Christina Warren

Member since: May 7th, 2006

Christina Warren's Latest Comments

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Googleholic for May 9, 2008 (Download Squad)

May 9th 2008 4:05PM It's a font called Zeppelin, but it does look a LOT like Gothic. :-)

Found Footage: Original iPod promotional video (TUAW.com)

Oct 12th 2007 6:13PM I had the 2G 10 GB version -- I came thisclose to buying the original 5 GB 1G after seeing a magazine ad and using Ephpod and MacDrive, but waited until the 2G 10/20 GB models came out in Fall 2002. The iPod never had any mechanical problems, that I can recall, but the charger ended up shooting sparks when plugged into the wall (kind of a fire hazard, no?) and so I exchanged it for a 3G when they were released the following May (I paid another $100 and upgraded to a 30 GB unit). I'm a DV fanatic, so I had firewire on my PC before buying my iPod, but that was the biggest limiting factor of the 1 and 2G iPods The dock connector might have screwed up some early accessories, but it opened the device up to a lot more people - even if they had to buy either a $30 cable in lieu of a firewire PCI or PCMICA card. I was the only person at my workplace (a large consumer electronics chain) who had an iPod as soon as we started carrying them in the store (with the 2G models) and was responsible for selling probably 90% of them that first holiday season and that really did make the device harder to sell. I'm rarely completely dead-on about technology trends, but I called the iPod from day one -- which is why I got one as soon as they were more widely available (the 1G units were only available from Apple and very few other retailers, and this was at the very beginning of the Apple Store roll-outs - when I found out about the 2Gs arrival that summer, I just decided to wait).

It's downright funny to remember the weird looks I used to get about my iPod back in 2002 -- one guy in one of my classes wanted to know if I had a "tape player" or something. Not long after I bought it, some idiot relatives tried to berate me (and my parents - as if they had any say in the matter) for buying a $400 MP3 player (I wasn't even 20 when I bought the thing - nearly $500 with tax and warranty for an audio player wasn't exactly inexpensive), especially one by Apple. Cut to two years later, same idiot relatives are bragging about the 3G iPod they bought on clearance (either a display or returned unit) after the 4G's came out - like they were so cutting edge.

Madonna leaving record label too (Download Squad)

Oct 12th 2007 12:32PM From what Wednesday's WSJ article laid out - and WMG's gross, but not untrue, rebuttal report - I don't know how much this is really going to impact Madonna's recording music career. I mean, I love Madonna, have seen her on each of her tours since 2001 (which was the first time I was really able to see her, seeing as she took the 8 year touring hiatus back when I was 10) - and I'll continue to see her in concert, but WMG still retains her back catalog - released on her own imprtint, Maverick, and they still get one more album out of the existing deal. The new deal is fantastic for Madonna, but realistically, I'm not sure how relevant or even profitable it is in terms of actual recorded music. Madonna will be 60 when the contract ends - and her biggest draw from a financial standpoint is touring and catalog sales -- not new recorded music (Music was a pretty substantial hit in 2000, but American Life and Confessions haven't been nearly as successful (I think both of her Greatest Hits albums still sell more per year than anything else)), which is why it makes sense for her to sign a pact with the largest touring/promotions company. If they want to distribute her post Warner album that comes out in 2008, hey - I look forward to buying/hearing it - but I think Madonna was smart enough to realize that she makes way more touring than she does off of new music, and with the industry in flux over the whole digital download thing, a guaranteed $120M for touring is substantially more than she could expect to receive based on record sales (not to mention having to fork over a percentage of tour profits to the label, as I feel certain that was part of the old Warner contract, as it is for most artists).

The only people taking an actual risk are Live Nation - and frankly, even if all of her recorded albums tanked, another World Tour like Confessions and they'll make their money back and then some (we're talking $80 a ticket minimums, $110 if you want good seats, not to mention t-shirts in the $50 range, and higher -- and I'm just one of the many morons who will pay that with glee to see Madge do her thing).

I think Madonna's deal isn't comparable to what Radiohead, Oasis and even the Eagles are doing, just because I see it as a restructuring of her financial portfolio -- putting the focus on what she knows will make her money - rather than acting as a new way to distribute content. I love Madonna, but I don't ever expect to see DRM-free MP3s (unless it is the industry standard by the time her first Live Nation release comes out), and she would never do a set your own price thing -- she's a business woman and she can still reach people through the old channels. Radiohead and Oasis want to challenge the system, in part, because they have never had the control that Madonna has had essentially since 1990 -- the Eagles are just trying to get the music out to people who I guess, they think will buy it. They might have the best selling album of all time (it's so close between Eagles Greatest Hits and Thriller), but really, who cares about the Eagles, like at all?

What this move does signify is how the profit centers in music have shifted -- record sales aren't the biggest boon for the artists - it's touring (and we've known this for a while, but this just shows how much the situation has shifted).

As for the question, can a nobody get Madonna-like success from MySpace? At this point, no. I'd say the best that an online phenom can hope for would be an Ani DiFranco situation. Granted, in the DIY movement, DiFranco did much of what the web was doing before the web existed (though to her discredit, Righteous Babe has not embraced the online world the way they should have -- but she probably claims that's about artistic integrity) -- and even though she's one of the 50 highest grossing touring artists every year, her mainstream Q rating is really low (12 years ago, it was high - but not now) and her supporters, while large, are their own little world. That's what I see happening with MySpace bands -- they might have success in their own little groups or worlds, but in the big picture - no, they won't be able to compete with the huge acts or the hugely promoted new acts -- at least not for a while. The entire recording industry system is not broken - the distribution chain and the dispersion of wealth is a big problem -- but radio, to a lesser extent music videos (which have been supplanted to a small degree by YouTube and to a larger degree by placement in TV show soundtracks) and the publicity machine that can only come with a seasoned, well-connected publicist (and not a MySpace page run by the drummer's girlfriend) are what make stars. A label might find someone online and they might become huge, but I don't really think that the online world is going to produce the next Madonna on its own -- at least not for quite some time. Taking over distribution is only part of the equation; I personally feel that the biggest problem with the music industry is radio - not the CD sales method -- and overthrowing corporate radio, the ClearChannel and Cumulus's of the world, isn't going to happen from things like MySpace or SNOCAP.

$220,000 Jammie Saga: fined P2P user may appeal (Download Squad)

Oct 9th 2007 3:12PM I'm actually kind of surprised that the defendant had to go to MySpace to try to raise money for her appeal, as I had assumed (wrongly, clearly) that she had taken measures to get her case funded by the EFF, ACLU, a non-profit for Native American litigants or you know, a pro-bono deal with a great lawyer who wants the publicity (although had she done that, she probably wouldn't have lost - or at least would have avoided biased jury instructions - so I guess I shouldn't be surprised). I don't know what universe $1000 will pay for even a draft of an appeal refuting damages in this magnitude -- again, I would think she would be better off foregoing begging on MySpace (which just looks tacky) and begging the old fashioned way by getting the ACLU, the EFF or a pro-bono deal.

As for her appeals arguments - not knowing the case and not being a lawyer, my very first thought was that unless the RIAA explicitly can prove that the artists whose music was shared lost sales that amounted to ~$9000 a track (and if they are arguing that overall album sales were lost and not just individual track downloads, they are really saying that ~$90,000 in sales were lost, if you average 10 tracks per CD - and that's just absurd), the damages will absolutely be overturned. If the jury got biased instructions - that in and of itself is not grounds for a reversal with prejudice (meaning that the RIAA couldn't bring the case again), because it would fall more under the theoretical "inadequate counsel" argument (and if she wasn't funded by legal aid and she paid out of pocket, that argument is much harder to make - a bad lawyer and an inadequate lawyer are different) -- but it would certainly be arguable in an appeals sense, to lower the verdict.

But as I said last week - I see this whole thing (not this particular case, unless a really good law firm takes up the cause, but the whole download/sharing thing period) ending up at the Supreme Court. At the very least, groups like the ACLU and EFF should start lobbying for a reduction in statutory minimums of fines in these kinds of cases - distinguishing individual downloads for personal use from widespread infringement/piracy (which is what they were designed to address).

God, it really does make sense now -- the woman had a straight-up shitty lawyer and that's why she lost and lost by that much. If any lesson comes out of this it should be that people who want to fight the man should make sure they have good counsel. I mean, I'm not fan of extortion, which is what I consider the $3000 settlements - but judgments like this just make it more likely that people will pay rather than fight.

BusinessWeek: Why I Won't Buy an iPhone (TUAW.com)

Oct 8th 2007 9:52PM @ Kai -- I totally agree

@ #43 -- clearly you haven't spent a lot of time with some of the more advanced Windows Mobile/Symian/RIM devices. As Kai said, in a limited scope, the iPhone is without a doubt the best of the available phones right now - for a very specific set of features - however, the amount of time they it will remain the best phone, even for that limited set of features, is shrinking by the day. Buying music through iTunes directly from the phone is one of the only areas I can actually see the iPhone remaining better or even different from any other smart phone released in the next six months.

And those other smart phones? Are hackable, in the sense that you can load a cooked ROM image without having your phone not connect. A guy I'm dating has some Asian super smart phone using a modified ROM image, running on AT&T -- and no, he doesn't have visual voicemail and he can't buy his music through iTunes -- but he has full wifi, GPRS/EDGE. bluetooth access - can create and install custom apps for his phone, oh - and when he leaves the country, he can take the SIM out and not have to deal with AT&T's insane international calling charges. He's a high end phone enthusiast (his job is to oversee application development for a variety of mobile devices used internally at USPS - on the side he likes to hack mobile devices and write or contribute to app development), but like me, doesn't want an iPhone, not because Apple has locked out third-party development (that will come - it'll just be in the same closed-system/we must have total control style that third parties have always had to deal with with Apple) -- or even because they are breaking the phones of users who unlock them (I think that's disgusting, but I concede they have every right to close the security holes that allowed the unofficial unlock, seeing as every other phone unlock mechanism that I have ever seen or used was not done by reverse engineering the phone but by reverse engineering or blatantly copying the official software used by the manufacturer to unlock said phone -- thus doing something the phone was absolutely designed to do (even if a carrier, like AT&T, didn't want to unlock the phone, the phone could still be officially unlocked) - not creating a function that it seems clear Apple never intended to support) -- but because we resent being tethered to one carrier.

What companies that make their business out of selling/designing/engineering cell phones do that Apple hasn't done is that they license their flagship product to more than one carrier. Motorola did it right with the Razr -- periods of carrier exclusivity, followed by exclusive colors/modified features on subsequent carriers -- with every carrier still retaining the original model (well, except for Verizon because of their whole "we hate Bluetooth stance -- but you can still use a non-Verizoned CDMA phone that is unlocked with Verizon). But no - Apple had to try to completely control their revenue stream, even if the end result is that they make substantially less money than if they had licensed the phone to multiple carriers.

Having typed all that -- I still agree with a lot of the iPhone faithful that the vast majority of iPhone users don't give a shit about homebrew apps for anything other than unlocking. And if unlocking can't be done without bricking the phone - most iPhone users are going to be content to use it as it was designed with the carrier it was designed to use.

I have thought, since the very beginning, that there was a disconnect with the way Apple marketed and hyped the product and with the actual userbase the phone was meant to serve. This is a phone was was priced at an enthusiast level - in large part because it is not subsidized and Apple is used to being able to mark-up prices for "enthusiast appeal" -- but that was designed for a regular non-business/non-international/non-phone fanatic user. It's intended userbase is the same as the Razr, not the Blackberry, not the Dash, not the guy I'm dating's i-Mate. And while you can defend Apple for a lot of the brouhaha that has come out of the iPhone, I put the blame on what is ultimately a marketing snafu squarely on Steve Jobs shoulders.

Yahoo! Mail turns 10 (Download Squad)

Oct 8th 2007 8:13PM I got my first HotMail account in seventh grade, or 1996, I think (though it may have been 1995) and I got a Yahoo! account at the beginning of 9th grade/1997. I used to do volunteer tech support with GeoCities, and when Yahoo! bought them, Yahoo! (I got 25 free shares of stock out of it and I cashed out in late '99 which made something I started doing out of boredom at 14 help buy my first car) - so I used the Yahoo! mail stuff on occasion, but HotMail was my web-based e-mail of choice (and even then, I've always preferred Outlook to web mail, especially after I bought my first domain in 2000) until GMail went into beta in 2004 (I was fortunate to get in pretty early because a close friend works at Google and was working on the project at the time). GMail is the only web-mail app that I've ever used for anything other than emergencies (well, at least prior to my first ISP POP account in 1996), but I still have that Yahoo! account from 1997 so that I can program my TiVo from their site if I need to do that.

Yahoo! Mail turns 10 (Download Squad)

Delicious Monster previews Library 2 web export (TUAW.com)

Oct 7th 2007 1:44PM I'm very excited about DL2 -- I have about 1500 DVDs that need importing (I tried to do it last month when I was alphabetizing/moving all my TV DVDs to their new shelving, but it seriously got too frustrating with the eyesight barcode detection only working may 1/3 of the time and my living room was full of stacks of media worth more than my car, plus my mom was over and leaning over my shoulder and so I said "screw it") and cataloging for insurance purposes (I have a basic title list but I'd like to have the UPC). Depending on how well the database works, DL2 or the *pedias will hopefully eventually catalog every DVD, music CD and non-textbook I own -- and maybe my current-gen video games too (all my retro games are in my parent's basement in plastic bins or with a now married ex-boyfriend who I'm afraid to call because his wife hates me - but he has my NES, SNES and like half my games and the NES was totally restored right before I let him borrow it like 4 years ago). Organization can be so sexy.

Ask TUAW: Swapfiles, Bluetooth Caller ID, Audio interfaces, iPhone streaming and more (TUAW.com)

Oct 7th 2007 10:25AM To Jon -- the only way it will sort the albums in the correct tracklist order if you are doing it by "date added" is if you add the tracks either individually or as a playlist - otherwise, it often adds smaller/shorter files before larger/longer files (the same thing happens when you purchase tracks off of iTunes,if you sort by "date added" the tracklisting is rarely in the correct order because track 3 might download before track 1). You could try creating an M3U file your albums - but unless you have some program like Media Range or you are comfortable writing or searching for an apple script, that could be time consuming (though no less time cosuming than adding files individually.

Apple working on pressure sensitive touchscreens (TUAW.com)

Oct 6th 2007 12:22PM I think that could be hugely beneficial, not just for a tablet (which would be awesome) but forfuture iPhone/iTouch models. Even for something like volume control, instead of tapping the levels higher or dragging a bar with your finger, how hard or how soft you press could instantly raise/lower the level. And it would be great for adding right-click functionality to the iPhone/iTouch that would be intuitive, like, after selecting text, pressing firmly opens the menu, where as pressing softly let's you change the position.

Very, very cool.