UPDATE - hours after I posted this Ed sent me another link, and one that couldn’t have been more relevant to the subject. The head of Warner Music admits that the industry was wrong to go to war with consumers, and what’s more he delivered that speech at a conference for mobile phone companies warning them of not repeating the same mistakes on the digital platforms that were made on normal computer platforms. Additional food for thought…

Continuing the recent series of posts about piracy and torrents, a friend of mine (Ed again!) sent me a very interesting link from someone who used Oink, worked in the music industry at various majors and who puts forward some very interesting points regarding the whole debate surrounding piracy, outdated business models and new technology.

You can check the article here. While not everyone may agree with his total disregard for the record industry (the majors that is, not the indies) it’s hard not to see some sense in a lot of the points put across - especially with regards to the record industry essentially missing the boat 8 years ago when p2p networks first surfaced. Something I’ve also mentioned before and which I really believe is what this whole debates does boil down to. They missed the boat and then went for the worst of the two remaining options: pretending that they were the victims and continually refusing to move on and adapt to the new world of music as a digital medium, with no tangible, physical aspect. There are other good points, regarding the bully tactics employed by the remaining majors and organisations like the RIAA, as well as some of the suggested possibilities for a new business model (which I don’t totally agree with).

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written by Laurent \\ tags: computers, Music, Random

Learning is not always fun, especially if you don’t want to do it or if it seems like an impossible task. Learning Kanji when you’re not Japanese, and didn’t start at an early age, falls quite neatly into the latter category (or the first one too, but at that point you’ve got to be thinking about why you’re learning something like Kanji, which you can get by without). The thing with Kanji is that once you get the past the feeling of pointlessness, and the other one that makes you want to bang your head violently against a wall because people today are still using such an antiquated, and totally impractical, way of writing and communicating, you actually realise that it’s quite good. And interesting. And fun. Really I’m serious.

It took me roughly 8 months before I seriously contemplated learning Kanji properly. And I’m glad I waited because it’s made it that much more interesting, especially after you get to the point where you know and can read the phonetic kana alphabets fine but you’re stuck on the Kanji and therefore have no other option but to move forth. My first step towards Kanji mastery was to buy the first set of the excellent White Rabbit Press Kanji cards, which are used to help you train for the first levels of the Japanese Language Profiency Test. Cards are cool and being a teacher makes you automatically down with flashcards anyways, so it’s a winner. There’s a few annoying things about them, including the order of the cards and the usefulness of some of the example sentences/words, but by and large they’re a great way to get stuck into Kanji and open a whole world of daily understanding.

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Popularity: 4%

written by Laurent \\ tags: Japan, kanji, learning, video games