Atomic Razor

Record industry practices revisionism about music recording - Boing Boing

Record industry practices revisionism about music recording
Record industry practices revisionism about music recording - Boing Boing 

Nothing particularly new here but one of the comments caught my eye.

"CDs changed from being products to promotional tools for your music career. What you're asking is: "Why should I make business cards if people can just scan them and get them from friends?" People sharing your business cards is good for business. If you want to continue to sell product, you can sell CDs and t-shirts at your live shows."

I actually do have a problem with this concept.  It's been put to me before in various forms about FOSS and I still don't really get it.  Firstly, it presupposes that all people involved in the chain of music delivery perform live, second, it supposes that consumers want to consume the live act.

I don't mind the occasional concert and some have been excellent, but generally I'm pretty so-so about the whole live music thing.  It's ok, but I'll not necessarily go out of my way for it.  I also wonder about the music creation process.  The performer isn't the only part of the musical experience, anymore than the actor is the core of a movie or play.  Moving the cost recovery for the generation of IPR to a particular slice of the consuming market is going to have an overall negative effect on quality.  I can see a future of more music produce (and video for that matter) of a more uniformly low quality.

While I like Cory Doctorow's work, generally (some of the stories in Overclocked were, in my opinion, awful), there's a lot more crap online than I find published through the traditional model.  While I could, in theory, put up my current block of, as yet, unpublished novels online under a Creative Commons License (and maybe I will), I'll not kid myself that the early stuff really isn't all that good at all.  The publishing systems, and the associated support mechanisms aren't all bad, and aren't all evil. 

Like with many polarising debates, the problem is that both sides are fighting for the wrong causes.  The music and, by extension, TV and Movie businesses need to lighten up about DRM and make their stuff more accessible through legal means and accept that there are more effective ways of sharing things now; and conversely the anti-DRM "it should all be free except for the people performing their work live" groupies also need to accept that having a professional class of writers and producers is actually preferable to having a lot more amateur stuff.

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Drawing the wrong conclusions from the data...

Too many university students
Freedom and Whisky
I find this happens a lot with a lot of Libertarians.  The comment; "e only way we'd know for sure would be if all higher education were to be privatised and if students (or parents or sponsors) had to pay the full fees." being said conclusion.

We know that the system in the UK did generally work and was the envy of the world, that was with full grants and subsidies for a more limited number of students with a more technical and practical system for the less academically minded.  I was a product of the last year of Lancashire Polytechnic. 

I am biased, I'll admit it.  While my 1st year roommate was having a whole 5 hours a week of lectures on his Business Studies HND I was lumbered with 28 hours of lectures plus labs with every day starting at 9am.  Not conducive to a good student life.  Of course, I rose to the occasion, pretty much in proportion to my degree classification plummeting.

Still, I have the same Honours degree as Neville Shute - although his was from a slightly better school.

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End the year on a high...

It's really easy at the end of a year like this to look at the crappy stuff (sub-prime mortgages, local wars, terrorists, floods and other problems) and not look at some of the brighter spots.  I think the Razor really ought to look to the future more and try to be a tad more positive.  Glancing back at the various posts that Paul and I have made, you tend to notice that we're often down on things; the economy, space exploration, Apple products, so now I want to look at some good news of the future we've had.

Transport: Lots of rumours coming out about high energy density capacitors which, if true, mean that the era of the true electric car might be about to dawn.  Initially these are being combined with a hybrid, but if the rumours are true there should be a range of capacitors able to handle the charge for about 300 miles of driving with a recharge time of about 5 minutes.  Hopefully these will come about before we slide too far down the idiotic road leading to bio-fuels and all the dumb-arse consequences that brings.

Power: Solar cells continue to get cheaper and Toshiba's recent announcement of a small 200KW nuclear generator is also exciting.  We, at The Razor, want a nice green nuclear future, and so should you.  Small local plants are a great way to go.

Space: Less to be positive about here but some excellent stuff still coming from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers now through an entire Martian year.  The space station has crawled towards completion and Bigelow launched his inflatable space station.  We're agnostic about space tourism but I have hopes that 2008 will be a better year.

Technology: 2007 really saw HD and HD TVs hit the big time, prices fell through the floor and the number of HD programmes really kicked off.  The BluRay/HDDVD battle is not yet resolved but prices continued to drop.  The Wii console saw in a second Christmas at the top of the tree.  Online and downloadable TV bumbled along with no clear direction emerging for the future of the media.  Apple screwed up, yet again, with the AppleTV (a unit with no real discernible purpose unless you can hack it), Microsoft's alternative, the Media Centre PC is fantastic but insanely overpriced.

Vista hit the market and the sane people out there will wait until SP1 before they make a call.  I didn't shift to XP until then and never regretted that decision. 

Apple hit the market with the iPhone and then screwed it's loyal customers over about it who responded in true fashion by asking "more sir, please sir."  They also released the iPod Touch - a fantastic device in every way everything I ever needed from an MP3 and Video player and more, and not crippled by that crappy phone stuff.  Microsoft released a new generation of Zunes which actually aren't that bad either.  Nokia continued to ignore both of them and lovingly stroke their solid 30%+ market share and engage in the Finnish equivalent of mirth.

Predictions: The Razor is loathe to make such.  There will be some cool phones coming out in Feb at the Mobile World Congress (formally 3GSM) in Barcelona.  Windows Mobile will finally lose what remains of the giggle factor and emerge as a solid threat to Symbian and RIM - all of them will continue to ignore Apple.  We _might_ see an Android phone but I suspect not and Android itself will prove as painful an experience for Google as the iPhone has actually been for Apple.  Capacitors will make the news.  More extra-solar planets will be discovered, some will be Earth-like.

The US will get a new president.

Well, that's it for me for the year.  One last thing, I promise to actually do more Blogging next year.

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Oh No It Isn't...

Sorry, I'm channeling the Panto from last night.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Revolution, Not Evolution | PBS

A little while ago Cringely decided to go for the Google Lunar X Prize.  I was dubious.  I still am, more so having read this.

Couple of things from here: But as a guy who has been evaluating technologies and technology programs for 30 years, the nature of the space culture is beginning to emerge.  I get nervous when people say things like this.  Sometimes things are not done the way they are because the people who do them are wrong, it's because they're just bleedin' hard.

Our budget to win the Google Lunar X Prize has grown from $3 million to $5 million, where it will stop.  Now, I think I could see how to build a remote controlled rover that could survive the journey and work on the moon for that budget.  Try as hard as I might I can't think of a way to get the payload to the moon for that kind of money.  You might be able to piggy back on an LEO launch and use some kind of long duration gravity loops to get to the moon.  You might be able to do all this in a weight budget that would leave room for a small rover.  But I'm still not convinced.

I wish space was easy, I really really really do.  It's not. :(

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The Best of the Science Fiction Writers

Atomic Razor salutes Sir Arthur C. Clarke on the occasion of his 90th birthday. If we may add a fourth wish to Sir Arthur's three, it is that he may live to see another 90 orbits of the Earth.

What Does It Mean?

Crow Aptok

Indeed. From the photograph I can't be sure that it says "CROW APTOK" rather "CROW AFTOK". Perhaps it is clear in real life that it is a "P" and not an "F". Furthermore, are we certain that the words are supposed to be connected? The "CROW" looks as though it was more carefully painted than the "APTOK". Would the painter of "CROW" have essayed the "A" of "APTOK" as an inverted "U" with a line through it that joins up with the lower part of the bulb of the "P" (or the lower stroke of the "F"). The "O" appears to be more nearly a circle than the chirographically standard ellipse found in "CROW", the "TOK" veers off at a careless angle to the horizontal and the brushstrokes are narrower. There is also a blob between the "AP" and "TOK". Is this a mere accidental splash or a full stop? Is "APTOK" actually "AP"."TOK" ("AF"."TOK")?

Are we dealing here with the (seemingly) mundane "CROW" accidently juxtaposed with the (seemingly) mysterious  "APTOK"/"AFTOK"/"AP"."TOK"/"AF"."TOK"?  "APTOK" is the work of a single hand, which argues against the notion that it refers to two individuals "A.P." and "T.O.K". The "." might represent a "4" or a heart, but we would hope that the "APTOK" painter would at least try to do better than a mere full stop. Ought we to be searching for an A.P. Tok, who lived in the Oxford area in the 1970s? "TOK" suggest "Tik-Tok" and we're not in Oxford anymore, Toto. "AP" could be many things, perhaps the painter was an A.P. Herbert fan. In fact, we don't even know that APTOK is in supposed to be a word in a Latin alphabet. It would be Cyrillic, in which case the "P" would be a "P" (or actually a "R" phonetically) what we have is "artok". I suspect that this word is a communication to/from Soviet  intelligence from/to an agents or agents in thge Oxford area in the 1970s - a slightly more permanent form of a numbers station. The "CROW"  is simply the painter's nickname ("tag") and has nothing to go with "artok".

Thoughts?

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Three Times Lucky

Twice today I have encountered (somewhat) unexpectedly references to Christopher Priest or, more precisely (and is not precision the thing that, ultimately, matters above all other things? And The Precision, or The Precisions would make a nicely Priestian title for a story or novel) , The Affirmation. The first was a link via Ansible to an exhibition based of art works inspired by the themes of The Affirmation at CHELSEA space (Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London) - apparently the organisers did not bother to tell Priest about the exhibition, which will feed into his feelings about his lack of recognition by the literary establishment and seems a nicely Priestian detail - there is a story or novel there - and the second a review of the novel on Waggish. I wonder what the third reference to the novel will be, although I recently lent my copy of the novel to one of my writing chums, so perhaps  I have already encountered it.