GTK already snapped up most of the cross platform action and troltech hasn't done much to go after it. Most QT stuff at this point is strictly Linux as "K" apps.. there's not much incentive to port to windows or mac because there are already GTK equivalents in that space.
If the OS X native port of GTK doesn't get its ass in gear, that is about to change. GTK on OS X means using X11. KDE4 apps on Mac will run native. About a year from now, we'll be seeing polished KDE4 apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I'm totally conscious of the loudness war when I record, mix and master music and it's hard to tell whether all that effort will be appreciated by the listener but your understanding of the issues illustrates some people are prepared to understand the art and science behind it to put the music first.
I ReplayGain all of my MP3s and FLACs. I once saw a poster opine that widespread use of such technology may end the "loudness war" since it puts the average volume level back under the listener's control. I hope he's right and I'm glad some producers such as yourself care enough about quality of your work to mix for those who care.
The amp was 27 watts which surprised me as I had assumed more was better, but it seemed plenty loud enough.
There are different ways of measuring wattage. Older equipment tended to be rated by how much average power they output continuously and cleanly. Newer stuff (within the last 25 years) tends be rated by Peak wattage with very little regard for distortion. Designers can always chuck in some big caps for transient sizzle and a big peak wattage number on paper but the amount of power the amp can output steadily without distortion probably isn't anywhere near your friend's old amp.
Sheer wattage isn't the only figure of merit here. That old amp very likely had an excellent "slew rate" as well. Slew rate is the speed at which the amplifier can go from lowest amplitude to highest amplitude. Imagine that you're trying to accurately reproduce a square wave. A low slew rate amp will have a marked slope on a scope rather than a near vertical trace. As the slew rate gets slower and slower, the reproduced square wave comes to resemble a clipped triangle wave. Of course, pure vertical isn't achievable because no device can be both on and off at the same time but the best devices can smoothly go from no power to max power very quickly.
The moral of the story is that a relatively low amount of clean power will sound better and louder than a lot of clipped distorted power.
Your friend was using good speakers as well which is just as important as a good amp.
Modern digital recording systems just keep getting better and soon I doubt that an analogue verses digital recording argument will exist.
Tweaks will always insist they are buying something tangible when they pay $100 a foot for oxygen free Monster Cable, 100lb output transformers, hand rolled capacitors, and those stupid little foam circles on the back wall of the listening room. As long as we have rags like Absolute Sound and Stereophile that use the language of art critics to describe technical artifacts then this "debate" will always exist. Even if sound is sampled at 1Mhz with 32bit resolution, some dumbass tweak will insist that his vinyl still has "infinite resolution" compared to that. Actual science from Nyquist and Shannon which among other things allows apples to apples comparisons of fidelity will be airily dismissed.
Because of the Loudness War, I'll concede that old vinyl and reel-to-reel versions of many recordings sound better. But this is not due to any inherent superiority of those media. It's just that digital production methods allow abuse of the sound that would literally make a stylus jump out of the groove. This abuse is not required. Marketing flaks that want to be the loudest thing in the juke just can't help themselves.
I also think that issues of sound production and reproduction are conflated together. Tubes, overdriven effects boxes, deliberating using ratty guitar pickups to get a special effect are all valid ways of specifically coloring sound to the producer's taste. But to the extent that price allows, playback equipment shouldn't color anything. Just give me a reasonably linear response and gobs of headroom and it really doesn't matter if it's tube or solid state. If you say your tube amp is "warm" then I say it is either a non-linear piece of garbage or you're overdriving it. If the solid state amp is harsh, then it is a piece of crap with no headroom or it's being overdriven. Either way, it isn't what I paid to hear.
The copyright free zone is probably more like a sort of legal field around Antigua and their nationals. As soon as an American copyrighted item leaves Antigua or the hand of a Antiguan national, I would imagine any copyrights are right back in force. After all, this same trick could be used on Adobe, MS or any other copyrighted item. Even if other countries recognize the loss of copyright, it won't be here in America. The first American individual or organization who tried to use Antigua as a copyright stripping proxy would have some splainin' to do in an American court.
Hopefully, if the latter happens, the copyrights to the music will revert to the artists and not to some random IP vulture that picks at the corpse. (Though the realist in me knows that the IP vultures will be feeding well when the old record companies start dying.)
It'll be random IP vultures. Almost all record company contracts are "work for hire". Unlike book authors, recording artists have to give up their copyrights to the record companies. Bigger artists like Eric Clapton can get better deals but guys who just got signed are screwed 16 ways from Sunday. The songwriter of a band may have copyright right to the lyrics and sheetmusic but the ability to exercise those tend to be heavily restricted by contract, again "big" longstanding artists get better deals here. Even so, the best you can hope for is that the songwriter will want to re-record cuts on non-RIAA terms. The pop records we grew up with are what will be covered in jackal spew.
Acts of Congress can only do so much when it comes to consumer wallets. Congress can pass laws until the cows come home and I'll still spend my entertainment dollars on movies, games, and non-RIAA artists. If they chisel up ways to bleed those non-RIAA artists then I won't buy that material either. So the non-RIAA artists had best get their butts in gear.
And I almost completely agree with you. Current record companies won't change to the model you describe. They're control freaks addicted to the paychecks they commanded in the past. They'll go down in the ugliest Congress-bribing propaganda-spewing way possible. I also think whoever inherits their old copyright portfolios will handle them in the most clueless way possible. It wouldn't surprise me to see the 20th century's musical legacy more or less die as it will be covered in legal jackal vomit. Jackals vomit on the part of a carcass they won't eat so others won't eat it either.
New record companies will arise that operate more or less as you describe. While the copyright situation that evolves won't be what the typical Slashdotter seems to want, it should be a lot saner. It'll have to be as a condition to even do business.
I've slowly been replacing my own incandescents with CFDs so yes I do realize that. However, the spectrum thrown out by these devices doesn't yet match the spectrum thrown out by incandescents though they're getting better all the time. They still tend be a bit whiter and "colder" feeling. The diffusion pattern also differs so the shadows cast from these bulbs also contributes to a different feel. A slightly more serious problem is that they tend to be slightly bulkier in odd places so it can be difficult to put them in some fixtures. Much of this is preference rather than inherent superiority so a certain amount of "consumer acclimatization" will have to take place.
At some point, improving bulbs and consumers will meet halfway. Nonetheless, I deplore the activist mentality that says this should have taken place yesterday with all peccadilloes overlooked. People will say one thing and do something else so effort is better spent on improving bulbs rather than haranguing people to use them.
Boycott schmoycott. I'm just not giving money to people who offend me. I have a limited number of entertainment dollars that I choose to spend on things whose makers don't make me want to spit. It's not as though I'm going to shrug my shoulders and just give these assholes the money anyway. Although Orrin Hatch would probably just push a law through saying they're entitled to my money whether I want to give it to them or not.......
I'm not bearing the standard for a cause or movement and could really care less if others are with me. The RIAA is on my shitlist and therefore gets nothing from me. Come to think of it, a multitude of individual shitlists may explain a lot of their problem.
It's tacky of me to reply to this again but there is also Seashore. It is more basic than GIMP but it can open GIMP's XCF format as well as the usual suspects like PNG and JPEG. It is a Cocoa app and doesn't require X11.
There is an alternative to the "civil disobedience" you describe: Neither download illegally OR buy CDs. Or at least don't buy CDs from RIAA labels or independents who support insanity in copyrights. While we're on the subject, whether lawful or not I'm increasingly cynical about my ability to influence the government. At least I can deny my cash to the ones who ARE influencing government.
I genuinely don't know: Is there anything objectively superior about the colour of light produced by incandescents, or is it just that people are accustomed to it?
I don't know either although I'm with you in agreeing that fluorescent tube light seems harsh. Furthermore, if used in a bathroom it will reveal every scab, pimple, blemish, abscess, and pit you've acquired since birth. The makers of CFLs DO seem to be addressing it but they aren't going to make the bulbs cost $50 apiece just to get it perfect.
Or the good ol' merkin could get the hell over himself and make the adjustment.
They generally won't and tend to vote out anyone that tries to force it. Note well that I don't necessarily approve of the mentality. I'm talking about reality and not ideals. Therefore, improvements like this have to be built into infrastructure systems. So, yes, a tad bit more research will have to go into making incandescent replacements pass the "wife test".
It isn't that good ole merkins won't go along with better and more efficient ways of doing things but it had better not feel like a hair shirt.
Your point is doomed to failure if everyone has to think like an activist. "Good ole merkins" will generally go along with how things are but most won't make special efforts for a cause. So it's fine to replace incandescents with CFLs and LEDs but it better be a perfect replacement. I still have yet to see CFLs and LEDs that throw off the slightly yellow spectrum of incandescents. A "good ole merkin" won't have the language for it but the light thrown off by these things is "a bit funny". So they better have that fixed by the time this mandate kicks in.
They are merely the polar opposite of those who think capitalism is an ideal rather than one of the consequences of the Dismal Science. Both corporatists and socialists cause hilarity when they project their ideals on forces they don't want to understand.
The very first hard drive I saw in person was a "MegaFile" 20 MB disk attached to 1040ST back in '87. I was 16 at the time and things like that were very much either an expensive toy for an early adopter or part of a high end workstation. The ST could access that unit through a DMA driver so the nerdy app I got to see it do was a flipbook animation of graphic stills pull directly from the drive. Ooooooh! Shiney!
The first machine I owned with a hard disk was a 486 with a 504 MB unit in '95. I suppose "relatively affordable" is true for some value of "affordable" but that machine cost me around $1100. The drive would have been $150 or so part so I imagine a 4GB unit would have been around 5 or 6 hundred at least.
I bet If I re-downloaded Slackware 1 or 2 I could in theory have it run all in memory.
Many Linux livecds including the venerable Knoppix can run entirely out of memory if you have enough of it. Knoppix requires a gig of memory to pull off this trick and yes that is with a full KDE desktop. Puppy Linux is designed from the outset to do this on far more modest hardware. The base variants of Puppy supply a usable desktop that can run entirely out of 64MB of ram although they are more truly usable with 128MB. However if one doesn't insist on running entirely from RAM even 64MB is spacious enough for a responsive Puppy session.
You could run an old Slackware entirely from RAM but then you can also do so with current Linux desktops. For that matter, someone has probably managed the trick with Windows and something like BartPE.
A new Crysis, Unreal, Doom, Half-Life, or something else will come out that will steal their thunder. Any existing work will be thrown out and an announcement will be made that DNF WILL be groundbreaking when it comes out.
Sounds like the so-called professionals made a complete and total hash of the live system since the documentation for that system doesn't in the least match reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I once resolved never to make a New Years resolution again. Happily, I have yet to break it.
GTK already snapped up most of the cross platform action and troltech hasn't done much to go after it. Most QT stuff at this point is strictly Linux as "K" apps.. there's not much incentive to port to windows or mac because there are already GTK equivalents in that space.
If the OS X native port of GTK doesn't get its ass in gear, that is about to change. GTK on OS X means using X11. KDE4 apps on Mac will run native. About a year from now, we'll be seeing polished KDE4 apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I'm totally conscious of the loudness war when I record, mix and master music and it's hard to tell whether all that effort will be appreciated by the listener but your understanding of the issues illustrates some people are prepared to understand the art and science behind it to put the music first.
I ReplayGain all of my MP3s and FLACs. I once saw a poster opine that widespread use of such technology may end the "loudness war" since it puts the average volume level back under the listener's control. I hope he's right and I'm glad some producers such as yourself care enough about quality of your work to mix for those who care.
The amp was 27 watts which surprised me as I had assumed more was better, but it seemed plenty loud enough.
There are different ways of measuring wattage. Older equipment tended to be rated by how much average power they output continuously and cleanly. Newer stuff (within the last 25 years) tends be rated by Peak wattage with very little regard for distortion. Designers can always chuck in some big caps for transient sizzle and a big peak wattage number on paper but the amount of power the amp can output steadily without distortion probably isn't anywhere near your friend's old amp.
Sheer wattage isn't the only figure of merit here. That old amp very likely had an excellent "slew rate" as well. Slew rate is the speed at which the amplifier can go from lowest amplitude to highest amplitude. Imagine that you're trying to accurately reproduce a square wave. A low slew rate amp will have a marked slope on a scope rather than a near vertical trace. As the slew rate gets slower and slower, the reproduced square wave comes to resemble a clipped triangle wave. Of course, pure vertical isn't achievable because no device can be both on and off at the same time but the best devices can smoothly go from no power to max power very quickly.
The moral of the story is that a relatively low amount of clean power will sound better and louder than a lot of clipped distorted power.
Your friend was using good speakers as well which is just as important as a good amp.
Modern digital recording systems just keep getting better and soon I doubt that an analogue verses digital recording argument will exist.
Tweaks will always insist they are buying something tangible when they pay $100 a foot for oxygen free Monster Cable, 100lb output transformers, hand rolled capacitors, and those stupid little foam circles on the back wall of the listening room. As long as we have rags like Absolute Sound and Stereophile that use the language of art critics to describe technical artifacts then this "debate" will always exist. Even if sound is sampled at 1Mhz with 32bit resolution, some dumbass tweak will insist that his vinyl still has "infinite resolution" compared to that. Actual science from Nyquist and Shannon which among other things allows apples to apples comparisons of fidelity will be airily dismissed.
Because of the Loudness War, I'll concede that old vinyl and reel-to-reel versions of many recordings sound better. But this is not due to any inherent superiority of those media. It's just that digital production methods allow abuse of the sound that would literally make a stylus jump out of the groove. This abuse is not required. Marketing flaks that want to be the loudest thing in the juke just can't help themselves.
I also think that issues of sound production and reproduction are conflated together. Tubes, overdriven effects boxes, deliberating using ratty guitar pickups to get a special effect are all valid ways of specifically coloring sound to the producer's taste. But to the extent that price allows, playback equipment shouldn't color anything. Just give me a reasonably linear response and gobs of headroom and it really doesn't matter if it's tube or solid state. If you say your tube amp is "warm" then I say it is either a non-linear piece of garbage or you're overdriving it. If the solid state amp is harsh, then it is a piece of crap with no headroom or it's being overdriven. Either way, it isn't what I paid to hear.
The copyright free zone is probably more like a sort of legal field around Antigua and their nationals. As soon as an American copyrighted item leaves Antigua or the hand of a Antiguan national, I would imagine any copyrights are right back in force. After all, this same trick could be used on Adobe, MS or any other copyrighted item. Even if other countries recognize the loss of copyright, it won't be here in America. The first American individual or organization who tried to use Antigua as a copyright stripping proxy would have some splainin' to do in an American court.
Get over yourself. I was talking about old-style tubes in public bathrooms.
Why don't YOU get with the program and take a remedial course in reading comprehension?
Hopefully, if the latter happens, the copyrights to the music will revert to the artists and not to some random IP vulture that picks at the corpse. (Though the realist in me knows that the IP vultures will be feeding well when the old record companies start dying.)
It'll be random IP vultures. Almost all record company contracts are "work for hire". Unlike book authors, recording artists have to give up their copyrights to the record companies. Bigger artists like Eric Clapton can get better deals but guys who just got signed are screwed 16 ways from Sunday. The songwriter of a band may have copyright right to the lyrics and sheetmusic but the ability to exercise those tend to be heavily restricted by contract, again "big" longstanding artists get better deals here. Even so, the best you can hope for is that the songwriter will want to re-record cuts on non-RIAA terms. The pop records we grew up with are what will be covered in jackal spew.
Acts of Congress can only do so much when it comes to consumer wallets. Congress can pass laws until the cows come home and I'll still spend my entertainment dollars on movies, games, and non-RIAA artists. If they chisel up ways to bleed those non-RIAA artists then I won't buy that material either. So the non-RIAA artists had best get their butts in gear.
And I almost completely agree with you. Current record companies won't change to the model you describe. They're control freaks addicted to the paychecks they commanded in the past. They'll go down in the ugliest Congress-bribing propaganda-spewing way possible. I also think whoever inherits their old copyright portfolios will handle them in the most clueless way possible. It wouldn't surprise me to see the 20th century's musical legacy more or less die as it will be covered in legal jackal vomit. Jackals vomit on the part of a carcass they won't eat so others won't eat it either.
New record companies will arise that operate more or less as you describe. While the copyright situation that evolves won't be what the typical Slashdotter seems to want, it should be a lot saner. It'll have to be as a condition to even do business.
I've slowly been replacing my own incandescents with CFDs so yes I do realize that. However, the spectrum thrown out by these devices doesn't yet match the spectrum thrown out by incandescents though they're getting better all the time. They still tend be a bit whiter and "colder" feeling. The diffusion pattern also differs so the shadows cast from these bulbs also contributes to a different feel. A slightly more serious problem is that they tend to be slightly bulkier in odd places so it can be difficult to put them in some fixtures. Much of this is preference rather than inherent superiority so a certain amount of "consumer acclimatization" will have to take place.
At some point, improving bulbs and consumers will meet halfway. Nonetheless, I deplore the activist mentality that says this should have taken place yesterday with all peccadilloes overlooked. People will say one thing and do something else so effort is better spent on improving bulbs rather than haranguing people to use them.
Boycott schmoycott. I'm just not giving money to people who offend me. I have a limited number of entertainment dollars that I choose to spend on things whose makers don't make me want to spit. It's not as though I'm going to shrug my shoulders and just give these assholes the money anyway. Although Orrin Hatch would probably just push a law through saying they're entitled to my money whether I want to give it to them or not.......
I'm not bearing the standard for a cause or movement and could really care less if others are with me. The RIAA is on my shitlist and therefore gets nothing from me. Come to think of it, a multitude of individual shitlists may explain a lot of their problem.
It's tacky of me to reply to this again but there is also Seashore. It is more basic than GIMP but it can open GIMP's XCF format as well as the usual suspects like PNG and JPEG. It is a Cocoa app and doesn't require X11.
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/download.php
Get it here:
http://www.wilber-loves-apple.org/forum.php?id=1
The forum I got that link from emphasizes that X11 MUST be patched up current on Leopard.
There is an alternative to the "civil disobedience" you describe: Neither download illegally OR buy CDs. Or at least don't buy CDs from RIAA labels or independents who support insanity in copyrights. While we're on the subject, whether lawful or not I'm increasingly cynical about my ability to influence the government. At least I can deny my cash to the ones who ARE influencing government.
I genuinely don't know: Is there anything objectively superior about the colour of light produced by incandescents, or is it just that people are accustomed to it?
I don't know either although I'm with you in agreeing that fluorescent tube light seems harsh. Furthermore, if used in a bathroom it will reveal every scab, pimple, blemish, abscess, and pit you've acquired since birth. The makers of CFLs DO seem to be addressing it but they aren't going to make the bulbs cost $50 apiece just to get it perfect.
Or the good ol' merkin could get the hell over himself and make the adjustment.
They generally won't and tend to vote out anyone that tries to force it. Note well that I don't necessarily approve of the mentality. I'm talking about reality and not ideals. Therefore, improvements like this have to be built into infrastructure systems. So, yes, a tad bit more research will have to go into making incandescent replacements pass the "wife test".
It isn't that good ole merkins won't go along with better and more efficient ways of doing things but it had better not feel like a hair shirt.
Your point is doomed to failure if everyone has to think like an activist. "Good ole merkins" will generally go along with how things are but most won't make special efforts for a cause. So it's fine to replace incandescents with CFLs and LEDs but it better be a perfect replacement. I still have yet to see CFLs and LEDs that throw off the slightly yellow spectrum of incandescents. A "good ole merkin" won't have the language for it but the light thrown off by these things is "a bit funny". So they better have that fixed by the time this mandate kicks in.
They are merely the polar opposite of those who think capitalism is an ideal rather than one of the consequences of the Dismal Science. Both corporatists and socialists cause hilarity when they project their ideals on forces they don't want to understand.
The very first hard drive I saw in person was a "MegaFile" 20 MB disk attached to 1040ST back in '87. I was 16 at the time and things like that were very much either an expensive toy for an early adopter or part of a high end workstation. The ST could access that unit through a DMA driver so the nerdy app I got to see it do was a flipbook animation of graphic stills pull directly from the drive. Ooooooh! Shiney!
The first machine I owned with a hard disk was a 486 with a 504 MB unit in '95. I suppose "relatively affordable" is true for some value of "affordable" but that machine cost me around $1100. The drive would have been $150 or so part so I imagine a 4GB unit would have been around 5 or 6 hundred at least.
I bet If I re-downloaded Slackware 1 or 2 I could in theory have it run all in memory.
Many Linux livecds including the venerable Knoppix can run entirely out of memory if you have enough of it. Knoppix requires a gig of memory to pull off this trick and yes that is with a full KDE desktop. Puppy Linux is designed from the outset to do this on far more modest hardware. The base variants of Puppy supply a usable desktop that can run entirely out of 64MB of ram although they are more truly usable with 128MB. However if one doesn't insist on running entirely from RAM even 64MB is spacious enough for a responsive Puppy session.
You could run an old Slackware entirely from RAM but then you can also do so with current Linux desktops. For that matter, someone has probably managed the trick with Windows and something like BartPE.
Marty! You may be able to buy plutonium at any corner store in 1985 but here in 1955 it is a little hard to come by!
A new Crysis, Unreal, Doom, Half-Life, or something else will come out that will steal their thunder. Any existing work will be thrown out and an announcement will be made that DNF WILL be groundbreaking when it comes out.
I hear ya. They'll pry my LaserJet 4M out of my cold dead heads.
Sounds like the so-called professionals made a complete and total hash of the live system since the documentation for that system doesn't in the least match reality.