Posts by Sam F
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Unless I'm mistaken, Dick Weir can sometimes still be caught on RNZN late at night, as can Lloyd Scott.
Oh, almost forgot. Any love for This Way Up around here?
whoever is responsible for the promos for Storytime needs to be beaten to death with a Bratz doll. I reckon it must put off multitudes of young listeners.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Nat Radio does seem to cater for the very young and Those of Advanced Years, with not much in between.
Eh... I don't know. I flatter myself that I fit somewhere in the middle there. It might be a function of my own interests - current affairs, social issues, history, New Zealand life as it exists outside of the mainstream media spotlight - but I don't feel particularly excluded as a (somewhat) young person by RNZN content.
For starters, the Internet, and also some bFM content via bCast, is always on tap for my particular taste in music or for a more explicitly "youth" perspective. And as someone who likes to (try to) use the ol' brain on a regular basis, I feel a damn sight more included by RNZN than by regular commercial radio. RNZN links me to a community of listeners who enjoy thinking and learning, regardless of age, and the podcasting adds flexibility which appeals to a huge range of listeners, younger people in particular.
I might add that, in the Internet age, public radio designed for broadcast over the Wireless feels almost outmoded enough to be hip, but that's really just a nice bonus.
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Underage NatRad listener reporting in. I was a bFM person until about the start of '06 when I got properly hooked on RNZN. It helped, I suppose, that my parents had been NatRad people since I was a wee tacker twirling the big Panasonic wireless dial to catch "Ears".
The regular news and weather updates hardly need be mentioned, but they are pretty much invaluable. Add Checkpoint to this and the TV news can go jump as far as I am concerned. I particularly love Mediawatch, Focus on Politics, At the Movies, and Our Changing World. Kim Hill on Saturday mornings I can take or leave depending on the guests - her chats with Max Gimblett recently and Henry Rollins a bit further back were absolute blinders. Chris Laidlaw I find is a nice mellow fit for Sunday mornings, and Sounds Historical followed by golden oldies is usually far better than you'd expect.
And a few on the downside: please God do not force me to listen to the banality of Jim Mora's weekday afternoon show, especially not the Panel. Music 101 I can also do without - I twirl the dial over to bFM on Saturday afternoons.
The online component is pretty much inseperable from my RNZN experience these days. I started downloading shows to listen to whilst in China in early 2007 and have not stopped since. My iPod is about 30 percent music versus 70 percent RNZN shows and interviews. It's something of a Sunday night ritual to scan the website feeds and drop in about six or eight promising programmes via iTunes, so I have something to do with my brain whilst at work, or save stuff to pass on to family and friends.
Yeah. I hope NatRad can keep on doing its thing for many decades to come.
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I was kinda expecting a dissection of the circular logic behind the post that I'd quoted, but hey, Lovecraft is always relevant...
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On the left-wing thing, it seems to me that right-wingers are either:
- stupid (Peters)
- intelligent but mad (Hide)
- intelligent but selfish (Key)
- intelligent but mad *and* selfish (Bush).Everyone else is left wing, and so aside from a quota of mad and/or selfish people, an intelligent media source will be intrinsically left wing.
Haha, what?
I eagerly await the return of Craig Ranapia in light of this blasphemy.
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I love those leper colonies... Back steps at a party is always the best conversation zone.
Emma, why do I agree with nearly everything you say about any given topic? It's... kind of freaking me out. :)
Me three. Only having to quickly Alt+Tab back to work stopped me from saying exactly the same thing earlier!
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I have hated the McCallum and Partners advert from the first time I saw it. This probably wasn't intended by the agency, but I got an impression of incredibly lame enforced bonhomie a la most office "casual dress days". This may have something to do with my extremely low tolerance for Elemeno P. I guess dull commercial rock and shouting "Let's Go Crazy!" is about as close to hip as you can drag a firm like Telecom.
I also noted the almost-too-perfect age, gender and ethnic diversity of McCallum and Partners' assembled staff, but in the end wrote this off as Telecom smartly picking the ideal photogenic business for their purposes before they cracked out the drinks and the cameras.
Now that I know it's all fake, of course, I can safely abandon my resentment of McCallum and Partners - that suspiciously perfect, cheesy "we are so casual on Fridays" fat-cat firm - and focus my hatred upon Telecom, where it belongs by right and tradition.
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I see Peter Low has provoked some dissension in the ranks.
"From now on, I want to distance myself from the AAG, which is becoming no different to the criminals and gangs that we are lobbying to have stronger laws against," said Francis Chai, chairman of the group's recruitment committee.
"Our original intention was to help victims, educate the community and act as a pressure group, not to go out there and pick fights. It is all wrong."
[...]
Two other committee members, who did not want to be named, also said they were resigning because of the intended association with triads.
"It took me years to get my status as a chartered accountant," said one member, "and I do not want to risk getting struck off because of my association with this group."
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isn't that what we have been doing with CD (only playable on a cd compatible player), Vinyl (only playable on a turntable or with a sharpened fingernail) VHS tape (VHS machine), DAT, and even mp3 (they don't play on my turntable or fingernail). apply that to most other consumer products, they work within specific boundaries (vacuum cleaner bags, batteries, pen refills etc).
The music formats you mentioned are standardised formats which will work on a wide variety of devices built to that particular standard. Vacuum cleaner bags are a bit more specific - but I prefer to hang onto my music for longer than a paper bag or a pen refill (I cannot speak on your behalf in this regard). If I'm trying to preserve music for a long time, it helps if it is transferable to a wide variety of devices after I've bought it. DRM is not terribly helpful in this regard.
And I thought you were a fan of music not as consumer good but as transcendental avenue to the heart of the performer? Oh well, carry on... ;)
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do you think it is just your computer they won't play on or is it all computers, so all people downloading from these sources can't play them on computers?
What's an acceptable percentage of users who can use the DRM content they paid for versus users who paid but get squat? How exacting should the hardware and software requirements be? What will it take before people walk away for MP3s which run on anything (and can be had for free by the unscrupulous)?
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if you're downloading music with drm in it and you download it to your computer and it doesn't play on your ipod (itunes) or Zune (what ever they use) then you're buying the wrong product.
its as sill as saying I bought diesel and it doesn't work in my regular 91 burning mazda 323.
Ah, but the reason we largely have two kinds of hydrocarbon-burning cars (diesel and petrol) is because those two fuels have been very convenient for several decades, and thus carmakers have an incentive to produce vehicles to a shared standard.
Computers and IT equipment, alas, are not so homogenous. I understand where you're coming from, but can you see why people might not want to buy music that can only work on a particular system which they then become locked into? I sense potential for format wars and profit-gouging from closed music systems - if consumers were stupid enough to opt for them, which I'm certain they're not.
You could always attempt to herd the proverbial cats of the music industry into a single DRM format and player standard - but once you've moved that particular mountain with your pinky finger, you can bet that the same millions of people who have been cracking DRM files and uploading them to bittorrent over the last few years will find a workaround for the same system in time, bringing us neatly back to square one.
To return to the car analogy: you might well mandate swamp or wood gas as the fuel of the future and sell proprietary vehicles to that standard, but you'd be facing some skepticism from legitimate consumers used to more convenient alternatives.