Let's talk about sound files, music specifically. I've tried putting encoded sound into the file, say very high frequency, but that can pretty easily be filtered out. Or, if the material is in just one part of the file, then that part can be simply edited out. What I'd like is something, I don't know, holographic that will be in any part of the file longer than say 5 seconds.
Have you tried putting some ultra-low frequency into it? Say, an amplitude modulation signal that tweaks the average amplitude over a 2-3 second period by a few percent? I bet you could make it audibly imperceptible without making it so that compression removes it.
When you have replicators, the 'replicated' goods become a commodity, so people who want to differentiate themselves would crave for real
stuff, much like the neo-victorians in the diamond age
Exactly. People already pay a premium for 'hand-made' goods to differentiate themselves from others who buy factory-made goods. So if people spend money they'll do it on fresh food, hand-made items, live music... wow, this is sounding really good!
Also, consider that if everything costs nothing you don't NEED money. So people will just do whatever the hell they feel like. And, you know... people can't stop designing and building things for long. It's in our nature, hell, it's in the very description of our species. "Man is a tool-making animal." Even if only 1% of the population can design new things, that's 1% who are creating because it's in their nature and have no material constraints forcing their designs. Like youtube videos, future commodities will be created for fame, not money.
The "free" duplication of digital information has such incredible potential if relieved of the burden of treating it like physical property, and we instead embrace its inherent nature.
Well said. And this is self-evident to anyone who stops to think about it... but at the same time, this 'post scarcity' view is anathema to proponents of an industry based on scarcity economics. Software companies are switching over left right and center to viewing software as a service rather than a product - witness MS's subscription model for the newer Office licenses, Blizzard's decision to make Starcraft 2 online-only, just for two examples. This works fine for software because software has an inherently high replay value. You'll spend enough consecutive months using MS Word that a subscription model is appropriate, and while Starcraft will not have ongoing costs, the online matchmaking will entice people to shell out for legit copies of the game. You could consider the purchase price a 'lifetime subscription' to Battle.net. Compare this with movies, which you'll probably only watch once or twice. I'm loving my local video hire place because instead of spending $30 for a DVD, I can hire it for $3.
Where DPP is insidious is that it's trying to change peoples' mindset about their own data, with the aim of eventually changing their mindset about commercial media. They want Joe Average to start thinking of his holiday snaps as physical objects, and 'lending' them to one person at a time but not letting them 'keep' one (when in practice this process is really equivalent to making a bunch of prints and then forcing your friends to burn theirs after they've looked at them). If he does this with his own digital media, he's more likely to see a pay-per-view downloaded movie as something that needs to be 'returned'.
You may be thinking of hand writing. If you do that, you'd better get it right the first time. But no one does that anymore.:)
As an interesting aside, having learned to type on computer, I find typewriter-oriented accuracy tests to be incredibly frustrating. My typing error-correction seems to happen at the muscle memory level these days, which is fine when I'm typing and I hit a wrong key and then backspace (or shift+backspace for a whole word) before I consciously think of it. It's horrible when some budget program based on a '50s secretarial employment test counts you typing 'dpg' instead of 'dog' to be an error and then ping you 5 more times for typing the rest of the word then backspacing back to the 'p'.
I taught myself to type, and I type at 100 wpm. I use all my fingers, just not in the ridiculously formal way touch typing is taught.
I'd say of all the replies, you're probably closest to my style. I did a 3 month typing course in first year high school, then promptly forgot it all. Later when I finally had regular use of a computer, I found myself typing with my fingers on the home row. A while later I found out by accident that I really didn't need to look at the keyboard while I typed. I've tested myself at 90wpm but I tend to type slower if I'm not transcribing (and infinitely faster if I am - gogo copy/paste:P ) because the bottleneck isn't my keyboard skills. I'd suspect that that's why I haven't raised my speed past 90wpm, and that if I started to spend more time on IRC again I'd see some improvements.
Most people I've seen who learned to touch type 'by themselves' are just fast hunt-and-peck typists who've memorised the key locations. Sure, they'll do OK at first, but they'll struggle to get above 40wpm. On the contrary, if you at least learn which finger goes on what key and then practise with that until you can touch type you can easily teach yourself 'the rest' and hit 80+ wpm with no problems. Touch typing with 9 fingers (My typing teacher told me she'd cut my left thumb off if she saw me using it:P ) is potentially at least 4.5x faster than doing so with two fingers due to maths and stuff.
Agreed. Since most people can't write, there's no point in having them touch type.
How on earth does this follow? In my daily life I type an incredible amount; emails, online chat, code, slashdot and other forum posts... in comparison I probably write no more than 50 words a week on paper using a pen. I know that if I had to choose one of the two skills to retain while I permanently forgot the other ("You are attempting to learn the skill 'Threesome'. Both your skill slots are full. You must choose one of the following skills to forget: (1) Typing (2) Handwriting") then I'd far rather keep my current 90+ wpm touch typing than lose it in favour of being able to write shopping lists on post-it notes.
I think the only reason the later volumes even sold was because people didn't want to admit to themselves that they'd been persuaded to waste the time and money on the earlier ones.
Nearly. The only reason I bought the later ones was because the first four or so were so good (imho, ymmv, etc) that it *had* to pick up the pace again at some point. Sadly it wallowed out not into a river delta but into a turgid mud flat.
No, my guess he's expressing a not unexpected horror that the sick fuck murdered a 4 year old child.
No, that is once again begging the question. The man's been charged but not yet convicted - you know that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing? It looks like he's guilty, yes, but 'looks like' isn't good enough when you're talking about a long life in prison or a much shorter one on death row.
Due process must of course be followed, but fuckit, there's something to be said for stringing that fucker up and hearing him gurgle.
Due process is all that stands between YOU and being strung up to gurgle when some kid goes missing and you happened to drive past their house that morning. Witch hunts are bad and don't serve 'justice' in any way.
In what business do you know where regular maint requires you to tear apart a running engine (After shutting it down) to make sure it is still operating properly.
Pretty sure airlines have mandated rebuilds every so many hours of flight time. Much better to find out that your turbine blades are damaged in the workshop than halfway across the Atlantic.
Mark this however you like. HE KILLED A FOUR YEAR OLD. Hmm do they still have their criminals drawn and quartered in Texas?
Begging the question, yerr'onner! Next you'll be saying "he shouldn't get a trial because if they find him not guilty then he's gotten away with it"...
I'm guessing you know the answer. The real way to help musicians is to socially encourage paying for music. Seems to be working okay for Jonathan Coulton.
You seem to be implying that in order to make a living through music, some level of skill is required. Damn, I guess I'll have to fall back on my plan of being a professional skateboarder.
In fact we should move towards a model where the music you buy isn't in any playable format to start with. You buy the music in the non-playable distribution format, and then whatever you use to play it converts it to a suitable format.
I can't help thinking that here your "non-playable distribution format" is either tiny pits on a silvered disk, charge variations in a semiconductor chip, or magnetic variations on a metal platter. When you use something to play it, it's converted into the only suitable audio input format for humans; namely, vibrations in the airspace near our ears.
Advertising is good when it's unobtrusive, it doesn't interfere with what I'm doing, and it alerts me to products or services that I may have a genuine need for. I'm quite happy to watch an ad talking about a new motorbike, or informing me of good prices for beer, or whatever. I get annoyed when I have to sit through the same damned ad for McDonalds six times during a half-hour episode of The Simpsons, even though I'm halfway through eating a burger.
No one with access to the code cares enough to post it to Wikileaks?
Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem that hard a project to write. It's basically a unit converter. The real unit of phone service is the minute-of-talk-time but they go through a smokescreen layer of dollars - you spend $X, you get $Y of credit, and somewhere in the fine print they charge you $Z per minute.
It should be easy enough to pump out an application where you can enter the plan cost per month, dollars of credit, call rates and so forth and have it spit out dollar-per-unit-service values. Have it save each entry and voila, a table of comparative plan value!
If I hadn't already posted you'd have gotten a +1, informative. Or maybe a +1, Get on a bike and do some work you fat f**k. Anyway I agree.
Also, it's one of my pet peeves that the over 50s 'lycra brigade' that prance around in skintight lycra pants when they're far too old and fat to otherwise get away with it, spend $5000 on a bike to shave 200g off the combined weight of them and their bike when they could leave their water bottle behind (or, like, lose some weight) and have the same effect.
Won't ANY short range personal transport device that costs more than $1000 get the same response? Seriously why the fuck would I pay $5000+ for the equivalent of one of those $500 electric scooters? Don't get me wrong, it's cool... but it's worth $1000 at absolute tops.
It was reverse engineered as in black-box analysis. They had to do that because IBM included the full, copyrighted source code. This let IBM claim that any compatible BIOS was stolen from them; IIRC (disclaimer: I get my entire knowledge of this incident from Kringley's "Accidental Empires") they had to actively try and find 'virgin' coders who hadn't ever read the IBM manuals.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's talk about sound files, music specifically. I've tried putting encoded sound into the file, say very high frequency, but that can pretty easily be filtered out. Or, if the material is in just one part of the file, then that part can be simply edited out. What I'd like is something, I don't know, holographic that will be in any part of the file longer than say 5 seconds.
Have you tried putting some ultra-low frequency into it? Say, an amplitude modulation signal that tweaks the average amplitude over a 2-3 second period by a few percent? I bet you could make it audibly imperceptible without making it so that compression removes it.
When you have replicators, the 'replicated' goods become a commodity, so people who want to differentiate themselves would crave for real stuff, much like the neo-victorians in the diamond age
Exactly. People already pay a premium for 'hand-made' goods to differentiate themselves from others who buy factory-made goods. So if people spend money they'll do it on fresh food, hand-made items, live music... wow, this is sounding really good!
Also, consider that if everything costs nothing you don't NEED money. So people will just do whatever the hell they feel like. And, you know... people can't stop designing and building things for long. It's in our nature, hell, it's in the very description of our species. "Man is a tool-making animal." Even if only 1% of the population can design new things, that's 1% who are creating because it's in their nature and have no material constraints forcing their designs. Like youtube videos, future commodities will be created for fame, not money.
The "free" duplication of digital information has such incredible potential if relieved of the burden of treating it like physical property, and we instead embrace its inherent nature.
Well said. And this is self-evident to anyone who stops to think about it... but at the same time, this 'post scarcity' view is anathema to proponents of an industry based on scarcity economics. Software companies are switching over left right and center to viewing software as a service rather than a product - witness MS's subscription model for the newer Office licenses, Blizzard's decision to make Starcraft 2 online-only, just for two examples. This works fine for software because software has an inherently high replay value. You'll spend enough consecutive months using MS Word that a subscription model is appropriate, and while Starcraft will not have ongoing costs, the online matchmaking will entice people to shell out for legit copies of the game. You could consider the purchase price a 'lifetime subscription' to Battle.net. Compare this with movies, which you'll probably only watch once or twice. I'm loving my local video hire place because instead of spending $30 for a DVD, I can hire it for $3.
Where DPP is insidious is that it's trying to change peoples' mindset about their own data, with the aim of eventually changing their mindset about commercial media. They want Joe Average to start thinking of his holiday snaps as physical objects, and 'lending' them to one person at a time but not letting them 'keep' one (when in practice this process is really equivalent to making a bunch of prints and then forcing your friends to burn theirs after they've looked at them). If he does this with his own digital media, he's more likely to see a pay-per-view downloaded movie as something that needs to be 'returned'.
Couldn't you put a SPOILER WARNING alert on this post? Now the game is ruined. Thanks a lot, pal.
Relax, he'll never figure out how to stop the babelfish from falling into the drain or being scooped up by the flying robot.
:/
...
Goddamn robot.
You may be thinking of hand writing. If you do that, you'd better get it right the first time. But no one does that anymore. :)
As an interesting aside, having learned to type on computer, I find typewriter-oriented accuracy tests to be incredibly frustrating. My typing error-correction seems to happen at the muscle memory level these days, which is fine when I'm typing and I hit a wrong key and then backspace (or shift+backspace for a whole word) before I consciously think of it. It's horrible when some budget program based on a '50s secretarial employment test counts you typing 'dpg' instead of 'dog' to be an error and then ping you 5 more times for typing the rest of the word then backspacing back to the 'p'.
I taught myself to type, and I type at 100 wpm. I use all my fingers, just not in the ridiculously formal way touch typing is taught.
I'd say of all the replies, you're probably closest to my style. I did a 3 month typing course in first year high school, then promptly forgot it all. Later when I finally had regular use of a computer, I found myself typing with my fingers on the home row. A while later I found out by accident that I really didn't need to look at the keyboard while I typed. I've tested myself at 90wpm but I tend to type slower if I'm not transcribing (and infinitely faster if I am - gogo copy/paste :P ) because the bottleneck isn't my keyboard skills. I'd suspect that that's why I haven't raised my speed past 90wpm, and that if I started to spend more time on IRC again I'd see some improvements.
Most people I've seen who learned to touch type 'by themselves' are just fast hunt-and-peck typists who've memorised the key locations. Sure, they'll do OK at first, but they'll struggle to get above 40wpm. On the contrary, if you at least learn which finger goes on what key and then practise with that until you can touch type you can easily teach yourself 'the rest' and hit 80+ wpm with no problems. Touch typing with 9 fingers (My typing teacher told me she'd cut my left thumb off if she saw me using it :P ) is potentially at least 4.5x faster than doing so with two fingers due to maths and stuff.
Agreed. Since most people can't write, there's no point in having them touch type.
How on earth does this follow? In my daily life I type an incredible amount; emails, online chat, code, slashdot and other forum posts... in comparison I probably write no more than 50 words a week on paper using a pen. I know that if I had to choose one of the two skills to retain while I permanently forgot the other ("You are attempting to learn the skill 'Threesome'. Both your skill slots are full. You must choose one of the following skills to forget: (1) Typing (2) Handwriting") then I'd far rather keep my current 90+ wpm touch typing than lose it in favour of being able to write shopping lists on post-it notes.
I think the only reason the later volumes even sold was because people didn't want to admit to themselves that they'd been persuaded to waste the time and money on the earlier ones.
Nearly. The only reason I bought the later ones was because the first four or so were so good (imho, ymmv, etc) that it *had* to pick up the pace again at some point. Sadly it wallowed out not into a river delta but into a turgid mud flat.
No, my guess he's expressing a not unexpected horror that the sick fuck murdered a 4 year old child.
No, that is once again begging the question. The man's been charged but not yet convicted - you know that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing? It looks like he's guilty, yes, but 'looks like' isn't good enough when you're talking about a long life in prison or a much shorter one on death row.
Due process must of course be followed, but fuckit, there's something to be said for stringing that fucker up and hearing him gurgle.
Due process is all that stands between YOU and being strung up to gurgle when some kid goes missing and you happened to drive past their house that morning. Witch hunts are bad and don't serve 'justice' in any way.
In what business do you know where regular maint requires you to tear apart a running engine (After shutting it down) to make sure it is still operating properly.
Pretty sure airlines have mandated rebuilds every so many hours of flight time. Much better to find out that your turbine blades are damaged in the workshop than halfway across the Atlantic.
Mark this however you like. HE KILLED A FOUR YEAR OLD. Hmm do they still have their criminals drawn and quartered in Texas?
Begging the question, yerr'onner! Next you'll be saying "he shouldn't get a trial because if they find him not guilty then he's gotten away with it"...
I'm guessing you know the answer. The real way to help musicians is to socially encourage paying for music. Seems to be working okay for Jonathan Coulton.
You seem to be implying that in order to make a living through music, some level of skill is required. Damn, I guess I'll have to fall back on my plan of being a professional skateboarder.
In fact we should move towards a model where the music you buy isn't in any playable format to start with. You buy the music in the non-playable distribution format, and then whatever you use to play it converts it to a suitable format.
I can't help thinking that here your "non-playable distribution format" is either tiny pits on a silvered disk, charge variations in a semiconductor chip, or magnetic variations on a metal platter. When you use something to play it, it's converted into the only suitable audio input format for humans; namely, vibrations in the airspace near our ears.
Advertising is good when it's unobtrusive, it doesn't interfere with what I'm doing, and it alerts me to products or services that I may have a genuine need for. I'm quite happy to watch an ad talking about a new motorbike, or informing me of good prices for beer, or whatever. I get annoyed when I have to sit through the same damned ad for McDonalds six times during a half-hour episode of The Simpsons, even though I'm halfway through eating a burger.
No, but reading implies a level of cognition far beyond what adwords uses.
...pants being irrelevant because it's made for public outdoors advertisements.
Dunno about you but I'd *definitely* not consider pants 'irrelevant' when outdoors and in public.
No one with access to the code cares enough to post it to Wikileaks?
Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem that hard a project to write. It's basically a unit converter. The real unit of phone service is the minute-of-talk-time but they go through a smokescreen layer of dollars - you spend $X, you get $Y of credit, and somewhere in the fine print they charge you $Z per minute.
It should be easy enough to pump out an application where you can enter the plan cost per month, dollars of credit, call rates and so forth and have it spit out dollar-per-unit-service values. Have it save each entry and voila, a table of comparative plan value!
If I hadn't already posted you'd have gotten a +1, informative. Or maybe a +1, Get on a bike and do some work you fat f**k. Anyway I agree.
Also, it's one of my pet peeves that the over 50s 'lycra brigade' that prance around in skintight lycra pants when they're far too old and fat to otherwise get away with it, spend $5000 on a bike to shave 200g off the combined weight of them and their bike when they could leave their water bottle behind (or, like, lose some weight) and have the same effect.
Won't ANY short range personal transport device that costs more than $1000 get the same response? Seriously why the fuck would I pay $5000+ for the equivalent of one of those $500 electric scooters? Don't get me wrong, it's cool... but it's worth $1000 at absolute tops.
A bad analogy on Slashdot is like a car journey with that guy who loves bean burritos.
Erm, if you brought 50,000lbs of black diamond back to earth, it wouldn't be worth $13mil/lb.
It was not about being better. It was about being affordable and compatible with the software you ran on computers at your work place.
Bingo. A computer on your desk running the software you need is "leaps and bounds" ahead of ANYTHING in a showroom and out of your budget.
Wasn't Lebensraum ("living space") one of the main justifications for World War II? People just want to explore.
And is a bizarre sort of way, Großdeutschland actually happened, only we now call it the European Union and it's (arguably) a good thing.
It was reverse engineered as in black-box analysis. They had to do that because IBM included the full, copyrighted source code. This let IBM claim that any compatible BIOS was stolen from them; IIRC (disclaimer: I get my entire knowledge of this incident from Kringley's "Accidental Empires") they had to actively try and find 'virgin' coders who hadn't ever read the IBM manuals.