I just read about Sony’s latest efforts to prevent paying customers from treating their possessions as something they paid for, rather than as something they’re borrowing from a megacorporation.
I like music and movies, and I want people who make music and film to make a decent living. That’s the starting point.
I do not believe that the way musicians and filmmakers have derived their income for the past seventy years or so (somewhere betweeen a hundred and fifty, depending on how one refines one’s crtieria) has become the necessary model for how they derive their income from this day forth for evermore, Amen. (As a side note, I want to observe that much of the music meagcorps’ income has developed from shifts in media: from LPs to cassettes, from cassettes to CDs, now possibly from CDs to SACDs; none of this has anything particular to do with “the artists,” just with the manufacturers.)
The ease with which we can reproduce and duplicate recorded performances means that any effort toward sustaining the business model of the mid-twentieth century will fail. It will, friends; and it drives me batty to see vast amounts of energy and resources thrown at shoring up a defunct system.
Here’s the clue: rethink the system (as Kevin, among others, is trying to do), don’t figure out ways to stick more digits into a swelling, leaky levee. Especially don’t try to stop the flood by making gravity illegal. All it will take is one daring executive decision by one major music distributor and the deluge will come—only we, the listeners, would be the beneficiaries of that flood. All it would sweep away is the rotten infrastructure of a corrupt, decaying industry.
Posted by AKMA at November 20, 2002 02:50 PM | TrackBackSony is also a daring charter member of Movielink (scroll down).
Posted by: Tom at November 21, 2002 05:56 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Cecily at January 13, 2004 08:54 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Rook at January 13, 2004 08:54 AMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Edwin at January 13, 2004 08:54 AM