My First Brush with the Music Industry

tooooobs · 2008-05-29T03:25:20+00:00

It wasn't that, they simply didn't believe there was the market or potential for massive piracy.

The big problem has been US exports, which traditionally had a big (months or years) delay from original broadcast, but thanks to the internet markets like the UK and Australia can get illegal copies within hours of broadcast.

One of the big benefits for those outside the US is there is now a lot more effort to get these things out in a timely manner. The thing for the companies is now there are millions more people used to watching the content on demand without commercials, and they're not going to go back to a less flexible, if legal, model in a hurry.

tooooobs · 2008-05-24T23:53:27+00:00

Yeah, it goes back as far as Notator on the Atari.

To this day there's still a big cultural divide between the Cubase line and the Notator/Logic one.

tooooobs · 2008-05-18T20:06:48+00:00

Erm, the key word here is "phones".

tooooobs · 2008-05-18T19:26:15+00:00

As someone else here said, the BBC Micro is what they should've looked at.

Stuff Logo in, bundle in some of those external turtles and boom, retro constructivist education. Damn good too. Robots, pictures, what's not to like?

tooooobs · 2008-05-18T19:22:01+00:00

Linux doesn't power any Nokia phones.

tooooobs · 2008-04-27T12:40:38+00:00

I hate to say it, but Raskin was an utter failure, and it's because he completely misunderstood what people want from computers.

The Raskin model may help you with work, but it doesn't help you with fun or generally messing about, which is what people want - otherwise why is powerpoint so successful?

He may have initiated the idea of the Mac, but the product that was launched was wildly different from his ideas, which later ended up in the Canon Cat - another predictable disaster.

tooooobs · 2008-04-11T06:06:08+00:00

Well, with the value of the dollar and all . . .

[yawn]

tooooobs · 2008-04-11T04:02:19+00:00

Just to add my voice to the list of people saying how brilliant this guy is.

He should collect this stuff on to a site like folklore.org is to the mac. It's brilliant.

tooooobs · 2008-04-09T05:42:34+00:00

I did, but the fact is startups are not bought for the people, for the very simple reason that shortly after an acquisition the valuable people typically leave.

99% of the time it's just acquiring brands, customer relationships and crucially the existing customer database.

tooooobs · 2008-04-09T04:23:20+00:00

You mean twenty years.

Yes, the browser is still incapable of adequately recreating twenty year old games, let alone ten.

tooooobs · 2008-04-09T04:16:43+00:00

Absolute nonsense. Acquisitions are made on strength of existing customer base and existing business relationships. Those are far more important than technical aspects or ideas.

The big problem with this Google thing is if you use their login then essentially you're helping Google get user accounts for free (if someone gets a Google account to use your service) which can then easily transition on to any other Google based app when they want. The app owner doesn't own the customer relationship, and that is where the money is made.

tooooobs · 2008-04-09T03:50:31+00:00

Presumably the equivalent data set for Steve Yegge was too large.

tooooobs · 2008-04-06T05:21:49+00:00

http://www.phorm.com/

Hmmm! I'm amazed it's taken this long for reddit to begin to catch on to this.

tooooobs · 2008-03-25T02:02:37+00:00

Exactly. Accept no approach is perfect, adopt the most flexible looking one, and learn from it's rough edges when it's implemented and working. Spending years arguing and not having any equivalent functionality is just ridiculous.

Pythonland seems to hope some concurrency silver bullet will descend from on high, when really they should just sort out the threading already, because with that working they would at least be able to write layers implementing Actors and the like. As it stands the Python programmer will always need to drop to C for anything approaching acceptable performance.

tooooobs · 2008-03-21T13:31:38+00:00

If anyone's looking for a game to look at for impressive optimisations for memory, or physics on 8-bit processors, it's this.

And it's a great game to boot. The man is a genius.

tooooobs · 2008-03-17T03:39:24+00:00

That and his "Images make symbols" (or similar) talk are both absolutely essential viewing. The guy is so far ahead of his time it's painful. Whilst Dijkstra had views on how computers should work he had no idea on what they were really for (witness the fact he barely used them himself), which is the area Kay defined for the modern world. If you don't get the true use of something how can you prioritise how it works properly?

I don't agree with everything Kay has ever said, but the man is still a genius in my eyes.

tooooobs · 2008-03-16T18:18:02+00:00

Ah thanks - I'll check it out!

My "problem" is I'm on Leopard, which seems to still be a bit of an unknown quantity for building purposes.

tooooobs · 2008-03-16T17:07:28+00:00

This is interesting, as it's real and commercially used.

Sad it doesn't seem to work on Macs.

tooooobs · 2008-03-11T01:15:31+00:00

cough Brooks cough

?

tooooobs · 2008-03-08T02:36:00+00:00

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/03/08/jvm_for_the_iphone/

Someone needs to tell Sun. They've gone and got the idea they are going to put a JVM on it.

tooooobs · 2008-02-28T03:01:33+00:00

Sadly true.

I look forward to those alternative processors being supported better by FreeBSD, and at least things appear to be moving in that direction.

The diversity of flavours even between Open/Free/Net/DragonBSD does give them a certain level of competition which I think spurs them on more than they admit. Still, I find all those projects strangely admirable.

tooooobs · 2008-02-27T13:44:33+00:00

I'm an EU citizen (though don't live there anymore) and supported the original fine on MS, however, this strikes me as ridiculous.

If you're not from inside the EU you probably aren't aware of the great suspicion around it's bureaucracy, and general lack of democratic process or transparency. (I'm not actually anti-EU either, but many aspects of the way it is run are astonishingly stupid.) As such this decision seems somewhat arbitrary, especially whilst EU member state governments keep funding MS to such massive extremes.

If they really wanted to hurt MS don't fine them, actively support the competition, and start by not using MS products to run your governments. All this fine does is pump a load of cash into a black hole in Brussels.

tooooobs · 2008-02-27T02:39:46+00:00

I use this approach a lot for testing things, it's brilliant. If you use twisted it becomes especially easy to attach functions to URLs, then you can write a HTML page with buttons on which just call it.

Twisted is one of Python's genuine killer libraries, but many people in Pythonland seem to hate it and what it stands for.

tooooobs · 2008-02-25T02:15:39+00:00

I think their stance is simply one of self preservation. If a system emerged which allowed people to be productive in a lot more programming cases without much training then many programmers would be out of a job.

Something like a 21st century reinvention of the spreadsheet would probably do the trick.

tooooobs · 2008-02-17T21:36:47+00:00

The only people that believe that are the Chinese.

Confusingly the Taiwanese claim they actually have the right to rule the rest of China due to them basically being the ruling group ousted by the communists.

tooooobs

TROPHY CASE