631–640 of 1001 posts
I think the most successful to date is the Nintendo Switch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available. I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content…
From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level pa…
Justin Bieber has very roughly 5 billion plays on spotify. Using your math, that would equate to 17 million CDs sold. Seems pretty reasonable. I'm sure he would have been better off before the internet, but it still seems doable.
Besides which I think youtube celebrities and twitch gamers have shown it is clearly possible to make a decent (if not quite profitable) living off creating content to be streamed. It's just music doesn't have the pre-eminent spot and advantages over other media it used to.
Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.
I think maybe the virtual world metaphor has been taken too literally. The real point of "jacking in", to me, would be a vastly superior interface compared to the screen-and-keyboard systems we have now. Ideally, it'd be more like a subsystem for your brain, an extension of the way we think, but in fiction it's easier to depict that as a virtual space. Letting people use their devices without looking at or touching t…
Not really! Watts does something a lot closer to what you describe with "ConSensus" in Blindsight, and handles it deftly enough. I think it's more just that the idea of VR as virtual space was the dominant metaphor of its time, and contemporary fiction reflects that time every bit as much as Watts's ConSensus - thought-controlled wireless information access, rendering to the optic nerves - reflects its own.
I think the persistence of the older style has to do partly with the fact that we can't yet implement the newer one no matter how much more useful it would actually be, and partly with the fact that VR metaverses look really cool in demos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeap. Portable and free (because stolen) trumped quality. That's something the music industry still hasn't recovered from.
As someone who use to have a SMALL Recording studio. We are in the best music business times for small indie bands. More people can support themselves through kickstarter like programs. Two of my bands traveled the world and were on MTV (Back when they played videos). The most one band made was $7,000 per person and they traveled to Europe and Australia/NZ. I never made a dime. They posted on Kickstarter 6 years afte…
I thought (and still think) the phone as single computing device is going to replace desktops and laptops via some kind of dock of some sort. There's been a few attempts at it by Dell and Microsoft and a few others, but none really satisfactory. I think the most successful to date is the Nintendo Switch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so. The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new…
When you say a thousand years ago presumably you mean the pre-French Norman language mixed with the Old English from 1066? I'd go back to the Roman invasion, at least, and the mixing of Latin as the official language of Roman Britain with the Brytthonic language(s) [themselves already probably mixing with other earlier Celtic tongues]. Some of the Latin in English (and Cymraeg) was adopted via the Norman/French tongu…
Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…
I think the biggest motivation for peer-to-peer networks was the lack of legal options for digitally accessing movies and music. The current streaming services and online stores have reduced this ache.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available. I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content…
From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream. If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD. If you take audiophile-level pa…
And if we divide those 238 streams by the 10 songs on the CD, it seems as though we only need to listen to a cd about 25 times before streaming becomes a better option for the artist.
Email. I work at a software development shop and most of our internal Email-like communication happens face-to-face or via phone. "Will you be available for a meeting two weeks from now?" "I just wanted to tell you that I checked in my code." "Please answer my trivially Google-able programming question right now." "Tell person X that I want to talk to them later." "The boss just told me [important news that concerns…
- If you receive a call, it breaks your flow, which is bad.
- If you send an email, it breaks your flow, which is bad. (As you have to wait for an answer, and do something else in the meantime.)
So if you have a question, the optimal strategy (for you) is to make a call. But if someone else has a question, the optimal strategy (for you) is they email you.
There's even a further level, which is that if someone else has a question, it's optimal (for you) that they email you, and you call them to give your answer, and discuss it until it's done.
So if it's up to you (and you're thinking only about your own productivity above all else) then tell people to email you when they need something, but call them when you need something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did people really think the arms race of heuristic malware detection in bolt-on security software would be be sustainable? Sandboxing applications and ending the free-for-all over the user’s entire file system were a long time coming. Then spammy software download websites and “Download Now” banner ads bigger than the official download buttons for popular software made it obvious that we needed a trustworthy distribu…
False dichotomy. A user-in-control sandboxing model is perfectly possible, e.g. https://sandstorm.io/ I agree that mainstream desktop OSes have failed to give us this yet. Fuchsia sounds like an opportunity to do better.
Why in the fuck do desktop computers have user-based permission models? Don't answer that, I know why, it's because they inherited them from the server-OS ancestors, but it's retarded. Desktops are personal computers, there is no reason to stop the user from doing what they want because it is their computer. Some might say, "oh, well, we can protect the system from malicious software by limiting user access to it" and they're correct, but who gives a shit? If my OS gets destroyed I'll reinstall it. It's a bit of a pain, but whatever. What's really important to me are my documents, my work, and the user-permission model does jack and shit for protecting those as the ransomware wave proved.
Application-oriented permissions are the obvious and correct way to do things in personal computing.