Am in the process of reading the "Book of Jobs", being a good member of
the Church of Apple :-)

In it, there is a very telling passage that compares Apple with Sony and
why Apple was able to kill the walkman.


Sony had all the ingredients, the sleek designs for hardware, the music,
 record label, the distribution etc. But it failed. But it was organised
into divisions. And this was telling to Jobs "divisions". It divides a
company.

And because each division had its own requiremenet to be profitable, the
record labels didn't want to play ball with the electronics to
cannabilise their own business to let digital downloads.

Apple, with its own "special" CEO and a single P&L for all of the
company was able and willing to cannabalise sales of one thing to get
another thing because they coudl see the "big picture".


Reading that passage reminded me of Digital. In its heydays, it had all
the components, hardware, OS, applications, database, support etc and
Olsen saw to it that they worked. He knew that compiler folks were
needed to support the whole platform and developpers etc.

Then came Palmer who organised everything into divisions which had to be
profitable and then you got lack of vision and stuff got canned left and
right.


Of course, Digital was always affraid that a new product would
cannabalise an older/bigger one, so it would put epoxy into a Bi-Bus to
 castrate a machine to prevent it from competing against a more
expensive one.


What Steve Jobs said was quite telling: If you're not willing to
cannabalise your own products when creating a new one, someone else will
cannabalise it for you.  Looks like Sun cannabalised a lot fo DEC sales
back in late 1980s.

JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:

(snip)

> Of course, Digital was always affraid that a new product would
> cannabalise an older/bigger one, so it would put epoxy into a Bi-Bus to
> castrate a machine to prevent it from competing against a more
> expensive one.

Someone I knew in the 1980's was using LSI-11's for embedded
systems until DEC stopped selling them to him.  It seems that
they thought he might compete with their sales of LSI-11 systems,
even though they weren't for embedded systems.

-- glen

On Nov 19, 2:01=A0am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Am in the process of reading the "Book of Jobs", being a good member of
> the Church of Apple :-)
>
> In it, there is a very telling passage that compares Apple with Sony and
> why Apple was able to kill the walkman.
>
> Sony had all the ingredients, the sleek designs for hardware, the music,
> =A0record label, the distribution etc. But it failed. But it was organise=
d
> into divisions. And this was telling to Jobs "divisions". It divides a
> company.
>
> And because each division had its own requiremenet to be profitable, the
> record labels didn't want to play ball with the electronics to
> cannabilise their own business to let digital downloads.
>
> Apple, with its own "special" CEO and a single P&L for all of the
> company was able and willing to cannabalise sales of one thing to get
> another thing because they coudl see the "big picture".
>
> Reading that passage reminded me of Digital. In its heydays, it had all
> the components, hardware, OS, applications, database, support etc and
> Olsen saw to it that they worked. He knew that compiler folks were
> needed to support the whole platform and developpers etc.
>
> Then came Palmer who organised everything into divisions which had to be
> profitable and then you got lack of vision and stuff got canned left and
> right.
>
> Of course, Digital was always affraid that a new product would
> cannabalise an older/bigger one, so it would put epoxy into a Bi-Bus to
> =A0castrate a machine to prevent it from competing against a more
> expensive one.
>
> What Steve Jobs said was quite telling: If you're not willing to
> cannabalise your own products when creating a new one, someone else will
> cannabalise it for you. =A0Looks like Sun cannabalised a lot fo DEC sales
> back in late 1980s.

Based upon the excerpts heard on BBC I am wondering if Job's book
should now be known as "The Book of Jobe" (living on a diet of Apples
+ Oranges, not using deodorant, thinking you can pray-away cancer,
etc.)

Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
selling players. Apple was selling players and content.

Many people will acknowledge that Job's made more money in Hollywood
(Pixar, etc.) than he ever did manufacturing electronics. It goes
without saying that Jobs' return to Apple also returned Apple to
profitability. But Apple went into the area of uber-profits with
iTunes (which then stimulated even more sales of iPods as well as
supporting other new gizmos like iPhone and iPad). Job's removed the
word "Computer" from the company name in January 2007.

Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson and
Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster. But we can't
ignore the fact that Jobs was now a Hollywood insider and so was
trusted to protect music royalties, copyrights, etc.

To be fair, Sony also became a Hollywood insider (buying Studios,
buying libraries, creating content) but they never attempted something
like iTunes until Apple did it first. Maybe Sony didn't have someone
at the top with a Jobsian Reality Distortion Field.
:-)

NSR

Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> selling players. Apple was selling players and content.

Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
Sony's new MP3 players.

Jobs played on the fact that Apple only had 5% of the market and
couldn't possibly hurt the music and pitched his project more as a pilot
where record companies could gauge the impact. Once this proved to be
wildly succesfull, they deployed the Windows version of Itunes and sales
 not only went through the roof, they went orbital.


Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
so many applications.

It is very interesting because I have alwasy believed that Sony was the
one company who understood "convergence". Yet, they have never been able
to leverage this very well (but this may be coming now).


Yes, Jobs was "different". But during his second coming at Apple, he
seemed far more mature and normal.


What this does show is that the job of CEO is far more than that of an
administrator. It is really necessary for the CEO to either have vision
for the company (as in the case of Apple) or be able to delegate this in
the case of conglomerates like GE that have wildly separate enterprises.


> Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
> would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson and
> Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster. 

That is probably correct although I think that Napster scared the
bejesus out of the music industry instead of destroying it. Jobs says
that the music industry had tried to come up with a standard DRM but
couldn't even get that to work.  Apple stepped it with its own and got
lucky because it was the first to really integrate everything from music
sales to the devices.

On Nov 19, 4:51=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> > Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> > selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>
> Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
> launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
> same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
> their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
> Sony's new MP3 players.
>
> Jobs played on the fact that Apple only had 5% of the market and
> couldn't possibly hurt the music and pitched his project more as a pilot
> where record companies could gauge the impact. Once this proved to be
> wildly succesfull, they deployed the Windows version of Itunes and sales
> =A0not only went through the roof, they went orbital.
>
> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
> so many applications.
>
> It is very interesting because I have alwasy believed that Sony was the
> one company who understood "convergence". Yet, they have never been able
> to leverage this very well (but this may be coming now).
>
> Yes, Jobs was "different". But during his second coming at Apple, he
> seemed far more mature and normal.
>
> What this does show is that the job of CEO is far more than that of an
> administrator. It is really necessary for the CEO to either have vision
> for the company (as in the case of Apple) or be able to delegate this in
> the case of conglomerates like GE that have wildly separate enterprises.
>
> > Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
> > would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson and
> > Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster.
>
> That is probably correct although I think that Napster scared the
> bejesus out of the music industry instead of destroying it. Jobs says
> that the music industry had tried to come up with a standard DRM but
> couldn't even get that to work. =A0Apple stepped it with its own and got
> lucky because it was the first to really integrate everything from music
> sales to the devices.

I suspect that as well as an industry standard DRM, the iTunes
business model also offered the record industry a big enough cut to
keep them interested. The details used to be on Tom Robinson's web
site when he offered free download of his back catalogue. He is now on
iTunes and the details of who gets what have gone, but this is what
they used to be:

    iTunes downloads cost 79p per track. Writer/publisher get 6p,
Performer 6-8p, Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company
almost 50p. Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your
friends (continues)

(originally copied from http://tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm
)

Tom also wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian featuring
the revenue split for iTunes download singles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/03/comment.musicnews
and there's a similar breakdown for download albums in another one of
Tom's articles (last but one paragraph):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/12/post149

So the record company get roughly two thirds of the revenue and the
artist and the writer each get about a tenth of that. The Church of
Jobs gets as much as the artist and writer together.

What record company would turn that down with the Church of Jobs
acting as salesforce?

Well, some did, including Apple Records, but then there's history
between those two Apples... or maybe it was the big Apple artists that
turned it down (given the size of the writer and performer cut, who
could blame them).

In article
<5183dff0-f4a7-4b57-ae1c-f732db5d31ad@q9g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>, John
Wallace <johnwallace4@gmail.com> writes: 

> I suspect that as well as an industry standard DRM, the iTunes
> business model also offered the record industry a big enough cut to
> keep them interested. The details used to be on Tom Robinson's web
> site when he offered free download of his back catalogue. He is now on
> iTunes and the details of who gets what have gone, but this is what
> they used to be:
> 
>     iTunes downloads cost 79p per track. Writer/publisher get 6p,
> Performer 6-8p, Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company
> almost 50p. Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your
> friends (continues)
> 
> (originally copied from http://tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm
> )

> So the record company get roughly two thirds of the revenue and the
> artist and the writer each get about a tenth of that. The Church of
> Jobs gets as much as the artist and writer together.

I remember reading this stuff from Tom Robinson.  Considering that he is 
now on iTunes, it doesn't look like his idealism was worth the electrons 
used to display it.

AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone from 
giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint to sign 
with a record company.  Apparently a business model in which the record 
company takes a smaller cut is not viable, otherwise someone would have 
become successful with such a company (there is certainly no shortage of 
musicians complaining that their record company takes too large a cut).

This is not to say that all record-company contracts are morally 
correct; certainly in the past the musicians did get too little payment, 
but those days are gone.

Some people who support illegal downloading (or think it should be legal 
to download music without paying for it in any case) often use "I'm 
hurting the evil record companies, not the artist, who doesn't get much 
anyway" argument.  However, if that were really true, I suspect that we 
would have many more musicians not signing with record companies at all; 
the fact that there are very few suggests that their cut is worth it.

It is easy for someone like Tom Robinson to give his catalogue away when 
hardly anyone is buying it anyway.

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:

> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone from 
> giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint to sign 
> with a record company.  


In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping
and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio stations.

This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
the sell music on itunes without going through a record company. But the
record copanies still have a big say in who gets to be famous or not
(and impose on us highly undesirable music like rap and auto-tune on
artists).

In article <4ec814a6$0$2930$c3e8da3$2e0018d8@news.astraweb.com>, JF
Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> writes: 

> In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
> was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping
> and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio stations.
> 
> This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
> the sell music on itunes without going through a record company. 

True to some extent, but it doesn't happen as often as one might think 
it might.

My guess is that a large fraction of people who would legally download 
music, i.e. be content not to "own the media", would also do so 
illegally, so the real money is to be made by selling CDs or whatever.

Of course, record companies also engage in promotion etc.

helbig@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---undress to reply) writes:

> My guess is that a large fraction of people who would legally
> download music, i.e. be content not to "own the media", would also
> do so illegally, so the real money is to be made by selling CDs or
> whatever.

Don't guess.  The world is not split into "those who download music"
and "those who buy media."

I'm not going to write a largely fictitious analysis of the music
market.

Just.  Don't.  Guess.

You will be wrong.


-- 
   Johann Oskarsson                http://www.2ndquadrant.com/    |[]
   PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services  --+--
                                                                  |
   Blog: http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/

On 11/19/2011 3:42 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
> Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
>
>> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone from
>> giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint to sign
>> with a record company.
>
>
> In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
> was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping

Do you suffer from dylsexia?  "vylin"?? and "rcord"??

> and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio stations.
>
> This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
> the sell music on itunes without going through a record company. But the
> record copanies still have a big say in who gets to be famous or not
> (and impose on us highly undesirable music like rap and auto-tune on
> artists).
>
"copanies"??

If your software doesn't spell check automagically, try Mozilla 
Thunderbird.  It's a real help to have it flagging my spelling errors.
I haven't caught Mozilla failing to catch spelling errors.

On Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:29:27 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> On 11/19/2011 3:42 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
>> Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
>>
>>> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone
>>> from giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint
>>> to sign with a record company.
>>
>>
>> In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
>> was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping
> 
> Do you suffer from dylsexia?  "vylin"?? and "rcord"??
> 
>> and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio
>> stations.
>>
>> This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
>> the sell music on itunes without going through a record company. But
>> the record copanies still have a big say in who gets to be famous or
>> not (and impose on us highly undesirable music like rap and auto-tune
>> on artists).
>>
> "copanies"??
> 
> If your software doesn't spell check automagically, try Mozilla
> Thunderbird.  It's a real help to have it flagging my spelling errors. I
> haven't caught Mozilla failing to catch spelling errors.

Doesn't do too well on the word "dyslexia", does it?




-- 
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
 http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Nov 19, 8:35=A0pm, hel...@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article
> <5183dff0-f4a7-4b57-ae1c-f732db5d3...@q9g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>, John
>
>
>
> Wallace <johnwalla...@gmail.com> writes:
> > I suspect that as well as an industry standard DRM, the iTunes
> > business model also offered the record industry a big enough cut to
> > keep them interested. The details used to be on Tom Robinson's web
> > site when he offered free download of his back catalogue. He is now on
> > iTunes and the details of who gets what have gone, but this is what
> > they used to be:
>
> > =A0 =A0 iTunes downloads cost 79p per track. Writer/publisher get 6p,
> > Performer 6-8p, Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company
> > almost 50p. Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your
> > friends (continues)
>
> > (originally copied fromhttp://tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm
> > )
> > So the record company get roughly two thirds of the revenue and the
> > artist and the writer each get about a tenth of that. The Church of
> > Jobs gets as much as the artist and writer together.
>
> I remember reading this stuff from Tom Robinson. =A0Considering that he i=
s
> now on iTunes, it doesn't look like his idealism was worth the electrons
> used to display it.
>
> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone from
> giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint to sign
> with a record company. =A0Apparently a business model in which the record
> company takes a smaller cut is not viable, otherwise someone would have
> become successful with such a company (there is certainly no shortage of
> musicians complaining that their record company takes too large a cut).
>
> This is not to say that all record-company contracts are morally
> correct; certainly in the past the musicians did get too little payment,
> but those days are gone.
>
> Some people who support illegal downloading (or think it should be legal
> to download music without paying for it in any case) often use "I'm
> hurting the evil record companies, not the artist, who doesn't get much
> anyway" argument. =A0However, if that were really true, I suspect that we
> would have many more musicians not signing with record companies at all;
> the fact that there are very few suggests that their cut is worth it.
>
> It is easy for someone like Tom Robinson to give his catalogue away when
> hardly anyone is buying it anyway.

"Apparently a business model in which the record company takes a
smaller cut is not viable."

That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that the major
content companies (records and movies including TV stuff) have a cosy
vertically integrated cartel with high barriers to entry.

On 11/19/2011 8:01 PM, Bob Eager wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:29:27 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>
>> On 11/19/2011 3:42 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
>>> Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
>>>
>>>> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone
>>>> from giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint
>>>> to sign with a record company.
>>>
>>>
>>> In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
>>> was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping
>>
>> Do you suffer from dylsexia?  "vylin"?? and "rcord"??
>>
>>> and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio
>>> stations.
>>>
>>> This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
>>> the sell music on itunes without going through a record company. But
>>> the record copanies still have a big say in who gets to be famous or
>>> not (and impose on us highly undesirable music like rap and auto-tune
>>> on artists).
>>>
>> "copanies"??
>>
>> If your software doesn't spell check automagically, try Mozilla
>> Thunderbird.  It's a real help to have it flagging my spelling errors. I
>> haven't caught Mozilla failing to catch spelling errors.
>
> Doesn't do too well on the word "dyslexia", does it?
>
>

My poor attempt at humor!  Sorry about that.

On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 09:12:23 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> On 11/19/2011 8:01 PM, Bob Eager wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:29:27 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/19/2011 3:42 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
>>>> Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> AFAIK, at least in most countries there is nothing to stop someone
>>>>> from giving away the music they create; no-one is forced at gunpoint
>>>>> to sign with a record company.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record
>>>> company was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging,
>>>> shipping
>>>
>>> Do you suffer from dylsexia?  "vylin"?? and "rcord"??
>>>
>>>> and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio
>>>> stations.
>>>>
>>>> This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube
>>>> and the sell music on itunes without going through a record company.
>>>> But the record copanies still have a big say in who gets to be famous
>>>> or not (and impose on us highly undesirable music like rap and
>>>> auto-tune on artists).
>>>>
>>> "copanies"??
>>>
>>> If your software doesn't spell check automagically, try Mozilla
>>> Thunderbird.  It's a real help to have it flagging my spelling errors.
>>> I haven't caught Mozilla failing to catch spelling errors.
>>
>> Doesn't do too well on the word "dyslexia", does it?
>>
>>
>>
> My poor attempt at humor!  Sorry about that.

I did wnder, but too subtle...!

-- 
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
 http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

On Nov 19, 11:51=A0am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> > Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> > selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>
> Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
> launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
> same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
> their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
> Sony's new MP3 players.
>
> Jobs played on the fact that Apple only had 5% of the market and
> couldn't possibly hurt the music and pitched his project more as a pilot
> where record companies could gauge the impact. Once this proved to be
> wildly succesfull, they deployed the Windows version of Itunes and sales
> =A0not only went through the roof, they went orbital.
>
> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
> so many applications.
>
> It is very interesting because I have alwasy believed that Sony was the
> one company who understood "convergence". Yet, they have never been able
> to leverage this very well (but this may be coming now).
>
> Yes, Jobs was "different". But during his second coming at Apple, he
> seemed far more mature and normal.
>
> What this does show is that the job of CEO is far more than that of an
> administrator. It is really necessary for the CEO to either have vision
> for the company (as in the case of Apple) or be able to delegate this in
> the case of conglomerates like GE that have wildly separate enterprises.
>
> > Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
> > would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson and
> > Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster.
>
> That is probably correct although I think that Napster scared the
> bejesus out of the music industry instead of destroying it. Jobs says
> that the music industry had tried to come up with a standard DRM but
> couldn't even get that to work. =A0Apple stepped it with its own and got
> lucky because it was the first to really integrate everything from music
> sales to the devices.

Don't take my remarks as offensive, but I was interpreting the
language of your post as that of a religious position before you used
the phrases "second coming", "bejesus", etc.

:-)

I, too, was a member of the Apple Religion until I became apostate
around the time the Mac moved from 68k to PowerPC (sure they provided
an emulator so you wouldn't need to flush your 68k s/w investment but
the emulator was crap and many people though Apple did it that way on
purpose; they did the same thing again when they jumped from PowerPC
to x86-64)

There's been lots of stuff written and said about Steve Jobs, but
everyone should watch this interview with Walter Isaacson by Charlie
Rose
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11962

I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs was unable to write a single
line of code. Talk about the Jobsian Reality Distortion field!!!

I was surprised to learn that he was such a big baby.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/11/why-steve-jobs-cried.ars

I was surprised to learn he was a first class prick. He traveled
around India with a good friend who became a very early Apple employee
but not a millionaire during the IPO. When another person approached
Jobs with a proposal to give this poor devil matching shares, Jobs
said "Sure, I'll match you. You give zero and I'll give zero". So much
for his Buddhism.

His belief he could "will away" cancer was just plain nutty. (or
Californian new-age)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201111112
His not washing or using deodorant speaks for itself.

I heard an interview last week where we heard that Steve Wozniak got
to view a video of Jobs touring the Foxconn plant where the iPhones
and iPads are manufactured. It showed people with crippled hands and
missing fingers but Jobs didn't appear to show any sympathy.
Apparently Wozniak left the video in tears.

I was upset to learn that he felt LSD use was responsible for his
talents. Even if this is true, I don't think it is something that he
(or Isaacson) should have publicized. Maybe one-in-ten-thousand would
benefit from this type of self-administered therapy but I am convince
the other 9999 would not with a much smaller number becoming the poor
devils who become society's drop outs.

His belief that Google's gPhone was an iPhone rip-off only proves to
me that he was under the impression that Apple had invented the phone.
Meanwhile, books like Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" tell us that Google
only went the gPhone route after Apple refused to allow the Google
Voice app (a skype like product) on the iPhone. Why? Apple had made a
back room deal with AT&T and GV would hurt AT&T's LD revenues.

###

With regards to Sony, while they had the technical ability to do
something like iTunes, they did not have someone with Jobs' Reality
Distortion Field who could convince Hollywood industry insiders that
this was in their best interests. Most people would agree that Jobs
could probably sell ice-cream to Eskimos.

Just my two cents worth

NSR

On Nov 19, 1:42=A0pm, John Wallace <johnwalla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 19, 4:51=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> > > Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> > > selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>
> > Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
> > launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
> > same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc bu=
t
> > their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
> > Sony's new MP3 players.
>
> > Jobs played on the fact that Apple only had 5% of the market and
> > couldn't possibly hurt the music and pitched his project more as a pilo=
t
> > where record companies could gauge the impact. Once this proved to be
> > wildly succesfull, they deployed the Windows version of Itunes and sale=
s
> > =A0not only went through the roof, they went orbital.
>
> > Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
> > it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
> > that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
> > so many applications.
>
> > It is very interesting because I have alwasy believed that Sony was the
> > one company who understood "convergence". Yet, they have never been abl=
e
> > to leverage this very well (but this may be coming now).
>
> > Yes, Jobs was "different". But during his second coming at Apple, he
> > seemed far more mature and normal.
>
> > What this does show is that the job of CEO is far more than that of an
> > administrator. It is really necessary for the CEO to either have vision
> > for the company (as in the case of Apple) or be able to delegate this i=
n
> > the case of conglomerates like GE that have wildly separate enterprises=
..
>
> > > Now there are many people out there (including me) that think Apple
> > > would have not been able to create iTunes had not Jordan Mendelson an=
d
> > > Sean Parker destroyed the music business with Napster.
>
> > That is probably correct although I think that Napster scared the
> > bejesus out of the music industry instead of destroying it. Jobs says
> > that the music industry had tried to come up with a standard DRM but
> > couldn't even get that to work. =A0Apple stepped it with its own and go=
t
> > lucky because it was the first to really integrate everything from musi=
c
> > sales to the devices.
>
> I suspect that as well as an industry standard DRM, the iTunes
> business model also offered the record industry a big enough cut to
> keep them interested. The details used to be on Tom Robinson's web
> site when he offered free download of his back catalogue. He is now on
> iTunes and the details of who gets what have gone, but this is what
> they used to be:
>
> =A0 =A0 iTunes downloads cost 79p per track. Writer/publisher get 6p,
> Performer 6-8p, Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company
> almost 50p. Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your
> friends (continues)
>
> (originally copied fromhttp://tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm
> )
>
> Tom also wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian featuring
> the revenue split for iTunes download singles:http://www.guardian.co.uk/c=
ommentisfree/2007/mar/03/comment.musicnews
> and there's a similar breakdown for download albums in another one of
> Tom's articles (last but one paragraph):http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment=
isfree/2006/jun/12/post149
>
> So the record company get roughly two thirds of the revenue and the
> artist and the writer each get about a tenth of that. The Church of
> Jobs gets as much as the artist and writer together.
>
> What record company would turn that down with the Church of Jobs
> acting as salesforce?
>
> Well, some did, including Apple Records, but then there's history
> between those two Apples... or maybe it was the big Apple artists that
> turned it down (given the size of the writer and performer cut, who
> could blame them).

To your point, I read recently that Amy Winehouse was not as rich as
many people thought. For every $1M in sales, she only received $70k.
Someone, either traditional music publishers, or e-publishers like
Apple, were taking $930,000. Why is it that creative people keep
getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.

On the flip side, there has been some light at the end of the tunnel.
Before y2k there used to be fairly decent content on so called free
(commercially sponsored) TV. This stuff has all devolved into reality
crap that almost no one watches. Meanwhile, you can watch decent stuff
from the likes of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg (to only name two of
many) on premium networks like HBO and TMN. Other networks (like AMC)
have gone out of their way to create new specialty content (The
Walking Dead, Hell on Wheels) if you are into that sort of thing.

The next big thing wont be an iTunes site (which is just a pay-as-you-
go entertainment network on the web), it will be a network that takes
those uber-profits and passed them onto the creative artists.

Just my two cents worth

NSR

On 11/20/2011 9:57 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> On Nov 19, 1:42 pm, John Wallace<johnwalla...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Nov 19, 4:51 pm, JF Mezei<jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca>  wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Neil Rieck wrote:
>>
>>>> Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
>>>> selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>>
>>> Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
>>> launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
>>> same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
>>> their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
>>> Sony's new MP3 players.

Sony, in many ways, was not too bright!  Their home video tape system
was technically superior.  They had it locked up with patents and were
unable or unwilling to license those patents.  They wanted the WHOLE pie!

VHS came along.  It also was patented but the holders of those patents 
were willing to license to just about anyone who was willing and able to
to meet their *very reasonable terms*.

Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today?  Would you buy a BetaMax????????
Guess who got rich!!  Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!

<huge snip>

In article
<2a46af63-1e22-4c62-931b-43d562b253b6@h5g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Neil
Rieck <n.rieck@sympatico.ca> writes: 

> To your point, I read recently that Amy Winehouse was not as rich as
> many people thought. For every $1M in sales, she only received $70k.
> Someone, either traditional music publishers, or e-publishers like
> Apple, were taking $930,000. 

This is a margin of 7%.  The margins in many other businesses are much 
smaller.  Also, the $930,000 is not profit, since it includes costs; ALL 
costs---"real" costs and profits---are covered by the $1M revenue from 
sales.

> Why is it that creative people keep
> getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
> people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
> movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.

Indeed.  And illegal downloading is bringing us closer and closer to it.

I find it strange that people who complain that artists get a too small 
fraction of the income generated from sales offer as a "solution" that 
the artists get nothing at all.

Neil Rieck wrote:

> Don't take my remarks as offensive, but I was interpreting the
> language of your post as that of a religious position before you used
> the phrases "second coming", "bejesus", etc.

By definition, aren't all discussions about the Church of Apple
religious in nature ? :-)

> There's been lots of stuff written and said about Steve Jobs, but
> everyone should watch this interview with Walter Isaacson by Charlie
> Rose

I am in the process of reading the book. And yes, I was susprised by how
"unconventional" Jobs was in his youth.  But why his lifestyle may not
look normal to you, perhaps it was standard in the post hippie days of
Kalifornia.

And in terms of LSD, anyone who has used the itunes visualiser knows
that similar substances have been used by the Apple programmers :-)


> I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs was unable to write a single
> line of code. Talk about the Jobsian Reality Distortion field!!!


But he did build hardware in his youth. Not software. He was a techie
and this is how he met Wozniak.


> I was surprised to learn that he was such a big baby.

Not clear to me whether this was genuine, or whether he was acting those
tantrums to get his way. In many case, it worked. Though in his later
years, he became much more normal and mature. And the folks around him
also learned how to deal with him and not take his blunt criticisms
seriously. (he would calls soe work "this is shit" but the next day, he
would proclaim it was the next best thing since sliced bread).



> I was surprised to learn he was a first class prick. He traveled
> around India with a good friend who became a very early Apple employee
> but not a millionaire during the IPO.

Andy Hertzfeld. Not sure that he travelled with him to India. But
Hertzfeld was instrumental in building the macintosh operating system.
But because of his job status at the time of the share distribution to
employees, he didn't qualify. And yes, Jobs was a real prick about it.
IT wasn't as if Jobs was a conventional "by the book" guy.

> His belief he could "will away" cancer was just plain nutty. (or
> Californian new-age)

Not too different from his belief that because he ate nothing but
fruits, he did not need to take showers.

> and iPads are manufactured. It showed people with crippled hands and
> missing fingers but Jobs didn't appear to show any sympathy.
> Apparently Wozniak left the video in tears.

You can spin this as "Foxcon doesn't discriminate against handicaped
people because they too can do the job".  Remember that the Chinese govt
doesn't force people to go work for Foxcon. People willingly apply
there. They work hard for a year or two and thn get a better job elsewhere.


> I was upset to learn that he felt LSD use was responsible for his
> talents.

Perhaps LaCarly should have used some too :-) (I bet she did if she grew
up in Kalifornia).

> His belief that Google's gPhone was an iPhone rip-off only proves to
> me that he was under the impression that Apple had invented the phone.

If you look at previous smart phones, they required a stylus to operate
the touch screen interface. So Apple was first with that stylus-less
form factor and interface.

What Apple rea;ly did is create a market for smart phones that extended
to the masses, not just a few nrds as was the case in the past.


> With regards to Sony, while they had the technical ability to do
> something like iTunes, they did not have someone with Jobs' Reality
> Distortion Field who could convince Hollywood industry insiders that
> this was in their best interests.


I disagree. Remember that Sony was Hollywood.  It has its very large
record label with the very big musicians and if it started to do the
"sony store" stuff, you bet the other labels would have jumped in.

Sony failed becasue of lack of leadership at the CEO level and the
internal structure which divided divisions into competing entities
instead of entities that worked together to build a unified solution.

This is where Apple succeeded where other companies failed, and this is
because Apple brought back this wacko guy who did not respect
conventional corporate structures  and  bucked the system.

And Jobs's "reality distortion field" may have been criticised, but Jobs
did manage to convince Sony to jump into the Itunes Store at a time
where Sony's own record label refused to embark into Sony's own attempt
at the same.  So give credit where credit is due.


> Most people would agree that Jobs
> could probably sell ice-cream to Eskimos.

I disagree. Jobs would not sell ice cream to Eskimos. He would want them
to desire Apple branded premium ice cream and  line up at the "Northern"
store (ex: Hudson's Bay corp) the day before in order to be first to get
their hands on it. That is a lot more than "selling".

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> Sony, in many ways, was not too bright!  Their home video tape system
> was technically superior.  They had it locked up with patents and were
> unable or unwilling to license those patents.  They wanted the WHOLE pie!

While Sony is not yet leveraging its assets to their full potential,
they did learn from that when you look at the BlueRay vs HD-DVD mini
war. Sony did win with its BlueRay.

However, it does appear that royalties are still not so good because
Apple has (so far) refused to fit its computers with blueray
players/burners.

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> 
> In article
> <2a46af63-1e22-4c62-931b-43d562b253b6@h5g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Neil
> Rieck <n.rieck@sympatico.ca> writes:

> > Why is it that creative people keep
> > getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
> > people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
> > movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.
> 
> Indeed.  And illegal downloading is bringing us closer and closer to it.

This is an oversimplification.  There are *many* who download the stuff
as
a "preview."  If it's junk they move on, if it's good they want to "own"
it
and buy the media.

The real fear the publishing companies have is that with free[*]
downloads
they lose the oppertunity to manipulate the markets and choose what's
pop-
ular and what's not.  Here I can refer to the movie The Man from Earth.

[*] Not neccesarily illegal.

-- 
   Johann Oskarsson                http://www.2ndquadrant.com/    |[]
   PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services  --+--
                                                                  |
   Blog: http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/

In article <4EC95425.1BBA@2ndquadrant.com>, Johann 'Myrkraverk'
Oskarsson <johann@2ndquadrant.com> writes: 

> This is an oversimplification.  There are *many* who download the stuff
> as
> a "preview."  If it's junk they move on, if it's good they want to "own"
> it
> and buy the media.

The question is the relative size of the groups.  How many download 
something illegally essentially instead of buying it compared to those 
who download something but either a) junk it (and wouldn't have bought 
it) or then go and buy the media?

On 11/20/2011 11:41 AM, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> In article
> <2a46af63-1e22-4c62-931b-43d562b253b6@h5g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Neil
> Rieck<n.rieck@sympatico.ca>  writes:
>
>> To your point, I read recently that Amy Winehouse was not as rich as
>> many people thought. For every $1M in sales, she only received $70k.
>> Someone, either traditional music publishers, or e-publishers like
>> Apple, were taking $930,000.
>
> This is a margin of 7%.  The margins in many other businesses are much
> smaller.  Also, the $930,000 is not profit, since it includes costs; ALL
> costs---"real" costs and profits---are covered by the $1M revenue from
> sales.
>
>> Why is it that creative people keep
>> getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
>> people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
>> movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.
>
> Indeed.  And illegal downloading is bringing us closer and closer to it.
>
> I find it strange that people who complain that artists get a too small
> fraction of the income generated from sales offer as a "solution" that
> the artists get nothing at all.
>

Then let them compose and perform their own compositions!  Perhaps one 
in three-thousand may be worth listening to.

Richard B. Gilbert <rgilbert88@comcast.net> wrote:

(snip)
> Sony, in many ways, was not too bright!  Their home video tape system
> was technically superior.  They had it locked up with patents and were
> unable or unwilling to license those patents.  They wanted the WHOLE pie!

Especially Beta-HiFi worked much better than VHS-HiFi, and could
be done without adding more heads.

> VHS came along.  It also was patented but the holders of those patents 
> were willing to license to just about anyone who was willing and able to
> to meet their *very reasonable terms*.

Also, VHS went to slower (and lower quality) speeds, and so won
over those who didn't care about picture quality.

> Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today?  Would you buy a BetaMax????????
> Guess who got rich!!  Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!

Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years
after it faded from the home market.  

-- glen

On 11/20/2011 4:42 PM, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert<rgilbert88@comcast.net>  wrote:
>
> (snip)
>> Sony, in many ways, was not too bright!  Their home video tape system
>> was technically superior.  They had it locked up with patents and were
>> unable or unwilling to license those patents.  They wanted the WHOLE pie!
>
> Especially Beta-HiFi worked much better than VHS-HiFi, and could
> be done without adding more heads.
>
>> VHS came along.  It also was patented but the holders of those patents
>> were willing to license to just about anyone who was willing and able to
>> to meet their *very reasonable terms*.
>
> Also, VHS went to slower (and lower quality) speeds, and so won
> over those who didn't care about picture quality.
>
>> Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today?  Would you buy a BetaMax????????
>> Guess who got rich!!  Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!
>
> Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years
> after it faded from the home market.
>

And the "professional market" represents what percent of Sony's profits?
0.1% perhaps?

Richard B. Gilbert <rgilbert88@comcast.net> wrote:

(snip, someone wrote)
>>> Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today?  Would you buy a BetaMax????????
>>> Guess who got rich!!  Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!

>> Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years
>> after it faded from the home market.

> And the "professional market" represents what percent of 
> Sony's profits?  0.1% perhaps?

Well, the markup might be higher, but yes it is a small fraction.

Even so, though, it looks good for consumers to see that a company
is known in the professional market.  

Does Nikon make enough from the professional market, to make it
worth staying in?   Should they give up, and just make cheap 
point-and-shoot digital cameras?

-- glen

glen herrmannsfeldt schrieb:

> 
> Also, VHS went to slower (and lower quality) speeds, and so won
> over those who didn't care about picture quality.

But wouldn't this mean that one can fit more pictures on the same tape?
If one can tape a two-hour TV show instead of just half of it,
that's certainly an advantage.

On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:42:03 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

> Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years after it
> faded from the home market.


The BBC used Betamax.

-- 
Paul Sture

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln

On Nov 21, 7:41=A0am, Paul Sture <paul.nos...@sture.ch> wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:42:03 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> > Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years after it
> > faded from the home market.
>
> The BBC used Betamax.
>
> --
> Paul Sture
>
> "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
> determine whether or not they are genuine." =A0 =A0 -- Abraham Lincoln

Broadcasters used Betacam and related formats. They're not entirely
the same as the domestic Betamax format, though they have some
heritage in common.

Has no one mentioned the lack of availability of "content" on Betamax?
You could buy a VHS recorder confident that your local video shop
would rent or sell you commercial pre-recorded stuff to watch. Pre-
recorded Betamax stuff was quite rare.

John Wallace <johnwallace4@gmail.com> wrote:

(snip)
> Broadcasters used Betacam and related formats. They're not entirely
> the same as the domestic Betamax format, though they have some
> heritage in common.

As well as I understand it, there was a Beta-I format originally,
and then Beta-II and Beta-III were more commonly used for home
recorders, where pros stayed with Beta-I.  Home recorders could
play Beta-I, but not record it.  

> Has no one mentioned the lack of availability of "content" on Betamax?
> You could buy a VHS recorder confident that your local video shop
> would rent or sell you commercial pre-recorded stuff to watch. Pre-
> recorded Betamax stuff was quite rare.

It wasn't hard to find in 1986, and was starting to get harder
in about 1990 or so.  


-- glen

Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer@gsi.de> writes:

> glen herrmannsfeldt schrieb:
>
>> Also, VHS went to slower (and lower quality) speeds, and so won
>> over those who didn't care about picture quality.
>
> But wouldn't this mean that one can fit more pictures on the same
> tape?  If one can tape a two-hour TV show instead of just half of
> it, that's certainly an advantage.

Yes, that's what it did.  The three hour tapes (popular during the
last century) are able to hold 6 hours of content that way.  Of course
with loss of quality.

I believe it's hard to get any VHS casette with less than 270min tape
these days.  Where you get them at all, that is.


-- 
   Johann Oskarsson                http://www.2ndquadrant.com/    |[]
   PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services  --+--
                                                                  |
   Blog: http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/

Paul Sture <paul.nospam@sture.ch> writes:

> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:42:03 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>
>> Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years after
>> it faded from the home market.
>
> The BBC used Betamax.

And other television stations.  This is what we mean by the
professional market.


-- 
   Johann Oskarsson                http://www.2ndquadrant.com/    |[]
   PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services  --+--
                                                                  |
   Blog: http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:39:35 -0800, John Wallace wrote:

> On Nov 21, 7:41 am, Paul Sture <paul.nos...@sture.ch> wrote:
>> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:42:03 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>> > Beta stayed popular in the professional market for many years after
>> > it faded from the home market.
>>
>> The BBC used Betamax.
>>
>> --
>> Paul Sture
>>
>> "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
>> determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln
> 
> Broadcasters used Betacam and related formats. They're not entirely the
> same as the domestic Betamax format, though they have some heritage in
> common.
> 
> Has no one mentioned the lack of availability of "content" on Betamax?
> You could buy a VHS recorder confident that your local video shop would
> rent or sell you commercial pre-recorded stuff to watch. Pre- recorded
> Betamax stuff was quite rare.

A colleague bought a Betamax recorder when the jury was still out, and 
pre-recorded titles were definitely available for a few years.

-- 
Paul Sture

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln

On Nov 20, 10:17=A0am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
wrote:
> On 11/20/2011 9:57 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 19, 1:42 pm, John Wallace<johnwalla...@gmail.com> =A0wrote:
> >> On Nov 19, 4:51 pm, JF Mezei<jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> =A0wrote:
>
> >>> Neil Rieck wrote:
>
> >>>> Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
> >>>> selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>
> >>> Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
> >>> launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
> >>> same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc =
but
> >>> their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
> >>> Sony's new MP3 players.
>
> Sony, in many ways, was not too bright! =A0Their home video tape system
> was technically superior. =A0They had it locked up with patents and were
> unable or unwilling to license those patents. =A0They wanted the WHOLE pi=
e!
>
> VHS came along. =A0It also was patented but the holders of those patents
> were willing to license to just about anyone who was willing and able to
> to meet their *very reasonable terms*.
>
> Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today? =A0Would you buy a BetaMax????????
> Guess who got rich!! =A0Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!
>
> <huge snip>

I guess Sony was a little more successful in getting Blu-ray to kill
off HD-DVD

:-)

NSR

On Nov 20, 11:41=A0am, hel...@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article
> <2a46af63-1e22-4c62-931b-43d562b25...@h5g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Neil
>
> Rieck <n.ri...@sympatico.ca> writes:
> > To your point, I read recently that Amy Winehouse was not as rich as
> > many people thought. For every $1M in sales, she only received $70k.
> > Someone, either traditional music publishers, or e-publishers like
> > Apple, were taking $930,000.
>
> This is a margin of 7%. =A0The margins in many other businesses are much
> smaller. =A0Also, the $930,000 is not profit, since it includes costs; AL=
L
> costs---"real" costs and profits---are covered by the $1M revenue from
> sales.
>
> > Why is it that creative people keep
> > getting the short end of the stick? Imagine a world where all creative
> > people are driven back into traditional jobs: No music, no TV, no
> > movies, no books, no games, no art. What a crappy world that would be.
>
> Indeed. =A0And illegal downloading is bringing us closer and closer to it=
..
>
> I find it strange that people who complain that artists get a too small
> fraction of the income generated from sales offer as a "solution" that
> the artists get nothing at all.

Someone (perhaps it was Roland Hughes) relayed a personal story a few
years back about publishing through Amazon. In the early days of
Amazon the web site grabbed something like 25% of the costs sent back
"to the industry" which includes "the creative talent" as well as the
marketing talent". Nut then along came iTunes who were reaping
something like 70% and returning 30%. That's when Amazon go the
message and decided to become more iTunes-like. Amazon will make
direct deals with authors but require you to sign on with the 70/30
split, or worse.

First off, if they decided to create a gizmo to read the books which
means they wouldn't need to deal with industry bozos to publish in
paper (this also does away with shipping and warehouse problems).
While shopping around for someone to make their gizmo, other computer
companies decided to jump in the market ahead of them. As everyone
already knows, the gizmo ended up with the name "Kindle" but many
companies without a book-site have also jumped into the market.

Even still, it kind of bothers me that a modern-day Isaac Asimov (or
in the case of iTunes, a modern day Johann Sebastian Bach) would only
get 30% of the royalties. Since these people are the creative talent,
they should get at least 50%. This would encourage them to create more
content because this stuff makes the world more enjoyable.

NSR

On Nov 20, 12:28=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > Don't take my remarks as offensive, but I was interpreting the
> > language of your post as that of a religious position before you used
> > the phrases "second coming", "bejesus", etc.
>
> By definition, aren't all discussions about the Church of Apple
> religious in nature ? :-)
>
> > There's been lots of stuff written and said about Steve Jobs, but
> > everyone should watch this interview with Walter Isaacson by Charlie
> > Rose
>
> I am in the process of reading the book. And yes, I was susprised by how
> "unconventional" Jobs was in his youth. =A0But why his lifestyle may not
> look normal to you, perhaps it was standard in the post hippie days of
> Kalifornia.
>
> And in terms of LSD, anyone who has used the itunes visualiser knows
> that similar substances have been used by the Apple programmers :-)
>
> > I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs was unable to write a single
> > line of code. Talk about the Jobsian Reality Distortion field!!!
>
> But he did build hardware in his youth. Not software. He was a techie
> and this is how he met Wozniak.
>
> > I was surprised to learn that he was such a big baby.
>
> Not clear to me whether this was genuine, or whether he was acting those
> tantrums to get his way. In many case, it worked. Though in his later
> years, he became much more normal and mature. And the folks around him
> also learned how to deal with him and not take his blunt criticisms
> seriously. (he would calls soe work "this is shit" but the next day, he
> would proclaim it was the next best thing since sliced bread).
>
> > I was surprised to learn he was a first class prick. He traveled
> > around India with a good friend who became a very early Apple employee
> > but not a millionaire during the IPO.
>
> Andy Hertzfeld. Not sure that he travelled with him to India. But
> Hertzfeld was instrumental in building the macintosh operating system.
> But because of his job status at the time of the share distribution to
> employees, he didn't qualify. And yes, Jobs was a real prick about it.
> IT wasn't as if Jobs was a conventional "by the book" guy.
>
> > His belief he could "will away" cancer was just plain nutty. (or
> > Californian new-age)
>
> Not too different from his belief that because he ate nothing but
> fruits, he did not need to take showers.
>
> > and iPads are manufactured. It showed people with crippled hands and
> > missing fingers but Jobs didn't appear to show any sympathy.
> > Apparently Wozniak left the video in tears.
>
> You can spin this as "Foxcon doesn't discriminate against handicaped
> people because they too can do the job". =A0Remember that the Chinese gov=
t
> doesn't force people to go work for Foxcon. People willingly apply
> there. They work hard for a year or two and thn get a better job elsewher=
e.
>
> > I was upset to learn that he felt LSD use was responsible for his
> > talents.
>
> Perhaps LaCarly should have used some too :-) (I bet she did if she grew
> up in Kalifornia).
>
> > His belief that Google's gPhone was an iPhone rip-off only proves to
> > me that he was under the impression that Apple had invented the phone.
>
> If you look at previous smart phones, they required a stylus to operate
> the touch screen interface. So Apple was first with that stylus-less
> form factor and interface.
>
> What Apple rea;ly did is create a market for smart phones that extended
> to the masses, not just a few nrds as was the case in the past.
>
> > With regards to Sony, while they had the technical ability to do
> > something like iTunes, they did not have someone with Jobs' Reality
> > Distortion Field who could convince Hollywood industry insiders that
> > this was in their best interests.
>
> I disagree. Remember that Sony was Hollywood. =A0It has its very large
> record label with the very big musicians and if it started to do the
> "sony store" stuff, you bet the other labels would have jumped in.
>
> Sony failed becasue of lack of leadership at the CEO level and the
> internal structure which divided divisions into competing entities
> instead of entities that worked together to build a unified solution.
>
> This is where Apple succeeded where other companies failed, and this is
> because Apple brought back this wacko guy who did not respect
> conventional corporate structures =A0and =A0bucked the system.
>
> And Jobs's "reality distortion field" may have been criticised, but Jobs
> did manage to convince Sony to jump into the Itunes Store at a time
> where Sony's own record label refused to embark into Sony's own attempt
> at the same. =A0So give credit where credit is due.
>
> > Most people would agree that Jobs
> > could probably sell ice-cream to Eskimos.
>
> I disagree. Jobs would not sell ice cream to Eskimos. He would want them
> to desire Apple branded premium ice cream and =A0line up at the "Northern=
"
> store (ex: Hudson's Bay corp) the day before in order to be first to get
> their hands on it. That is a lot more than "selling".

I recently bought a copy of "The Book" as well. I just didn't want to
pay full price.

Why? I have always been a bigger fan of Steve Wozniak (in my 8-bit
days, everyone would see the phrase "WOZ" in the code listings for the
Apple-2 monitor (anybody remember "call -151") as well as the sweet-16
routines, the BASIC RENUM routines, the 6502 disassembler, as well as
other stuff.)

While it it true that Jobs was the marketing guru, there wouldn't have
been anything to market without the creative genius of Wozniak. Anyone
remember the 7-chip floppy disk controller card? Equivalent cards from
companies like DEC required anywhere between 40 and 70 chips.

NSR

In article
<ea7af4a5-fb46-4a8d-ac6b-0c0a6edee203@r9g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>, Neil
Rieck <n.rieck@sympatico.ca> writes: 

> Someone (perhaps it was Roland Hughes) relayed a personal story a few
> years back about publishing through Amazon. In the early days of
> Amazon the web site grabbed something like 25% of the costs sent back
> "to the industry" which includes "the creative talent" as well as the
> marketing talent". Nut then along came iTunes who were reaping
> something like 70% and returning 30%. That's when Amazon go the
> message and decided to become more iTunes-like. Amazon will make
> direct deals with authors but require you to sign on with the 70/30
> split, or worse.

In the early phases of a new product, one can find all sorts of models, 
ideas, concepts.  For various reasons, most die off and some set of 
standard conditions evolve.

> Even still, it kind of bothers me that a modern-day Isaac Asimov (or
> in the case of iTunes, a modern day Johann Sebastian Bach) would only
> get 30% of the royalties. Since these people are the creative talent,
> they should get at least 50%. This would encourage them to create more
> content because this stuff makes the world more enjoyable.

There are various sorts of contract, of course, and the rich and famous 
can demand more, but with a traditional (paper) book, the standard was 
that the author got about 10% of the cover price.  One shouldn't think 
that if the author gets x% (from which, of course, he has to pay his own 
costs, but they are not very high in most cases), then someone else gets 
(100-x)% in PROFITS.  There are various costs.  These might be somewhat 
less for purely electronic publishing.

On 11/22/11 12:42, Neil Rieck wrote:

> I recently bought a copy of "The Book" as well. I just didn't want to
> pay full price.
>
> Why? I have always been a bigger fan of Steve Wozniak (in my 8-bit
> days, everyone would see the phrase "WOZ" in the code listings for the
> Apple-2 monitor (anybody remember "call -151") as well as the sweet-16
> routines, the BASIC RENUM routines, the 6502 disassembler, as well as
> other stuff.)
>

....and other stuff like the way that the code in the limited 256 byte
iopage rom space was hand optimised for size so that the same rom sequences
resulted in different instructions, depending on the result of a branch
instruction. Such optimisation is largely dead now, but was quite 
appropriate
in the days of limited address space and memory resources.

>
> While it it true that Jobs was the marketing guru, there wouldn't have
> been anything to market without the creative genius of Wozniak. Anyone
> remember the 7-chip floppy disk controller card? Equivalent cards from
> companies like DEC required anywhere between 40 and 70 chips.
>

I've said it before, but dec never could do kiss hardware design, perhaps
due to the design automation tools they were using, or just an old style
mainframe hardware design culture with an ssi mindset.

Iirc, the Apple ][ floppy controller used a 4 bit latch and bipolar prom
to separate clock and data, with a non standard disk format to simplify the
encode / decode. Way beyond the curve at the time. An Apple ][, Videx 80 
col
card, Programma Pie editor, assembler and 5 meg hard drive bought me lunch
doing embedded 6502 work for 2 or 3 years before moving on to other 
machines.
Never filled that hard drive either, but how the world has changed since...

Regards,

Chris

On 2011-11-22 13.42, Neil Rieck wrote:
[...]
> While it it true that Jobs was the marketing guru, there wouldn't have
> been anything to market without the creative genius of Wozniak. Anyone
> remember the 7-chip floppy disk controller card? Equivalent cards from
> companies like DEC required anywhere between 40 and 70 chips.

Well, we could have a fun argument about "equivalent" here...
Apple designed for cheap. DEC did not. DEC did things like DMA. Apple 
never heard of the concept.
DEC had a general bus. I'm not sure what I'd call the Apple II, but 
saying it had a bus is being rather generous...

And we could go on... :-)

	Johnny

Neil Rieck wrote:


> Why? I have always been a bigger fan of Steve Wozniak (in my 8-bit
> days, everyone would see the phrase "WOZ" in the code listings for the
> Apple-2 monitor (anybody remember "call -151") as well as the sweet-16
> routines, the BASIC RENUM routines, the 6502 disassembler, as well as
> other stuff.)


You should also be a fan of Andy Hertzfld and others because they are
the ones who wrote the MacOS and created the macintosh. Woz was out of
that game completely by that time (and did not agree with the concept of
a closed case because to him, coputers were only for geeks who wanted "in".

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply <helbig@astro.multiclothesvax.de> wrote:

(snip on costs of selling, Sony, and Apple)

> There are various sorts of contract, of course, and the rich and famous 
> can demand more, but with a traditional (paper) book, the standard was 
> that the author got about 10% of the cover price.  One shouldn't think 
> that if the author gets x% (from which, of course, he has to pay his own 
> costs, but they are not very high in most cases), then someone else gets 
> (100-x)% in PROFITS.  There are various costs.  These might be somewhat 
> less for purely electronic publishing.

As I understand it, it is usual in retail for the retailer to keep
about half of the cover (suggested retail) price.  That gets less
and less true for higher priced items, though.

One of the costs for paper book printing is all the unsold copies
that actually were printed.   Electronic publishing avoids that.

-- glen

On Nov 22, 12:53=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > Why? I have always been a bigger fan of Steve Wozniak (in my 8-bit
> > days, everyone would see the phrase "WOZ" in the code listings for the
> > Apple-2 monitor (anybody remember "call -151") as well as the sweet-16
> > routines, the BASIC RENUM routines, the 6502 disassembler, as well as
> > other stuff.)
>
> You should also be a fan of Andy Hertzfld and others because they are
> the ones who wrote the MacOS and created the macintosh. Woz was out of
> that game completely by that time (and did not agree with the concept of
> a closed case because to him, coputers were only for geeks who wanted "in=
".

You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument. Although the Apple ][ was more
expensive than other 8-bit machines, it was very popular because it
was open. There are numerous books written about the launch of the IBM-
PC and almost everyone of them includes an account of how the people
at IBM wanted their PC to be open "like the Apple ][". Meanwhile,
there are also numerous books about Apple where the author mentioned
that Jobs seemed pissed every time he saw a third-part adapter sitting
in the Apple ][ backplane then remarking "their robbing Apple of
profits". So Between 1981 and 1984 we see the two companies flip: IBM
goes open and Apple goes closed.

Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
(although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
little, too late.

In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task. In
order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
from NeXT. (IIRC)

 NSR

Neil Rieck <n.rieck@sympatico.ca> wrote:

(snip)
> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
> back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
> criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument. 

(snip)
> Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
> place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
> with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
> of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
> one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
> (although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
> Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
> relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
> little, too late.

Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many
that I knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
you used what you had.

Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
use other disk systems.

-- glen

On 11/23/11 14:49, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

>
> Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many
> that I knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
> you used what you had.
>
> Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
> non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
> use other disk systems.
>
> -- glen

Nearly all the companies I worked with used 3rd party drives and
controllers, as well as analog / digital and specialist comms cards.
It was a thriving ecosystem, because the dec kit was so much more
expensive and in many cases, no better quality or reliability. The
most common disk setup would be fujitsu smd drives with either Dilog
or more commonly, Emulex disk controllers, on unibus or qbus. Emulex
were and are a first class engineering company and still in business,
whereas many of the others faded into obscurity in later years...

Regards,

Chris

Neil Rieck wrote:

> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
> back into the 8-bit division.


According to the official bible, it wasnt quite like that. After his
crash, Woz wanted out of the business alltogether. He had always stayed
at Apple II because this is what he wanted and was against the closed
architecture of the Mac. He wanted to work on a machine for geeks, while
Jobs wanted a machine for the mass market.

Remember that at the time, Jobs was already in trouble with his own
company. The Macintosh happened because Jobs had been ousted from the
Lisa group and told to go work in a corner, which he did. The Mac was
not a successor to the Lisa, it was a competing project with both trying
to implement what they had obtained from Xerox Parc.

Woz did not want to be involved with all the infighting and did not
believe in a closed machine which is what Jobs wanted.


> In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
> examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
> Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
> locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task.


That is definitely not true. I still have the "Inside Macintosh" manuals
which fully documented the system calls to allow people to program.
MacOS did not have multitasking. They did add a routine your app should
call which would voluntarily relinquish control to the system so the
system could pass control to someone else or update the clock on the
menubar (aka do system related stuff).

A few years alter, they improved the OS to allow multiple applications
to run at same time, using that same call to allow the system to switch
tasks. (the first implementation was MultiFinder, and this was later
integrated into the Finder).

The lack of true multi tasking was the result of the boring CEOS like
Sculley and his successors who were unable to stick to one project to
add pre-emptive multitasking and get it to completion.  Until Windows
95, MacOS wasn't too different from DOS/Windows in that respect. But by
1995, the lack of multi tasking started to really hurt Apple. But
remember that Jobs left in 1985.


> order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
> with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
> from NeXT. (IIRC)

This wasn't quiet ! It was amazing ! Extraordinary ! the Best OS ever
made on the best machines ever made etc etc.  It was quite public that
Apple had failed under Sculley some other dude and d'Amelio to come up
with a new OS and Apple got desperate and bought NeXT in order to use it
as a basis for the renewed Mac OS.

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:49:40 +0000, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

> Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many that I
> knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
> you used what you had.

I lost count of the types of third party terminals I came across. Some 
were excellents, others positively dire.

> Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use non-DEC disks
> with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to use other disk systems.

We used CDC disks on VAXen, but they were the same models as DEC rebadged.
I came across Ampex disks on PDP-11s at a couple of computer buros but we 
had pure DEC at our place.



-- 
Paul Sture

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:25:23 +0000, ChrisQ wrote:

> On 11/23/11 14:49, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> 
> 
>> Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many that I
>> knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
>> you used what you had.
>>
>> Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use non-DEC
>> disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to use other disk
>> systems.
>>
>> -- glen
> 
> Nearly all the companies I worked with used 3rd party drives and
> controllers, as well as analog / digital and specialist comms cards. It
> was a thriving ecosystem, because the dec kit was so much more expensive
> and in many cases, no better quality or reliability. The most common
> disk setup would be fujitsu smd drives with either Dilog or more
> commonly, Emulex disk controllers, on unibus or qbus. Emulex were and
> are a first class engineering company and still in business,
> whereas many of the others faded into obscurity in later years...
> 

Does anyone remember Emulex CS-32 terminal controllers?  These took the 
interrupts associated with DZ-11s off the system, and IIRC you only 
needed one slot to support 32 lines.

-- 
Paul Sture

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to
determine whether or not they are genuine."     -- Abraham Lincoln

"glen herrmannsfeldt"  wrote in message 
news:jaj164$5as$1@speranza.aioe.org...
>
>Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
>non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
>use other disk systems.
>
>-- glen

At my previous place of employ, our MVII (still running last I talked to 
them), we had an CDC Eagle drive until our 3rd party service organization 
was having problems locating replacement Hard Drive Assemblies.  They 
replaced it with a third party QBus SCSI controller and RZ28 which also 
quieted the room and lowered the A/C bill. 

On 11/23/11 18:37, Paul Sture wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:25:23 +0000, ChrisQ wrote:

>>
>> Nearly all the companies I worked with used 3rd party drives and
>> controllers, as well as analog / digital and specialist comms cards. It
>> was a thriving ecosystem, because the dec kit was so much more expensive
>> and in many cases, no better quality or reliability. The most common
>> disk setup would be fujitsu smd drives with either Dilog or more
>> commonly, Emulex disk controllers, on unibus or qbus. Emulex were and
>> are a first class engineering company and still in business,
>> whereas many of the others faded into obscurity in later years...
>>
>
> Does anyone remember Emulex CS-32 terminal controllers?  These took the
> interrupts associated with DZ-11s off the system, and IIRC you only
> needed one slot to support 32 lines.
>

I remember the Emulex comms cards. Never saw the 32 line version, but 
vaguely
remember the CS-08 and CS-16, which were the 8 and 16 line versions. I 
don't
think they were DL11 emulation, which did generate an interrupt per 
char, but
more likely a CXA16 style emulation, which had on board fifo and pre
processing. May even have some of those cards in store, though sold off 
/ gave
away much of the collected dec kit some years ago. The Emulex dual smd 
controllers
were quite a work of art. The QD32/33 did mscp emulation in only a dual 
height
qbus card and a couple of dozen chips, whereas the kda50 was two quad 
height
boards with hundreds of chips and lots of amps from the psu. Worked in 
microvax
and pdp and you could hang 2 x 8" fujitsu 2 Gbyte (2382 ?) drives on a 
single
controller, which was quite a lot of storage at the time. Coming 
originally from
a hardware background, I couldn't help but respect the skill in getting 
so much
functionality in such a small footprint and their prowess with custom 
microcircuits,
which did most of the work on the cards.
I
The setup was quite interesting, in that you had to load the drive 
format and bad
block utilities from the controller firmware via a short hand entered 
assembler
program, which then dma'd the utilities into main memory. Looking back 
it seems
a bit tortuous, but pretty standard stuff at the time.

The problem with dec wasn't just the cost, but functionality gaps which 
were quick to
be filled by the third party vendors. Viking dual height scsi 
controllers were
another example, one of which emulated mscp and tmscp -> scsi on the 
same dual height
qbus card. Part number was the qdt, iirc, with the disk only version 
being the qd0.
Rocking horse material now and very expensive, even if you can find one.

This should probably be on afc, but hey :-)...

Regards,

Chris

On 11/22/2011 7:19 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> On Nov 20, 10:17 am, "Richard B. Gilbert"<rgilber...@comcast.net>
> wrote:
>> On 11/20/2011 9:57 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Nov 19, 1:42 pm, John Wallace<johnwalla...@gmail.com>    wrote:
>>>> On Nov 19, 4:51 pm, JF Mezei<jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca>    wrote:
>>
>>>>> Neil Rieck wrote:
>>
>>>>>> Here's my two cents about comparing Apple to Sony. Sony was only
>>>>>> selling players. Apple was selling players and content.
>>
>>>>> Wrong. At the time Apple launched iTunes Store (a year or two after
>>>>> launching iPods), Sony already had all of what was needed to do the
>>>>> same, yet they failed royally. They did have a "store" for games etc but
>>>>> their own music division wouldn't allow that store to sell music to
>>>>> Sony's new MP3 players.
>>
>> Sony, in many ways, was not too bright!  Their home video tape system
>> was technically superior.  They had it locked up with patents and were
>> unable or unwilling to license those patents.  They wanted the WHOLE pie!
>>
>> VHS came along.  It also was patented but the holders of those patents
>> were willing to license to just about anyone who was willing and able to
>> to meet their *very reasonable terms*.
>>
>> Can you buy a "BetaMax" new, today?  Would you buy a BetaMax????????
>> Guess who got rich!!  Hint; it wasn't Sony's stock holders!
>>
>> <huge snip>
>
> I guess Sony was a little more successful in getting Blu-ray to kill
> off HD-DVD
>
> :-)
>
> NSR

DVD is still alive and well.  My wife is a video junkie.  She can rent, 
buy, or sell DVD disks and does <sigh>!  She also rents or buys video tapes.

On Nov 23, 12:51=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
> > pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
> > up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
> > back into the 8-bit division.
>
> According to the official bible, it wasnt quite like that. After his
> crash, Woz wanted out of the business alltogether. He had always stayed
> at Apple II because this is what he wanted and was against the closed
> architecture of the Mac. He wanted to work on a machine for geeks, while
> Jobs wanted a machine for the mass market.
>
> Remember that at the time, Jobs was already in trouble with his own
> company. The Macintosh happened because Jobs had been ousted from the
> Lisa group and told to go work in a corner, which he did. The Mac was
> not a successor to the Lisa, it was a competing project with both trying
> to implement what they had obtained from Xerox Parc.
>
> Woz did not want to be involved with all the infighting and did not
> believe in a closed machine which is what Jobs wanted.
>
> > In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
> > examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
> > Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
> > locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task.
>
> That is definitely not true. I still have the "Inside Macintosh" manuals
> which fully documented the system calls to allow people to program.
> MacOS did not have multitasking. They did add a routine your app should
> call which would voluntarily relinquish control to the system so the
> system could pass control to someone else or update the clock on the
> menubar (aka do system related stuff).
>
> A few years alter, they improved the OS to allow multiple applications
> to run at same time, using that same call to allow the system to switch
> tasks. (the first implementation was MultiFinder, and this was later
> integrated into the Finder).
>
> The lack of true multi tasking was the result of the boring CEOS like
> Sculley and his successors who were unable to stick to one project to
> add pre-emptive multitasking and get it to completion. =A0Until Windows
> 95, MacOS wasn't too different from DOS/Windows in that respect. But by
> 1995, the lack of multi tasking started to really hurt Apple. But
> remember that Jobs left in 1985.
>
> > order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
> > with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
> > from NeXT. (IIRC)
>
> This wasn't quiet ! It was amazing ! Extraordinary ! the Best OS ever
> made on the best machines ever made etc etc. =A0It was quite public that
> Apple had failed under Sculley some other dude and d'Amelio to come up
> with a new OS and Apple got desperate and bought NeXT in order to use it
> as a basis for the renewed Mac OS.

I think we are talking past each other at this point.

First off, I never said that third party s/w development products were
not available for the Mac. I know because I owned a few of them. In
fact, I first learned how to program in "C" on a Mac using "Lightspeed
C". I first learned how to do 68K assembly programming using MacAsm.

 If I didn't say it clearly before then let me say it now "Apple/Jobs
no longer wanted other companies making making hardware" for the mac.
In the Apple ][ days it really was "Apple" and "the Apple compatible
industry" vending to the world and this is one reason why the product
was considered the Chevy of its time. With Macintosh, it was Apple
only. So Macintosh (1984) was closed while IBM-PC (1981) was open and
we can see which platform won out. BTW, part of the success of the PC
comes from companies like Compaq (who reverse engineered the IBM BIOS)
and AMD (who reverse engineered the x86 architecture to make an x86
work-alike), as well as all the other companies making all kinds of
compatible add-ons. So today we have a very closed Apple product line
vs. an ISA (industry standard architecture) PC which is very much
open. What does this mean today? Last December an old Apple buddy sent
me an email telling me that he just bought a new Core-i7 based iMac
for CA$2500. This was the same month that I bought a similar Windows-
based systems from Futureshop for CA$1195. (Mine was an HP with Core-
i7 CPU, 8 GB of memory, Windows-7 64-bit edition).

To bring my arguments back to the purpose we all hang out in this
newsgroup, new Alpha systems really dropped in price when DEC shifted
from mostly closed semi-open. DEC stopped building every subsystem
then shifted to building systems from COTS (commodity off the shelf)
components. Alpha backplanes started to appear with ISA, EISA, and PCI
slots. It is a hard thing to compare but I think I can make a good
case for Alpha systems being (on average) ten times cheaper than VAX
while also being ten being ten times more powerful than VAX. I can
only assume than Itanium has continued this trend.

Not sure what "bible" you are reading (perhaps it is the current book
from the "church of jobs" :-), but there are numerous books out there
(including Woz's most recent biography called "iWoz") claiming that
Woz went back to Apple after the accident and was treated like a
second class citizen relegated to the 8-bit division. The Mac was
going to be a Jobs-only-creation with no interference from the likes
of Wozniak. That is when Woz decided to leave Apple in order to return
to University (registered under the name Rocky Racoon) so he could
become a school teacher.

p.s. People forget that Apple made lots of money from 8-bit Apples
long after the Mac was introduced. Jobs hated this fact but it is a
prime example from companies who produce products which compete with
themselves. For more examples, see the book "In Search of Stupidity"

p.s. Speculation: if Woz had been allowed to return to any position of
prominence, then maybe the Lisa wouldn't have been so expensive while
also so slow (I heard of 2 minute boot-up times). Also, many people
have wondered if the first Woz-Mac might have been a machine with a
color display.

NSR

Neil Rieck wrote:

>  If I didn't say it clearly before then let me say it now "Apple/Jobs
> no longer wanted other companies making making hardware" for the mac.

Note that the Macintosh had a SCSI port (at least the Mac+) which
allowed 3rd party hardware/drives to be connected. This included MIDI
interfaces for musicians. One of the serial ports could also be used for
networking with appletalk.

So while the box itself was not accessible, there were interfaces on the
outside which were.

And it didn't take long for tools to become available to open the Mac so
you could add your own memory in it.


> In the Apple ][ days it really was "Apple" and "the Apple compatible
> industry" vending to the world

I had never heard of Apple II compatible machines. In fact, even the
diskettes were proprietary because Woz had devices his own way to dump
data to them.

And yes, it is true that the Apple II continued to gnerate the funds to
sustain Apple after the Mac was introduced.


> compatible add-ons. So today we have a very closed Apple product line
> vs. an ISA (industry standard architecture) PC which is very much
> open. What does this mean today?

It means that when Steve Jobs found out that iFixit was selling parts to
do self repairs for the iPhone, he ordered the 2 screws that allow
access to the iPhone be changed to soe proprietary tool. iFixit
responded by selling "iphone liberation kits" which includes that
proprietary took and standard phillips screws from the original batch.

This was not a question of revenue, it was a question of conviction by
Jobs that customers should never have to open their gear.



> Last December an old Apple buddy sent
> me an email telling me that he just bought a new Core-i7 based iMac
> for CA$2500. This was the same month that I bought a similar Windows-
> based systems from Futureshop for CA$1195.

The Apple computers tend to be loaded with many items which are optional
on wintel boxes. If you don't want/need those items, then yeah, the
wintel boxes are cheaper. But if you want them, you will find the prices
are not all that different between the two machines. And you need to
compare the price with the full Windows edition (Professional I think it
is called).


Note that an iMac includes the screen, keyboard and mouse, and many
wintel packages don't. So one has to be careful comparing apples with
oranges.



> To bring my arguments back to the purpose we all hang out in this
> newsgroup, new Alpha systems really dropped in price when DEC shifted
> from mostly closed semi-open.

And Apple has been using COTS since the Mac days, although for its disk
drives, it has its own firmware on otherwise COTS hardware.  The
disquette drive on the original drive came from Sony. It looked
proprietary because Apple was first to use this commercially, but it was
developed by Sony and was to become an industry standard.

In the case of DEC, it may have bought drives from Maxtor, but it wasn't
just firmware that was different, it was also the interfaces since DEC
didn't do SCSI or IDE back in the 1980s.

And while Alpha prices did drop when DEC shifted to COTS, there was
still a premium on them because DEC wanted more money. And DEC still
charged an arm and a leg for compilers.

> case for Alpha systems being (on average) ten times cheaper than VAX
> while also being ten being ten times more powerful than VAX. I can
> only assume than Itanium has continued this trend.

You know, runnning ALLIN-! on a 4000-600 with DSSI disks seemed just as
fast as running it on a DS10-L with IDE disks which are slow as
molasses.  So the CPU may have been much faster, but the use of
el-cheapo peripherals really slowed down those alphas.



> Not sure what "bible" you are reading (perhaps it is the current book
> from the "church of jobs" :-),

No, it is the Book of Jobs from the Church of Apple. You need to get
your religions right :-)


> Woz went back to Apple after the accident and was treated like a
> second class citizen relegated to the 8-bit division. 

At that time, Jobs was treated like a 3rd class citizen and sent to work
in a different building and not allowed to work on the Lisa project.
Woz was apparently not interested in working on the "illegal" Mac
project in a different building and wanted to work on the Apple II
(which was still the mainstay of Apple's revenus).

> The Mac was
> going to be a Jobs-only-creation with no interference from the likes
> of Wozniak. 

That is an interesting spin because apparently Jobs asked Woz to come
work for his group. Considering how bad a condition Jobs was in, I would
not be susprised if Woz had turned it down.  Woz was likely refused
entry into the Lisa project though. But this would have been Apple
management, not Jobs' doing.

If Woz had been allowed to work on the Lisa project, things might have
been totally difeferent for Apple and Jobs. Had the Lisa been succesful
instead of being a big flop, Jobs' group would have served no purpose
and the Lisa would have been the project that replaced the Apple II.

But what happened is that the Lisa floppped, and Jobs managed to get the
Mac out at the right time and worked against Apple to market the hell
out of his pet project. That famous "1984" superbowl add had been
rejected by the Apple board BTW, and Jobs and his ad agency managed to
keep it running in one slot claiming it was too late to resell that
slot. (but the other slots were cancelled)


> p.s. People forget that Apple made lots of money from 8-bit Apples
> long after the Mac was introduced. Jobs hated this fact but it is a
> prime example from companies who produce products which compete with
> themselves. For more examples, see the book "In Search of Stupidity"

When the Lisa flopped and Mac succeeded, Jobs was re-admitted into Apple
due to his success. But he did not manage the now official Macintosh
group well, there were software delays which the non-computer-savvy
managers at Apple didn't understand and they progressively sidelined him
and offered him another skunkworks project in a separate building where
he could have fun and play, but Jobs fought for control of his company
and lost.

Note that Woz didn't go teaching right away. He had a go at making
remote controls and durng Jobs's short time after the Mac success where
he had power at Apple, he told the industrial design company Apple was
using to prevent Woz from using them because Woz's products might end up
looking too much like Apple products.  Needless to say that started a
rift between the two that lasted a long time.

Jobs was a very colourful fellow. And it remains to be seen how Apple
will change now that it wont have to cope with his tamper tantrums.

On Nov 24, 12:19=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:

>
> I had never heard of Apple II compatible machines. In fact, even the
> diskettes were proprietary because Woz had devices his own way to dump
> data to them.
>
Up until now, I was under the impression that you, too, started out as
an 8-bit Apple user.

Apple floppy drives would accept any 5 1/4 inch media and could read
foreign formats (with special software). DOS 3.x could reformat any
disk from any manufacturer for so-called native Apple use. (I remember
needing to buy preformatted RX01 media from DEC at this same time)

The main difference between DOS 3.2 and 3.3 was a modified byte-to-
nibble mapping in order to increase the number of sectors written to
disk. In those days, economy minded programmers (me) would routinely
reformat a floppy disk to increase the number of usable tracks from 35
to 40 or remove DOS from the first three tracks (so you would end up
with 43). How did copy protection work? Game manufacturers would
routinely format, then use, areas normally considered to be "between
tracks" (this was called half-tracking). Vanilla disk copying programs
would see these disks as defective (unreadable) but programs like
Locksmith could be used to analyze a disk to find various weirdness.

People wishing to learn more about this ancient technology should
locate a copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" on eBay. They are cheap and
ubiquitous. "Beneath Apple ProDOS" is just as useful.

People wanting to learn more about the Apple ][ family should check
out this Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_family

I still own an Apple //e Platinum edition with Z80 Softcard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_//e
(scroll down to see picture)

Last year I learned there were companies still producing new adapter
technology for Apple ][. This company:
http://www.bootzero.com/
makes an adapter which enables the connection of an IDE (PC) Harddisk.

###

Two years ago I met WOZ at a breakfast sponsored by RIM in Waterloo,
Ontario. The planners initially expected 80 people but they had to
move the venue several times as the number of RSVP responses soared to
700. Lots of engineering nerds showed up with stuff for him autograph
like "Macintosh Mice", etc. I brought along my copy of his book "iWoz"
and will always remember the look on his face when he asked me how to
sign it and I replied "to: 8-bit forever. Woz"

NSR

Finally finished reading the Book of Jobs.

In many places, there is mention of the debate on closed vs open
architecture, and how Apple would succeed by making a solution from
hardware to application and content that works, even going as far as
buying a chip design company to ensure they got features they wanted in
the CPUs.

Jobs speaks very highly of HP throughout the book, they inspired him
(since Hewlett and Packard also started ina garage, and Jobs first job
was at HP etc). But at the very end of the book, where Jobs speaks of
hoping he has injected Apple with his long lasting DNA, notes how
Hewlett and PAckard had done the same and seemed to have succeeded  but
now, HP was self destructing having lost its initial culture.

Digital Equipment is mentioned once in the book, with Woz working on a
PDP-8 in one of his early jobs.


What I find interesting is that Jobs never mentioned Digital in his
discussion about open/closed architecture. He mentioned IBM briefly, and
of course the Apple-Windows and now Apple-Google competition on closed
vs open.

I find it interesting because at a time where Jobs matured between his
two stints at Apple, he would have seen Digital's demise, going from a
vendor similar to Jobs's aspirations (selling everything and making sure
it all worked together and being succesful) to being an also ran that
had become irrelevant in the industry (same as Apple did while Jobs was
not there).


Jobs was old enough to know about mini computers. He was old enough to
have known about VMS. So it is interesting that he totally ignored this
large part of IT back then.

Perhaps his world was really bounded by a short radius around palo alto
and cuppertino and because DEC was on east cost, he didn't know they
existed.

Or perhaps Digital also had a reality distortion field, making believers
think DEC was far more important than it really was and that Alpha was
far better than other chips of the day, and Jobs' own reality distortion
field made him immune from propaganda from other vendors.

On Nov 25, 7:19=A0pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Finally finished reading the Book of Jobs.
>
> In many places, there is mention of the debate on closed vs open
> architecture, and how Apple would succeed by making a solution from
> hardware to application and content that works, even going as far as
> buying a chip design company to ensure they got features they wanted in
> the CPUs.
>
> Jobs speaks very highly of HP throughout the book, they inspired him
> (since Hewlett and Packard also started ina garage, and Jobs first job
> was at HP etc). But at the very end of the book, where Jobs speaks of
> hoping he has injected Apple with his long lasting DNA, notes how
> Hewlett and PAckard had done the same and seemed to have succeeded =A0but
> now, HP was self destructing having lost its initial culture.
>
> Digital Equipment is mentioned once in the book, with Woz working on a
> PDP-8 in one of his early jobs.
>
> What I find interesting is that Jobs never mentioned Digital in his
> discussion about open/closed architecture. He mentioned IBM briefly, and
> of course the Apple-Windows and now Apple-Google competition on closed
> vs open.
>
> I find it interesting because at a time where Jobs matured between his
> two stints at Apple, he would have seen Digital's demise, going from a
> vendor similar to Jobs's aspirations (selling everything and making sure
> it all worked together and being succesful) to being an also ran that
> had become irrelevant in the industry (same as Apple did while Jobs was
> not there).
>
> Jobs was old enough to know about mini computers. He was old enough to
> have known about VMS. So it is interesting that he totally ignored this
> large part of IT back then.
>
> Perhaps his world was really bounded by a short radius around palo alto
> and cuppertino and because DEC was on east cost, he didn't know they
> existed.
>
> Or perhaps Digital also had a reality distortion field, making believers
> think DEC was far more important than it really was and that Alpha was
> far better than other chips of the day, and Jobs' own reality distortion
> field made him immune from propaganda from other vendors.

DEC.
Apple.
National Instruments.

Compare+contrast, using one side of the paper only (I think we've
largely covered DEC vs Apple?).

In article <jaj164$5as$1@speranza.aioe.org>,
glen herrmannsfeldt  <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>Neil Rieck <n.rieck@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>(snip)
>> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
>> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
>> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
>> back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
>> criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument. 
>
>(snip)
>> Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
>> place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
>> with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
>> of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
>> one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
>> (although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
>> Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
>> relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
>> little, too late.
>
>Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many
>that I knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
>you used what you had.
>
>Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
>non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
>use other disk systems.
>
>-- glen

Systems Industries put a lot of disks out on their 9900 (IIRC) subsystem
using CDC9766's on their own SBI interfaces.  They sold pretty well to
Government customers... Fort Monmouth had some as did the FBI.

Bill

-- 
-- 
Digital had it then.  Don't you wish you could buy it now!
              pechter-at-pechter.dyndns.org

On 11/28/2011 12:47 PM, Bill Pechter wrote:
> In article<jaj164$5as$1@speranza.aioe.org>,
> glen herrmannsfeldt<gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>  wrote:
>> Neil Rieck<n.rieck@sympatico.ca>  wrote:
>>
>> (snip)
>>> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
>>> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
>>> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
>>> back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
>>> criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument.
>>
>> (snip)
>>> Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
>>> place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
>>> with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
>>> of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
>>> one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
>>> (although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
>>> Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
>>> relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
>>> little, too late.
>>
>> Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many
>> that I knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
>> you used what you had.
>>
>> Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
>> non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
>> use other disk systems.
>>
>> -- glen
>
> Systems Industries put a lot of disks out on their 9900 (IIRC) subsystem
> using CDC9766's on their own SBI interfaces.  They sold pretty well to
> Government customers... Fort Monmouth had some as did the FBI.
>
> Bill
>

The company I worked for bought a disk farm from EMC^2. I forget just
how much storage it had but it was at least  a couple of hundred GB!  We 
didn't have any VAXen left but our Alpha systems used the EMC^2.  Just 
about everything was stored in the EMC^2.  This was ca. 2003-2004.

On Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:47:16 +0000, Bill Pechter wrote:


> 
> Systems Industries put a lot of disks out on their 9900 (IIRC) subsystem
> using CDC9766's on their own SBI interfaces.  They sold pretty well to
> Government customers... Fort Monmouth had some as did the FBI.
> 

Yes, we had one of those on one system, but it got swapped out for an
Emulex mode.  I think that was so that all our systems used the same 
components.

-- 
Paul Sture

On Nov 19, 10:51=A0am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
> so many applications.
>

Actually it fell apart when Ken Olsen allowed MBA's to join the
company.

It went off the rails when DEC originally created the Micro-PDP BEFORE
IBM shipped their PC and refused to sell it because the sub $8K price
tag would cannibalize existing PDP-11 sales.

It imploded when he allowed the eat-your-own-young competition to
continue with the VAX 9000 while the Alpha was close to completion.  I
had one client who spent around a million dollars installing a 9000
and migrating licenses, etc. only to have it be worth less than
$250,000 six months later when the Alpha started shipping.

It became a pile of smoldering ash DEC launched the Rainbow and some
MBA decided to charge $5 for a pre-formatted 5 1/4 floppy while
withholding a FORMAT utility...

It became a pile of wet and lifeless ash when DEC did a joint venture
with RadioShack to make ACTUAL PC's and they didn't seriously push
them into client sites or allow RadioShack dealers to sell the DEC
brand computer, thus stopping DEC from becoming a household name like
Hewlette Packard.

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/RadioShack-Corporation-com=
pany-History.html
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
In 1988, Tandy test-marketed its 100SX computer line through 50 Wal-
Mart stores. The company also announced plans to develop new computers
with Digital Equipment Corporation (reselling the finished product
under the DEC name) and to supply personal computers to Panasonic
(which would be sold under the Panasonic name).
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Ironically, the same dealers who whined about Tandy branding computers
for others would still be in business today had they sued for the
right to sell ALL of the brands instead of suing as they did.  Now,
nobody goes to RadioShack.

On Nov 19, 12:42=A0pm, John Wallace <johnwalla...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I suspect that as well as an industry standard DRM, the iTunes
> business model also offered the record industry a big enough cut to
> keep them interested. The details used to be on Tom Robinson's web
> site when he offered free download of his back catalogue. He is now on
> iTunes and the details of who gets what have gone, but this is what
> they used to be:
>
> =A0 =A0 iTunes downloads cost 79p per track. Writer/publisher get 6p,
> Performer 6-8p, Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company
> almost 50p. Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your
> friends (continues)
>

What he really offered them was a chance to make money without
actually producing anything.

If you haven't heard, the major record labels have announced they are
no longer going to press CDs.  The "record it once and load it on a
server for eternal sales" business model is taking over.  It is taking
books off the shelves at book stores as well as music.  Borders didn't
put up servers in time.  Barnes & Noble managed to catch the wave.
They are now even selling downloadable audio books.

Audio books used to be massively expensive to create.  If you think
$45 for a hardcover is getting raped you should have been one of those
poor sots who had to shell out over $100 for the same title in
audiobook format.  Even when they switched from vinyl to cassette tape
to CD, per unit production was high with all of the silkscreens,
cases, inserts, media, and safety packaging.  Not anymore.  Now we
only have to pay the voice actors and production staff to make the MP3
file set and the initial loading fees for each of the retail sites.
After that, the book can generate money forever.  I may actually not
put out a print version of my next novel.  I sure as hell don't want
to put out a crummy toner printed POD version.  Both ebook and audio
allow the title to sell eternally without any additional costs.

iTunes was "successful" because it was the golden goose you only had
to feed once.

Yes, piracy still happens.  It happens more now than it ever did.  In
the USA, prison sentences are higher and there is a LOT more
enforcement.  Not too far from where I live is another podunk town
with a population of around 800 people.  The feds busted a junior
college girl in that town for piracy.  Besides a massive dollar fine,
the paper said she got 7-10.  With "good behavior" she'll be out in
7.  Truth be told, that is the SECOND bust they made in that area.
The dude who got caught within the same year was stupid enough to have
his smoldering ash pipe sitting on the table when the feds came in so
they got to search a lot more and he got a lot more time.

When it comes to honest people, most of them will shell out a dollar
to legally own a song they want as long as they can play it on any
device they want.  Less than 10% of that same group will shell out
$15+ for a CD when they only want one song.

Personally, I think iTunes really started with Tower Records.  That
chain was one of the first to let you listen to an entire album/cd
BEFORE you bought it.  This slaughtered album sales because people
found out before they bought an album it was one song with a lot of
filler cuts.  Since the industry and most people had abandoned 45's,
there wasn't a legal method for customers to buy "just the song they
wanted".

On Nov 19, 4:07=A0pm, hel...@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <4ec814a6$0$2930$c3e8da3$2e001...@news.astraweb.com>, JF
>
> Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> writes:
> > In the past, if you had music and wanted to sell it, the record company
> > was the one with access to vylin rcord production, packaging, shipping
> > and most importantly distribution to record stores and to radio station=
s.
>
> > This is changing now where an artist could become famous on youtube and
> > the sell music on itunes without going through a record company.
>
> True to some extent, but it doesn't happen as often as one might think
> it might.
>

It happens enough though.  The vast majority of the bands attending
South by South West each year do not have any record company contracts
or contacts.  What they have is a Web site selling music, a few
friends making the CD's in their garage, and music for sale on iTunes.

Oh, they also have DirecTV and a few other television companies
filming and playing the bands relentlessly.

I was exposed to my current favorite band in just this manner.

http://www.theairbornetoxicevent.com/

In article <a9bd18b1-3a89-4fc8-9dd2-1ed5f16d672f@i8g2000vbh.googlegroups.com>, seasoned_geek <roland@logikalsolutions.com> writes:
>On Nov 19, 10:51=A0am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
>> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
>> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
>> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
>> so many applications.
>>
>
>Actually it fell apart when Ken Olsen allowed MBA's to join the
>company.

Massive Bullshit Artists?

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

All your spirit rack abuses, come to haunt you back by day.
All your Byzantine excuses, given time, given you away.

On 11/30/2011 6:05 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Nov 19, 10:51 am, JF Mezei<jfmezei.spam...@vaxination.ca>  wrote:
>> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
>> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
>> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
>> so many applications.
>>
>
> Actually it fell apart when Ken Olsen allowed MBA's to join the
> company.
>
> It went off the rails when DEC originally created the Micro-PDP BEFORE
> IBM shipped their PC and refused to sell it because the sub $8K price
> tag would cannibalize existing PDP-11 sales.
>
> It imploded when he allowed the eat-your-own-young competition to
> continue with the VAX 9000 while the Alpha was close to completion.  I
> had one client who spent around a million dollars installing a 9000
> and migrating licenses, etc. only to have it be worth less than
> $250,000 six months later when the Alpha started shipping.
>
> It became a pile of smoldering ash DEC launched the Rainbow and some
> MBA decided to charge $5 for a pre-formatted 5 1/4 floppy while
> withholding a FORMAT utility...

Not terribly bright and certainly not terribly effective.  Somebody 
wrote and distributed a program to format blank floppies with a DEC Format!

There went the $5.00 US floppy disk!  Bye bye DEC's floppy business!
There was something seriously wrong with DEC's notions about pricing
commodities!

<snip>

It was this sort thing that killed DEC.  I have never really understood
why DEC couldn't or wouldn't compete in a free market.  As far as I can 
see they were living in some sort of dream world were people would buy 
anything branded DEC even if someone even if someone else was selling an 
equivalent product for ten or fifteen percent of what DEC was asking!

R.I.P. Digital Equipment Corporation!

In article
<934cd784-0a89-42f8-b00c-7a6aeeb6e53e@z12g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
seasoned_geek <roland@logikalsolutions.com> writes: 

> It happens enough though.  The vast majority of the bands attending
> South by South West each year do not have any record company contracts
> or contacts.  

Yet.

> What they have is a Web site selling music, a few
> friends making the CD's in their garage, and music for sale on iTunes.

And they probably don't make a living from their music.

On Dec 1, 3:46=A0pm, hel...@astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---
undress to reply) wrote:
> In article
> <934cd784-0a89-42f8-b00c-7a6aeeb6e...@z12g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
>
> seasoned_geek <rol...@logikalsolutions.com> writes:
> > It happens enough though. =A0The vast majority of the bands attending
> > South by South West each year do not have any record company contracts
> > or contacts.
>
> Yet.
>
> > What they have is a Web site selling music, a few
> > friends making the CD's in their garage, and music for sale on iTunes.
>
> And they probably don't make a living from their music.

In truth, the ones who attend SxSW usually do make a living with their
music.  It's a rock & roll living though.  The kind you can put up
with when you are young.  Thankfully Airbone Toxin Event makes a whole
lot more than that now!