Demise of Marconi
Blame falls squarely on the shoulders of George Simpson.
806 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2008
"Artists" and "Repertoire". It used to be the case that there were people employed by record companies who had an ear for a hit. They would choose the songs that they thought had a chance of selling well, and picked the group or singer who was the best fit for that song. This was necessary because record companies had to create a carefully calculated run of pressings, ship them out to retail outlets, and promote them (through means legal and illegal) in order to make a profit. This worked well for the record companies, the artists and the fans.
Home taping did not kill music.
Steve Jobs was a visionary (not a particularly pleasant one, but that's irrelevant) in that he saw that people wanted to be honest and wanted to actually "own" a song, album, or collection. IMHO, the price per track on ITMS is ludicrously high, for the simple reason that there is no longer any risk associated with getting music to the record-buying public; there is no longer a role for the A&R guy. Make each track on ITMS 5 cents and the world will become honest again. Keep charging the grossly inflated "old school" prices where genuine skill, instinct and risk was involved and you're taking the piss. It costs next to nothing for Apple to transfer a file to your computer when you've decided you want it, and even 1 cent to the artist/composer per download would make the world of difference.
However, it would need a FAR more robust and abstraction-layered OS to be useful in today's internet-centric home computer experience. And that would unfortunately negate a lot of the very clever tricks that they were able to pull in the days of stand-alone machines talking directly to the chips.
I remember watching a documentary yeeeeeears ago about phage research in the former USSR. It seemed like an incredibly promising technology, especially in the light of increasingly antibiotic-resitant organisms. There seemed to be barriers to exporting the technology to the West, but can't recall which side was making it difficult.
Useless.
Making sure our children and our peers _never forget_ man's inhumanity to man through the ages?
Priceless.
I won't be signing the e-petition, but I have made sure my kids were exposed to Schindler's List, Roots and Holocaust. And there's a much-thumbed copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma on the bookshelf if they feel up to it.
"As I became more experienced in using Linux distributions I ventured to the more challenging ones."
Do you hit yourself with progressively bigger hammers because it feels even better each time you stop? Each to their own, but I can't imagine trying out 'more challenging' OSs is a particularly rewarding way to spend your free time.
Exactly right. It's then up to the audience/critics to consider whether it is 'good art' or 'bad art'.
“The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a "box" around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?” - Frank Zappa.
"Truth is, if physicists really had a clue about the nature of motion, they would know that the speed of light is not just the fastest speed in the universe but the *only* speed in the universe. Nothing can move faster or slower."
Physicists do indeed know that everything in the universe travels through space-time at exactly the speed of C. This was beautifully explained in the popular-science book "Why Does E=MC2 (and Why Should We Care)?" written by.......oh, that'd be rockstar physicist Brian Cox. No need for a series of quantum jumps, either.
So much fail in so short a post.
It's Friday afternoon. If you fancy wasting a few hours before hitting the pub, google "Louis Savain". YOUR HEAD ASPLODE.
For a couple of years LG made good cheap transitional phones between simple handsets and smartphones. My daughters loved the real QWERTY of the KS-360 and the resistive touch screen (with virtual QWERTY) of the GD510 'Pop'. Friends had the Cookie, etc.
Great battery life and very useful as a phone (I 'inherited' the Pop when one of them upgraded to an Orange San Fran). Not very fashionable, though. I think that cheap-ish middle market will disappear pronto.