I recently went through some personal problems which kept me from posting on here as often as I would have liked.

Things have settled down now and I should be spending some time updating this blog more often.

Posted on July 29th, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Personal | No Comments »

Nearly everyone has heard that the record business is hurting these days, if you haven’t then you are officially living under a rock.

As of 2007 48% of American teens are NOT buying music on CD and piracy over P2P networks is soaring to new highs.  In turn though this has led to the rising success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3, these services sell music at prices people are willing to pay and in a way that lets them use the music how they want.  Kids are still customers they just prefer to listen to music their own way now instead of how the record companies intended.

All these large media companies are being run by Absolute Idiots who are much like the big three American car companies of the 70′s in that they have no idea how to make money in this new and different market.  The President of the RIAA even tried to reduce the consumers right to fair use (back a couple years ago) as a way to save his industries decaying business model.  Hey if you can’t rip a CD to your computer then your more likely to buy the same song everytime you want to play it on a new device.

Unlike the American car companies of yore these buffoons managed to sink their own battleship by suing Napster out of existence in 1999 when this whole music sharing thing was still in its infancy. Things only get worse for them in 2003 when Apple introduced the iTunes Store and with it a price fixing system for online sales.  That left these Music Industry Idiots with a devalued product that led to Apples lead in portable devices (iPods) which is distribution channel that they can’t possibly control.

One may be wondering where to go from here as the business appears to be in the gutter with the fans used to free, open and cheap music.   There may not be one answer that can help them gain back the prestige they once enjoyed.  That said the single best thing they could do today would be to stop suing customers for file sharing and embrace it.

They should:

• Create an open license (similar to the Creative Commons license I use on here) for artists to share music online and help them distribute it by starting social networking sites that help artists reach the fans.
• They need to work with each other because if the big labels could collaborate they wouldn’t waste time and money competing against each other (aka the way it doesn’t need to be spent}).
• Embrace open codecs, MP3 is king only because you don’t support open standards.
• Support a universal portable media player project with the likes of Google to help break the Apple Monopoly.

My blog is not even a blip on the radar of these companies, even if they did hear about this post they wouldn’t change.  Corporate America is just so much of a beurocracy that it won’t come around until the next generation unless something major happens first.  Until then I think its fair to say the Pirate Bay’s of this world will have a large audience.

Posted on April 21st, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Industry News, Music | No Comments »

If anyone who knows me ends up reading this blog they would probably chastise me for not having something up about my man Obama.

This past weekend his campaign called me again, this is like the fourth time this year that they called me but this time they had my name messed up in the database.  Instead of being called “Mr. Campbell” or “Lane” they had me in as “Campbell”.  The conversation went well but thats because I want this man to be my next president, no ammount of disinformation in the database is going to change that.  The troubling factor for me was that the gentlemen on the phone seemed completely disinterested that my name was wrong and even after he was corrected he insisted on calling me “Campbell”.

Still regardless of a bad volunteer I am willing to campaign for the man and I hope that America wakes up and votes Obama this November.

Posted on April 14th, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Politics | No Comments »

I was busy knocking back a couple brews trying to enjoy the relative peace of my place when my brain started nagging me to make my Inaugural post on here.  As you can tell by this post I gave in and am going to take the initiative to start sharing my thoughts.  To set the tone of this blog I will start it off by posting an opinion piece that is based entirely on my point of view and should not be cited or seen as anything but.  If you don’t agree with me then comment away on any article where you feel I have gone astray.

I am not a professional writer, I am a professional technician.  Please excuse my typographical errors and try to focus on the content instead.

Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Site News | No Comments »

Today on Digg I read an article called NVIDIA CEO: “We’re Going to Open a Can of Whoop Ass” that made it to the top 10 for the day.  This article summarizes the ongoing war in discrete GPU technology in which Intel has chosen to play the role of the sleeping giant.

It’s easy to jump in here and be speculative on how Intel is going to make its splash in the market, what isn’t easy is trying to predict where the market will be in 1 – 2 years.  Having been a PC gamer for several years I have the sense that in the coming months AMD will be courting a buyout (just look at their financial state) and that Nvidia will be one of the big names interested in a takeover.

The repeated attempts by AMD to take back the performance crown from Intel in the CPU realm have been met with Intel releasing newer, faster and less expensive architectures.  Each of these releases has been aimed toward unseating AMD’s position in everything from budget chips to the high end enthusiast chips.  With the news of its CTO departing it seems that AMD is on the ropes and more ripe than ever for a juicy buyout.  Only time will tell but if we see a merger this year I don’t doubt that Nvidia would be interested in acquiring its historically largest competitor.

Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Industry News, Technology | No Comments »