objection to artists being paid fairly for their talent. I have every objection to the agency vermin that feed from us all.
Ah, if it were only possible to tell when the Feds were viewing your information... Any spending time on some blogs would have some explaining to do.
There's not always coded messages, there's not always secrets - um, unless you count Victoria...
If a structure is visible from a public way, it is legal to photograph it and publish it; it is not a copyright violation. Exceptions are made, of course, for certain government areas, most notably Area 51.
Fortunately, and long may this right continue. People can also be photographed in this way without recourse too, and those photos can be published without release agreements - upskirt shots and the like are however viewed as an invasion of privacy understandably. If you are outside, you aren't in private. Just ask Britney.
Because many people think that everything on Wikipedia is The Truth (tm)?
I'm sure there are many cases where "The Truth" (TM) is well represented on Wikipedia.
Actual truth however, is occasionally there in between The Truth, Lies, Vandalism, Opinions, Spam, and Articles that would be true if you could understand what the hell language they're written in...(probably Bablefishese)
Wikipedia should really have a disclaimer at the top of every page warning and reminding users that there's a good chance that the page below may contain absolutely no facts whatsoever. That really would solve a lot of issues, and is honest.
Best security practice has always been to turn off ActiveX, Javascript, Flash, and any other means by which untrusted executable content is automatically downloaded to one's machine and then automatically executed.
Of course that is true. It's just that it's a real pain in the ass. Well, no mortal being requires ActiveX for any reason, and I block the horror that is Flash with the (truly joyous and wonderful) Flashblock extension - and rarely ever allow it to run, mostly just for YouTube.
It's the Javascrpt that's the pain really. I tried using the noscript extension for a while, but it was actually more of an inconvenience than the risk of running something malicious. Seems that a very high number of webpages - and the most improbable ones too - use javascript and are dysfunctional if you disallow it. I'm not sure how to win with this - a little risk for a higher quality of web browsing? It's what I do, but not what I want.
Seriously, you deal with terrorism by NOT being afraid.
Yes. Absolutely. The only way to beat terrorists is to live a normal life. If the NYSE or banks are vulnerable to attack right now without having to add extra defenses and protections, then we must all ask them exactly why our money is not safe already. It's not just terrorists out there, it's mafia botnets and mischievous teenagers and all manner of other black hats. I think we all need a very clear answer as to why any financial institution needs to take any extra security precautions today.
It seems to be a piece of cake to get red alert status these days:
1. Post Islamist blog entry that sounds like an attack of some kind is imminent.
2. Sit back, relax and do nothing.
3. Watch and laugh as Western Infidels run around in circles going ???
4. Profit.
The concept of allowing others to invent and develop an idea and waiting for the right business moment to launch your own version of it, while predatory, is certainly one used by many corporations and small businesses everywhere. So MS can't be singled out for that, it does make business sense.
What is sad however, is that it is still possible to allow other to invent and then innovate to improve the original product. MS did indeed used to do that. They don't appear to now.
For example, Word, though possibly technically inferior to Word Perfect, was considerably easier to use. Word allowed everyone to use a word processor, rather than just those who had the arcane knowledge of what that cardboard shortcut list stuck on top of the function keys meant. Word provided most people with exactly they needed and empowered many more. Seriously, if you're old enough to remember those times you know that Word Perfect deserved to die the slow and painful death it did.
Similarly true with IE versus Netscape. IE was a good free thing compared with the performance of the paid-for Netscape.
Now MS seems to be in the middle. There are more innovative companies ahead of them and behind them (Firefox, as one example). It would be great if they can regain some of that innovation that they once had. There are still many targets for improvement. Photoshop being one that comes to mind immediately - powerful and the best available but preposterously expensive, arcane and unintuitive. I use it every day, and though it's take me years to get proficient with it, I'd gladly dump it right now for a better more intuitive and user focused interface.
Last week Dvorak was an idiot, but today he's the best tech columnist in the world.
I think it's more like the thing with the monkeys isn't it? You know, where if you get a million chimpanzees to sit long enough at typewriters you'll get them to produce Shakespeare eventually.
It's kind of like that, if Dvorak types enough words one day he will accidentally produce a tech review. Looks like today's that day.
(And offtopic, but hey Firefox developer dudes - the spell check is telling me that I should spell Dvorak, "Dvorák". Which, I assume is supposed to be the correct spelling of the surname of the composer Antonín, whose surname has, in fact, a caron over the "r", which admittedly doesn't display on some webpages - such as Slashdot.... Anyway, as far as I'm aware there's no such thing as Dvorák. Oh, and I wish there was no such thing as Dvorak too, but that would be too much to ask of Firefox I guess... um, is it?)
While this point may be true in some cases, it's only part of the issue. There is a significant difference between dirty and unsterile. Cleanliness isn't the real problem, it's sterility.
It is far easier to sterilize a flat durable solid surface than something convuluted and fragile like a keyboard. So, this is a great thing. And of course it has so many many many more applications too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be inclined to agree, if it were not for the fact that it seems that at least half their stories seem to be "oh look, an aircraft carrier in a Google Earth desert" or "cor, look at 'em hooters reflected in that pic on eBay". They obviously pay some poor idiot to trawl eBay's sadder listings every day.
While I appreciate my own blog isn't exactly highbrow, I'm not pretending that it's anything else. The Register is pretending to be a tech news source but is in fact most of the time as tech centered as The News of the World. Sadly, mostly without pictures of the TnA.
And in this particular case your argument fails - this "analyst" report is just a biased piece of PR - ALL analysts reports always are. Nobody hires an analyst to find out Truth, they hire them to prove a truth. This is Press Release Journalism - as almost all journalism is.
It's also worth noting, that especially where the back catalogue is from a time before CDs, 90% of tracks on any vinyl album were filler and B-sides that no-one ever wanted to listen to, but had to because they were on the album.
There are dozens if not hundreds of bands where I like one song and one song only. Now it's possible to get just that one song and not pay for crap I will never listen to. The records companies are now reaping their just rewards for bad seeds they sewed 30 or 40 years ago.
The time for record companies to die is overdue. Please only buy music second hand, or directly from the artists.
I'm not an American, but I do not agree with your post. Somewhere within your post there is a valid point, but you missed it by focusing your ad hominem attack on the US.
Firstly, as other posters have said, watch The Colbert Report. It is intelligent and brilliant satire, the purpose of his invented words is satire, and is also valuable and necessary commentary on the manipulation of words by the (often right-wing extremist) media such as Fox News. It is also very funny.
As to nature of manipulation of words, the biggest culprit is the advertising, promotion and marketing industry. They are closely followed by News Corp (owned by Murdoch - who is Australian, not American.) Please see the documentary "Outfoxed" if you have not done so. Bear mind that Murdoch's claws extend far beyond the US, they also own TV and Newspapers in Australia, South Africa, China, and in the UK (The Sun, The Times, Sky, and recently part of ITV).
Much of the advertising and promotion industry is international, and UK agencies play a significant part in that - Saatchi and Saatchi as one example.
Evidence of ad manipulation exists in words such as "free", "diet", "low fat", "extra" and many, many, many more. That's universal and also exists in other languages other than English.
One of the most beautiful and wonderful things about English is it's ability to be bent and stretched and often broken without losing it's meaning, in fact it often gains depth and poetry from such manipulation.
If you were to go back in time to the 16th Century I'm certain Ye Olde Slashe Dotte would have a culpatory post by M'lord Scumptious listing his bile at the disgraceful disregard for Her Most Noble Majestie's Englishe by that upstart proletarian Mr Shakespeare.
Seriously if you can understand it, it works. Grammar Nazis, you can all burn forever in Hell. We can blame Dr Samuel Johnson for introducing language fascism, which remains utterly unnecessary to humanity.
And finally, if you have a chance, do read Bill Bryson's book, "Made in America" for an eye-opening history of how American English is, in fact, more correct in many cases.
Oh, and PS, if you believe the Americans have no love of language I can only assume you have never read Steinbeck.
Much as I love "truthiness" I'm personally more fond of "wikiality". They go hand in hand, and wikiality is fantastic tool for proving truthiness.
Wikiality's ability to prove "truth" on the other hand, however...
I would have thought that phishing and eBay / Criagslist fraud was the quickest and easiest way of making money for criminals. The tech ability for phishing doesn't need to be that high.
What I've often wondered though is, why do phishers just go for the harder targets like eBay, Paypal and Banks? Since a significant proportion of sites these days require a login and password, and that many people will simply use the same login and password, why not phish for some forum or news site, where users are off guard and more likely to fall for the phish? Then you take their login and password and plug in into sites like eBay etc. Seems a piece of cake to me, and more effective.
Still, in his favor he isn't the CEO of the Real organization. Who just has got to be worse...
Not quite. You need to model it more fully. Yes, there is opportunity cost in not receiving money form other advertisers. However, they can gain tax benefits from reassigning large quantities of revenue that would otherwise be taxable profit to Adwords campaigns.
It's pretty much win win. I'm fine with it personally, it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to me that a company would promote itself using it's own products. Especially when in many cases their products are the best in their class. For me the only caveat I have over Adwords is the click fraud issue which I feel is a significant one. I use Adwords, and every time I set up a campaign I wonder if I'm just donating money to Google.
I, for one, welcome our new... again... er...
This service is designed for professionals and serious indie filmmakers. Even a minimalist indie film has about 10 people who have a vested interest in the success of the movie. And their moms and friends and whatever... Prostudios have a webserver set up with the files stored there and a perpetual seed. No problem.
If you don't work in the movie industry and you are downloading full feature length movies from YouTube in your workplace, your chances of a pink slip are really really high - that's just a tip. This is a different animal. YouTube can even be used for trailers on Zudeo. You can download by opening those ports on your home pc without issue (assuming you have a non-fascist ISP admittedly)
Azureus aside, which is a monstrous resource hog IMHO, The bandwidth is controllable with most BT clients, and you are aware of the file size when starting the torrent. There are some great BT clients out there that make it easy to use. With YouTube you never know when something will load if the servers or your connection is running slow. Plus, you have to use Flash, which again IMHO should be driven off the Internet as fast as possible.
I have Flashblock installed for a reason. Flash is a third party program. Torrents can run nicely and quietly in the background.
Ok, so that is a fairly genuine point, but it just means you have to have a little patience and do a little planning. Other than pr0n, I'd imagine that most people aren't going to need a movie right there and then.
For example, most painters and sculptors cannot expect to make a decent living in their lifetimes, nor can many classical composers and musicians, and nor poets nor authors. What makes the agents of pop and rock musicians and film and TV actors and producers so special that that they can bully and threaten others to protect their (sometimes dubious quality) work. Most signed bands are in debt to their agencies for years, most of their money goes to people who have no talent and have never contributed one single thing to the creative advancement of humanity.
I have no objection to artists being paid fairly for their talent. I have every objection to the agency vermin that feed from us all.
Ah, if it were only possible to tell when the Feds were viewing your information... Any spending time on some blogs would have some explaining to do. There's not always coded messages, there's not always secrets - um, unless you count Victoria...
Actual truth however, is occasionally there in between The Truth, Lies, Vandalism, Opinions, Spam, and Articles that would be true if you could understand what the hell language they're written in...(probably Bablefishese)
Wikipedia should really have a disclaimer at the top of every page warning and reminding users that there's a good chance that the page below may contain absolutely no facts whatsoever. That really would solve a lot of issues, and is honest.
I built an Igloo once, that was really cool.
Sorry...(ducks)...
It's the Javascrpt that's the pain really. I tried using the noscript extension for a while, but it was actually more of an inconvenience than the risk of running something malicious. Seems that a very high number of webpages - and the most improbable ones too - use javascript and are dysfunctional if you disallow it. I'm not sure how to win with this - a little risk for a higher quality of web browsing? It's what I do, but not what I want.
It seems to be a piece of cake to get red alert status these days:
1. Post Islamist blog entry that sounds like an attack of some kind is imminent.
2. Sit back, relax and do nothing.
3. Watch and laugh as Western Infidels run around in circles going ???
4. Profit.
But TFA (I read it, sorry!) doesn't use "some"... even though logically that must be the case.
The concept of allowing others to invent and develop an idea and waiting for the right business moment to launch your own version of it, while predatory, is certainly one used by many corporations and small businesses everywhere. So MS can't be singled out for that, it does make business sense.
What is sad however, is that it is still possible to allow other to invent and then innovate to improve the original product. MS did indeed used to do that. They don't appear to now.
For example, Word, though possibly technically inferior to Word Perfect, was considerably easier to use. Word allowed everyone to use a word processor, rather than just those who had the arcane knowledge of what that cardboard shortcut list stuck on top of the function keys meant. Word provided most people with exactly they needed and empowered many more. Seriously, if you're old enough to remember those times you know that Word Perfect deserved to die the slow and painful death it did.
Similarly true with IE versus Netscape. IE was a good free thing compared with the performance of the paid-for Netscape.
Now MS seems to be in the middle. There are more innovative companies ahead of them and behind them (Firefox, as one example). It would be great if they can regain some of that innovation that they once had. There are still many targets for improvement. Photoshop being one that comes to mind immediately - powerful and the best available but preposterously expensive, arcane and unintuitive. I use it every day, and though it's take me years to get proficient with it, I'd gladly dump it right now for a better more intuitive and user focused interface.
It's kind of like that, if Dvorak types enough words one day he will accidentally produce a tech review. Looks like today's that day.
(And offtopic, but hey Firefox developer dudes - the spell check is telling me that I should spell Dvorak, "Dvorák". Which, I assume is supposed to be the correct spelling of the surname of the composer Antonín, whose surname has, in fact, a caron over the "r", which admittedly doesn't display on some webpages - such as Slashdot.... Anyway, as far as I'm aware there's no such thing as Dvorák. Oh, and I wish there was no such thing as Dvorak too, but that would be too much to ask of Firefox I guess... um, is it?)
Not to mention no iTunes downloads of "Radioactive" by Gene Simmons.
While this point may be true in some cases, it's only part of the issue. There is a significant difference between dirty and unsterile. Cleanliness isn't the real problem, it's sterility.
It is far easier to sterilize a flat durable solid surface than something convuluted and fragile like a keyboard. So, this is a great thing. And of course it has so many many many more applications too.