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He makes these things available _free_ to advance science and art in general.

Among the things that will NOT be affected by IPIX are the ability of his software to correct for normal lens pincushion and chrominance distortion (luminance? the darkening of edges of an image), the ability to do wild and very high-resolution distortions for artistic purposes, the ability to take rectangular images and modify them so you can stitch them into a panorama (I actually have a QTVR panorama of my old studio's early days, done exclusively with Helmut's tools and hand-stitched (with no stretching) before his software helped you do that).

Going after Helmut is a crime. I am glad he is showing the same patient methodical attitude that pervades the rest of his work, and plans to work around the problem in reasonable ways.

My secret fear is that IPIX will try and push its limit, for instance attempting to muzzle Helmut entirely because his algorithms and tools CAN BE used or adapted to the fisheye case. In that event, my outrage would become unbearable- it would be a matter of suppressing the desire to go buy an uzi and HUNT THEM DOWN, and instead settling for scraping together money and paying someone to HUNT THEM DOWN LEGALLY. As in EFF, or some other likely candidate.

IPIX had better know its limits. I consider too-extensive persecution of a 'open' scientist to be an act of war. It's an act of war against the community of scientific information sharing that got all of us where we are, and I can't consider that a situation for simple workarounds. At some point you have to wage war back, whether that's through lawyers or through DOSing or through people planting rumours and destroying their company's stock price even more, or even, if the persecuted scientist is being threatened with imprisonment or violence, threatening back in kind. So far, the most extensive threat being made has been fines and imprisonment through use of the government as a weapon. In other industries (*cough* music industry *cough*) threat of physical violence has often been a quiet and unremarked additional element. Things are escalating, and if people like IPIX decide they want to start acting like the shadier sides of the music biz in their desire to stamp out all possible competition for their product, there needs to be a response ready.

I can't believe anyone would try and suppress Helmut Dersch. The question that is obviously on my mind is, how FAR will they go if unchallenged? Who else is being stepped on? And, can we be certain that all the coercive force being applied is strictly confined to narrow legal claims and patent-related demands? Record labels have often been known to use muscle in dealing with radio stations and programming- hell, Bob Marley's rise was partly reliant on just this sort of strong-arming. How do we know if companies like IPIX cross that line? And there are plenty of companies like IPIX :P

The following is taken from my airwindows/studio page- slightly out of date but with some effective ideas in it- especially mass-loading the case walls with aluminum tape.

"Finally, before we get into instruments, here's a glance over the ways Airwindows controls ambient noise. The main computer's case is heavily reinforced with aluminum tape to damp and weight it (several pounds worth) and the front bezel is concrete-filled. Extensive internal damping on both computers is used to cut drive and fan noise. Finally, and as shown here, the fans from the computers are run into acrylic fur lined ducts (applied to the outside as well for amusement value and minor sound absorption) that powerfully damp and absorb fan and air handling noise, as well as block direct sound paths from inside the computer. On the far right you can see the humidifier Airwindows runs (in the kitchen, as part of maintaining a comfortable environment, particularly for vocalists) and that, too, makes use of a large duct which cuts its noise down by more than half. It's shut off for serious work or monitoring: the main computer, which cannot be, is approximately twice as loud as the ticking of the (also sound-damped!) clock in the room, and the MIDI sequencing computer is about half again as loud as the ticking of the clock. To give a reference for what this is like, both computers running simultaneously are not as loud as the ordinary, not-especially-loud refrigerator in the other room- they're roughly as loud as water running through pipes elsewhere in the building, which is slightly louder than the ticking of the clock. A more pro-audio reference: neither computer is as loud as a running ADAT with head spinning and tape loaded."

You can't bitch about not having code because other people don't really owe you anything. I develop 'Mastering Tools' at my own pace to suit my own needs. The point is, through _developing_ free software I make it possible for other people to develop other things, offshoots in which the hard work is done. I don't think anyone without a mastering-grade studio could have tuned the dithers I've written- you need specialised monitoring to do that. But now anyone can make a simple little app that just sticks a different GUI on it, or uses some of the dither routines for, say, a game in which it's important that distant footsteps _sound_ distant, in which depth cues are actually well handled instead of sound blaster crap. This is the way the world works- or should work.

And if nobody re-uses my GPLed routines, that's fine too- I wrote them for _me_ and have already got my investment in time back many times over, in the effectiveness and quality of my new CD mastering processes.

As far as I know, it only makes sense to do that with terms- but I enjoyed it so much I thought it'd make a pretty nifty GUI. The term-only GUI :D

I can supply an example, as well. Here's the deal- a lot of the skills needed are specialised. Computer geeks don't necessarily know squat about how to (for instance) make sound that is really, seriously impressive. But _other_ types of geeks, like sound engineering geeks *bows* do have that technology and the knowledge base to know what to do. And you'll find that some of them (like me) resonate with the computer geek Free Software GNU-oriented approach.

My 'Mastering Tools' software is Free- it's GPLed. It's not C- in fact it only understands a certain type of AIFF file because I'm not programmer enough (yet) to really have the file handling routines down, seeing as I'm making sense out of the very expandable AIFF format byte-by-byte, and trying to do everything with just two file streams and no buffers.

But although it's weak from a programming standpoint, it's got two serious dither algorithms and various sonic enhancers and all of it could be put together to make a sort of SDK for a Free game console- and since this is my scene, I am certain that it could kick the butt of X-Box or whatever else is coming out there. Sure, it's only audio, but it's _there_ to be used- but you've gotta be open source to use it. And I've done enough work with digital mastering, and have enough contacts with pro mastering engineers, to inspire and produce a sound infrastructure that would _really_ kick, hurt, stomp and maim generic sound routines such as we're likely to see in X-Box et al, or even PS2 etc.

The trick is to do all the sound mixing on a high resolution mix buss like 32-bit floating point- and then reduce it to 16 bit to feed to affordable DACs using professional techniques, not the lame truncation or TPDF dither that the commercial consoles are likely to use (if that- I would not be at all surprised to learn they did everything on a 16 bit buss). This is so totally do-able, and I'd be delighted to work with anyone who's doing Free software and wishes to do things like this. It's about knowing what to do, who to ask. For instance, who here has ever heard of sidechain compression (the _audio_ compression)? Turns out that's not only an old mastering engineer trick to add lushness and detail, but it is also very easily doable realtime with just a few extra variables. I've got a 'primitive root residue' dither that sounds very deep and more importantly is fast as hell to compute- not that this matters so terribly much with today's processors! Picture something like Quake 3's sounds, only instead of being roughly mixed by a tinny 3D sound card, you'd have them coming through four channels of high-end surround sound with subtle compression and loads of soundstage depth from even non-optimal speakers- fully immersive sound _textures_ that really brought you into the game. A lot of that could be done just through proper design of the system audio busses... and the code's GPL and ready to be taken and adapted...

Mind you- this work is still going to be done whether Linux game people pick up on it or not. It's not being done _for_ 'TuxBox'. It's being done for pro quality digital mastering. But the Linux movement has started to affect people outside the arena of just raw coding- I'm not sure anyone on Slashdot would know this, but mastering engineers _and_ radio station technical people are being boxed into a corner by corporate brainlessness, overcompression and an industry-driven, listener-hostile 'arms race' of CD and radio loudness. There's a huge amount of dissatisfaction with this- and understandably, some people (like me, obviously) react to this dissatisfation by rebelling, doing stuff that makes no concessions to corporate fashion, and sacrificing mass media access- and the GNU camp just sits there, looking appealing, saying 'You can put your stuff out and share with people who will share with you, and bring whatever you have to offer to the table- do it the best you can and see where it takes you!'

I have to wonder what people are out there working in visual imaging, AI, 3D API writing, game concepts etc. who are also being frustrated and turning to the principles of Free software. I see things like this from time to time, and then I ignore them, because that's not my field. I'm the one who's doing Free work in high end digital audio. They probably have no idea who I am, either.

But add enough of these non-communicating, marginalized people together, and you'll really have something. Aren't there people working on Free _hardware_? That blows my mind. But I suppose it would blow theirs if they knew they could spec out a severely competitive audio subsystem for cheap using regular 16-bit DACs just by knowing what parts had to be overbuilt (coupling caps, DAC or DAC buffer power supply caps), and applying software to 'master' the output busses of the system.

I agree with jfunk- "For just about anything creative, you'll find people not only willing, but enthusiastic.". But do you know how far it extends? Neither do I, because I'm not competent to spot which 3D coders or board designers are really hot. I just know that there's some overlap between the Free stuff _I_ do, and the Free game console being talked about. And I'm not going to chase it, I've got a _lot_ else to do- but I write GPLed code for a reason, and will do absolutely everything I can to help anyone who _wants_ help that I can provide. We all benefit by cooperation. That's too easily forgotten.

Chris Johnson

Why does this work for me and not for Indrema? Because I'm managing my cashflow better. I've been shoveling money into 24-bit digital mastering to go along with the Free mastering/dithering software I've written, and it is exactly the amount of money I can _afford_ to shovel if I can live on ramen and spaghettios. This means I get hit with delays because it's flat out not enough money to accomplish everything at once, but the _cashflow_ situation demands budgeting and accepting the limitations- the concept is to move step by step rather than to seek financing to move all at once.

There are some things that I hope are in my future that would require financing- but that's all the more reason to consider cashflow, and look at the breakeven point very conservatively. Dotcoms were freaks of nature... in the real world your job is not 'make lots of money by whatever means', your job is providing whatever good or service will get you paid enough to break even or better. People forget this very easily, which is why I think they get excited about financing, apparently on the assumption that if you can get someone to give you loads of money, you win, and you simply spend it on advertising and marketing to have more people give you money and so on.

If Indrema is really dead in 30 days it can only be because it tried to play this game and lost. Maybe the better course would have been for Indrema to develop just as an idea for years and skip the next couple generations of console products, developing in the form of a virtual machine on Linux boxen. I don't know- but a real Free project can't die, it can only stagnate and gather dust. If Indrema can die, it's not what I thought it was- and seems less worthy of a donation from me. I don't seem them donating anything _to_ me. And if that sounds like a wiseassed remark, note that I've now put three separate near-Nyquist dither algorithms into the GPLed sphere, which any Free gaming console could use to convert internal 24 bit or better audio to 16 bit audio output. If you tried to license POW-R it'd cost thousands- Apogee UV22 is likewise a commercial, proprietary product, and I don't see anyone _else_ doing Free high resolution audio development. I am, and because of that it's available to any Free game console project, with or without actively involving me. I'm not aware of anything Indrema's done that does _me_ any good the way this could do them good.

Maybe the next bunch will have better cash flow management. I know I can't give Indrema money- I'm scrabbling to pursue my own projects. Though they don't know it, I've given them some very high performance audio tweaks- various aspects of Mastering Tools could easily be transformed into a Free game console audio engine that's very competitive with the coming generation of consoles. But they have to keep their own boats afloat first. Really, how many of us are venture capitalists?

*ahem*

Speaking as someone who _does_ produce things, you can take free software away from me when you pry my cold dead fingers off it- when I write something it's _my_ choice how to license it, not yours, and it's simply comical to see you insisting that free software will go away. Not a freaking chance, Sparky. What have _you_ written besides Slashdot comments?

I DON'T HAVE FUCKING TIME TO PERSONALLY AUTHORISE EVERY LITTLE DOWNLOAD!

_Apologies_ to anyone who is offended by this strong language- but I am _very_ angry here. As copyright holder it is UP TO ME how I want to license my stuff. As it happens, I use the statement "All commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY", because I fully intend to completely permit ALL FORMS of fair use copying and EVERY sort of copying and sharing and trading that doesn't actually involve someone charging people for my stuff. That is MY RIGHT under the law. _I!_ am the one who says what people can do with it.

Even _if_ the idea of this isn't 'submit your song to the RIAA to have Napster given permission to let YOU host it on YOUR computer only', even if the idea is that Napster keeps the records, I am really angry and finding this suggestion absolutely intolerable. As copyright holder _I_ have the right to authorise every listener I have to share my stuff on Napster. I've even asked people to do just this, repeatedly- I thought it would not only help me but would also add to the argument that Napster links to lots of different kinds of content.

I am not trying to get a free ride off the RIAA, okay? I'm not even _seeking_ fame and money and record contracts that are fair. I am perfectly content to do all the work for producing my own music, to seek out places like besonic and ampcast that aren't ripping me off, to accept that I may not sell zillions of CDs even once I finish the work of making them available from Ampcast. I'm not asking for help with all this, and I'm not getting any. I have to do it all myself and that suits me fine.

But I draw the line at having to be a _fucking_ performing rights organisation too, just because OTHER PEOPLE can't deal with the idea that people can exchange their artworks without paying. I am completely offended at this to the point that I begin to understand the feelings of some slashdotters and anarcholibertarians when confronted with unions: I am more socialist myself but here's a situation where I am forbidden to license my stuff under my own rules because that would mean people could legally share it on napster without my _personal_ authorisation. And I'm looking at a possible future where, every time some new sharing program or P2P thing comes around, I have to PERSONALLY go and give them an 'it's okay to share my music' before they're permitted. Goddammit, I write that on my CDs! I do not have TIME to piddle around being a performing rights organisation. The record companies have time and resources to do this kind of crap, and I do _not_.

And I am _pissed_ that they are even suggesting it. Sorry for all the strong language. I am _so_ pissed at this suggestion. I'm sorry, I put a great deal of effort into checking out the resources available to me (like ampcast, and for that matter CafePress) that let me offload some of the work in being an active, productive Internet artist and musician, and this ability is absolutely central to increasing the fluidity and efficiency of the Internet age and allowing people like me access to the world's commerce and media. It is _crucial_ that I am allowed to set my own terms on copyright and that this is _respected_: requiring me to authorise each new little P2P startup is refusing to honor the copyright licensing I already make that specifically authorizes noncommercial copying! I _must_ be allowed to authorise just-plain-listeners to share my stuff on P2P networks etc, do anything with it as long as it's noncommercial- because _I_ don't have the time to run around being a Publishing Rights Organisation and an IANAL and a publicist and an advertising flack and a suit. It's just not reasonable. Why the hell can't they at least let _me_ do my work and allow the random forces of the net to bring me whatever publicity or sales turn up? Why do they effectively plan to _force_ me to operate as a rights agent and individually authorize every little P2P thing that might turn up? I am so angry...

OK, that was messy and a lot of extrapolation but I've got a lot of work to do which these nice people at the RIAA are _not_ helping me do in any way shape or form, so I'd better go off and do it and hope other people can keep the RIAA from loading even _more_ compulsory work on me for the privilege of trying to distribute MY OWN music... I _so_ don't have the time to track down the relevant people and scream at them... if anyone wishes these views cleaned up for broader publication I'd be more than happy to do so and promise not to say F**K...

Free, you say? It's news to _me_ that online content is free. From where I'm standing, I have to _pay_ for web hosting, and do so without batting an eyelash, because I have content I want to put up, and I want people to be able to see it.

Are you arguing that I am supposed to be _paid_ for having content on the internet? Gee, that's nice of you, but what planet are you from? I am eternally grateful that I no longer have to pay for the paper and printing of fliers, pay for cassette tapes and duplicate them, etc etc all to just try and get content to a curious onlooker.

If you are really upset that you're not being paid just to have content available to curious onlookers, I suggest the quick and easy solution of not having content. You should be grateful you got to show me pictures of CK your dog without having to print them up on physical media and somehow get them to me... nice dog btw...

I am also an author, and I have to say I resent the generalisation there. Or perhaps I should say this: you don't even know what you're doing to yourself with your mental categories there.

I suspect it's a thing like 'REAL musicians', 'REAL authors' want everything to be pay-per-view, kaching, next! There is some validity to this but it breaks down pretty rapidly- where do you fit, say, Emily Dickinson into that scheme? There's someone who stood the test of time as a great writer but never pursued any sort of recognition, much less reward, for her work during her life. There are more people like that than you'd think: you haven't heard of them for the obvious reason that they're not hawking their wares brazenly on the open market.

In this day and age, you're cheating yourself if you assume the only real artists are the ones under contract to some industry conglomerate. There isn't even that much of a correlation- there's an awful lot of commercial tripe out there, and an awful lot of sincere if unpolished art. You simply cannot make the assumption that artists primarily want to be paid. Most would like that, but what they primarily want is ATTENTION. Applause! Recognition. And, as every major avenue to mass market art is increasingly controlled by corporations with a $$$$$$$$ bottom line, more and more artists are turning away from the prospect of money so they can at least have a shot at that ATTENTION.

If you define artist (author, musician, whatever) as "that which wants to be paid and is willing to hit the mass market, be published, get signed etc", then you are stripping the 'indie' folks of even the dignity of being considered artists themselves. You're calling them hobbyists, or amateurs, which denies them the respect and attention they might otherwise be able to achieve on the merits of their work.

Please don't do that. Learn to tell the difference between a pretty face and $30,000 of makeup and photographic lighting. No matter what the field of art, it's possible to go mass media and throw resources at it to make it seem way cooler than the output of individual artists with nothing but a vision and minimal resources. It is your responsibility to be able to recognise the real stuff when you see it, and learn to value it for what it is. Otherwise the word 'artist' will end up meaning nothing more than 'merchant'- or possibly 'lawyer'. o_O

I'm trying to get a recording studio off the ground (obMusicLink), and putting a lot of effort into it. I _have_ to keep airwindows.com out there publically and I get all its email, every dictionary-attack spam on the domain- and I need a solid memorable unsurprising email address to give people if they want one- chrisj@airwindows.com.

It's like some of the mp3-fan reactions to the threat of the format being suppressed- I don't care if you can hide mp3s in zips, or hide email addresses in geeky obfuscation or ever-changing 'stale address discard' rules. I don't have that luxury and never will have it- I'm stuck operating on the outside with my domain and my fledgling business (for which I keep all records of income and expense- not gonna hide from IRS either). I have no option but to use email and web resources straightforwardly and unobfuscatedly- and I won't be able to keep up with the load of spam forever unless the spammers are cracked down on. The spamload could easily just keep accelerating exponentially if nothing is done to stop it- as it seems more mainstream, more will do it, and so on.

(random side note- remember how mp3.com changed its agreement and made it evil? Well, a new music site called ampcast.com recently changed their agreement- and, get this, changed it to be MORE favorable to the artists! Color me flabbergasted. I'm still happy with besonic, myself, but who knew? Kudos to ampcast, just found out about this today :) )

Seeing as I've stuck that post on my own site (here), I must thank you for the flame as you've helped to correct a spelling error :)

To the other AC- no, I am not on the 3Dsia mailing list :) however, they are welcome to any of my stuff if it will help them. I don't always have the capacity to implement on all of my ideas so the least I can do is let others do so if they want :)

Come to think of it, wouldn't it be interesting to have a plane with _one_ GE high-bypass fanjet between two fuselages? hmmmmm (reading Slashdot has a tendency to give me ideas for cool aircraft to design- last time it was the 'flying train' ground-effect vehicle getting me to design a landspeeder- very wide rear wing and narrower canard producing a tendency to hold a fixed altitude at around treetop height and avoid the ground. I didn't quite get it so it could hurtle over rolling terrain with no pilot input, but it is a hell of a lot easier to mow the grass with this one than with any traditional aircraft :)

You want geeky? Try blade element modelling on all flight surfaces at least six times a second and _emergent_ flight model. Try modelling one of those wack planes from that upcoming MS game and seeing just how *CRASH!* unrealistic *WHAM!* it *CRASH!* really is *SPLAT!* ;) Then, work like a crazed weasel at trying different airfoils, giving the canard a steeper upward cant, messing with the center of gravity, and eventually get something that flies, even something that flies well- and know that if you could build the actual plane, IT WOULD fly like that, for the most part. Now that's geeky! It's freaking delightful. There's no complex system half as much fun as designing aircraft and modelling them with blade element modelling. And half the fun is knowing that the majority of even X-Planers aren't up to the challenge and will only fly the Cessna 172 Skyhawk (aka 'spam can') and bitch about its modelling ;) (which considering that no actual 172 flight model data was put in, just the dimensions of the plane and vital statistics, is not so bad at all)

I haven't updated the planes to the latest version of X-Plane yet, but I have some planes (with pictures) up at http://www.airwindows.com/gam es/flightsims/index.html. The planes there were a lot of fun to make, and there are infinite other possibilities..

See ROTSOS, or as I like to think of it Return Of The Son Of Spacewar :) The demos I have so far consist of only a couple MPEG videos of essentially infinite consistent and entirely emergent terrain- and there's also a section on names generated the same way :)

What this means is that among the nineteen million stars of the galaxy you'll have several hundred that have a temperate habitable planet (and many that are borderline...), among which is the star Conard in the quadrant of the galaxy controlled by a feline sort of alien race, the planet being Diaceside. On this planet by the largest sea is the port city Corantial, which you can find from space by looking for the three surrounding mountains forming three points of a square with the city as the fourth...

Now. The trick is- all that is emergent. The three mountains would be blind luck- the city might end up named Sounirmas, or Fraeutnte, or Loeespgon, or even Asshot. However, given the proper algorithms to produce EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE from a single block of data read back and forth and up and down, you could go to thousands of stars and visit hundreds of planets and still, when you return, there's those three mountains again, and you are welcomed by the cat ladies of the port city of Corantial- because the mechanism, the algorithm, is totally rigid but _totally_ consistent and repeatable (also bloody fast, but that's another story :) )

I've GPLed everything I have so far but currently am hard at work on other things- but I do mean to pursue this further. The concept is so flexible you could use it for anything- as long as you can cope with the fact that everything has to be emergent. You can have a world-city, or countryside with cities down to the positioning of the trash barrels on the sidewalk- but you _cannot_ place even a single cigarette butt manually and expect it to be persistent, or you'd have to have a database terabytes in size to handle the sheer scope of the game world. If everything is emergent from the one database, you get to have a game world the size of a state, or country, or world, or the size of Ringworld if you wanted- all off a 16M file, all consistent down to the street-signs (but you're going to have street names like Bloangble :) )

The kick in the tail from all this is the security and consistency of multiplayer situations. Done properly (i.e. to extremes) the game world is unhackable barring clever executable tricks. You simply cannot change the bit of data that would say 'deposit of gold under place in the countryside I colonised' without simultanously changing many stars and planets in the universe, altering the very terrain you're standing on (gee, where'd the mountain go? Hell, where'd the _town_ go?) and possibly the name of the planet you're on :) it's a very effective way of keeping lots of data on the client side but making it resistant to tinkering- the data is so general purpose that any modification to it will put you in a parallel universe due to how extensively each byte is used for so many different purposes.

Seeing as my work is GPLed I would be happy to see other people take this idea and use it in their own stuff- the only trouble is, to get the proper benefits you have to build your world entirely this way. If you build the driving game you can spend a lot of time sorting out good algorithms so that if this quartermile is data value 123 and the next is data value 213 you have such and such a transition of roads (over varying-LOD terrain- see my flyover demos), but the one thing you can't do is draw a road freehand, or plunk down a gas station. Instead you make gas stations sub-data-value 107 and look to see if that's giving you an acceptable distribution of gas stations.

If you like exploring that much perhaps you'd like to _make_ a game of this nature :)

(yes, I'm the same guy who's always going on about his mp3.com music :) I was revamping my mp3.com site the other night instead of working on ROTSOS, and today I replaced a microphone cord plug and am making four high-resolution mini patchcords. But I'll get around to it- probably when I get really REALLY sick of wiring patchcords and winding bass pickups :) )

The fact is, there are some very important principles in MacOS that would apply directly to the 'Anti-Mac' interface- but, typically, do not. The single most important principle is structure.

On MacOS, the menu nearest to the 'Apple Menu' (which is always there) is the 'File' menu. It contains 'quit' and other commands including 'open' and 'close' and 'new' if present. Why? No reason- there's no reason why quitting should be considered a file action. But the structure is the reason- not structure in 'this is how we force developers to code a certain way' but structure in that the user can quickly form a mental model in which there is always this menu that says File, and Quit is in it. It's not important that the menu be called file, or that it be in a particular place- or even that quitting must be a menu action! The important thing is that the user jumps to a conclusion which continues to be valid across the entire interface.

The same is possible for text mode interaction- it just takes different forms.

I wrote a program for my own use to remind myself of things. It's not very elaborate (now that I have a small second monitor I might try making it more elaborate) but one way it works is very important in the Anti-Mac style of interface. It runs off a list of events that's kept, and edited, just as a plain text file (something that could be edited by other programs too), and you enter a date or day and event and priority.

The priority ended up being almost meaningless as a feature because there aren't loads and loads of events in the file- but it is important in another way because it is a 'punctuation mark' for the event data format, and that's where the 'user concept' comes in. Basically, the idea was to define a format which could be parsed quite forgivingly by the computer, but which did not get into full-on natural language parsing- instead, you are given one very simple rule. "Type date, then priority in parentheses, then the event text."

That's it. Friday(2) Visit Fred. Or Thu(e)Dance Naked. Or 11/3(1)Third Of December Day. Or just "Go Fishing" (which will always display, until removed. There is an expectation for US date formats, but it's opensource ;) ) The point is that you can get very weird with the data (for instance with the weekdays, it uses a string comparison routine that is case insensitive) but there is an element of structure to focus and direct you- one that is very, very simple to remember. Date(priority)Entry, and the parsing keys off the parentheses.

The reason this matters at all is because it's so easy with natural language parsing to get into a game of 'Do What I Mean', to get so seduced by the challenge of parsing weird inputs that you basically go, "Okay! The user's inputs have NO FORM whatsoever- complete freedom! That is the ideal interface!" That's a crock- the thing you want to do is present interface elements that must be learned, but the elements (textual, conceptual, graphical) are SO SIMPLE that they're nothing to learn. "Quit and file stuff are in File menu" is a very small piece of information when you think about how widely useful it's been made (do _you_ have a File menu in front of you right now?). "Date(priority)Event" is partly textual but it is just as easy to grasp and use- it's syntactically obvious, with the key concept being Parentheses- if you don't have the ( then it's a degenerate case like a quickie-note to be always presented.

There are similar issues to HTML- the bracketed tags like B and I (yes, I know those are stylistic not logical tags) are easy to understand- yet I have so often messed up in Slashdot posts by failing to close a bold tag properly or something- just repeating the 'b' with no / to close the tag. This is possibly unavoidable because of the complexity of HTML, but it's an interface screwup because when typing a message the user does not use the tags the same way as the computer does. To the computer it is an opening and closing tag (entirely distinct entities). To the user the tags are used more like toggles: you hit (b) to turn on bold, and then hit it again to turn it off, only you have to remember to make it (/b). In the flow of writing it's easy to fall back on the opening form of the tag and use it as a toggle- which of course does not work. The funny thing is, it's as if the special closing form is used to make sure that you remember to keep track of the 'stack' of tags more easily- instead of having to count instances of a tag (which the computer can easily do), but if you do forget to keep track the result is just the same as if you treated the tags as toggles and failed to close them with the special closing tags. The result is a special form of the tag to be kept track of by the user, so that the user must be aware of not only 'entering/leaving styled area' but which way you're going- and if you don't correctly specify, the HTML screws up. Treating simple 'off/on' tags as toggles (granted, much HTML can't be reduced in this way) makes the mental model of the style setting much simpler- "hit (b) tag to switch boldface on and off", and suddenly you don't have to keep track of phase at all, only the opening and closing locations of what you want to stylize.

There is no reason this capacity to define simple behavioral models can't be used to improve text-based interfaces, or even Unix shell. Of course, it's mostly not ;P you have certain things. Typing a letter causes it to appear on the screen! Hitting return executes commands (woops, unless you're in a subshell, then it's what, ctrl-D?) Arguments for programs take the form -a -r -g -s, unless it's -args. And so on- the problem is NOT that it's a text based interface, or that it requires learning, the problem is simply that so little of the learning is globally applicable- but that can change. Not with Unix shell, as it would be throwing away a lot of backward compatibility- but in any new text or hybrid interface that comes onto the scene.

I'm picturing a sort of 'agent', but one that you talk to in clearly defined forms and not natural language. It'd be there ready for input or puttering along keeping an eye on things and you'd type Fiday(2)Get ready for job interview! and hit return, and because of the (2) it would know you meant to make an entry in the day-planner, and would figure out from context that 'Fiday' (a real typo that I actually typed just then, fixed, then put back for purposes of the argument) was Friday. You'd be working on something and would suddenly realise that you hadn't coded anything game-related in months and would type Games++ and hit return and it would understand from context that you were establishing a priority level in a simple 'geek code' sort of way- and it might also have the job of sorting your mail and would keep an eye out for 'Games' and sort it up higher based on this new priority level (which you may have just created by typing that). Or you'd read Joakim Ziegler's article and in a fit of admiration type Joakim Ziegler++++++, an 'item' that might never come up in email, but if it did you'd not only be given a priority boost, but would also be reminded that there was something about Joakim Ziegler worth remembering and paying attention to. And the ability to, dare I say it, 'intuitively' plug this things into the computer is the ability to not rely entirely on your own head for all that.

But the important thing is not to devise the most sophisticated arrangement for such things, not to devise the most fiendishly clever way to get data out of sloppy natural language- the important thing is to come up with these simple strokes that can become internalised rules. I happen to think Fri(2)Friday Meeting is a very sensible 'form' for a reminder, because for some reason having a 'priority' there in parens makes sense for me and serves as a suitable 'punctuation mark'. By the same token, you can't go wrong with strings of plusses and minuses to indicate the changing of priority levels for a keyword or key phrase. Possibly the exclamation point and question mark can be used similarly- for instance, the 'agent' might react to OpenGL?(return) by a quick search of other entries in its databanks for things that match this. It becomes even handier if you say Rob Malda? and the agent gives you references including his email address and phone number because you'd entered them into your address book :) You might even end up with web search results if you set it up that way. The exclamation point might serve as an indicator of a command- Slashdot! would launch your web browser and point it at slashdot, email! might be set up to return the 20 highest-priority emails you currently have. The 20 would be a setting kept in some other place- the interface of it would not be about going email-20-all-mail-agents! (unless you really wanted to be constantly specifying all that), it would be about going email! and also being able to go set up email! and have the control panels right there. And of course the basic assumption here is that the exclamation point distinguishes running programs from other actions- it seems fairly obvious, and that is a _good_ thing.

*g* time for me to start working on this I guess ;) it's sounding neat enough that I'm getting pretty interested in exploring it ;)

Meanwhile, I just ordered for my studio a Lexicon reverb/multieffects- an upgrade of my Alesis drum module- and a Kurzweil Micropiano. I'm also plotting a revision of my UberMonitors while I'm at it. How did I get the money for this, selling CDs? No- I WORKED for it. (To be exact, I sold costume tails at a convention, believe it or not- see here.)

Let 'em keep coming up with new ways to make their $18 CDs sound worse in order to fight copying! I'll be coming up with ways to make my $5.99 CDs sound BETTER and encouraging copying- it's your right as a music owner to make dubs for noncommercial use, that's the law. The sooner I conclusively beat (oh all right, maim) the audio quality of the major labels, the happier I shall be, and getting them to butcher their tone in the name of copyprotection can only help. Bring on the mutated, deformed audio! *g*

I don't think the Wachowski Brothers have anything to worry about. How much would you personally give them to do more Matrix sequels? Would you help get them set up with a Beowulf Cluster (tm) to do more EFX shots? Would you drop $50 on a "I Sponsored Matrix 2" t-shirt? Would you let them use the spare cycles of your Pentium MCXXIII in some future SETI-esque super distributed arrangement to render frames of the film? Would you _pay_ them so you could literally say "I helped _render_ that movie!" and one-up your geeky friends? ;)

People are always saying that the loss of IP would mean the obliteration of all big budget blockbuster media. I don't think that's a sensible conclusion. You'd end up with an awfully big vacuum waiting to be filled- and a lot of creators who'd be able to do it given the resources- and an awful lot of fluidity regarding how those people could get the resources.

Look, I've just invented a game console that plugs into color PalmPilots to generate flightsims! Here is actual video footage taken off the PalmPilot's actual screen- this was generated by a PalmPilot in REAL TIME and you'll be able to fly combat missions against your friends on the Internet, while jotting down notes in Graffiti! (Do you believe FNORD! that?)

After the story I read in which the guy tried to change to another registrar and NS closed his account and promptly sold his domain to somebody else before the other registrar could plug it in, I had no stomach for doing anything other than paying them off and praying they wouldn't botch _that_ up. I'm nervous because I paid them by check when they're expecting web-credit-card payments! It's pretty sad when you can't trust the buggers to be paid off and do NOTHING... we'll see. I hope other people are ready to put some heat on them. I don't feel comfortable trifling with them because of how badly they could hose me. Color me extorted ;P

My recording studio cost money, and for commercial work I'll charge $75 an hour for it, which isn't even that high of a figure.

For people who are on my side in this mp3, open source, freedom to express thing, I'll literally let them use my studio FREE. If you are going to be releasing all your stuff as mp3s free (NO holdouts) and will allow purchase of your CD to be strictly voluntary (as mine are- nothing is withheld from the free downloads or will ever be), then I will be delighted to work with you for free. You merely have to call me, email me, set up a time and get yourself to Brattleboro, Vermont. (I obviously can't gallivant all around the country recording people for free!) As to other costs, hell, I can probably throw in the tape if that's a problem. (New Maxell XR-S Black only please).

As to how downloading an mp3 supports an artist? DOWNLOAD MINE and find out!! Please? Do I have to _beg_ people to listen to the artform I've been doing for almost 20 years? Do I have to tantalise people with the studio of which the 'anima' album is a good demonstration of the sounds I can get? It's not like this is crud- nearly broke top 20 in Instrumental Rock with _no_ promotion, up against much more established artists such as Carmine Appice, Dweezil Zappa, Richie Sambora and Brian May (all of whom I beat in the charts, in various combinations) and Wolf Hoffman (who I haven't beat- yet). It's not like it can be less expensive because I've been a slashdot-reading, GPL-using, linux-booting creativitysharing geek for years, and the CDs I have up there are all the minimum of 5.99 that mp3.com will allow (think about THAT for a minute. That's presumably the price at which they are still making some money- how much lower than the mainstream is that?) and there's nothing that I won't freely GIVE to someone who doesn't have the money or just wants to be given stuff.

And all I'm really asking in return is for people to DO THAT- download the mp3s, what, do I have to PAY people to listen to music that's not off the major labels? If this is not supporting the artist then WHY are 90% of the songs on the mp3.com artist boards "Please download my song, I want to be in the charts, I want to be heard"? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be an artist supporting the mp3 revolution and feel like anybody is listening, is accepting what you're giving?? It's like that scene in Cryptonomicon- "Accept one of our free army tanks! They get 2000 mpg and go 500 miles an hour playing quadrophonic stereo with air conditioning!" and everybody wants the station wagons :P

I _beg_ people, follow those links, download my mp3s paying me nothing. If people desperately want to pay me they will eventually get their chance but for now I ask _nothing_ more. If you don't like people who rant on slashdot, go there and download somebody _else's_ music out of spite- as long as it's not "Rolling Stones Interview" or something! Do you know how irritating it is to have some rock dinosaur major label appendage open an account at mp3.com alongside you, put out some _soundcheck_ or radio station promo and then instead of using the medium (like Chuck D.!) and putting the whole album up, putting up the ONE TRACK (like Robby Krieger) and withholding the rest, or putting up INTERVIEWS (Robby, the Stones, the Eagles) so then you end up having some rock dinosaur's PRESS CONFERENCE beating you to death in the charts and staking out the top places for weeks on end? A _press_ conference? That's like listing IE service packs right alongside Freshmeat packages, complete with hit ratings. I don't know how better to express how insulting and damaging this is. "Gee, Martha, looks like many more people like and enjoy the latest NT service pack than this new linux program- looks like we should be running that!" feh.

And then I come here and read the question "And how does downloading an mp3 support an artist"? Yeesh, stand aside for venting- I apologize for freaking right out at you, because you meant no harm and surely were trying to encourage people to support artists _more_ than that. But, man! If you had any idea how badly I wanted people to just plain hear what I'm doing with this wizzy new studio I've built, how I want to be supported and respected for how seriously I'm taking the new paradigm- rather than ignored- "Oh, he has all his songs available for download, he must suck if he's not on a major label or at least trying to sell his albums by forcing people to buy them in order to get every song!" "Oh, he has all his programs open source, they must suck if they're not proprietary or at least crippleware that will shut itself off if you don't pay for it!" Can't you even see the parallels? Wouldn't you want Linux to 'be higher on the charts'? Is it so hard to understand that music operates on a similar economy of respect and status, and is equally hard to bullshit about, and is equally threatened by a totally hostile and corrupt culture that's got most people unaware there is even a better, more open, more community-oriented way?

*sigh!*

So maybe my only answer is the sheer desperation and intensity of this rant. _Please_ go to mp3.com (or some other indy-artist site if you prefer another one) and download some artist who is _not_ signed to a major label and polluting the music charts with _interviews_ and crap like that. If you do nothing else, at least take what's being given. There's damned good stuff out there. I happen to think my stuff is good stuff, but I've heard _lots_ of other acts who had terrific music up there- and I can be pretty certain that they would _all_ love to be heard, if nothing else. Half of them beg constantly in the artist bulletin boards _just_ to be downloaded, and that includes damn good artists whose music I really liked.

Please go and listen to us rather than questioning whether mp3 will help us... and listening only to major label shite! Thank you. -chris

Or not _wrong_, exactly, he's just got slightly incorrect expectations. 3dfx is NOT helping him understand these issues, because naturally they want him to produce demos that are way over-the-top, like effects sequences in The Matrix or something.

Think of it as _time_ antialiasing. You don't antialias by having some big shocking Gaussian Blur that goes out for 10 pixels: it's very local, and the effect is to make angled edges appear more clearly angled (less stair-stepped, and not fuzzed). I do have a page that gets into this w.r.t fonts: it's this page.

By the same token, if you can see visible blurring happening in action, the motion blur is _already_ too much. What 3dfx need is not to arrange for Quake to send 27 frames to make a smooth blurry contrail behind everything (no matter how nice that may look in screenshots)- what's needed is to buffer a _single_ frame and average it with the current frame at a variable blend ratio. 50/50 might even be overly strong though it would maximize the time-based antialiasing- 40/60 could be better. Screenshots might show a tiny video echo effect on the fastest moving objects, but the most significant effect at typically high frame rates would be the softening of edges only in the specific directions of movement. To demo this you'd want something like a guy dressed in black and white pinstripes- the desired effect would be that the guy wouldn't blur out, but you would have a much clearer subliminal sense of his exact movements- something it would take a gamer or multimedia geek to pick up on.

Running at sufficiently high framerates (say, over 80), the ideal density _would_ be 50/50, because as the speed is pushed, differences between frames become smaller. The end result would be strictly confined to the softening of just such edges that are moving the most, which would highlight exactly what types of motion are happening.

Serendipitously, this type of motion blur (being not a fancy cinematic 'blur' that you don't see ALL THE TIME anyhow, but time antialiasing) would be just as suited to the driver as the planned spatial antialiasing- and just as suitable for application to ALL extant games that can be played on a 3dfx card. Again, all that's needed is to buffer one frame and average it with the current frame. It's not supposed to be a lightsaber blur, and 3dfx is foolish to emphasize this concept.

Time-based antialiasing is just as effective as spatial antialiasing but people don't know what to look for, partly because nobody seems to be bothering to even try doing it properly! It'll be just the one frame buffered- or possibly two. For the purposes of 3dfx, clearly using a single extra buffer and setting a blend ratio is the way to go. For serious video, a better approach is this: think of the frames as one pixel _deep_ and treat the antialiasing as a sphere centering on each pixel. The most weight would be on the pixel being tested, the pixels that are directly left or right or up or down or earlier or later would have less of a weighting, and so on: a pixel that's one pixel up _and_ left _and_ a frame earlier would have the least weighting. I've had very good results experimenting with code that averages the frames directly before and after a frame, then doubles the size of the immediate frame and dithercopies it down to antialias it and averages it with the time shifted frames. The goal was to cut video noise, and this approach was very effective at doing so without causing lots of stupid blur. (anyone doing an open source video editing program might try this- I need to finish up my version if possible and gpl it ;) )

The long and the short of it is that 3dfx should offer this spatial antialiasing as an extra driver feature, and that Carmack shouldn't have to do anything to enable it- and the last thing you want is to dump lots of frames in for a nice pretty blur effect. As Carmack quite rightly says you can do that easily in the program anyhow and don't need special interaction with the card- the only thing he's not getting (and this is because 3dfx are pointedly not suggesting he try it) is that time based antialiasing really isn't his problem, and is an entirely undramatic effect, to be sensed rather than seen and marvelled at. And marvelling at effects might sell more 3D cards ;)

Again, the desired effects are practical rather than strictly visual in a 3D game. Racing and flying games would definitely be more exciting with such a driver feature, but in a 3D game it would be a matter of quickly sensing when a player you're chasing is turning or slowing- or whether you are dodging a flying projectile thoroughly enough. These things would be conveyed through the subtle softening of the lines perpendicular to motion- giving you more information than just the straight frames. (I really need to render up some demos of this...)

Of course, the panorama is only a picture of my studio and "Dog" is a good song (sort of an instrumental groove jam with a happy upbeat feel, tight and gutsy) but that still fits in very nicely with my sense of what these divergent formats are for. I would be dismayed if the Quicktime media was getting all the downloads, as again it's closed and I don't like encouraging that.

Speaking of encouraging, I've been feeding my karma account (no not Slashdot karma, general karma) by making samples to share with other artists at mp3.com, sort of in a musician-style open source spirit. If any slashdotters want them, a highlight is the drum samples I made, those are at http://www.airwindows.com/studio/DrumSounds.zip and could come in handy. Hope people enjoy them, they're darn good samples :)

However, I have the file relegated to a text link, because I'm not about to go embedding it in my page- I don't consider it right to imply that Quicktime is part of the normal web browsing experience, any more than WMP should be. So my 'extended media' sits under a text link like the sideshow it basically is.

For my music I go with mp3, with a vengeance. (and actually it's doing real well- I've been doing some instrumental pieces, and my bouncy rocking instrumental "Dog" is beating Carmine Appice w. Richie Sambora, and another track of Carmine Appice with Brian May, in the charts! www.mp3.com/ChrisJ) So I'm really pushing mp3 hard- and mpeg in general, in fact I had some video clips on my site and pulled the Sorenson Quicktimes leaving only the abbreviated, hacked ASTARTE-demo mpegs up even though they could only run a few seconds.

Speaking of which- thank you Millenium *rejoice rejoice* for tipping me off to Movie2MPEG! Made my day- I really _needed_ that! I'm going to see if I can re-do some of my video stuff using this.

So basically, my position is this: I like Quicktime, I use it for authoring, but I'm very reluctant to publish in it. Why? Not quality, it's better than MPEG and does amazing things many of which I understand and can use. It's that it's not open- and I just can't support that in a format. It's as bad as using Word format....

And, you know, I'd also really really like the opensource-like benefit of status and appreciation- but ya know it seems like that's going to happen anyhow regardless on account of I don't suck :) "Dog" debuted at 54 (out of over 10,000) on the mp3.com instrumental rock charts! And it's still there and sneaking slowly up the main charts- in fact it's on page two of the instrumental rock chart webpages, and that's from a totally new artist who's never been seen on mp3.com before. "Horse" is also quite good but I think "Dog" is the breakout hit. They're both going to be heard a lot- they're both free- they're both licensed for radio station play, for that matter.

So can I do anything for Geeks In Space? I really like it. I also have this monster studio from hell going, and there are a lot of neat sounds and effects and riffs and things I could give Geeks In Space. Whaddya need?

"Why would anybody sit down and write a novel if it's going to be pirated for free the first day it's released?"

Ye gods. You'd better ask Emily Dickinson that, my friend. In fact, you don't have to (she's dead and still more lastingly popular than you could hope to be)- you can ask me. I have written a novel and put it up on the net to be 'pirated for free'. Ask _me_.

I'll tell you why: the story needed to be told. As it grew I eventually realised I was telling a story, also, about how the world seemed to me at the time- without intending it, the fiction and invention became a kind of communication. It became a means of self expression- and also an exercise in the joy of sheer craftmanship. I once told somebody I met in a bookstore about how I wrote the ending to Kings Of Rainmoor, and how through a series of twist endings and unexpected but inevitable surprises I ended it in a very artistic and appropriate way- and she was most impressed, and got some of the sense of _rightness_ I feel about that ending. And that sense is what writing the book was _for_... I created something that has power and beauty to me (and to other people, too.)

It's the same with my MP3 songs and MP3 instrumentals. Let's look at the latter for a second. I'm in the process of doing an album on animal themes, and I had some music in my head that gave a very romantic sense of what a Horse is (we're talking teenage girl obsessiveness levels of romanticism ;) ). I could hear it, could feel it wanting to exist- and through a lot of work and the application of skills I've spent a lot of years learning, I got it on tape- it's at the 'MP3 instrumentals' link above, named "Horse", naturally. I ran about trying to tell people it was there, too, because it's one of the finest bits of art I've ever done. I ran across a person on a MUCK who was a big horse lover (or, rather, a unicorn fancier) and he listened to it- and was blown away! And that validated all the effort I'd put in- because in part musical art is the fiction of imagining stuff and playing it, but it is also communication, and I was able to communicate to another person the almost mystical romanticism I was trying to express in pure _sound_. That's fscking magic, to be able to do that. It's addictive. Who the hell needs to get money to justify being able to wreak magic? I wonder if these 'artists' who don't understand this are even able to come up with even scant milliamps of magic. That seems simply pathetic to me- I know what I want and we're not even speaking the same language, it seems. When I get things set up right, work really hard, maybe bleed or get a few blisters from strenuous playing or drumming, and find the right listener (because there's always a right listener), I get to produce whole _amps_ of magic, I get to every now and then hit people with a charge of music like a lightning bolt and _stun_ them with art. I hardly exaggerate to say that I live for that- certainly I know musicians who can stun _me_ in turn. The Pixies, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits have all managed to stun me one way or another with music (Beefheart is the man who said, "I'd like to give my music away because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it"!). From the slush piles of mp3.com I've also found the same charge- there's this band Creeper Lagoon- most of their stuff didn't hit me so hard but this one song, "Drop Your Head" stunned me. And there it is- it's the visceral response to art, to music.

Reading Puff Daddy's take on the matter is even more ludicrous than reading the pop music hacks' take on it. Are we or are we not talking about a rapper who takes complete works of music by somebody else, grabs some loops out of the song, basically using those MUSICIANS' best notes for nothing, _talks_ over them (shouts? rants?) and thinks _he_ is guaranteed income from this? That's fscking ludicrous. Look, I have that MP3 instrumentals area. Some of it, particularly the albumlength workout 'Extended Play' (which has been compared to 'really good Yes, or King Crimson') is absolutely _begging_ to have bits of it looped and used as a more rock-derived rap backing, a more snarling distorted driving beat. It's wide-range, it's fierce, it's just waiting to be sampled. I'd like to see Puff Daddy go raid _my_ music, grab notes that I sweated over and got blisters over, do some rap over them and then claim _he_ is entitled to money for it. How much time does he spend compared to how much time and effort I spend on the source for those 'fair use' loops?

And yet I'm not arguing that he shouldn't be able to do that- I'm arguing that he doesn't have special rights to money on that basis. If he finds people who want to watch him rap in person to my music as a backing loop, I for one will not bitch. If people want to buy physical media from him on that basis, I'll let it pass and will cheerfully allow him to not give me a dime for it. If he thinks he's _entitled_ to payment just for having done this, then I would have to ask whether I was _entitled_ to payment in turn for supplying those theoretical loops.

The logical conclusion is this: these frustrated pop business majors are _obligated_ to stop attempting to record music, because they can't guarantee that they are paid for every playing of a note (many use session men so they are trying to guarantee that they are paid for the playing of _someone_ _else's_ note). For the rap artists who feel this way, they are obligated to try and be paid for every word. Since rap is music of the streets and is taken from life and performed by people who live what they rap, the rap artists are logically obligated to try and be paid for every word they ever utter, and need to walk about with a big sack (and, presumably, a gun) speaking to people and taking money from them in payment for their rap performances. Since this is certifiably insane behavior, they will then get locked up and the rest of us can go on with our lives :)

Including me, finishing this post and signing it with the URLs where I give my art to my listeners:

http://www.mp3.com/RFW (radio-type songs)

http://www.mp3.com/ChrisJ (instrumentals)

Personally, I went with web publishing through impatience with the normal routine. First agent I tried (totally 'cold calling') was the Maas Agency. Struck out (have since learned that it was insanity to even attempt them, but it was fun). Second agent I tried bit, and asked for the rest of "The Kings Of Rainmoor" to read. I sat for months, in an agony of uncertainty, knowing that the guy _had_ expressed an interest- and finally, politely, he passed, citing a big workload.

There was no third try. I plead a low tolerance for sitting around in an agony of uncertainty. I don't write to be _not_ read.

This whole novel, and many other things, are there to be read by anyone, at http://www.airwindows.com/fiction/inde x.html

For that matter, I don't play music to be not listened to: as of a few days ago I have most of my song catalog up at http://www.mp3.com/RFW, and I'm working on getting instrumental stuff up at http://www.mp3.com/chrisj (currently not online as the songs have just been uploaded)

With all of this, my motives are a lot like OSS coders in some ways. I can do these things. They are entertainment things. Where is it written that I have to withhold them and extort money off them and all that rot? I get by- I may never, ever, own a house or something like that, but I don't starve and I have a place to stay. What I would like most of all is to be IN PEOPLE'S FACES making art and GIVING it away. If you want to get picky, I'm expecting to be able to sell _studio_ time and my talents as a sound engineer- and even then, as I've said before, I'll work for open source types who are willing to release the result freely as mp3 for nothing! (_they_ pay cabfare to Brattleboro Vermont, tho)

The era we're starting to enter has some very interesting qualities. It allows pretty much global networking of talents, and the only downside is that you don't just hear about the 'slush pile'- you're soaking in it! But by the same token, word can get out about one of the ten percenters really quick. I know I work pretty hard to be one of those ten percenters- though there are areas, still (like C coding) where I just lose :)

In a way that's why I am so committed to the mp3 revolution that I've put out basically _everything_ as mp3 with no attempt to get money off it. I want people to see that you can do that- it's like OSS coding, people eventually had to _see_ that you could work together giving your code away and that it was all right and even beneficial. I want OSS for artists. I want to show that the qualities for artistic success are talent and hard work- not greed and marketing. I don't know if that'll happen, but it's not for lack of trying- and I have nothing to lose, I can survive even in total obscurity, and in fact I needn't even pay for the 100 megs of broadband web hosting required to store my current mp3 catalog- because I give it to mp3.com, too, and they have nonexclusive rights to it. So even if I get nothing else, my willingness to give out this stuff freely gets me web hosting that would cost me a hundred bucks a month from my current provider. (It gets me no promo, of course- it's all one big slush pile.)

"I'd like to give my music away, because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it." -Captain Beefheart

Airwindows Desktops

Airwindows Backgrounds

Airwindows Tiles

Airwindows Titlebars

Airwindows Web Backgrounds

It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)

Airwindows Desktops

Airwindows Backgrounds

Airwindows Tiles

Airwindows Titlebars

Airwindows Web Backgrounds

It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)

Airwindows Desktops

Airwindows Backgrounds

Airwindows Tiles

Airwindows Titlebars

Airwindows Web Backgrounds

It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)

Airwindows Desktops

Airwindows Backgrounds

Airwindows Tiles

Airwindows Titlebars

Airwindows Web Backgrounds

It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)

Airwindows Desktops

Airwindows Backgrounds

Airwindows Tiles

Airwindows Titlebars

Airwindows Web Backgrounds

It's there to use and has consistently been the biggest draw at airwindows.com. I hope to one day be looking at a Linux eyecandy screenshot and spot some of my own work in it! I think my tiles and natural media backgrounds kick butt in a serious way :) down with swirlies! Quit being so arty and get crafty! ;)

They aren't. I am a Slashdot author, and I'm conspicuously present in the public forums. I did the Borgification and Interface article. I have every intention of doing another, heartily encouraged by at least Roblimo who posted the last one- when I have something well-developed enough to say that I'm ready to spend some days writing it, just as if it was for print.

I tend to run long but not, I think, repetitively- basically the only time I feel I have an article is when I have a _lot_ of ground to cover. I disagree strongly with some of Katz's writing principles- I figure, if you are not quite sure you are right, why are you writing anything at all? The world has a way of _editing_ your rightness- unless you are truly pigheaded there's no reason to be wishywashy and pretend you don't have an opinion. If you are off base you _will_ be corrected, and at that point your notion of what is completely right will change. Rightness is not really a destination, it's more of a process- it is time based. I took pains to time-stamp the argumentative essays on airwindows.com for just this reason. When I go back and look at my ideas later, some of them will be wrong in the new context.

I feel that to fully interact with a world that is both embracing and hostile, you have to have both humility and selfconfidence- not one or the other, _both_ in large amounts. I figure I do pretty well on those grounds, mostly because I have to. I believe Jon Katz is on the one hand lacking in humility (which is a _very_ easy and obvious criticism to make) but on the other hand, lacking in selfconfidence. This sets him up to try and pull rank and _assert_ a superiority he does not feel and isn't entitled to- which is a large part of why he's not slugging it out in the threads like writers like me.

I can only guess at the reasons for this, but I'd single out Jon's attempts to censor his past from himself- he doesn't honor all parts of his life. He was a very heavyweight media exec, the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News, and this seems to have horrified him so much that he attempts to call this another, now disdained, life. It is as if that life is not part of him at all.

Unfortunately, you can't do that- I suppose Thomas Merton, Jon's Trappist monk, led a more sheltered life which did not contain elements of shame. This is why Jon would be drawn to him, but it wouldn't equip Merton to be able to teach Jon about coming to terms with all elements of his life- and so he hasn't, and this is a barrier preventing Jon from dealing with us on equal terms.

I realize that I am a _strange_ candidate for bringing further enlightenment, but on other hand I'm one of the two critics Jon named who post under their own names with their own emails handy. I too have had supportive email from intelligent people over this. In retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't consider the idea that _Jon_ felt inadequate: I know perfectly well how this sort of thing works, and now we have all the clues (former big media job that was repudiated, shame over past 'lives', efforts to behave 'born again' to totally disclaim the former life and not accept it in the slightest way) to see that, as so often happens, Jon's seeming arrogance is compensation. It reads as arrogance, but comes from feelings of inadequacy. Beating on him frankly doesn't help alter this, it perpetuates it, and I'm not surprised Jon resents such beating though he can't articulate it in a way that will help to stop it.

I would suggest,

"Hey, I like you people but I'm not as geeky as you are. I have some stuff in my past, such as being a bigshot TV Executive Producer, that is supposedly something to be proud of but which I am actually ashamed of. I don't want to live like that anymore but I still have the connections I made from that time. How about I pull some strings to try and use this uncomfortable position I'm in, 'slumming' with people whom I actually respect more than the Big Media people, in a way that helps the community? I've done the bigshot thing and it sucked and I'm still trying to shake the habits of thought it taught me. I'm trying as best I can to be one of you, but when I get flamed I tend to puff up with fake ego and bombast, which doesn't help me sleep and also doesn't make anybody flame me less. I don't know how to stop reacting like this. Can I stick around anyhow, in hopes that I learn something?

I, for one, would not continue saying 'no' if that was the question. Jon, people desperately want to resolve the contradictions in your presence here, but they can't until you come to terms with the contradictions within yourself. I'm almost completely sure that a lot of this stems from the whole 'rejection of media trendy' thing you've done to yourself- completely rebelling against what had to be a major part of your life, and desperately searching for something to redeem it, make it like it never happened. How about instead asking if perhaps Slashdotters could accept these parts of you? I see no reason why that wouldn't happen. In effect, you have decided for yourself that being a bigshot executive producer was _so_ bad that nobody can possibly accept you unless you pretend it didn't happen. It would be much healthier and more effective if you quit trying to deny entire parts of your life, and got honest about them. You pontificate a bit much for a writer- but there's a harmony and appropriateness about your pontificating as a writer-ex-bigshot-TV-producer... a friendly one, one that really loves geek culture and wants to further it, help it. That is likeable, more likeable than an incongruously bombastic philosopher-writer...

Be who you are, and I know that many of _my_ objections to your presence, your writing, will tend to fade away. This is because of who _I_ am: I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I do tend to fixate on such incongruities and hammer them into the ground- it's my nature, I have a tough time letting go of such things. It looks to me now that there's a path for you to be in more harmony with Slashdot, but it requires you to quit trying to redefine yourself using Slashdot as a tool- and _accept_ yourself, including the bits that shame you, with slashdot as an environment.

For the first time in a long time I'm genuinely happy I don't filter you, because this is just the sort of insight I needed to get... I might actually start wanting to hear from you if you can grow in this way. The key point is that not being who you are is a barrier: you've been getting defensive, you fight it, you try to be superior to avoid having your barrier broken, avoid the "He's nothing but a 'tired TV producer'!", and in doing so you cut off any chance of real communication- which is your only hope of thriving in the new media, much less as a person among other people.

Be who you are. Slashdot will accept a writer/pontificator/ex-TV-producer. What it will not accept is somebody who insists on being So Much More than an ex-TV-producer. Your efforts to 'rise above' what is only part of your life are separating you from the people whose community you want to belong to...

I was involved with a computer repair shop that wanted to start up an internet service provider for nonprofit organisations. We had a storefront people could find us at, we had a good reputation in the community, we had a founder who was exceptional at applying for grants and 501c3 nonprofit status. However, at the moment the whole thing appears to have withered, and I myself left half a year ago.

Here's what happened, what I learned, what to do.

Use your talents, and try to avoid turning away from them towards more generic 'popular' ideas.

You need to distinguish, and if that means some customer doesn't like you, you'd better accept that rather than casting yourself into ever-new forms to please everybody you meet. I wrote a special version of site compiling software based on my Airwindows.com engine, trying to integrate people's amateur HTML into a 'more professional' three-column tablebased layout. This was discarded because customers (still about 4 customers, even now, and the one complaining left and isn't a customer anymore) insisted on uploading their pages completely unaltered, and _not_ built into a more sophisticated layout. I'll let them have some hits too, so they can use that as an argument for hopefully winning more clients- I was with Co-opnet.org. By this point all traces of my work have been removed, except that I did much copywriting on the main page, and a fair amount of this writing remains.

Outperform- but be damn aware of the context you're doing it in.

You need to be able to absolutely burn rubber, to totally cut any competition to shreds. For instance, I figure I can cut most web designers, as I do sorta Perl-active-site type things with custom programs written in REALbasic- I can maintain a large elaborate site and do redesigns and have the software handle crosslinks and details like filesizes and image dimensions. In sound recording, I'm even cockier :) Now, with the putative ISP for co-opnet (AFAIK still hosted off the very capable Vservers virtual servers company), there were also elaborate plans for an internet cafe to co-locate with the ISP servers. There were questions of location, of bandwidth and getting a pipe- while the other Co-opnet people kept the computer repair shop running (a demanding task), I ran about coming up with answers for these questions. I got to the point of actually entering negotiations for a storefront property in town at 2/3 of the going rate (because I knew the landlords personally and also knew the previous tenant and got figures on what he was paying) and basically came in with a bid that would have cost one third or less of the property originally being looked at, plus the previous store's customers were a similar demographic to internet cafe customers... at which point, again, the rules began quietly changing under me, and I got the impression we'd already put money down (without my even hearing about it, and I was on the damn board of directors- may _still_ be) on a basement room just big enough for servers that happens to have a fibre optic link capable of T1. (co-opnet's site currently boasts just over 1000 hits total). Clearly DSL would be more suitable, but what concerned me more was that I was putting myself out there, actually trying to make deals on behalf of co-opnet, and getting second-guessed and undercut- the internet cafe part of the idea quietly dried up and blew away while I was shopping for properties and figuring out what kind of store layout would bring people in and where to get the machines. This, plus I'd agreed to be the main sysadmin, put down $300 of my own money on O'Reilly books and was trying to armwrestle other co-opnet people to not commit to Vservers 'check here to get our special search engine, check here to give all your clients secure web Email' features that'd kill me to get all of them implemented singlehandedly on top of setting up a webserver on a dedicated machine for the first time- and though I'd made it clear that I wasn't going to be able to do all this myself, nobody else ever got added to the roster to cover this.

I bailed, obviously. Stress was freaking me out, I was beginning to get physically sick and nothing was being resolved. So, back to the moral of the story- outperform, but know the context. It wasn't going to help that I could wear many hats and do many things- I wasn't capable of doing what would need to be done. The context was that I was wasting my effort attempting to deliver on the things we'd originally written into the feature list.

Don't be afraid!

Every time you try something it's an opportunity to learn. The founder of co-opnet would boast that he'd had 18 businesses, 14 of them successful(I may be misremembering the numbers a bit). Now, one could well ask, "If they were so successful why aren't you still doing them?" but there's one key point about this- you learn by doing. Investors and smart businesspeople would rather deal with a startup run by people who have _had_ a total failure- at least this makes it possible for the people to learn from their mistakes! Maybe to learn is not a sure thing, but it's better than nothing, and better odds than dealing with people who've either never tried, or have never failed.

Business is a process because _life_ is a process. You're not laying plans for the only thing you'll ever do for the rest of your life- you're laying plans for what you hope to be doing next month or next year. If that works out well enough that you do it your whole life, well then- did you remember to ask yourself, "Is this the way I want to live my life?" Because if you _must_ arrange things so that you can't fail, you might end up hosing yourself, ruining it for yourself. In a way, that's what happened to co-opnet... it was never okay to momentarily fail. If a customer was fussing about some web page thing, it wasn't "Perhaps you'd be better off with something like Geocities", it was panic and overhaul the whole concept of the website. If it was looking too hard to get the internet cafe going and there wasn't enough people or money to do the work, it wasn't 'commit to it more, make it happen', it was quietly lose faith and scrap the concept, go with less exciting, safer ideas.

I'm currently in debt for a year trying to start up a recording studio, building all sorts of equipment toward that end, and I'm happier because though my horizons are more limited (I'm hardly going and shopping for storefront properties! That was kinda fun), it's up to me to pursue them. So figure out what you want to do, and pursue that! Don't be afraid of failure. It happens to everybody, especially if you haven't fallen on your face much.

The most important thing is to learn, and keep learning. Any geek-type slashdot-reader linux-fetishing person is a lot more likely to be committed to this (who runs Linux without having to learn? I'm not sure that's possible). Hence, rejoice- you are probably the sort of person who _should_ be starting a business and doing that sort of thing. Enjoy it :)

There are flame-free zones on the net- I've seen one. It was and is a Usenet newsgroup, co-hosted on a private news network dedicated to that group and others like it, and it was created as refuge from a flame-saturated situation which showed no signs of ever easing up, i.e. the group alt.fan.furry. (If you want to see what real flames look like, go look at that- even so, there is some normal dialogue there).

A subgroup was tired of being flamed and left to create this new group, and in the charter specified that it was orthoganal to AFF interests and also specified that flaming and argument was offtopic, that nobody's opinions were to be denigrated but also that you weren't to denigrate anybody or anything. THIS WORKED. It continues to work and has worked even in the face of the occasional attack from flamers or 'meowers' or whoever. But it asks a lot- more, I think, than you, Jon, can give.

How often, Jon, do you refrain from denigrating people or things? It appears to me that you wish to have flames against you outlawed by rule or peer pressure, but you still want to flame hotheaded adolescents, corporations, movie theaters, you name it. This is unfair- and you don't deserve peace unless you are willing to start extending it.

As for myself, I've spent a lot of effort mediating and protecting this mysterious non-flame newsgroup I speak of (in which everyone has every freedom except the freedom to denigrate which must be exercised elsewhere). I compare it to Slashdot and I think it would be vastly inappropriate to subject Slashdot to such conditions. Never mind that it can't happen because it'd have to be written into the charter and have all slashdotters agree on it- even so, Slashdot is simply too feisty and controversial to function under such a system. Its primary value is that of a crucible in which the newest tech and the most bitterly contested issues are brought to light and argued about by the readership until a reader can see all the points of view and find a personal viewpoint on the matter. Even in your own articles the most important work is done by the readership, not you. Far from 'self-appointed border guards', a deeply derogatory description, these people are Slashdot.org, something you seem to not understand in your desire to be superior to them and control or silence them.

And on a personal note, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with your characterisations of your enemies. Am I the 'Invisible Katz-Critic'? To read your take on the matter, I am an illiterate, adolescent, cowardly hothead primarily motivated by jealousy and spite, with nothing to say. I just want to take a minute to rebut this, knowing that you are not even deigning to read this, but that others are, and can form their own opinions on my character.

• I am not illiterate. I've been a writer for years, and have written for the international audio journal "The Absolute Sound" (v18, issues 87 and 88). I have fiction writing up on the web, including my first novel, "The Kings of Rainmoor".
• I am not adolescent. I was born in '68 and am 31 years old. Maybe this is not the ravages of old age, but it is certainly not adolescence, and I prefer it that way. I hated my adolescence and prefer being an adult.
• I am not a coward. It particularly rankles after I've constantly put myself out there, willingly risking 'dekarmaization' from what fans of yours remain, to criticise your failings publically, under my own name. My email is available- you certainly have not used it. I'll make a special one, just for you: IKatz@airwindows.com to make replying as easy as a single click on a word in the middle of the text you're (not) reading. I don't believe for a second this will work, but what more can I do? I honestly considered posting my full address and telephone number, might still do so someday in a fit of bravado, but this would fall more accurately under 'I am not stupid' ;)
• I am not motivated by jealousy. Jon, I've had a feature all to myself on Slashdot too. I can have another one any time I want, under two conditions- one, that I come up with a topic that is genuinely interesting and worthy of Slashdot and the attention of its readers, and two, that I put enough effort into writing it to justify its massive virtual publication. You seem to be free of either of these restrictions- am I jealous of that? No, because they are self-imposed restrictions reinforced by the necessity of going through Slashdot editorial circles. If I had story posting access like you, I can only say that I would be a great deal more sensitive to the responsibility of it.
• I am not motivated by spite. Jon, you abuse your position. You come out with the damndest notions and use your access to media to dump them on the world without a thought to your responsibility.

Rob Malda, do you really want this guy publically denigrating _your_ _creation_?? That's crazy! It's also harmful- if self-moderating discussion boards develop the public image of mere usenet groups (and who is to say even these are valueless? Russ Albery's Rant) then a major and novel mechanism for social equality is cut off at the knees. It is _important_ that people learn to respect the value, and tolerate the jarring nature, of an 'unfiltered feed' of opinion and information. It will be a tremendous victory if people can learn to coexist and thrive in an environment which contains both approval and bitter disapproval, and allow the full range of opinion to get out there, allow the public to get the whole story (including rants and even nonsense and spite) and make up their minds about it.

Except, Jon Katz does not _trust_ the new media. That which he likes, such as R-rated movies, he considers a freedom, and overrides anyone else's opinion thereof. That which he doesn't like, such as detailed, bitter criticism of himself and his whole ethic? Well, we'll assume that he does not try to have it silenced outright. (Only CmdrTaco and other Slashdot staffers can answer this, as they are the only ones who'd hear if Jon had been steadily canvassing for the banning of ACs, his pet peeve.) Assuming that he has not been surreptitiously trying to get ACs shut off, his reaction is instead to attack their reputation! It's been posted in this very thread that the overall karma value for the AC is 1975- that's a very positive moderation total! Yet to listen to Jon, they are all hothead adolescents- and the unstated implication here is that such people should not be listened to, do not have a right to an opinion. One wonders if Jon felt the same way about adolescents in the 60s when he was one...

Summary? Jon Katz abuses his position, and has increasingly been trying to discredit the very publically-moderated system that makes Slashdot what it is. He needs to be dropped. Period.

There are flame-free zones on the net- I've seen one. It was and is a Usenet newsgroup, co-hosted on a private news network dedicated to that group and others like it, and it was created as refuge from a flame-saturated situation which showed no signs of ever easing up, i.e. the group alt.fan.furry. (If you want to see what real flames look like, go look at that- even so, there is some normal dialogue there).

A subgroup was tired of being flamed and left to create this new group, and in the charter specified that it was orthoganal to AFF interests and also specified that flaming and argument was offtopic, that nobody's opinions were to be denigrated but also that you weren't to denigrate anybody or anything. THIS WORKED. It continues to work and has worked even in the face of the occasional attack from flamers or 'meowers' or whoever. But it asks a lot- more, I think, than you, Jon, can give.

How often, Jon, do you refrain from denigrating people or things? It appears to me that you wish to have flames against you outlawed by rule or peer pressure, but you still want to flame hotheaded adolescents, corporations, movie theaters, you name it. This is unfair- and you don't deserve peace unless you are willing to start extending it.

As for myself, I've spent a lot of effort mediating and protecting this mysterious non-flame newsgroup I speak of (in which everyone has every freedom except the freedom to denigrate which must be exercised elsewhere). I compare it to Slashdot and I think it would be vastly inappropriate to subject Slashdot to such conditions. Never mind that it can't happen because it'd have to be written into the charter and have all slashdotters agree on it- even so, Slashdot is simply too feisty and controversial to function under such a system. Its primary value is that of a crucible in which the newest tech and the most bitterly contested issues are brought to light and argued about by the readership until a reader can see all the points of view and find a personal viewpoint on the matter. Even in your own articles the most important work is done by the readership, not you. Far from 'self-appointed border guards', a deeply derogatory description, these people are Slashdot.org, something you seem to not understand in your desire to be superior to them and control or silence them.

And on a personal note, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with your characterisations of your enemies. Am I the 'Invisible Katz-Critic'? To read your take on the matter, I am an illiterate, adolescent, cowardly hothead primarily motivated by jealousy and spite, with nothing to say. I just want to take a minute to rebut this, knowing that you are not even deigning to read this, but that others are, and can form their own opinions on my character.

• I am not illiterate. I've been a writer for years, and have written for the international audio journal "The Absolute Sound" (v18, issues 87 and 88). I have fiction writing up on the web, including my first novel, "The Kings of Rainmoor".
• I am not adolescent. I was born in '68 and am 31 years old. Maybe this is not the ravages of old age, but it is certainly not adolescence, and I prefer it that way. I hated my adolescence and prefer being an adult.
• I am not a coward. It particularly rankles after I've constantly put myself out there, willingly risking 'dekarmaization' from what fans of yours remain, to criticise your failings publically, under my own name. My email is available- you certainly have not used it. I'll make a special one, just for you: IKatz@airwindows.com to make replying as easy as a single click on a word in the middle of the text you're (not) reading. I don't believe for a second this will work, but what more can I do? I honestly considered posting my full address and telephone number, might still do so someday in a fit of bravado, but this would fall more accurately under 'I am not stupid' ;)
• I am not motivated by jealousy. Jon, I've had a feature all to myself on Slashdot too. I can have another one any time I want, under two conditions- one, that I come up with a topic that is genuinely interesting and worthy of Slashdot and the attention of its readers, and two, that I put enough effort into writing it to justify its massive virtual publication. You seem to be free of either of these restrictions- am I jealous of that? No, because they are self-imposed restrictions reinforced by the necessity of going through Slashdot editorial circles. If I had story posting access like you, I can only say that I would be a great deal more sensitive to the responsibility of it.
• I am not motivated by spite. Jon, you abuse your position. You come out with the damndest notions and use your access to media to dump them on the world without a thought to your responsibility.

Rob Malda, do you really want this guy publically denigrating _your_ _creation_?? That's crazy! It's also harmful- if self-moderating discussion boards develop the public image of mere usenet groups (and who is to say even these are valueless? Russ Albery's Rant) then a major and novel mechanism for social equality is cut off at the knees. It is _important_ that people learn to respect the value, and tolerate the jarring nature, of an 'unfiltered feed' of opinion and information. It will be a tremendous victory if people can learn to coexist and thrive in an environment which contains both approval and bitter disapproval, and allow the full range of opinion to get out there, allow the public to get the whole story (including rants and even nonsense and spite) and make up their minds about it.

Except, Jon Katz does not _trust_ the new media. That which he likes, such as R-rated movies, he considers a freedom, and overrides anyone else's opinion thereof. That which he doesn't like, such as detailed, bitter criticism of himself and his whole ethic? Well, we'll assume that he does not try to have it silenced outright. (Only CmdrTaco and other Slashdot staffers can answer this, as they are the only ones who'd hear if Jon had been steadily canvassing for the banning of ACs, his pet peeve.) Assuming that he has not been surreptitiously trying to get ACs shut off, his reaction is instead to attack their reputation! It's been posted in this very thread that the overall karma value for the AC is 1975- that's a very positive moderation total! Yet to listen to Jon, they are all hothead adolescents- and the unstated implication here is that such people should not be listened to, do not have a right to an opinion. One wonders if Jon felt the same way about adolescents in the 60s when he was one...

Summary? Jon Katz abuses his position, and has increasingly been trying to discredit the very publically-moderated system that makes Slashdot what it is. He needs to be dropped. Period.

I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

One envisions doing this to the whole Katz on Slashdot collection, thus getting not only terrific headlines, but entire articles. For anybody interested in doing this, Katz is a _very_ good subject for travesty as he is disjointed and covers the same subjects over and over. To markov chain this stuff it's best to work at the word level- pairs of words end up chaining very abstractedly, and word triples can sometimes spit out overlarge chunks of unaltered text (though I suspect with Katz the triples would work perfectly).

Here's a sample of this sort of travesty: Speak Roughly To Your Evidence, an edited Alice In Wonderland travesty.

Correction: the artistic equivalent of OSS might well be commission or retainer. I've been commissioned for fiction writing- the story Passages was a commission for money, for which the client was well satisfied. I even got to use my own artistic judgement on how it came out and the points it made- it was a lot of work balancing that, but I did it.
However, with regard to music the money is in _merchandising_, not having people commission you to write songs for them. Yes, if you're amazing then maybe you might get commissioned- just as, if you're an amazing instrumentalist, you can be retained as a house musician somewhere. However, in the world of the net, where the art goes out there for free, the winning solution is to then sell posh versions, or shirts, or posters, that sort of thing. Hell, sell figurines ;)
For example, I don't have stuff up at the moment, but my most recent mix was a long format rock instrumental with a 'live band feel' in which the low-end was absolutely phenomenal- we're talking low end authority to utterly show off any subwoofer no matter how expensive, or on the other hand to make any truck go 'boom' ;)
Bearing that in mind, I have a definite outlet for 'audiophile' CDs (actually, I could omit the quotes- I mix _damn_ well and build my own equipment- but my point is that I'd have a big market in pure bass test stuff, which is not truly audiophile).
I have albums of pop/rock songs which I think are good songs. If I can deliver them well enough, really rock 'em and make great albums, then I'd have an extra outlet- besides selling audiophile CDs of the original sources for the mp3s (or custom mixes, for instance for more dynamic range or 'in your face' radio mix CDs), I would definitely be well advised to try and come up with a T-shirt or poster. How many techno bands would be well advised to do a _mouse_ pad? I use a fancy 3M mousepad, but even so I could easily see using a 'u4ia' mousepad if he made them (classic Amiga techno MOD artist, now goes by F8 and no he doesn't make mousepads ;) )
You've got to think merchandising, not trying to 'milk' the very music that you're trying to have _everybody_ listening to. Having it be free is a very good way to help 'everybody' be listening to it. If you can get that happening, if you're that good an artist, then other avenues begin to open up. And you won't make millions- but seriously, lots of 'industry' artists end up heavily in DEBT for their art. Bands that don't recoup royalties, artists signing away everything, pay-to-play just in order to get booked at gigs: it's an absolute snake pit, evil, if you want to make money you're better off giving away free mp3s and then trying to sell mousepads, CDs and figurines over your little website. Seriously...

Desktop Pictures (jpg)
Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm)
Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm)
Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there.
I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked.
All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game.
I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content.
At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs :) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment.
Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....

Desktop Pictures (jpg)
Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm)
Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm)
Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there.
I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked.
All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game.
I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content.
At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs :) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment.
Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....

Desktop Pictures (jpg)
Tiling Background Library (gif/jpg/xpm)
Dithered Background Textures (gif/xpm)
Oddly enough, just last night I was doing an analysis of airwindows.com traffic, and found that although no specific weblog showed it, a huge amount of activity at my site had to do with people who were searching for art. They found it at airwindows, they downloaded it, they looked around to see what else was there.
I went and enhanced what I had. I made web gifs of the XPM tiles I'd originally meant for strictly Linux background purposes. Conversely, I went to the dithered GIFs I'd made, and I made XPM versions of all of them. I made all of it available, updated the links, tidied it up a bit, made sure it worked.
All of these are free downloads. I request that nobody try to take credit: that's it, that's the only condition. Anything else is fair game.
I can't do this with mp3s on my site- for the very simple reason that I have way too much music to store as mp3s on my site (by several orders of magnitude), some of which is very long format. However, I've been steadily building the needed mastering equipment to go into mp3 in a very big way, and when I do I anticipate loading really huge amounts of original music onto mp3.com or somewhere like that, somewhere that just yells, 'Bring it on! more megabytes please!' knowing that they get ad revenues for hosting good content.
At that point, my making money from that content is _my_ problem. If my engineering isn't good enough to be worth spending money on an uncompressed CD version, that's my problem- if my music isn't so cool that everybody buys T-Shirts and posters from me, that's my problem. MP3 will be my radio- it's the loss leader, it's what I give out like I give out the silly little webgifs :) it's the sort of thing where I can vow to never restrict or limit it, because I'm not greedy- I can give some things and sell others, I don't need 'protection' in the form of mp3 encryption, I don't need to harass music listeners like a repo man- that sucks, it's stupid, it's bad business, and it's certainly not entertainment.
Entertainment is optional. It seems the big entertainment industries are forgetting that....

Write your own and open it. If you don't like that then you can play around with mine (currently some innovative terrain generation tricks combined with techniques for POV-Ray rendering), but frankly it would be best if you wrote your own. Do the work, and free it. Trying to talk a bunch of IP holders into opening their stuff just because it's a good idea is a very hard sell. It's the whole 'stone soup' concept- you have to start with _something_. What I have may not be much, I think it has potential- anyone who thinks it is crap is invited to GPL something better, please >;)
I would like to see a movie studio dedicated to open content, so people could focus on the stories they are telling. Desktop movie production is coming so soon, and it will be as much a revolution as the cassette multitrack home studio- and there are so many people working on things (such as computer game design and graphic effects) that could easily be applied to home moviemaking. There are GIF animation tools and computer image compositing tools available that do the same thing as the multimillion dollar Disney Multiplane camera used for Disney's greatest animated features.
Rather than going begging to effects houses, why don't we just arrange it so they end up coming to us? If I'm not mistaken, my terrain generation trick is markedly less demanding on CPU than the techniques used, say, for the pod racer scenes in Star Wars TPM. Cutting down modelling and render times is incredibly important in professional work, there's never enough time so it's always a balance being struck between vision and reality. I've GPLed my terrain generator program, meaning that anyone who either uses a Mac, or can port a Python-like syntax to another platform, can use it in movies for nothing. Anyone who really wants that industry's technology to open up would be well advised to do their level best to accomplish _something_ cool, GPL it, and then simply let it be known as such- other stuff that wants to incorporate this can do so by going GPL itself, and we don't need to beg or pressure anybody. Really, IP on these sorts of tools is a bit like IP on brushes or pencils- you don't copyright the brush, you copyright the painting you do with it. The brush is not important compared with what's being done with it...

Hi! We have changed one of your contracts. This email announcement is entirely free. To read the changes for the low low fee of 10$, please click on the following link- Tell me more about the changes in my contracts! Thank you for being one of our most valued customers!

After all, my domain (a .com, even though more and more I'm doing free software now) was taken from my original name for my recording studio.
The name? airwindows.com.
You tell me a certain entity isn't going to consider everything with those latter seven letters their property... I'm depending on (1) apathy, and (2) my right to sit on the name as it is MY trademark dammit, and I registered the domain over a year ago and have been using the name in business since 1994.
There's no way I can possibly take anything to court, so if I do get trouble my only option is to make publicity. I just hope that is never, ever necessary.

http://www.airwindows.com/rotsos/index. html

Like it? Take it. It's an engine for generating entire universes, planets down to the 3dpi resolution, complete overwhelming amounts of synthetic data into the billions of gigabytes, and it's all generated from a 16M datafile and a series of extremely evil and effective hacks, and a profound desire for doing game optimizations and returning the results FAST FAST FAST so the game doesn't suck.
No, it's not fractal. Yes, IT IS GPL. It's actually not even C (I'm told it looks like Python code- it's a funky Mac language called REALbasic that kicks butt for rapid prototyping but is not itself free) but that makes no difference- it is GPLed, and it is entirely original.
Why isn't everybody doing it? Because it's too radical an idea to generate entire universes, whole planets entirely emergently, and then _explore_ them to find interesting places. Game developers usually want to write their 'maps' by hand, or at least edit them. In doing so, they limit themselves to little weenie maps ;) and there is another way, and it is FREE.
I don't know who else is out there ready to hit the world with genuinely innovative stuff under the GPL. I'm doing it. Why? Because I have no confidence in the ability of the U.S. legal system to protect me or my ideas. I have no confidence in business to be able to help me implement them. All the promises about innovating and making millions off of great ideas are all crap- that doesn't happen anymore, those days are over. And since the promise to the independent developer is a lie, I'm giving it away like crackdotcom gave away Golgotha when they went out of business- except I didn't go out of business. Take this stuff, do neat things with it, I certainly intend to. There will always be a version of it you can use in code.
GPL doesn't seem to produce new, original stuff, hell! _ALL_ the stuff I've GPLed has been new, and some of it has been original by any standard (mind showing me the other space based game universes with nineteen million individually plotted stars, most of which have specific and consistently repeatable planets and entire landscapes and resource maps? That's what this is).
I rushed this stuff into public view out of fear that patents were being written that touched some aspects of it. Any aspect- I don't labor under the misconception that patents make sense, or expect that anyone was duplicating the more large scale aspects. I also rushed it out there because of just such attitudes as yours. I wanted to prove them wrong, and continue to work at doing that. GPL is not a world of derivative crud. It is a philosophical statement, it is growing, and it is a way for a developer to be guaranteed freedom no matter what the commercial world might do to step on it or stop it. As the commercial world grows more and more poisonous, the number of people doing wholly original work and GPLing it will only grow.