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Comment Re:Good. Now copyright terms (Score 1) 91

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

And I'm pretty sure even small bands make good money nowadays from touring,

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

Comment Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score 1) 84

"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"

I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.

Comment How is the lack of govt information relevant? (Score 3, Insightful) 68

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

Comment Re:the last mac pro had an big upchange for very l (Score 1) 84

I believe that the Mac Studio fills up the role of the Pro, via the M5 Max and M4 Ultra. In most head to head performance tests, they've been trouncing Windows, be it on Ryzens, Core Ultras or Snapdragons

CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.

I think the Mac Pro - particularly the trashcan - was excellent

The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).

Comment Re:the last mac pro had an big upchange for very l (Score 1) 84

I disagree with Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you,"'.They've abandoned a very specific and shrinking segment of pro users, but the vast majority of pro users are covered by today's lineup with Mac Studio at the top.

Depends on what you mean by covered. Can they do their work? Yes. Are they negatively impacted by hardware limitations? Also yes. A lot of professionals would be willing to pay extra for ECC. The fact that Apple doesn't offer ECC makes their machines less than ideal for use cases where a crash would be expensive. The fact that a lot of pros put up with crashes doesn't mean they like the situation. It just means that they dislike it less than switching platforms and tools.

But the pro users I was specifically talking about here are the ones doing high-performance computing tasks involving GPUs. Their only real option is to change platforms, because even though the new Apple Silicon CPUs are great in terms of performance per watt, the wattage is really low, so if you genuinely need boatloads of GPU, to the extent that Apple was still in the game without NVIDIA support, they completely dropped out of the game when Apple Silicon dropped support for AMD. At that point, Apple computers became nearly useless for most modern high-performance computing/AI workloads, people doing large-scale 3D video rendering, etc., because they're underpowered as shiped and can't be expanded with more GPUs, and parallelizing work across multiple machines is way more expensive and not always practical.

One minor peeve - what is "pro" today? Most office workers can do their work just fine with the some of the cheapest equipment you get - isn't that "professional" enough?

The historical definition of "pro" is people who are running software beyond what a typical user would run. Web browsers and productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets) are not pro apps; they are business apps. Pro apps are mostly things like high-end photo editing (think Photoshop/Pixelmator, not iPhoto/Capture One), 3D modeling, audio/video production, etc.

Even most developers can do most of their work on laptops these days - and if they need more horsepower, that's likely to be on the server side anyway. Don't they count?

Developers at least arguably fall into that category, though they are borderline, because they don't have huge storage requirements or huge compute requirements. Developers can do most of their work on laptops, though Apple's non-Pro laptops are pretty thermally throttled, so they will be miserable. And developers are probably the group who care most about ECC RAM, because they understand enough to know why it matters, but they still often use laptops because they don't want to be tethered to a desk. It's a tradeoff.

And what about project managers, lawyers, and CEOs - aren't they "pro" either?

No, and they never were. While the users might have professional occupations, their computing requirements are indistinguishable from a high school student. "Pro" in this context doesn't mean "users with money". It means "users with needs that exceed typical requirements". :-)

Comment Dumped Grok over this (Score -1) 61

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

Comment Re:Nobody (Score 1) 84

Eh traditionall the big "need many hdmi" tasks was multicamera editing.

I know that at some point Multi Camera support got broken or removed but apparently it came back? Honestly its been a long long time since i've been anything close to knowledable about FCP

Oh. Today I learned that FCP regained live multicamera switching support in 2024... four years after everybody stopped caring and started using OBS, vMix, or Tricaster.

Comment Re:No wonder (Score 1) 74

Extremely unsafe reputationally, and extremely dubious in terms of profits.

Especially for an administration who's priority is to eliminate pornography as an evil to society and why the US isn't having more babies and getting divorced way too often.

It's in the book. Everything Trump has done has followed Project 2025 (and now Project 2026) book. Getting rid of pornographic materials is pretty much the first chapter.

Comment Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score 4, Informative) 76

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

Chinese law doesn't require a warrant for such access and it may be done in secrecy (i.e. without informing the user) if necessary to perform duties. The problem with Apple in China isn't that they aren't following the law, it's that they are and the law is openly fascist.

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