Just enter in the equation you want solved (say, for example, Solve 2x3 - 6.543x = x2, then click the Show steps link to see how you could solve the problem yourself next time without the help of Wolfram Alpha. It'll then walk you through all the steps necessary to reach your answer. TI-85, eat your heart out.
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.
Now, I don't ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years' worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn't out of the question.
So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of… $62.47.
What the fuck?
I mean, w! e all kn ow that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they're also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn't insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.
Here's the thing: I work at Rhapsody. I know what we pay Warner Bros. for every stream and download, and I can look up exactly how many plays and downloads we've paid them for each TMJ tune that Warner controls. Moreover, Warner Bros. knows this, as my gig at Rhapsody is the only reason I was able to get them to add my digital royalties to my statement in the first place. For years I'd been pestering the label, but I hadn't gotten anywhere till I was on a panel with a reasonably big wig in Warner Music Group's business affairs team about a year ago
The panel took place at a legal conference, and focused on digital music and the crisis facing the record industry**. As you do at these things, the other panelists and I gathered for breakfast a couple hours before our session began, to discuss what topics we should address. Peter Jenner, who manages Billy Bragg and has been a needed gadfly for many years at events like these, wanted to discuss the little-understood fact that digital music services frequently pay labels advances in the tens of millions of dollars for access to their catalogs, and it's unclear how (or if) that money is ever shared with artists.
I agreed that was a big issue, but said I had more immediate and mundane concerns, such as the fact that Warner wouldn't even report my band's iTunes sales to me.
The business affairs guy (who I am calling "the business affairs guy" rather than naming because he did me a favor by finally getting the digital royalties added to my statement, and I am grateful for that and don't want this to sound like I'm attacking him personally, even though it's abo! ut to se em like I am) said that it was complicated connecting Warner's digital royalty payments to their existing accounting mechanisms, and that since my band was unrecouped they had "to take care of R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers first."
That kind of pissed me off. On the one hand, yeah, my band's unrecouped and is unlikely ever to reach the point where Warner actually has to cut us a royalty check. On the other hand, though, they are contractually obligated to report what revenue they receive in our name, and, having helped build a database that tracks how much Rhapsody owes whom for what music gets played, I'm well aware of what is and isn't complicated about doing so. It's not something you have to build over and over again for each artist. It's something you build once. It takes a while, and it can be expensive, and sometimes you make honest mistakes, but it's not rocket science. Hell, it's not even algebra! It's just simple math.
I knew that each online service was reporting every download, and every play, for every track, to thousands of labels (more labels, I'm guessing, than Warner has artists to report to). And I also knew that IODA was able to tell me exactly how much money my band earned the previous month from Amazon ($11.05), Verizon (74 cents), Nokia (11 cents), MySpace (4 sad cents) and many more. I didn't understand why Warner wasn't reporting similar information back to my band – and if they weren't doing it for Too Much Joy, I assumed they weren't doing it for other artists.
To his credit, the business affairs guy told me he understood my point, and promised he'd pursue the matter internally on my behalf – which he did. It just took 13 months to get the results, which were (predictably, perhaps) ridiculous.
The sad thing is I don't even think Warner is deliberately trying to screw TMJ and the hundreds of other also-rans and almost-weres they've signed over the years. The reality is more boring, but also more depressing. Like I said, they don't actually ow! e us any money. But that's what's so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won't cost them anything.
They just can't be bothered. They don't care, because they don't have to.
An interlude, here. Back in 1992, when TMJ was still a going concern and even the label thought maybe we'd join the hallowed company of recouped bands one day, Warner made a $10,000 accounting error on our statement (in their favor, naturally). When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn't just befuddled by my anger – he laughed at it. "$10,000 is nothing!" he chuckled.
If you're like most people – especially people in unrecouped bands – "nothing" is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like "$10,000," but he seemed oblivious to that. "It's a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?"
These days I work for a reasonably large corporation myself, and, sadly, I understand exactly what the guy meant. When your revenues (and your expenses) are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $10,000 mistakes are common, if undesirable.
I still think he was a jackass, though, and that sentence continues to haunt me. Because $10,000 might have been nothing to him, but it was clearly something to me. And his inability to take it seriously – to put himself in my place, just for the length of our phone call – suggested that people who care about $10,000 mistakes, and the principles of things, like, say, honoring contracts even when you don't have to, are the real idiots.
As you may have divined by this point, I am conflicted about whether I am actually being a petty jerk by pursuing this, or whether labels just thrive on making fools like me feel like petty jerks. People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance th! e musici ans when they're first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it's the bands' fault when those advances aren't recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, "Too Much Joy never earned us shit!"*** as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly).
I don't want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man's world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice.
Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn't being evil, just careless and unconcerned – an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****
I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, "Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why." I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released – an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely – that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner's side, he said he'd look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: "We don't normally do this for unrecouped bands," he ! said. "B ut, I was told you'd asked."
It's possible I'm projecting my own insecurities onto calm, patient Danny, but I'm pretty sure the subtext of that comment was the same thing I'd heard from $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man: all these figures were pointless, and I was kind of being a jerk by wasting their time asking about them. After all, they have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to deal with, and the label actually owes those guys money.
Danny may even be right. But there's another possibility – one I don't necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There's a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today's technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.
If that's true (and I emphasize the if, because it's equally possible that people everywhere, including major label accounting departments, are just dumb and lazy)*****, then there's more than my pride and principles on the line when I ask Danny in Royalties and Licensing to answer my many questions. I don't feel a burning need to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers any more money, but I wouldn't mind doing my small part to get us all out of the sad world $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man inhabits.
So I will keep asking, even though I sometimes feel like a petty jerk for doing so.
I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I'm simply explaining why I'm not embarrassed that I "owe" Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn't make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn't lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase "just don't earn enough" for the word "lose."
** The whole conference took place at a semi-swank hotel on the island of St. Thomas, which is a funny place to gather to talk about how to save the music business, but that would be a whole different diatribe.
*** This same dynamic works in reverse – I interviewed the Butthole Surfers for Raygun magazine back in the 1990s, and Gibby Haynes described the odd feeling of visiting Capitol records' offices and hearing, "a bunch of people go, 'Hey, man, be cool to these guys, they're a recouped band.' I heard that a bunch of times."
**** Again, I am avoiding using his real name because he returned my call promptly, and patiently answered my many questions, which is behavior I want to encourage, so I have no desire to lambaste him publicly.
***** Of course, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive – it is also possible that labels are ! evil and avaricious AND dumb and lazy, at the same time.
Reprinted with permission from Too Much Joy.
The Zero is available in several different configurations, ranging from a wall sconce to ceiling lamps to floor and table models. The lamps also come with color filters and perforations that create an other worldly ambiance with LED lighting effects. It's worth checking out Punto's other products as well—their self-titled and Linea lines are equally as impressive. [Punto via Trendir]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9KqQxSB7hFY/this-hobbit-hole-has-a-serious-view
Designed by SeARCH, a Dutch architecture firm, and Christian Müller Architects, the home features an enormous patio with an elliptical opening designed to accentuate the view. The old-looking barn in the distance even features an underground tunnel that serves as an entrance into the home. All in all, the design was so unique that the builders were able to skirt around the notoriously strict building requirements in the area. Absolutely beautiful—which is why you should hit the following link for more images. [Iwan Bann via Arbitare via Fast Company]
Researchers have figured out that they can modify existing electromagnetic pulse technology and use it to cut hard steels about seven times faster than with a laser and at only a fraction of the cost of other methods. That's not even the crazy part though:
The impact pressure [of the pulse] on the steel is approximately 3,500 bar, which equates to the weight of three small cars on a single fingernail.
Three cars on a single fingernail. Three cars. One fingernail. Forget cool buzzing sounds from mechanical tools and the pewpewpew of lasers. That description alone makes this the coolest cutting method I've heard of today. [Phys Org]
Photo by Current
Niesluchowski was known as NEZ at the SETI volunteer program. He scored 575 million hours of data mining during a nine years period, which pushed him to "god" status among the SETI@home users, who in 2007 were writing things like this:
What is NEZ? Who is NEZ? Is he a god?
According to the Higley Unified School District investigation, Niesluchowski went from installing SETI—a software program that analyzes data from radiotelescopes in search of intelligent signals—in every computer in the district to purchasing more powerful computers specifically for that task. And downloading porn. And left all the machines running 24/7. And adopting 18 school computers at home. In total, the school says that his Earthling antics got the bill up to $1.6 million. [Arizona Republic via Techdirt]
Micron's new C300 2.5-inch SSDs are incredibly fast. We're talking 50% faster than the current market leaders, and fast enough to downright shame any hard drive. Yeah, there's a new SSD speed champ every week, but these are damned impressive.
The C300 SSDs, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities when they're released sometime early next year, whups the current top dogs in read/write speeds. It's also the first to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0, which allows 6Gb/s throughput, twice that of SATA 2.0—but regardless of whether it's using 2.0 or 3.0, it's still blazingly fast. It's rated at 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write—for comparison, the champ, OCZ's Agility EX, gets 255MB/s and 195MB/s read and write speeds, respectively. You can see it compared with "a market leader" (probably either the OCZ or maybe Intel's X25-M) here:
By using the new ONFI 2.1 specification, it's also got nearly five times the data speed per transfer, which is basically means you'll be seeing improved performance while multitasking.
The C300 series is expensive, obviously, at about $350 for the 128GB and $715 for the 256GB (and then only when bought in bulk), but it's a pretty incredible performer—hopefully we'll be seeing it in some equally impressive laptops when it's released next year. [Micron]
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/intel-ssd-firmware-02hd-brings-back-trim-support-sans-bugs/
Intel's 34nm X25-M G2 drives might not've had the most peaceful of existences so far, but you can't fault the company's efforts to fix whatever maladies have popped up. The latest firmware update from Santa Clara brings back the lauded Trim support, but this time leaves the drive-killing antics behind. User experiences so far have been positive, though unsurprisingly a couple of people have questioned whether Trim is in fact enabled on their drives -- clearly, the difference between fast and really, really fast is not as distinguishable as we like to think. The source link will provide you with the latest firmware update tool and the precious new code -- if you dare risk it.Intel SSD firmware 02HD brings back Trim support, sans bugs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/viewsonic-outs-23-inch-vp2365wb-and-26-inch-vp2655wb-ips-lcd-mon/
Continue reading ViewSonic outs 23-inch VP2365wb and 26-inch VP2655wb IPS LCD monitors
ViewSonic outs 23-inch VP2365wb and 26-inch VP2655wb IPS LCD monitors originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/kingston-40gb-ssdnow-review/
Continue reading Kingston 40GB SSDNow review
Kingston 40GB SSDNow review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | CommentsSource: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/motorola-sholes-tablet-detailed-sounds-as-tasty-as-wed-hoped/
Motorola Sholes Tablet detailed, sounds as tasty as we'd hoped originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/intel-crams-48-cores-onto-stamp-sized-processor-wants-to-do-wha/
Intel crams 48 cores onto stamp-sized processor, wants to do what Cell did originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/time-inc-shows-off-magazine-tablet-demo-plans-future-anger-abo/
Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |AllThingsD, The Wonder Factory (YouTube) | Email this | Comments
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/02/microsoft-giving-bing-maps-a-3d-overhaul-tacking-on-apps-for-go/
Microsoft giving Bing Maps a 3D overhaul, tacking on apps for good measure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Because of that low power consumption and tiny package, the Mobile-ITX should be great for always-on devices and even smaller gadgets. As far as whta features it brings to the table, it looks like there's support for "core CPU, chipset and memory functionality and I/O that includes the CRT, DVP and TTL display support, HD Audio, IDE, USB 2.0, as well as PCI Express, SMBus, GPIO, LPC, SDIO and PS2 signals." Wowza. Quite a lot for such a small fellow. [Hot hardware via Engadget]
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