LemurZone News

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

what's hot what's not

So now you will be going to Hell, for sharing music.

The RIAA has decided that sharing should be illegal. This premise is based on the facts that the music recording industry has shot itself in the groin in it's decision to lower it's costs and increase profitability in a business that has been demonstrated to be obscenely profitable for recording companies and excruciatingly unfair to the creators of their music.

When the RIAA made a conscious decision to make music available in a digital format on CD media, they saw increased profits. These profits were taking the form of reduced production costs in media as CD's require less space for production, less physical shelf space, and lower shipping costs. This made them salivate with dreams of cash flowing into their coffers.

Based on the evidence available on the web, nowhere in this equation was sharing the bounty with the artists who are directly responsible for a recording industry, nor did these reduced production costs show up at the point of sale in the music stores. Quite the reverse is true, and the greed of the industry was brought to light in the anti-trust ruling against the recording industry in the MAP or Minimum Advertised Price ruling.

This had a couple of side effects for the consumer electronics industry. 8 tracks died, cassette players to a dive, Turntable manufacturers saw their sales drop off a cliff, until artists of rap and hiphop, revived the turntable as an instrument for music.

This new media format required consumers to once again buy new and different devices to play music, and should have increased the number of sales of the same artist's music in this new format. After all, it worked when the transition was made from LP to 8 track, to cassette.

In it's relentless battle to stop file sharing of which music files is a small part, the RIAA is bringing in the big guns. These two nuggets are courtesy of John Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association;

''There's a moral imperative that because it's illegal, it's also a sin to download music.''
''Stealing gospel music is probably a little worse than stealing other things."

New tactic by record industry Infringement warnings sent via Kazaa, Grokster
read here - go there
Source: sfgate.com

the radio experment is over.

This my last post on radio.
you can keep the money dave... I have spent more and gotten less, although not by much.
my opinion is that this is a piece of shit. piece of shit is a little nebulous. hacking the templates to bring some sort of valid code is a pain in the ass. Valid code is important. although joe jenett has done an outstanding job. setting up categories the way i would like them is a nightmare. it does not have a spell checker, which in my case is a must have, as i write poorly, i should at least spell shit right. You can't cut and paste in the edit window, i still haven't seen anybody actually use or deploy the my pictures tool. it does not just run as an application but actually makes changes to my operating system far beyond registering a few .dll's. it interferes with the running and shutting down of my computer.

In reality radio is nothing more than a bloated scratch pad. The only feature that had any real interest for me was the news aggregator. But even here, I am not so lazy that I can't use my mouse and click on links that I have bookmarked.

My primary problem is that radio as a software program opens up the door of what is euphemistically being known as Social Software. However the expression is being defined by the constraints of the program. I think I have a pretty good grasp of what you can do with the web, having been here since the mid nineties. The opportunities for expression on the web are just beginning to be explored. The possibilities of transmission and retrival of information is still in it's infancy.

According to a private source, Network Solutions are loosing domain registrations at the rate of 50,000 a month. Folks are tired of putting up with the bullshit and the cost.

If you have a domain, register it somewhere else, like GoDaddy, or Register.com

Hiding Content [Posted] 12/11/02

One of the re-occurring themes that appear on design lists is 'hiding content', or making one's code invisible. Most of the solutions just don't work. The internet is not about hiding stuff. But in the interest of fairness I can offer a proven method of hiding content.

Mitch Ratcliffe is definitely an other. The 21st century holds the promise of rich multimedia across the web. Mitch was blazing this trail in the 20th century. From code to finance.

p i x e l v i e w - behind the screen with Mitch Ratcliffe
read here - go there