A band usually can not afford to pay to record an album on their own.
Maybe not at the highest level of production, but I've listened to music recorded by bands who never sold a disc.
You still need someone to pay to shoot your video.
How many songs that you listen to have you seen the video for? Did you see the video before you decided you liked the song? Would you buy a copy of a lousy song if it had a good video?
You still need to get radio air play.
Ok, that's one thing the labels do. Internet radio and the like may not be enough to make a band big. But it may be enough to make a living.
Your bank is ripping you off. To send a wire from my credit union account, it costs $5.
I just did a web search for wire transfer prices, and that's what I came up with. But how much does your bank or credit union charge you for writing a check?
It's not quite the same, since the sender has to activate a wire transfer (as opposed to buying a car, where I give you the keys, you give me the money, or in this case, the magic number.) I also can't choose the account into which I put the money.
The real problem with wire transfers, though, is cost. Despite it all being electronic and safe, it's $20-$40 minimum cost. Why? I want it as cheap as a check, so my company can give me magic numbers instead of reimbursement checks I have to deposit.
We get 10-20 nigerian emails per week, being in the medical equipment business.
I got forwarded a PayPal scam message from a guy I did a small ebay purchase with yesterday. I don't know if he was the scammer (doubtful, with a 5K+ feeback, although he never e-mailed me back), or is just a very unhappy person right now.
What is needed is "magic number" checks. The number is like a encrypted message, encoding a one-time money transfer, with the payer and payee as part of the magic number. The bank could be contacted with that number, and verify the transaction (and lock the funds) instantly.
The problem is that the places volunteers would least want to map (like the south Bronx) are also the places in which users least want to get lost and would thus need the most accurate mapping.
I find it very easy never to get lost in the South Bronx. I never go there...
You see it is much cheaper to write and record one or two songs than it is to do a whole album.
Cheaper, yes, but not that much cheaper. There's a fair bit of overhead in setting up a recording session in the first place. Finding and rating new acts is expensive, as is promoting them (though in the iTunes world, less so).
I would also try to contact cyclists, since the various railtrail groups would probably have volunteers who would be interested enough to add data for various trails.
It may be one of those "tipping point" things. Get enough interest, and your project gets useful enough that more will volunteer, which will make it more useful, which will encourage more volunteers, which...
If you can make a go of this, I'd recommend you also record who contributed how much, so maybe you would get a little friendly competition (who can get the most miles) that would stimulate people to further the project. Regardless, do whatever you cna to make sure whatever you do is recorded as permanently as possible; there's little more annoying than contributing to a project, only to find your contribution vanishes into the bit bucket (see http://www.june29.com/IDP/spiers/ for example...) Even if you have limited results, someone else may be able to build on them later.
Record one song that flop, bye bye... Find new artist to record hit song.
In this case, however, there's little cost to maintaining an artist in the "catalog", even if their sales are way down. And the artist that does put together a quality album makes $10/customer, not $1.
Seriously, this is both interesting and disappointing. I've been working, as a hobby, on a Palm-based GPS mapping program. The reason I'm not making much progress is because even when I'm done it's not going to be very useful without map data which is probably not available for free.
Have you considered making recording a part of the program, and soliciting volunteers to do some of the endless driving around? Enough volunteers, spread around enough, and you could probably get a pretty good database. Then start planning vacations based on areas that need coverage...
A 120G hard drive costs about as much as a burner + 120G worth of media and would give me online access to my entire collection, not to mention the space savings. Why switch?
I've never known a hard drive with a write-protect tab (no doubt someone else does), and hard drive back-ups are as expensive as the original. While I agree having a big hard drive is a great way to keep an active copy of your data, you may want a separate archive elsewhere. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are $0.10-0.20/gigabyte, not $0.60-$1.00/gigabyte like a hard drive, more for an external.
Well, yes, that would be excellent, but the current set of online music services don't do anything to help bands bypass the RIAA. In fact, they do the exact opposite.
I couldn't tell for certain, but word is some indie (i.e., non-RIAA) labels are working with iTunes. So you can bypass the RIAA itself at least. Some indie labels are much-more artist-friendly.
If the nanoshells migrate into the wrong location, they will kill healthy tissue.
Aside from the greater likelihood that they will accumulate in the cancerous tissue, remember the nanshells do little or nothing on their own. They require heating to kill tissue, and the surgeons will be aiming their IR at the target area. Healthy tissue will only be killed if it has the nanoshells and is in the IR beam path.
You could also use a multiple beam approach, where healthy tissue around the tumor only receives one beam, the target area several, and thus the healthy tissue may not receive a fatal amount.
I don't see how the RIAA's "business model" has been cracked.
It hasn't, yet. But what happens when bands start to bypass the RIAA?
Tommy Mottola and Co. get big money and to bang the hottest babes because they're essentially a cartel, controlling the various channels through which most people hear about and purchase music. Take away the need for the cartel, even if at first they're heavily involved in the channel, and perhaps artists will take control of their own careers.
The bitter pill about the Mac is, there isn't a cheap entry level option.
An $800 eMac, "including monitor", isn't that expensive, and comes with reasonably tolerable performance for most purposes. The only real weakness I see is USB 1.1 instead of 2.0, which makes talking to digital cameras slow.
and while I'm not completely sold that Montgomery had Rommel under wraps in Africa before Paton showed up, he was making progress.
But they made a lot more progress with the aid of the American Lee/Grant tanks and then the Shermans. Prior to their arrival, the British really had no good offensive weapons against anti-tank guns. The Matildas, Crusaders, and Valentines all fired solid shot from their 2-pounders, not high-explosive. The 75 mm of the American tanks was the first weapon that was effective both in the anti-tank and anti-anti-tank gun role. Once the Shermans were available in numbers, the British pretty much abandoned using any of their tank designs other than Churchills until the Cromwell arrived in '44. (The British also get credit for providing the 17-pounder that made the Sherman Firefly so effective.)
It's not fundamentally different from any punishment - once you lock someone up for a period of time there is no way for that person to ever get that time back - even if they are innocent and later released and exonerated.
But you haven't lost everything. In Maryland, an man has been found innocent after 27 years in prison, and pardoned by the governor. He can now seek redress; a person in a similar situation received $45K per year of prison.
Not wonderful, but it sure beats having the governor come to your grave and say "Oops!"...
How the hell do they get a Celeron to run at 1.8, anyways?
The 1.8 Ghz Celeron is an Intel spec product, not an eMachine special. It actually uses a P4 core, so has a longer floating point pipeline and does somewhat less per cycle than the lower clock-rate Celerons. It has less cache than regular P4s, so it is slower than a P4/1.8.
Luckily the government is doing something that isnt for corporate interests and Bush campaign donors.
Actually, this is in general good for corporate interests. It's Ebay who is being forced to shell out millions for a trivial patent. Ditto Microsoft. Ditto Sun. Just as Ford spent decades trying to invalidate the automobile patent, and thousands of other companies forced to pay legal fees and licensing fees to use ideas they would have come up with without any input from the patenter. The patent system as-is is suboptimal. An optimal system would improve the economy, because patents would only be issued for truly innovative, developed ideas, and companies would license those ideas because it would improve their profits over what they would otherwise do.
Improving the patent system is good for the economy. It's only bad for those who patent obvious things and try to license them.
why people give kids stimulant packed drinks is beyond me
The thing being ignored is that kids want these things. They want sugar (yes, my kids want to eat straight sugar, and my daughter will eat butter straight), they want ice cream, they want sodas, and they want TV and video games. It's an eternal battle for a parent to get them to eat the healthy dinner, rather than nibble at it and then ask for a junk food snack later, especially since they generally dislike most spices and thus have a limited set of healthy food they will it. It's a constant battle to keep them from watching junk on TV, and unlike adults they're willing to watch the same thing over and over -- and if not, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are available 24 hours a day.
Add to that the schools are all pressured to get high test scores, so kids now get homework starting in kindergarten. All the neighbor's kids are just as busy, so the only way to get the kids exercising is via organized activities, which means 20 minutes or more of drive time.
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A band usually can not afford to pay to record an album on their own.
Maybe not at the highest level of production, but I've listened to music recorded by bands who never sold a disc.
You still need someone to pay to shoot your video.
How many songs that you listen to have you seen the video for? Did you see the video before you decided you liked the song? Would you buy a copy of a lousy song if it had a good video?
You still need to get radio air play.
Ok, that's one thing the labels do. Internet radio and the like may not be enough to make a band big. But it may be enough to make a living.
Your bank is ripping you off. To send a wire from my credit union account, it costs $5.
I just did a web search for wire transfer prices, and that's what I came up with. But how much does your bank or credit union charge you for writing a check?
You may be right...
I may be crazy.
It's not quite the same, since the sender has to activate a wire transfer (as opposed to buying a car, where I give you the keys, you give me the money, or in this case, the magic number.) I also can't choose the account into which I put the money.
The real problem with wire transfers, though, is cost. Despite it all being electronic and safe, it's $20-$40 minimum cost. Why? I want it as cheap as a check, so my company can give me magic numbers instead of reimbursement checks I have to deposit.
We get 10-20 nigerian emails per week, being in the medical equipment business.
I got forwarded a PayPal scam message from a guy I did a small ebay purchase with yesterday. I don't know if he was the scammer (doubtful, with a 5K+ feeback, although he never e-mailed me back), or is just a very unhappy person right now.
What is needed is "magic number" checks. The number is like a encrypted message, encoding a one-time money transfer, with the payer and payee as part of the magic number. The bank could be contacted with that number, and verify the transaction (and lock the funds) instantly.
But what if you want to purchase music in your underwear
"How that music got in my underwear I'll never know."
The problem is that the places volunteers would least want to map (like the south Bronx) are also the places in which users least want to get lost and would thus need the most accurate mapping.
I find it very easy never to get lost in the South Bronx. I never go there...
"I walked through Bedford-Sty alone..."
You see it is much cheaper to write and record one or two songs than it is to do a whole album.
Cheaper, yes, but not that much cheaper. There's a fair bit of overhead in setting up a recording session in the first place. Finding and rating new acts is expensive, as is promoting them (though in the iTunes world, less so).
It will be interesting to see what develops.
I would also try to contact cyclists, since the various railtrail groups would probably have volunteers who would be interested enough to add data for various trails.
It may be one of those "tipping point" things. Get enough interest, and your project gets useful enough that more will volunteer, which will make it more useful, which will encourage more volunteers, which...
If you can make a go of this, I'd recommend you also record who contributed how much, so maybe you would get a little friendly competition (who can get the most miles) that would stimulate people to further the project. Regardless, do whatever you cna to make sure whatever you do is recorded as permanently as possible; there's little more annoying than contributing to a project, only to find your contribution vanishes into the bit bucket (see http://www.june29.com/IDP/spiers/ for example...) Even if you have limited results, someone else may be able to build on them later.
Record one song that flop, bye bye... Find new artist to record hit song.
In this case, however, there's little cost to maintaining an artist in the "catalog", even if their sales are way down. And the artist that does put together a quality album makes $10/customer, not $1.
Seriously, this is both interesting and disappointing. I've been working, as a hobby, on a Palm-based GPS mapping program. The reason I'm not making much progress is because even when I'm done it's not going to be very useful without map data which is probably not available for free.
Have you considered making recording a part of the program, and soliciting volunteers to do some of the endless driving around? Enough volunteers, spread around enough, and you could probably get a pretty good database. Then start planning vacations based on areas that need coverage...
A 120G hard drive costs about as much as a burner + 120G worth of media and would give me online access to my entire collection, not to mention the space savings. Why switch?
I've never known a hard drive with a write-protect tab (no doubt someone else does), and hard drive back-ups are as expensive as the original. While I agree having a big hard drive is a great way to keep an active copy of your data, you may want a separate archive elsewhere. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are $0.10-0.20/gigabyte, not $0.60-$1.00/gigabyte like a hard drive, more for an external.
Well, yes, that would be excellent, but the current set of online music services don't do anything to help bands bypass the RIAA. In fact, they do the exact opposite.
I couldn't tell for certain, but word is some indie (i.e., non-RIAA) labels are working with iTunes. So you can bypass the RIAA itself at least. Some indie labels are much-more artist-friendly.
If the nanoshells migrate into the wrong location, they will kill healthy tissue.
Aside from the greater likelihood that they will accumulate in the cancerous tissue, remember the nanshells do little or nothing on their own. They require heating to kill tissue, and the surgeons will be aiming their IR at the target area. Healthy tissue will only be killed if it has the nanoshells and is in the IR beam path.
You could also use a multiple beam approach, where healthy tissue around the tumor only receives one beam, the target area several, and thus the healthy tissue may not receive a fatal amount.
I don't see how the RIAA's "business model" has been cracked.
It hasn't, yet. But what happens when bands start to bypass the RIAA?
Tommy Mottola and Co. get big money and to bang the hottest babes because they're essentially a cartel, controlling the various channels through which most people hear about and purchase music. Take away the need for the cartel, even if at first they're heavily involved in the channel, and perhaps artists will take control of their own careers.
The bitter pill about the Mac is, there isn't a cheap entry level option.
An $800 eMac, "including monitor", isn't that expensive, and comes with reasonably tolerable performance for most purposes. The only real weakness I see is USB 1.1 instead of 2.0, which makes talking to digital cameras slow.
Name a large difference between console and PC games.
First party expansion packs. Third party mods. Games designed explicitly for high-resolution.
Cool idea, but I'm sure that someone already has a patent from 1980 on "Delivering music content at a live event to a small device"
A 1980 patent would have expired by now.
and while I'm not completely sold that Montgomery had Rommel under wraps in Africa before Paton showed up, he was making progress.
But they made a lot more progress with the aid of the American Lee/Grant tanks and then the Shermans. Prior to their arrival, the British really had no good offensive weapons against anti-tank guns. The Matildas, Crusaders, and Valentines all fired solid shot from their 2-pounders, not high-explosive. The 75 mm of the American tanks was the first weapon that was effective both in the anti-tank and anti-anti-tank gun role. Once the Shermans were available in numbers, the British pretty much abandoned using any of their tank designs other than Churchills until the Cromwell arrived in '44. (The British also get credit for providing the 17-pounder that made the Sherman Firefly so effective.)
It's not fundamentally different from any punishment - once you lock someone up for a period of time there is no way for that person to ever get that time back - even if they are innocent and later released and exonerated.
But you haven't lost everything. In Maryland, an man has been found innocent after 27 years in prison, and pardoned by the governor. He can now seek redress; a person in a similar situation received $45K per year of prison.
Not wonderful, but it sure beats having the governor come to your grave and say "Oops!"...
How the hell do they get a Celeron to run at 1.8, anyways?
The 1.8 Ghz Celeron is an Intel spec product, not an eMachine special. It actually uses a P4 core, so has a longer floating point pipeline and does somewhat less per cycle than the lower clock-rate Celerons. It has less cache than regular P4s, so it is slower than a P4/1.8.
"Yep, you need to get rid of that junk"...
And you didn't tell them about Kazaa Lite?
Luckily the government is doing something that isnt for corporate interests and Bush campaign donors.
Actually, this is in general good for corporate interests. It's Ebay who is being forced to shell out millions for a trivial patent. Ditto Microsoft. Ditto Sun. Just as Ford spent decades trying to invalidate the automobile patent, and thousands of other companies forced to pay legal fees and licensing fees to use ideas they would have come up with without any input from the patenter. The patent system as-is is suboptimal. An optimal system would improve the economy, because patents would only be issued for truly innovative, developed ideas, and companies would license those ideas because it would improve their profits over what they would otherwise do.
Improving the patent system is good for the economy. It's only bad for those who patent obvious things and try to license them.
why people give kids stimulant packed drinks is beyond me
The thing being ignored is that kids want these things. They want sugar (yes, my kids want to eat straight sugar, and my daughter will eat butter straight), they want ice cream, they want sodas, and they want TV and video games. It's an eternal battle for a parent to get them to eat the healthy dinner, rather than nibble at it and then ask for a junk food snack later, especially since they generally dislike most spices and thus have a limited set of healthy food they will it. It's a constant battle to keep them from watching junk on TV, and unlike adults they're willing to watch the same thing over and over -- and if not, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are available 24 hours a day.
Add to that the schools are all pressured to get high test scores, so kids now get homework starting in kindergarten. All the neighbor's kids are just as busy, so the only way to get the kids exercising is via organized activities, which means 20 minutes or more of drive time.
Notice to all personnel: Please do not wear brown shirts to work. It makes it too obvious what we're doing here--G.W.B.
They're working for UPS? The mind boggles...