Yup -- most of us Mac users know that a shit pc can be put together for less than $200 from scraps left over from other projects and upgrades from friends.
PC gaming is one of the FEW things I steer people towards when looking at computers. Folks that want solely work machines, its better to get a Mac and get the job done.
PCs *ARE* far more economical than a Mac and there isn't anything that can disprove this. TCO is another matter -- but it only comes into play when you actually depend on the machine to make money for you -- of which I know few nongeeks that will be out that much if their home machine goes down (at least until they ask me to fix it for them -- I charge my friends the same as I do customers).
"my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better"
Thats funny -- I'm playing UT2004 on my 12" powerbook and its fine. Its as good as my roommate's high end gaming pc.
I don't play many games for the Mac -- I have dedicated consoles for that (as well as a PC that goes unused except for when clients need something that can't be run under VPC).
I'm renovating part of my work area, and now I've got to go out and buy an apple white surge protector. The only one actually looks good, but compared to the Apple stuff plugged into it, it looks shitty.
I was just thinking about this last night as I was tinting my new desk and chairs. Normally, I'd have just ignored this stuff...but damn...even the power supply looks good enough you'd be an idiot not to upgrade the rest if you like aesthetics.
Looks ain't everything -- but for the area that clients stop by, I want things to look good. My PC sits in a very unimposing area -- and the linux servers are now sitting in my industrial steel powder blue racks in the basement out of site / out of mind.
Good to have you as a convert -- I see this as a big plus for everyone. The more unix users, the more we can all use our skills elsewhere. Knowing unix has taught me to do things that most mac users never need to do. Knowing OS X means there are things I never thought to try, and find out it works the same elsewhere. Having some cross compatibility is always good.
I know one artist being put through the ropes right now where the label wants a specific sound out of them. They sounded near 80s alternative (back when we called it modern rock) and the label wants a contemporary alternative sound.
Can the label force them to produce something like this? Sorta. They agreed to go through a team that will help them write the music -- in a sense giving up their own artistic values in hopes that these guys will make them a lot of money.
Sometimes these kinds of guys do. Sometimes they don't.
I have a friend that worked on the latest Liz Phair album. I was a little miffed when I heard it -- it sounded like Brittney Pop after hearing her soul pouring earlier works. I was very disappointed and I mentioned it to the friend working on this. His statement on the subject was that his goal was to make something that could sell to the masses, not a small percentage of fan boys that actually like art. He also mentioned this album sole more than the combination of all her older works.
You know going in how you are going to be used. Are you simply going to be a vehicle for the label to make money and you simply come along for a ride? Or is the label going to hire you to be yourself? There are hundreds of labels to choose from and you know what most are about. A good friend of mine delayed signing to record his last album -- the label all had ideas of what they wanted. He recorded it on his dime (which isn't hard as he's a multimillionaire) and THEN shopped the album. It received a grammy last year. Shit, even within labels are sublabels and imprints that are all different in what they are looking for.
No musician comes into this process blind. They are told the entire way. Some of us know whats going to happen and push the envelope anyways (with the full advice of our legal aides), others go for the ride bitching and moaning that they got ripped off or that it isn't fair.
Well, it depends on how much of an idiot the artists were.
The last time I was signed, I made sure my lawyer looked at everything and he struck out several clauses -- and put an escape clause in for me and my guys.
Point was, I got paid when the label decided that they wanted us to go another direction and I kept control of the content. They had a year to accept or reject it and that was that. It paid well enough that I went back to school for a few more years sans student loans (I still have $30k in student loans that my current occupation -- researcher at a university -- isn't very helpful in paying).
The point it, if someone signs a restrictive contract that can hold them hostage for several years (likely 7 at most if they signed in California or the label's headquarters are there), they should be held to the contract. If you promise to do something, you should keep your word. The promise is the contract -- not what others say about the contract. They signed it, they suffer.
Past popular point of view, no one forces a band to sign whats in front of them. And more than likely, quite a few clauses are in there solely for give an take purposes. When my lawyer struck that clause and several others, the label didn't seem to care and faxed back revised copies within the day. No questions asked. And then I meet others that actually might have made it (unlike me, who sabotaged everything as it came to me and my friends), and they didn't even consult a lawyer other than the manager provided to them by the label.
Acting in bad faith would be not laying out all possibilities at the onset. These are laid out for anyone willing to read the contract. I have no pity for people that sign their name to anything without knowing the consequences.
"Why, in my day, Windows rebooted often and randomly, and that's the way we likes it..."
You mean like Slashdot these days...
Seriously, whats up with that...are they trying to see if they can get the code working on Longhorn Server or did Taco's venture capitol money run out and OSDN (what ever they are called these days) sell it back to him for 2 ham sandwiches and a piece of turkey with dressing and now he's running it on a donated Transmeta laptop running 98SE?
Damn...my first true troll post...that I'm admitting to...
Fairplay *IS* a software patent. Look it fucking up. You can do that. You know how.
Hardware can have software on it. Are you following?
Patents can lead to ideas that have to be reverse engineered.
PGP is an application that has patents around it. You can patent a delivery mechanism that utilizes PGP. Thats a little broad, but you can patent using it in some not so broad way. Knowing this doesn't give you any clue on how to break the engineering.
Are you getting this yet?
You find out that to transfer items utilizing this means means that another app has to look at the public key on an item to encrypt it, and that public key is technically hidden out of the way where its not plain text -- to get it, you'd have to REVERSE ENGINEER IT.
Do you see how a fucking patent can also be safeguarded by nonobvious means?
As for the DCMA -- its an evil law. I don't consider a company using it against anyone to be evil though. If Microsoft used it, I'd hope the DCMA were overturned, but its a valid use of an existing law. The fact is, most of the DCMA is mirrored in other laws in ways that make much more sense. That isn't so clear cut. The fact is, the DCMA can be used effectively, but its used in a much more wrong way more often than not.
When it is eventually overturned, most of the precidents will still be illegal because it was an illegal act even before this law -- it will just take a little more proof than some large corporations word.
No, I don't think there is any fucking vague IP cloud around the iPod. I think there is a very clear patent around FairPlay -- and certain implementations of it can only be reversed illegally by someone other than Apple.
The point is, Apple isn't preventing anyone from playing their music on the machine -- legally. They provide at least 4 ways to do so legally and to upload the files into the machine. The old version of MusicMatch could upload files into the iPod (I don't know about the new version as I don't have it).
What is being prevented isn't uploading -- its preventing folks from using Fairplay -- something you don't need to get music into the machine -- illegally.
Is it that hard to understand?
Its like if Microsoft said Hey Kids, Load All The Linux You Want On The XBox, But Don't Hand Out Illegal Versions Of Windows That Can Run On The Box. Linux can still run legally, the pirated version can't.
Fuck, why am I even trying an analogy on you. You are obviously a dumbfuck that is clueless and can't get the fact that something isn't a pure 1:1 analogy and thus can't figure it out.
A patent can be as vague or not so vague as one wishes. You can articulate the means to how it might work, but utilize other means to implement it -- still encapsulating the essence of the patent, but not making it completely open at the same time.
The patent protects you from companies somewhat on the up and up. Trade secrets protect you from areas where folks aren't entirely on the up and up...for instance, a major softdrink use to use clove for its flavor (before the advent of artificial fucking everything) -- but the patent for its formula never mentions it as a major ingredient. The difference between what the two protect.
So, if you had a neighbor that we fucking your wife, and you were determined to get even with him -- how would you do it? Use the biggest gun in your (legal) arsonal. Even if its not the most moral way to do it -- its still legal. Thats the DMCA in this case. It means you don't even have to answer questions about your patents and get into the sticky situations where someone might challenge you on them and hold you up in court for years to come. Nope, you use the law that is clear cut and gets answered relatively quickly...if that doesn't work, then you go for the riskier proceedures...the ones the might actually backfire on you if you take a misstep.
Sigh. If you weren't trying to prove others wrong, maybe you'd have noted this as well.
"no,Real seams to be encrypting information that they have (presumidly) been given the copy right holders permission to encrypt, and passing it along to their customers, just so happens their customers in this case must first be Apples customers."
You missed my point -- Real took information that didn't belong to them -- both the reverse engineering of the Fairplay patent as well as the keys used to enable the Fairplay software to work for a specific device.
But as for DRM encoding, Apple does not provide this to the end user. Any encoding of audio on the users part is done DRM-less with the end user being able to share these files with the rest of the world if he felt the need to do so.
The only DRM encoding for the iPod or iTunes happens on Apples server.
"Not only is the Mini-Disk's interal Li-ion battery swapable by the user, you can attach a (supplied) small external cradle that takes one AAA size battery. If you use boh at the same time, the play time is crazy!"
With a small addition to the device, you can do the same thing with the iPod as well. I believe Belkin sells the AA adapter.
As for getting music in, you can do the same thing with the iPod. Well Gen2 or better. Its not the easiest to access without a dedicated device to do so, but it is possible under the secret maintence menu. Past that, you buy a Mic Adapter that has a button that puts it into this mode for you.
Having said that, I'm personally looking into a MiniDisc for recording sound fx and otherwise portably. Apparently the newest can do 24 bit -- a friend that does this stuff has just upgraded and said its pretty damn cool.
That doesn't take anything away from the iPod because its a different idea. One is for playing music simply. The other is for both recording and playing, but not as simply as just playing on an ipod. I don't understand when folks can't understand there are different tools for different occasions.
Because they are paying almost solely for bandwidth.
Unlike those of us that make music, these guys take the content and sell it without paying us. I know for a fact several of my friends are listed on that site and they aren't getting paid for it. Hell, some of the music isn't even sold in Russia nor is it licensed for play there. I know one guy that sells in the US, UK and Germany solely and charts regularly, but since he only uses he labels as a distribution source and as such, has to arrange these deals in each country (it was part of his agreement to get out of a major label contract -- and it worked out better for him) -- his stuff is there.
So buy from them if you want to pretend you are one step past Napster of the old days, but you are still ripping off the artist. At least with things like iTMS, musicians are getting paid. Every professional artist I know (and heck a few nonpros though different services like CDBaby) want their stuff there and happy to see it up -- they are making money on this. AllofMP3 -- not a single dime.
To burn a disc, you have to put it in the machine where it starts sucking them off in the format you choose. And then to get them in the iPod you have to click and drag them.
Same with MP3s I get from other legal sources...this IS the most annoying program...you have to get them on your computer and then drag them to your iPod directory under iTunes.
Geez...in all of this, to actually get them on your machine, you also have to have it connected to the iPod. Why can't they figure out how to do this WITHOUT having the pod connected. Jeez, you'd think Steeve Jobs would want something a little more intuative like hooking the f'n iPod up to satelite based WiFi Always On technology so this is one less step.
Secondly, to get music off 'the net', you actually have to be connected 'to the net', some how. I'm a tech savy guy as well, and I KNOW there has to be a way to get music off the net without actually being connected to it. They talk about 'ether'-net, why can't it just peer into the ether in alternate dimensions and go that way (though I hear the 6th dimension is purely pay per view these days).
But you are right, 2 steps is WAY too much to putting songs on the device. Give me a walkman with a tape anyday. One with a radio in it too...because the music I listen to is automatically put into it...I can hear my new favorite song 37 times a day now. I didn't know it was my favorite, but who can argue with a disk jockey -- they are the smartest and most funniest men on earth.
"Why would you now spend $50k on a mac recording studio when you can get a Linux based one for the cost of cheap 2nd hand hardware?."
Because the most you will be spending on a Mac Based Recording Studio will *NOT* be in the computer hardware. If you have $50k in a studio, I can guarentee that at most, a tenth of that is going to be on the computer.
$3k for the highest performing Mac...maybe another $2k for the monitor. Thats $5k right there.
And its well spent because it works out of the box. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a studio, I don't want to deal with computers. I want to deal with music. Then again, thats why PC users call me in...because I can fix their setups. I use to charge $75 an hour for the easy jobs -- and honestly, I've switched tacts over the last few years where I don't want to be bothered by technical bullshit in the studio as I can earn more by dealing with the musical aspects of things as opposed to the technical.
But all in all -- you will not be saving that much all in all. And you won't be saving by running second hand equipment. And if you know anything about music technology, you know the crappy hardware is the death of recording...if all you are doing is a 4 track punk recording or if you are doing offline techno bedroom mixes (and honestly, most techno I've heard could easily be done offline in a loop environment in a bedroom -- its one of the advantages of the medium as well as one of the curses) -- second hand hardware based mediums might work perfectly for you.
Personally, I still deal purely with SCSI and now SATA (firewire is for backups and sample storage). That stuff doesn't come cheap. You *CAN* record the 4 track stuff on a 3 year old laptop with a 5400 RPM drive -- and it will be fine, but when you are recording 64 tracks simultanously (which I rarely do, but I work with studios that do), you will see that your revolution means nothing.
Past that, there is that tricky easy of use thing...people use the Mac because it makes the operating system transparent in many ways. The software they record on is mostly transparent -- at least from a seasoned musicians point of view (there are problems -- otherwise I wouldn't run a forum to help people get over the hump and my friends wouldn't make so much money writting training books or doing instructional dvds).
But all in all -- I say bring it on. The more competition, the better. The more free solutions, the less I have to deal with pirates. The more free solutions, the more potential musicians that might write the next masterpiece. The more not so usable solutions, the more oportunities for music techs to get paid (heh! and maybe the ignorant slashdot masses might actually understand why albums cost so much to record -- because of bastards like me who want to get paid).
I'm gonna have to try this one out as my PC has sat for 6 months without being turned on -- and its actually twice as fast as my Mac. Maybe I might find a reason to use it again...
I got one of those JVC ones just for that purpose...and they had the cheapest one out there are the time.
Still, I'd rather have a radio that had a Firewire In that would read and stream directly. Now, I'm kinda pissed that I bought this radion just 6 months ago because now I think I will be upgrading again in 6 months...
"Then why is it when I go to a museum some random images are passed of as art?"
I have done a bit of random generated musics, so I might be able to answer this.
The random is not truely random -- there was some alg that the artist designed that created it. My roommate paints and watching him sometimes, he's slapping his brush down and doesn't know exactly where its going to land, but its going to land within specific parameters he gave it...some have VERY specific parameters, others not so specific.
The alg could be considered like that. You can state exactly what you want, or you can state generally what you want.
Past that, there is the human element of weeding out the bad. Or compositing these now pseudorandom bits into something new. Honestly, a photographer is as much about the art as well -- its not like he can grow a mountain exactly the way he wants it -- he finds his subject and then finds the best way to present it. In a sense, his subject is just as random (though refined though billions of years as opposed to hours of programming).
So, if you go into a museum and see random art -- it might be random, but its creation most certainly wasn't, nor was its selection and presentation. The art comes into play when the human imparts his or her opinions on the work -- sometimes even just the title can change your attitude on the subject (I've don't this with my random musics -- given different titles and watched as people would tell me that one of the titled pieced implying a relationship felt different that the one that implied a martian landscape or locked in the basement). You random image is only a small part of the art...anyone that doesn't get this doesn't understand art:-)
There are several products that do this and sell pretty well. Some even use Linux / BSD as their OS of choice (not that you'd hear this from them).
They are all on the low end because flash and its likes are all expensive. As a quick 4 / 8 track recorder that can do a few minutes of tracks in total (without replacing the card), they work fine. For garage band types, they sell pretty well.
So maybe if you were an engineer that does problem solving, you'd have done the product research as well:-)
Personally, I like my Mac its nice firewire mixers and the complete compatibility I find with it (most pro level FW audio devices are made compatible with the Mac before anything else these days).
Still, I wouldn't mind having a system I could drop off for friends and then pick it up a few hours later to do the real work after they'd put their audio on this...
Its far more than that -- as I've learned, the Roomba is not a replacement to a good weekly hand cleaning.
The Roomba is a GREAT device, but its not a vacuum cleaner like most of use are use to...or maybe we are -- this is slashdot:-) Its intended for light cleaning and otherwise -- I generally have to change the dust collector at least 2 or 3 times a cleaning (and probably more if I was actually paying attention) because it gets clogged with cat fur pretty readily (as well as pizza and other geek goodies).
From what I understand, the Electrolux is actually a fuller featured vacuum cleaner that actually has bit more power on the suction (I believe the roomba doesn't actually suction anything -- it just pulls the stuff in from its brushes -- I could be wrong as I've never stuck my face up to it) and has some real storage capacity for the dustbins.
That in itself meaning I don't have to baby sit the sucker would almost be worth it if I wasn't so damn poor these days....probably wouldn't be so poor if I'd stop buying things like the Roomba (I bought mine a week before the newer ones came out -- but other than the remote controls, the original is still pretty good).
I was mentioning to friends just last night that we actually used something similar to the PostModern Generator to create texts that are rated in a test environment to see where things could be improved.
Sadly, the text in PMG is actually pretty good. We aren't grading for content. At least in this model. It is grading for correct sentence structures. It also uprates bigger value words, unfortunately. PMG uses its share of twenty dollar words.
Again, this is a 10 year old model. I explained in detail what it rated for. Anyone that read my description and tried to understand what I was saying as opposed to just making an ignorant point to prove they were more right than those that have been doing this for a good deal of the responders life. Of course fucking PMG is going to be better than 90% of most incoming high school students in the fact that I'm sure all words were spelled correctly, and one has to understand correct sentence structures and otherwise or the whole snotty bit of the PMG gets discarded. Who ever wrote that program knew what they were doing and had a firm grasp of the English language.
I'm sorry if this sounds defensive, but I get a little irked when people don't read my warning and explanations of what this looks at and then puts far more advanced text in there and claims its bad because they need to prove their worth. Almost any college grad that didn't sleep though their classes could write a 5 minute impromptu essay that maxes this out, easily. I made that obvious in my original comment.
My company sells sounds for synthesizers and anything under 1M is sold directly through email / download.
Yes, we get the billing address and security numbers -- but you'd be surprised how many of these kinds of lists include both of these.
So even though 'any decent company' should be able to verify this, if you are billing to one address, and the IP# that is downloading it is no where near this, you'll never know. And shit, with the way my customers travel, its not uncommon for someone to be out of the country yet have a domestic card, and download from them (lest someone a bit more uninformed suggest using one of the IP to Location databases). In these cases, as its not Card in Hand and we aren't shipping to a physical address, we get pinged 2x what we would have...it becomes a net loss instead of the card companies just evening it out.
Actually, its a perfectly good word and used within some statical jargons.
The OED would claim that Agreeance is a correct word.
Preferred choice would have only to do with ones vernacular and nothing else. On the street, I would look like an overeducated dick for using this word. Well, not me -- but anyone else using the word:-)
The word has been in place since early 1700s as noted by the OED. Feel free to look it up if you choose to do so. Just remember, because of my research, I have language dictionaries in a dozen tongues as well 300 years of English (mainly so we could scan them in and build a computer generated euclidean dictionary with a z plane for timelines -- never worked as well as we thought it would).
I'm not saying anything else is going to be spelled right (or anywhere near gramatically correct), but I am in fact sure of this word.
So, doesn't that make you an even bigger dick for correcting someone when you are in fact wrong and the one you corrected had stated he might be wrong alerting one to the fact you shouldn't be verifying the text purely for anything but informational means:-)
The same way you make certain any educator is doing their job. Do you think there are no peer reviews going on or that the school board doesn't ever ask for educators to be evaluated?
Seriously -- you make it sound like an educator goes in and has no guidance about anything.
The fact is, the software does not do everything. It does enough to give you pointers and thats about it. It takes a human to interpret this for you. Even if ALL the papers went through the system, you'd need a human to guide the students -- and that wouldn't be a bad thing either. Have the computer do the manual work, and let the human explain this to them.
One of the great things about the rating system I initially designed -- and this idea has been used in most designs I've seen -- is that the truely good and the truely bad are those that the computer cannot rate with any efficiency. These get flagged for human review regardless.
Its not hard for folks that know what they are doing to max out certain rating models on the upper or lower end. If above or below, a human *WILL* read it. For instance, one of the early models had a student quoting several lines of Haiku. That gave all but the creativity conglomerate nightmares and scored lower to the point a human had to look at it (don't even ask about the Poetry / Prose identifier that one of our collegues ended up writting in regards to these situations).
There are safe guards in place for educators of all ilk in their grading methods. Like anything, some will ignore these and get away with it. Students will cheat on tests, educators will skim papers and the world will be as it is. You can't provide a system that will catch everything, nor should you try.
By trying to build a system that tries to catch gaming of the system, you only encourage it to happen and you put the idea out that one might be able to out think the computer.
Like a hammer, you can put nails into a wall or you can bash someones brains out. Its a tool. Tools can be used inappropriately. Get over it. I don't see anyone outlawing hammers -- those that use them wrong get thrown in jail -- or at least given the threat of jail. Educators that do nothing to help their students out will be asked to leave their employment.
Do you stay awake at night fearing the misuse of hammers?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup -- most of us Mac users know that a shit pc can be put together for less than $200 from scraps left over from other projects and upgrades from friends.
PC gaming is one of the FEW things I steer people towards when looking at computers. Folks that want solely work machines, its better to get a Mac and get the job done.
PCs *ARE* far more economical than a Mac and there isn't anything that can disprove this. TCO is another matter -- but it only comes into play when you actually depend on the machine to make money for you -- of which I know few nongeeks that will be out that much if their home machine goes down (at least until they ask me to fix it for them -- I charge my friends the same as I do customers).
"my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better"
Thats funny -- I'm playing UT2004 on my 12" powerbook and its fine. Its as good as my roommate's high end gaming pc.
I don't play many games for the Mac -- I have dedicated consoles for that (as well as a PC that goes unused except for when clients need something that can't be run under VPC).
" Not that you should buy one, I could care less if you use a Mac."
:-) Geeks get chicks, nerds never do except in bad 80s movies.
More to the point, the minute unfashionable geeks like him start using the machine, these idiots will ruin our social status.
Its like going backstage or a vip room and finding all the losers you went to high school hanging back there as if they have a right to do so.
This motherfucker knows his place in the hierarchy, let him do what he wants as long as the plebes don't try to fucking look at our girlfriends.
NERDS!!!
Having said that, I'd rather be a geek over a nerd any day of the week
Gawd damn, don't remind me of the power adapter.
I'm renovating part of my work area, and now I've got to go out and buy an apple white surge protector. The only one actually looks good, but compared to the Apple stuff plugged into it, it looks shitty.
I was just thinking about this last night as I was tinting my new desk and chairs. Normally, I'd have just ignored this stuff...but damn...even the power supply looks good enough you'd be an idiot not to upgrade the rest if you like aesthetics.
Looks ain't everything -- but for the area that clients stop by, I want things to look good. My PC sits in a very unimposing area -- and the linux servers are now sitting in my industrial steel powder blue racks in the basement out of site / out of mind.
Good to have you as a convert -- I see this as a big plus for everyone. The more unix users, the more we can all use our skills elsewhere. Knowing unix has taught me to do things that most mac users never need to do. Knowing OS X means there are things I never thought to try, and find out it works the same elsewhere. Having some cross compatibility is always good.
I reread that, I should have previewed (but then it wouldn't be /. -- I make sure I turn off Safari's spell check before I show up here).
The opening lines should be:
Mac users are NOT scavengers.
Changes the whole idea...
I know one artist being put through the ropes right now where the label wants a specific sound out of them. They sounded near 80s alternative (back when we called it modern rock) and the label wants a contemporary alternative sound.
Can the label force them to produce something like this? Sorta. They agreed to go through a team that will help them write the music -- in a sense giving up their own artistic values in hopes that these guys will make them a lot of money.
Sometimes these kinds of guys do. Sometimes they don't.
I have a friend that worked on the latest Liz Phair album. I was a little miffed when I heard it -- it sounded like Brittney Pop after hearing her soul pouring earlier works. I was very disappointed and I mentioned it to the friend working on this. His statement on the subject was that his goal was to make something that could sell to the masses, not a small percentage of fan boys that actually like art. He also mentioned this album sole more than the combination of all her older works.
You know going in how you are going to be used. Are you simply going to be a vehicle for the label to make money and you simply come along for a ride? Or is the label going to hire you to be yourself? There are hundreds of labels to choose from and you know what most are about. A good friend of mine delayed signing to record his last album -- the label all had ideas of what they wanted. He recorded it on his dime (which isn't hard as he's a multimillionaire) and THEN shopped the album. It received a grammy last year. Shit, even within labels are sublabels and imprints that are all different in what they are looking for.
No musician comes into this process blind. They are told the entire way. Some of us know whats going to happen and push the envelope anyways (with the full advice of our legal aides), others go for the ride bitching and moaning that they got ripped off or that it isn't fair.
Well, it depends on how much of an idiot the artists were.
The last time I was signed, I made sure my lawyer looked at everything and he struck out several clauses -- and put an escape clause in for me and my guys.
Point was, I got paid when the label decided that they wanted us to go another direction and I kept control of the content. They had a year to accept or reject it and that was that. It paid well enough that I went back to school for a few more years sans student loans (I still have $30k in student loans that my current occupation -- researcher at a university -- isn't very helpful in paying).
The point it, if someone signs a restrictive contract that can hold them hostage for several years (likely 7 at most if they signed in California or the label's headquarters are there), they should be held to the contract. If you promise to do something, you should keep your word. The promise is the contract -- not what others say about the contract. They signed it, they suffer.
Past popular point of view, no one forces a band to sign whats in front of them. And more than likely, quite a few clauses are in there solely for give an take purposes. When my lawyer struck that clause and several others, the label didn't seem to care and faxed back revised copies within the day. No questions asked. And then I meet others that actually might have made it (unlike me, who sabotaged everything as it came to me and my friends), and they didn't even consult a lawyer other than the manager provided to them by the label.
Acting in bad faith would be not laying out all possibilities at the onset. These are laid out for anyone willing to read the contract. I have no pity for people that sign their name to anything without knowing the consequences.
Then what are up with all these 503 errors? Something ain't right.
How about a uptime since last 503? Percentage of page views that work...
"Why, in my day, Windows rebooted often and randomly, and that's the way we likes it..."
You mean like Slashdot these days...
Seriously, whats up with that...are they trying to see if they can get the code working on Longhorn Server or did Taco's venture capitol money run out and OSDN (what ever they are called these days) sell it back to him for 2 ham sandwiches and a piece of turkey with dressing and now he's running it on a donated Transmeta laptop running 98SE?
Damn...my first true troll post...that I'm admitting to...
Fairplay *IS* a software patent. Look it fucking up. You can do that. You know how.
Hardware can have software on it. Are you following?
Patents can lead to ideas that have to be reverse engineered.
PGP is an application that has patents around it. You can patent a delivery mechanism that utilizes PGP. Thats a little broad, but you can patent using it in some not so broad way. Knowing this doesn't give you any clue on how to break the engineering.
Are you getting this yet?
You find out that to transfer items utilizing this means means that another app has to look at the public key on an item to encrypt it, and that public key is technically hidden out of the way where its not plain text -- to get it, you'd have to REVERSE ENGINEER IT.
Do you see how a fucking patent can also be safeguarded by nonobvious means?
As for the DCMA -- its an evil law. I don't consider a company using it against anyone to be evil though. If Microsoft used it, I'd hope the DCMA were overturned, but its a valid use of an existing law. The fact is, most of the DCMA is mirrored in other laws in ways that make much more sense. That isn't so clear cut. The fact is, the DCMA can be used effectively, but its used in a much more wrong way more often than not.
When it is eventually overturned, most of the precidents will still be illegal because it was an illegal act even before this law -- it will just take a little more proof than some large corporations word.
No, I don't think there is any fucking vague IP cloud around the iPod. I think there is a very clear patent around FairPlay -- and certain implementations of it can only be reversed illegally by someone other than Apple.
The point is, Apple isn't preventing anyone from playing their music on the machine -- legally. They provide at least 4 ways to do so legally and to upload the files into the machine. The old version of MusicMatch could upload files into the iPod (I don't know about the new version as I don't have it).
What is being prevented isn't uploading -- its preventing folks from using Fairplay -- something you don't need to get music into the machine -- illegally.
Is it that hard to understand?
Its like if Microsoft said Hey Kids, Load All The Linux You Want On The XBox, But Don't Hand Out Illegal Versions Of Windows That Can Run On The Box. Linux can still run legally, the pirated version can't.
Fuck, why am I even trying an analogy on you. You are obviously a dumbfuck that is clueless and can't get the fact that something isn't a pure 1:1 analogy and thus can't figure it out.
You know what I meant :-)
A patent can be as vague or not so vague as one wishes. You can articulate the means to how it might work, but utilize other means to implement it -- still encapsulating the essence of the patent, but not making it completely open at the same time.
The patent protects you from companies somewhat on the up and up. Trade secrets protect you from areas where folks aren't entirely on the up and up...for instance, a major softdrink use to use clove for its flavor (before the advent of artificial fucking everything) -- but the patent for its formula never mentions it as a major ingredient. The difference between what the two protect.
So, if you had a neighbor that we fucking your wife, and you were determined to get even with him -- how would you do it? Use the biggest gun in your (legal) arsonal. Even if its not the most moral way to do it -- its still legal. Thats the DMCA in this case. It means you don't even have to answer questions about your patents and get into the sticky situations where someone might challenge you on them and hold you up in court for years to come. Nope, you use the law that is clear cut and gets answered relatively quickly...if that doesn't work, then you go for the riskier proceedures...the ones the might actually backfire on you if you take a misstep.
Sigh. If you weren't trying to prove others wrong, maybe you'd have noted this as well.
"no,Real seams to be encrypting information that they have (presumidly) been given the copy right holders permission to encrypt, and passing it along to their customers, just so happens their customers in this case must first be Apples customers."
You missed my point -- Real took information that didn't belong to them -- both the reverse engineering of the Fairplay patent as well as the keys used to enable the Fairplay software to work for a specific device.
But as for DRM encoding, Apple does not provide this to the end user. Any encoding of audio on the users part is done DRM-less with the end user being able to share these files with the rest of the world if he felt the need to do so.
The only DRM encoding for the iPod or iTunes happens on Apples server.
Make sense?
"Not only is the Mini-Disk's interal Li-ion battery swapable by the user, you can attach a (supplied) small external cradle that takes one AAA size battery. If you use boh at the same time, the play time is crazy!"
With a small addition to the device, you can do the same thing with the iPod as well. I believe Belkin sells the AA adapter.
As for getting music in, you can do the same thing with the iPod. Well Gen2 or better. Its not the easiest to access without a dedicated device to do so, but it is possible under the secret maintence menu. Past that, you buy a Mic Adapter that has a button that puts it into this mode for you.
Having said that, I'm personally looking into a MiniDisc for recording sound fx and otherwise portably. Apparently the newest can do 24 bit -- a friend that does this stuff has just upgraded and said its pretty damn cool.
That doesn't take anything away from the iPod because its a different idea. One is for playing music simply. The other is for both recording and playing, but not as simply as just playing on an ipod. I don't understand when folks can't understand there are different tools for different occasions.
You know why they can offer this so cheaply?
Because they are paying almost solely for bandwidth.
Unlike those of us that make music, these guys take the content and sell it without paying us. I know for a fact several of my friends are listed on that site and they aren't getting paid for it. Hell, some of the music isn't even sold in Russia nor is it licensed for play there. I know one guy that sells in the US, UK and Germany solely and charts regularly, but since he only uses he labels as a distribution source and as such, has to arrange these deals in each country (it was part of his agreement to get out of a major label contract -- and it worked out better for him) -- his stuff is there.
So buy from them if you want to pretend you are one step past Napster of the old days, but you are still ripping off the artist. At least with things like iTMS, musicians are getting paid. Every professional artist I know (and heck a few nonpros though different services like CDBaby) want their stuff there and happy to see it up -- they are making money on this. AllofMP3 -- not a single dime.
Yeah, it is real annoying.
To burn a disc, you have to put it in the machine where it starts sucking them off in the format you choose. And then to get them in the iPod you have to click and drag them.
Same with MP3s I get from other legal sources...this IS the most annoying program...you have to get them on your computer and then drag them to your iPod directory under iTunes.
Geez...in all of this, to actually get them on your machine, you also have to have it connected to the iPod. Why can't they figure out how to do this WITHOUT having the pod connected. Jeez, you'd think Steeve Jobs would want something a little more intuative like hooking the f'n iPod up to satelite based WiFi Always On technology so this is one less step.
Secondly, to get music off 'the net', you actually have to be connected 'to the net', some how. I'm a tech savy guy as well, and I KNOW there has to be a way to get music off the net without actually being connected to it. They talk about 'ether'-net, why can't it just peer into the ether in alternate dimensions and go that way (though I hear the 6th dimension is purely pay per view these days).
But you are right, 2 steps is WAY too much to putting songs on the device. Give me a walkman with a tape anyday. One with a radio in it too...because the music I listen to is automatically put into it...I can hear my new favorite song 37 times a day now. I didn't know it was my favorite, but who can argue with a disk jockey -- they are the smartest and most funniest men on earth.
"Why would you now spend $50k on a mac recording studio when you can get a Linux based one for the cost of cheap 2nd hand hardware?."
Because the most you will be spending on a Mac Based Recording Studio will *NOT* be in the computer hardware. If you have $50k in a studio, I can guarentee that at most, a tenth of that is going to be on the computer.
$3k for the highest performing Mac...maybe another $2k for the monitor. Thats $5k right there.
And its well spent because it works out of the box. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a studio, I don't want to deal with computers. I want to deal with music. Then again, thats why PC users call me in...because I can fix their setups. I use to charge $75 an hour for the easy jobs -- and honestly, I've switched tacts over the last few years where I don't want to be bothered by technical bullshit in the studio as I can earn more by dealing with the musical aspects of things as opposed to the technical.
But all in all -- you will not be saving that much all in all. And you won't be saving by running second hand equipment. And if you know anything about music technology, you know the crappy hardware is the death of recording...if all you are doing is a 4 track punk recording or if you are doing offline techno bedroom mixes (and honestly, most techno I've heard could easily be done offline in a loop environment in a bedroom -- its one of the advantages of the medium as well as one of the curses) -- second hand hardware based mediums might work perfectly for you.
Personally, I still deal purely with SCSI and now SATA (firewire is for backups and sample storage). That stuff doesn't come cheap. You *CAN* record the 4 track stuff on a 3 year old laptop with a 5400 RPM drive -- and it will be fine, but when you are recording 64 tracks simultanously (which I rarely do, but I work with studios that do), you will see that your revolution means nothing.
Past that, there is that tricky easy of use thing...people use the Mac because it makes the operating system transparent in many ways. The software they record on is mostly transparent -- at least from a seasoned musicians point of view (there are problems -- otherwise I wouldn't run a forum to help people get over the hump and my friends wouldn't make so much money writting training books or doing instructional dvds).
But all in all -- I say bring it on. The more competition, the better. The more free solutions, the less I have to deal with pirates. The more free solutions, the more potential musicians that might write the next masterpiece. The more not so usable solutions, the more oportunities for music techs to get paid (heh! and maybe the ignorant slashdot masses might actually understand why albums cost so much to record -- because of bastards like me who want to get paid).
I'm gonna have to try this one out as my PC has sat for 6 months without being turned on -- and its actually twice as fast as my Mac. Maybe I might find a reason to use it again...
clif
sonikmatter.com
I got one of those JVC ones just for that purpose...and they had the cheapest one out there are the time.
Still, I'd rather have a radio that had a Firewire In that would read and stream directly. Now, I'm kinda pissed that I bought this radion just 6 months ago because now I think I will be upgrading again in 6 months...
"Then why is it when I go to a museum some random images are passed of as art?"
:-)
I have done a bit of random generated musics, so I might be able to answer this.
The random is not truely random -- there was some alg that the artist designed that created it. My roommate paints and watching him sometimes, he's slapping his brush down and doesn't know exactly where its going to land, but its going to land within specific parameters he gave it...some have VERY specific parameters, others not so specific.
The alg could be considered like that. You can state exactly what you want, or you can state generally what you want.
Past that, there is the human element of weeding out the bad. Or compositing these now pseudorandom bits into something new. Honestly, a photographer is as much about the art as well -- its not like he can grow a mountain exactly the way he wants it -- he finds his subject and then finds the best way to present it. In a sense, his subject is just as random (though refined though billions of years as opposed to hours of programming).
So, if you go into a museum and see random art -- it might be random, but its creation most certainly wasn't, nor was its selection and presentation. The art comes into play when the human imparts his or her opinions on the work -- sometimes even just the title can change your attitude on the subject (I've don't this with my random musics -- given different titles and watched as people would tell me that one of the titled pieced implying a relationship felt different that the one that implied a martian landscape or locked in the basement). You random image is only a small part of the art...anyone that doesn't get this doesn't understand art
There are several products that do this and sell pretty well. Some even use Linux / BSD as their OS of choice (not that you'd hear this from them).
:-)
They are all on the low end because flash and its likes are all expensive. As a quick 4 / 8 track recorder that can do a few minutes of tracks in total (without replacing the card), they work fine. For garage band types, they sell pretty well.
So maybe if you were an engineer that does problem solving, you'd have done the product research as well
Personally, I like my Mac its nice firewire mixers and the complete compatibility I find with it (most pro level FW audio devices are made compatible with the Mac before anything else these days).
Still, I wouldn't mind having a system I could drop off for friends and then pick it up a few hours later to do the real work after they'd put their audio on this...
Its far more than that -- as I've learned, the Roomba is not a replacement to a good weekly hand cleaning.
:-) Its intended for light cleaning and otherwise -- I generally have to change the dust collector at least 2 or 3 times a cleaning (and probably more if I was actually paying attention) because it gets clogged with cat fur pretty readily (as well as pizza and other geek goodies).
The Roomba is a GREAT device, but its not a vacuum cleaner like most of use are use to...or maybe we are -- this is slashdot
From what I understand, the Electrolux is actually a fuller featured vacuum cleaner that actually has bit more power on the suction (I believe the roomba doesn't actually suction anything -- it just pulls the stuff in from its brushes -- I could be wrong as I've never stuck my face up to it) and has some real storage capacity for the dustbins.
That in itself meaning I don't have to baby sit the sucker would almost be worth it if I wasn't so damn poor these days....probably wouldn't be so poor if I'd stop buying things like the Roomba (I bought mine a week before the newer ones came out -- but other than the remote controls, the original is still pretty good).
I was mentioning to friends just last night that we actually used something similar to the PostModern Generator to create texts that are rated in a test environment to see where things could be improved.
Sadly, the text in PMG is actually pretty good. We aren't grading for content. At least in this model. It is grading for correct sentence structures. It also uprates bigger value words, unfortunately. PMG uses its share of twenty dollar words.
Again, this is a 10 year old model. I explained in detail what it rated for. Anyone that read my description and tried to understand what I was saying as opposed to just making an ignorant point to prove they were more right than those that have been doing this for a good deal of the responders life. Of course fucking PMG is going to be better than 90% of most incoming high school students in the fact that I'm sure all words were spelled correctly, and one has to understand correct sentence structures and otherwise or the whole snotty bit of the PMG gets discarded. Who ever wrote that program knew what they were doing and had a firm grasp of the English language.
I'm sorry if this sounds defensive, but I get a little irked when people don't read my warning and explanations of what this looks at and then puts far more advanced text in there and claims its bad because they need to prove their worth. Almost any college grad that didn't sleep though their classes could write a 5 minute impromptu essay that maxes this out, easily. I made that obvious in my original comment.
What if you are selling data over the net?
My company sells sounds for synthesizers and anything under 1M is sold directly through email / download.
Yes, we get the billing address and security numbers -- but you'd be surprised how many of these kinds of lists include both of these.
So even though 'any decent company' should be able to verify this, if you are billing to one address, and the IP# that is downloading it is no where near this, you'll never know. And shit, with the way my customers travel, its not uncommon for someone to be out of the country yet have a domestic card, and download from them (lest someone a bit more uninformed suggest using one of the IP to Location databases). In these cases, as its not Card in Hand and we aren't shipping to a physical address, we get pinged 2x what we would have...it becomes a net loss instead of the card companies just evening it out.
Actually, its a perfectly good word and used within some statical jargons.
:-)
:-)
The OED would claim that Agreeance is a correct word.
Preferred choice would have only to do with ones vernacular and nothing else. On the street, I would look like an overeducated dick for using this word. Well, not me -- but anyone else using the word
The word has been in place since early 1700s as noted by the OED. Feel free to look it up if you choose to do so. Just remember, because of my research, I have language dictionaries in a dozen tongues as well 300 years of English (mainly so we could scan them in and build a computer generated euclidean dictionary with a z plane for timelines -- never worked as well as we thought it would).
I'm not saying anything else is going to be spelled right (or anywhere near gramatically correct), but I am in fact sure of this word.
So, doesn't that make you an even bigger dick for correcting someone when you are in fact wrong and the one you corrected had stated he might be wrong alerting one to the fact you shouldn't be verifying the text purely for anything but informational means
The same way you make certain any educator is doing their job. Do you think there are no peer reviews going on or that the school board doesn't ever ask for educators to be evaluated?
Seriously -- you make it sound like an educator goes in and has no guidance about anything.
The fact is, the software does not do everything. It does enough to give you pointers and thats about it. It takes a human to interpret this for you. Even if ALL the papers went through the system, you'd need a human to guide the students -- and that wouldn't be a bad thing either. Have the computer do the manual work, and let the human explain this to them.
One of the great things about the rating system I initially designed -- and this idea has been used in most designs I've seen -- is that the truely good and the truely bad are those that the computer cannot rate with any efficiency. These get flagged for human review regardless.
Its not hard for folks that know what they are doing to max out certain rating models on the upper or lower end. If above or below, a human *WILL* read it. For instance, one of the early models had a student quoting several lines of Haiku. That gave all but the creativity conglomerate nightmares and scored lower to the point a human had to look at it (don't even ask about the Poetry / Prose identifier that one of our collegues ended up writting in regards to these situations).
There are safe guards in place for educators of all ilk in their grading methods. Like anything, some will ignore these and get away with it. Students will cheat on tests, educators will skim papers and the world will be as it is. You can't provide a system that will catch everything, nor should you try.
By trying to build a system that tries to catch gaming of the system, you only encourage it to happen and you put the idea out that one might be able to out think the computer.
Like a hammer, you can put nails into a wall or you can bash someones brains out. Its a tool. Tools can be used inappropriately. Get over it. I don't see anyone outlawing hammers -- those that use them wrong get thrown in jail -- or at least given the threat of jail. Educators that do nothing to help their students out will be asked to leave their employment.
Do you stay awake at night fearing the misuse of hammers?