‘Yahoo’s latest quarterly earnings weren’t exactly the stuff of investors’ fantasies, though it performed about as well as expected during a relatively difficult quarter.’
How can any technology company expect to do well in such a hostile market?
This guy just refuses to believe the truth. Maybe I need a mousepad that says, “Michael S. Malone is a cocksucking whore.”
Here is another example of what happens when a journalist tries to think about what’s going to happen to the record industry because of Napster. He basically suggests that the recording industry is going to come up with its own version of MP3, only their version you’ll pay for.
He almost dismisses the fact that the MP3 format was introduced and developed entirely by the public. But it’s in fact this very point that ensures that the record industry will never seize control over it. To illustrate this, I’d like to use The Allegory of the Cave, from Plato’s Republic. In case you’re not familiar, it tells the story of people who live their whole lives in a cave, watching shadows playing on the wall in front of them. No one tries to look behind them to see what’s producing the shadows, they’re just content with looking forward, being almost hypnotized by them. One brave soul decides to venture out of the cave, and into the sunlight. What he experiences is both painful and liberating: the sunlight burns into his eyes, but he realizes the truth. This, of course, is where my analogy breaks down, because the character cannot deal with the truth. But I digress.
The people in the cave, to me, are like everyone who’s ever purchased a CD without knowing truly what forces lie behind the production of it. To us, it seemed as though basically the Band On The CD went through the entire process themselves, with the record company only having a logo on the bottom: the shadows on the wall. The MP3 revolution, however, has served the purpose of the brave person leaving the cave, only we are all now enlightened as to how the industry really is, and we now know we have power.
Maybe this is a fantasy of mine, but I see the record industry slowly falling into oblivion. They will not be able to harness this digital format, only succumb to it. I’m not saying Napster is the answer, but it certainly was the catalyst. The ingredients for this revolution have been around for a long time. Anyone who remembers bookmarking Hotline servers, FTP sites and Newsgroups to find the latest music knows this, but it wasn’t readily accessible to the public. Now, with broadband internet access in the home, Napster, and cheap easy-to-use MP3 players on the market, we have the power. The RIAA might as well go after Covad and AT&T for providing DSL and Cable access. They might as well go after Intel and Motorola for making faster processors. How about Diamond Multimedia for making the first really cool MP3 players?
This ‘MP3 thing’ is not just going to go away if Napster is done away with. And I’m not just talking about Gnutella and whatever else. I’m talking about the fact that we have control over what the record industry spoonfeeds us, and we don’t have to pay $17.99 for it any more.
I know you were all waiting with bated breath to see this:
Thanks, Jen!
This article (thanks to SVN for the link) poses some interesting points about the state of the internet today. He seems to think that ‘the net’ is dead, and everyone finds it boring and frustrating. I’ve got some things to say about that.
The whole problem is that the author assumes that everyone reading his article perceives ‘the net’ to be comprised solely of those sites who had staggering IPOs last year despite a complete lack of revenue. Anyone who didn’t see this year’s fall coming must have been a complete idiot. My definition of the net is this: sites like ours, and any other site devoted entirely to the distribution of knowledge, opinion, and joy. We had it first; the hackers, the geeks, the artists. It was ours. We built it (not me personally, I was like 15 when this all started). It would only make sense that when corporations and people with big ideas of big money came along seeking only to fatten their wallets instead of making the world a better place, that their brief world would fall. Now it’s back in our hands. And we now know what to do with it.
His first annoying comment is: ‘stocks don’t lie.’ My response? Oh, yes they very well do. A company’s stock price usually has very little to do with how the company is actually performing, and more to do with how the media perceives them to be performing (case in point: the recent drop in Apple’s stock price).
And this: ‘I keep waiting for my brain to come up with answers about how to beat the conundrum of how something like this column, with its built-in ephemeral nature, could get a much better return in print, where it might already be late, than on the Web, for which it’s perfect.
And here’s what I come up with: Nothing. It just makes no sense. None at all. But it’s the unbreakable reality that no one has been able to solve. It has only gotten worse, not better, as the years go by.’
He’s wrong only because he never got it in the first place. None of them ever did. And now they can’t figure it out. And I just can’t stop laughing. :>
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: everyone in the world is a sellout:
‘With its fate hanging in the balance, Napster Inc. has floated a possible solution that could end its legal battle with the Recording Industry Association of America: Turn the free service into a pay service.’
(Read the entire article here, but believe me, there’s nothing else interesting in it.)
Fuck that shit. Can I get a show of hands as to how many people are going to PAY to use Napster? The cat’s already out of the bag, and not only that, but both the cat and the bag were free of charge. Say goodbye to our beloved Napster, people. It’s too bad that Macster is carbonized, too, because Napster will be dead before OSX even comes out. Give me one reason to think otherwise, and I’ll gladly listen. But for right now, as long as the courts and the RIAA agree to this ‘pay-to-play’ bullshit, Napster is as good as dead to me. I’ll have to get that god-damned, slow-as-shit Gnutella working on my Mac.
If you want to know the honest-to-god truth, I’m kinda sick of covering Napster items. But this article I had to comment on….
‘…Napster is essentially a criminal organization that exists to help people steal. Now the question is, is there a legal use of Napster?’
Of course not, you buffoon. Jesus. The problem here is not with Napster being illegal, but with the copyright laws in the first place. Napster wouldn’t be illegal if it WEREN’T ILLEGAL. Get it? It shouldn’t be illegal.
This part of the story is the best: ‘Hollywood sued Sony over the VCR, a home-recording technology, alleging it would illegally cut into their profits’ Now, did you NOT know that the VCR is a home-recording technology? How stupid do you guys over at ABCNews.com think we are, anyway?
(By the way…the bolding of the section of that quote in the last paragraph was added by me…also, I specifically tried not to use the word ‘fuck’ in this post, seeing as how 7 of the last 10 posts contained some usage of it, usually more than once. As you can see, it would have fit nicely right into the ‘you buffoon’ statement above. But, I stopped myself, all for you dedicated readers.)
Are you using MacOS X Public Beta yet? If not, then fucking start. And don’t give me any of that ‘But I’m on a PC’ crap. Go buy a $800 iMac and fucking install it.
But I digress. I just found a cool site: Xappeal.org. Despite the fact that it sounds a little like a porn site, it’s actually a place to get info on OSX, carbon, cocoa, and the like. I just downloaded a piece of software called ‘Fire’ that lets me use my AIM account to talk with not only other AIMers, but other IM client users as well. So I can use this carbonized software to talk to you on your ICQ client, for example, using my AIM screenname and password. It’s rad. It’s a little like Jabber, only it’s for Mac, and it works. Try it out. I dig it. The icons could use some work, though.
So Apple’s stock dropped 48% in morning trading today. So who fucking cares (I actually do care) ? Sorry to reiterate what 808 wrote yesterday but this gets me fucking going. The following quotes (of course from one source) are from an AP story that I am sure is being used by every fucking so-called journalists and form of media. These fuckers wouldn’t think of coming up with their own stories, now would they?
“We saw this coming,” said Steve Fortuna, a PC hardware analyst with Merrill Lynch. “We clearly were not pushing Apple stock with our clients and were recommending Gateway and Dell.”
Maybe if there was a “PC hardware analyst with Merrill Lynch” that advised their clients to buy Apple and not Gateway and Dell the world would be a better place.
“They had no real new products, tough comparisons, and a stale upgrade cycle,” he said.
Okay, they had no real new products, tough comparisons, and a stale upgrade cycle?!?! What the fuck!!!!!
Apple recently introduced a snazzy-looking Power Mac G4 Cube – a “nice machine but too expensive,” Fortuna said. “Most consumers are looking for a $899 PC at Best Buy and not a $1799 machine.”
Yah, most non-thinking asshole consumers that want a fucking shitty product will take a $899 PC at Best Buy and whatever crock of shit you feed them.
Sorry about the word fucking- but I like that word, it has feeling.
First of all… What the fuck is afterhours trading and who thought of that crap?
For anyone who doesn’t know, Apple stock dipped almost 50% this evening in after hours trading… and of course the Media is running around publishing the general down fall of Apple crap.
The “little” stock dip this evening has caused the genius journalistic minds over at zdnet to publish crap like this.
Ok, so who thinks ZDnet is trying to buy hits using an ‘Apple has died’ story? I do. I hear that Newsweek sells twice as many issues everytime they have an Apple story or article gracing the cover… I suppose that the journalists feel they “know” better than anyone what companies are still “living” and which ones are just now “dying”. How could you live with yourself publishing utter bullshit like that??? I couldn’t.
I would buy serious loads of Apple stock tomorrow morning if I could get some money together, but as usual I can’t.
I think i’ts just another good week to be at Apple. 🙂
