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Comment Re:Good on him (Score 1) 513

by tingeber (#28952521) Attached to: Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu
I know it's not his case, but if you use Logic Studio, made by Apple, then you are actually locked into Apple from all sides.
OTOH the Apple HW/SW combo is so complete and solid for music production that you just don't mind.
I work live and in studio on a MacBook unibody with Logic Studio and, apart from audio cards and interfaces, never need anything else to produce music. Which is a very good thing.

Comment Re:Let it die. (Score 1) 554

by tingeber (#28923971) Attached to: The Music Industry's Crisis Writ Large
The big labels are almost exclusively distribution industries. What they create is almost exclusively a "product", ie an abominy that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with selling the product to the largest demographic.
The music as we know it (or knew it) is still being born and created as it always has been: from talented musicians that bust their balls and sweat their way to getting heard by as much people as possible. What happens then is they get signed to a label. But it's almost always a small indie spring-board label, that will get a bit more people to hear their music. Then, if they are really good (but mostly if they sell enough) they'll get picked up by the big guys since they have proven to be a product.
So, in all, I'm happy to see the big guys die since they don't really create anything of value, except a distribution infrastructure. But we already have the web.
Transportation

Submission + - @sshole Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams (physicscentral.com) 3

Submitted by
BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: "Traffic jams are minimized if a significant fraction of drivers break the rules by doing things like passing on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to an intersection. The insight comes from a cellular automata study published this month in the journal Physical Review E. In effect, people who disregard the rules help to break up the groups that form as rule-followers clump together. The risk of jamming is lower if all people obey the rules than if they all disobey them, according to the analysis, but jamming risk is lowest when about 40 percent of people drive like jerks."

Comment And the problem is... what? (Score 2, Insightful) 110

by tingeber (#28743709) Attached to: Brazil Demands Repatriation of UK Hazardous Waste
I don't know much about garbage, but 1.400 tons doesn't sound like an enormous number, considering the USA produces 220 milion tons a year.
Plus, it seems like a simple problem of foul play between companies, why does the government get involved?
I know waste disposal is a huge problem, but this sounds like attention-whoring.
Sci-Fi

The State of Sci-Fi MMOs 194

Posted by Soulskill from the work-in-progress dept.
Massively is running a story that looks into the status of the sci-fi MMO genre, and why such games have had a tendency to struggle over the years. Quoting: "Fantasy alone carries with it assumptions based in our own history, a romanticized version of the middle ages where knights were good guys and smart people with beards could cast spells. Preconceived notions in sci-fi are far less cast in our collective memory. While stories that predict the future are surely as ancient as the myths describing the past, sci-fi itself didn't really ingrain itself into our culture until the 1800s, with H.G. Wells' stories and other writers at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. ... Compounding the lack of specificity in setting is the tendency of sci-fi games to overwhelm players with skills and rule sets they initially don't understand and eventually don't need."
Music

Apple Shifts iTunes Pricing; $0.69 Tracks MIA 429

Posted by kdawson from the where-it-comes-down-that-is-not-my-department dept.
Hodejo1 writes "Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart's 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to $1.29, not down. 2) Obscure '90s Brit pop and '50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at $0.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, '30s, and '40s artists all remained at $0.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at $0.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon's UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ($0.42)."
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Bands bypass iTunes with iPhone apps

Submitted by iminplaya
iminplaya writes: "What's a good way to release your entire back catalog of music to a large audience without having to deal with the bureaucratic red tape of the record labels and the iTunes Store? Release it yourself through the App Store, of course. The album-as-an-iPhone-app method has been experimented with by some bands already, but the Presidents of the United States of America (yes, the guys behind the "Peaches" song) have gone all out, selling its entire discography through the App Store in hopes of engaging fans in ways they couldn't through the iTunes Store alone.

The music, however, is not actually contained within the application itself; instead, it is streamed to the app from a server, requiring the user to be connected to a network of some kind (iPhone users on the cell or WiFi network, iPod touch users on WiFi) in order to access the media.

In a way, this method is almost the beginning of the iTunes subscription model, except controlled entirely by the bands..."

Yep, that's a light there at the end of this tunnel. But let's see if the RIAA doesn't pressure Apple to reject these apps. I'm sure they'll make up some kind of infringement case against them.

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