Ah, I get it.  My website needs more warez on it to be reputable.  And this people, is why Web of Trust models don’t equate to website trust.  Here’s a tip, it has to do with internet vigilantes being morons.

Previously…

Holy shit, they actually shipped the damned thing.

Also, has anyone else noticed that CentOS is still on 5.4, while RHEL 5.5 has been out for a month now?  Is that project dead or something?

Out of the 348 comments I have had in the last 90 days, 341 of them were rejected as spam. Sheesh.

Anyone who tells you that internet marketing is relevant is totally full of shit.  Depending on what product sector you’re marketing for, music, information technology, whatever, it does not really matter.  No, really, lets look at this:

• MySpace Music, for example, is a place where 1,000,000 horrible bands are shouting at each other every day.
• Web Hosting Talk and DigitalPoint are two forums filled with shouting braindead idiots who can’t really demonstrate why people should go with their services (other than playing a pricing war, which is utterly inane).
• Blogs like Kotaku are the least ridiculous place for the gaming industry to push their games, but it’s still pretty crappy, and bloggers only cover things they actually think are cool.
• Facebook is rather noisy as well, and suffers on a general scale in the same ways that MySpace, Web Hosting Talk and DigitalPoint have problems.

Or, look at it this way: why bother to make a posting on a site where all of your competitors are already established?  On a local level, it may make sense, but it certainly does not on a global or national level.

A recent New York Times article had this to say on the decline of the music industry:

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

Yes, that’s right.  Less than 25% of songs produced in the last year sold a single copy… then again, most songs out there are not very good.  Being forefront to the release of my father’s solo CD, I can definitely say that internet marketing hasn’t delivered much sales (unfortunately, I don’t wish to publish that sales data at this time).  But if you’re still doubting, look at the IT hosting industry, where the people with the crappiest products tend to attain the most success.  I blame this on the echo chamber that is Web Hosting Talk.

Actually, the IT hosting industry is worse, because when companies fail due to mismanagement, instead of falling flat on their face, they get acquired for their customer base.  While this is a good thing for the customers, it provides no motivation to do a proper job of managing a company, because you can just get a whole bunch of customers, spend all the money they give you on cocaine and hookers, and then sell out to a larger company, which happens all the time.  I wish I were kidding.

At least in the IT hosting industry and in the record business, the only real way to gain customers that matter, is through word of mouth.  However, many companies in both of those industries try to squelch out the very thing that is an effective marketing tool.

Because internet promotion is like shouting into the darkness, it’s become a dead thing now.  Many people don’t bother to do it that way.

This whole thing is just becoming Kafkaesque.  Why does Sony hate freedom so much?

By the way, in case you didn’t notice, there’s several CFW projects out now.  But watch out, you could get banned from PSN.  So being able to fool PSN’s anti-cheat platform will pose a serious challenge to firmware modders.

A way that this could be defeated is by modifying the PSN code itself to return the correct responses during the monitoring process.

It would behoove me to say that Sony would not be having this problem if they just left things alone.