This is of course why the entertainment industries are buying your representitives to pass laws that make it a crime to manufacture/trade devices that "circumvent effective copy protection"... They want people to continue using their VHS recorders because serial copying quickly degrades the already low quality.
However, it is the general purpose computers that circumvent the laws yet are technically capable (and programmable!) of being a media player that will save the day. Ultimately the consumers will get what they want and by and large everyone will win (artists, entertainers, and their management overall will be richer than ever), though there will be a lot of bloodshed on the way.
Also, did DAT fail because of the copy protection? I think DAT failed because it has all the disadvantages of tape; no instant random track access, complicated/expensive/failure-prone transport with very delicate media (thin mylar tape), limited high speed duplication capability, etc... that make it pretty lousy compared to the CD's consumers would be copying with it. Notice CDR's have taken off like gangbusters and burners/media have dropped in price like rocks. "Consumer Audio" CD products have the same copy protection as DAT... You buy a computer burner/media or prosumer DAT deck / computer media to avoid copy protection. DAT is still very much alive for musicians and people recording concerts. Sony still makes ever smaller walkman sized decks that are very popular for bootlegging concerts of Sony Music Artists...
John Gilmore drives home a very important point in this essay that is easily missed even though most of us are quite familiar with nanotechnology.
What is happening now to the movie and music industries will soon happen to EVERY industry. When we can build universal assemblers (matter compilers) that can turn dirt into nourishing food at the push of a button, will we mandate copy protection to save the farmers? Will we ban these machines to protect the jobs of carpenters, skilled laborers, machine tool manufacturers, etc ad nauseum?
John Gilmore is one of the few people who truly understand what is happening and where this is all heading.
The constitution and the writings of some of the framers of the consititution make it abundantly clear that copyright holders do NOT own the work. All copyrightable material is duly owned by the Public. Copyright only grants a temporary right to control the creation and distribution of copies (but not beyond the "First Sale"). It most certainly does not grant ownership in the same way I own pysical property.
I don't think you can, but you can buy the base config and add more memory/disk yourself. Apple hardware is always going to be more expensive but at least it's nice. Don't forget, the cost of developing their kick ass operating system is also built into the hardware.
Claude Shannon wrote his seminal paper "A Methematical Theory of Cryptography" just after the war in 1945, though it was classified. This is the paper where he proves that a Vernam cipher with a truly random key (a.k.a. One Time Pad) provides perfect secrecy. It is well known that Shannon was the main man for US crypto during the war. So it shouldn't be a surprise that they knew exactly what they were doing.
I very highly recommend everyone read the paper, which was published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal under the title "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in 1949. It's pretty accessible, you don't need to be a crypto weenie to understand it. However, you can't even pretend to know anything about cryptology without having read that paper.
What they have done is a real One Time Pad on voice. By quantizing the voice and combining each sample with an equal amount of entropy modulo the sample size (in this case 2.5 bits since there were only 6 possible levels) you get perfect secrecy. If you assume that the key is completely unpredictable then every possible outcome is equally as likely. They can only do this by breaking down the voice into samples of a known size. Check Claude Shannon's groundbreaking paper "Communications Theory of Secrecy Systems" for more detalis.
The system required that the key be used in twenty millisecond segments. Therefore, it was necessary for each record to be kept in synchronism within a few milliseconds for fairly long periods of time (one hour or so). This was accomplished by the use of very precisely driven turntables. The turntables themselves were remarkable machines. Each was driven by a large (about thirty-pound) synchronous electric motor with hundreds of poles. The motor was kept in constant operation, and the power for it was derived directly from dividing down the terminal's frequency standard. The frequency standard was a 100 kHz crystal oscillator. The accuracy of the standard had to be maintained within about one part in ten million so that the system would stay in synchronism for long periods of time. The system frequency standard could be corrected by comparing it to an available national frequency standard (which was WWV in the U.S.).
For reference, the clock in a high performance modern digital audio device is only accurate to within about 1-10ppm. A cheap consumer device like a CD player or walkman type DAT deck will only have about 50-100ppm accuracy. This is 0.1ppm, in 1943, for a freakin' record player. Absolutely amazing.
You also forgot the little part in the "deregulation" regulations that mandated that utilities only be able to buy power from wholesalers one day in advance. It was done to prevent the incumbents from locking out startups by securing contracts for all available power. It means the utilities can't get long term contracts to keep the prices they pay for power relatively stable. That means the utilities are hit by every price fluctuation and makes them double fucked because they can't raise retail prices either.
You forgot the part about the legislation that has mandated that the retail price of power not increase. Increased demand and reduced supply of course has caused wholesale power prices to skyrocket and the utilities, unable to raise retail prices despite so-called "deregulation," are taking it up the ass.
yes, Linn makes a product called "skeet" (they are halfway down that page) howevever, they are just hard disks that go between the spikes and the floor. So you should be able to use any small flat hard object. The idea is that the little disc is still small enough that it makes good contact with the floor and you can then adjust the spikes so the speakers are very rigid and don't wobble.
I'm not sure what the Linn discs are made of but they appear to have a hole for the spike too. Talk to your hifi dealer, they probably have something. Otherwise small scrap pieces of marble or slate might work pretty well.
While it's easy to fixate on what gear to buy, of as much importance is how well the gear is setup, particularly the speakers. A great system cannot perform to it's full potential if it is not setup properly. Proper setup can make the difference between a system sounding good and a system sounding great, and proper setup doesn't cost much extra money.
The most important thing is that speakers be positioned properly and mounted on rigid stands. Speaker positioning is a large topic that I can't go into depth here but there are many excellent articles on the web (use Google). Important things to remember are that corners are never a good spot for speakers. The stands should be heavy (most can be filled with sand or lead shot) and mounted on adjustable spikes. The spikes are adjustable so you can match the contours of your floor (which is never perfectly flat). This allows you to set the stands so when you put your hand on top of the speaker and try to wiggle it the speaker will not move. This is important as if the speaker can wiggle than some energy will be lost. Any setup can get you 90% of the way there, but in high performance audio it's that last 10% where all the action is (and your ears/brain can really tell the difference). Trust me on this one, spending some bucks on nice rigid speaker stands with spikes on the bottom (use floor protectors under them if you have a hardwood floor) makes a big difference, it's not just cosmetic.
Subwoofers also need careful placement. While your brain cannot localize deep bass, improper placement can cause phase cancellation with the other speakers which creates comb filtering that sounds bad. Many subwoofers have phase adjustment but there is no substitute for proper placement in the first place.
In short, it's not worth spending a lot of money on good audio equipment if you don't bother to learn to set it up properly. Spending a few days with trial and error speaker placement, using your favorite and best sounding CD for reference, can make all the difference.
Stereophile, a magazine dedicated to ridiculously expensive audio reproduction equipment, has some nice articles on low/zero cost "tweaks" (such as speaker placement) that can greatly improve the sound of your system. Some of it may sound pretty tweaky, and some of it is, but by and large it is sound advice (no pun intended). Search their archives for "Fine Tunes"
It seems to me that bandwidth is a horrible commodity these days - everyone has too much to
spare - you almost have to give it away. (Well, not quite - but its a far sight better then 3 or 4
years ago)
First of all, the author of the referenced article is totally clueless. You can't measure the transfer of copyrighted material and charge accordingly if you don't know that the material being transferred is copyrighted. When people send things to eachother over encrypted channels (and this will become the dominant form of distribution in the future), you can't tell if the data is copyrighted or not.
Secondly, all of the people who are ranting and raving about how unfetterred copying on the internet will lead to the death of art are also mistaken. Copyright is a relatively new legal concept and the arts survived before it and they will survive after it. In fact, many people can successfully argue that the finest of art and music was better before the existance of Copyright, but that is irrelevant.
The main problem many people have is they are stuck with this outdated assumption that every single copy made should be accounted for and paid for. If my friend sends me a copy of a song and I listen to it once, decide it is garbage, and never listen to it again, who loses? The answer is: Nobody.
The problem isn't that people on Napster and other information trading systems do not want to pay for any of the music under any circumstances. It's that they cannot! If you download something from Napster and really like it, the only way to compensate the artist is to go to the store and buy their album. This certainly happens, but because of the dissociation between the downloading and the purchasing, there isn't a good way to measure this activity (downlaoding then buying).
Given that you cannot stop people from copying bits and you cannot force people to pay for art either before or after the fact, the only hope for artists is to make voluntary payments after the fact as simple and painless as possible. We have the techonolgy, the main road blocks are political. Many people are vehemently opposed to voluntary tipping of artists but those same people always insist on some type of involuntary a priori payment, which shows that they are in denial of reality (you can't stop people from copying bits).
The upshot of a voluntary tipping system that is integrated into browsers, viewers, players, etc... is that many more small artists who couldn't support themselves on their art alone will be able to. What will happen to the "mega pop stars" is less certain, but it is entirely possible that these folks will get even richer. The Internet will become the greatest thing to ever happen to art. The only thing is certain is that the people who have been making money by virtue of the control they have over the traditional distribution mechanisms (i.e. big record companies) are going to loose.
People want to support the artists they like. After all, we all do what we have to do to make money so we can eat, so the idea that people are unsympathetic to the needs of artists has no merit whatsoever. I find it very disturbing that record company executives who get rich off the backs of artists go around pontificating about how common people do not understand this basic fact of life (artists need food too). The evidence is that fans voraciously purchase hats, t-shirts, and other trinkets (even CD's) for little other purpose than to enrich their favorite band. Stephen King's "The Plant" experiment is also good evidence. The author of the referenced article tries to make it look like a failure when it was actually a complete success. Not only did a ridiculously high number of people purchase the first part (over 75%), some people expressed interest in tipping more than the suggested one dollar and some went ahead and made multiple purchases. The author tries to make it look like a failure, because the second part wasn't successful, but that's just because people didn't like the first part all that much, and nobody likes to read a book in stages; people like to read the whole thing at once.
Summary: you can't stop people from copying bits. You can't force people to pay for something they have a copy of, either before or after the fact. The only solution is to make it as simple and painless as possible for people to voluntarily contribute to the artist after they get a copy, no matter where they get the copy from.
Burris
"What do you do when you know that you know, that you know that you're wrong? You've got to Face the Music, you gotta listen to the Cosmos Song."
I don't think the special carpet is just to make it static free. It sounds much more like TEMPEST style emanation protection. They want to keep the signals inside the building so they cannot be detected outside by enemies or their own equipment.
Almost every system like this uses cryptographic hashes to identify data. That means if two people publish the same data you end up with the same data being more highly distributed/available; not two seperate copies of the same data. Hashes also have other properties that are highly desirable in distributed filesystems.
The way to handle data write policies is to use a market based system. The market is the only system humans have found to "fairly" allocate resources and works on a global scale. Instead of having some head honcho machines make write decisions, use a market. Mojo Nation does this by using a barter economy for the file system resources. Anyone can write, if they compensate the servers they are giving blocks to with Mojo, the internal currency which represents system resources. The only thing that requires centralization is the token server, which isn't needed in every transaction as "microtransactions" are aggregated into "microcredit" between peers. Further, the token servers can be distributed and multiple competing currencies are possible.
A small, working prototype is due by summer, although Kubiatowicz cautions the system is easily ten years away from widespread use.
Why wait years for a bunch of grad students to finish a prototype when you can start using and improving
Mojo Nationnow.
Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.
Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.
Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for
an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).
If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.
The future is solar powered watches. The face is a solar cell... Junghans makes watches that are both solar powered and have a radio receiver to pick up the time broadcast from the standards beureu. The watches set themselves every night so they are always exactly right (synchronized with UTC).
Unfortunately, the watches that are both solar and radio controlled are not available in the US yet. (Europe and the US and Japan all have different frequences/standards for time broadcast and each watch has an antenna that is tuned for one or the other.)
The law that tries to ban that which is unbannable is a foolish law and
I suspect in time Congress and the courts will recognize that.
Be prepared to wait a long time for Congress and the Courts to come around. The many laws associated with prohibition are foolish and millions of Americans have inhaled, but we all know that we got at least another four years of prohibition in front of us.
Burris
(to be fair, Gore is just as much of a prohibitionist as Dubya)
I predict the Apple menu much like it exists in OS-9 will return. I used the NeXT since 1990 and thats the only reason I have a Mac now. However, despite my bias I think the Apple menu rocks and so do most Mac users, so I predict it will appear in the next beta.
I could go on, but suffice to say that I regard the Dune movie as an example of why Dune could have
been a good movie, but in and of itself it was not. There's a reason it was directed by Alan Smithee...
(for those who don't know, Alan Smithee is the name directors put on movies they no longer wish to
be associated with)
I'm sorry, but you are incorrect. The movie was directed by David Lynch, but the remade TV adaptation was Alan Smithee.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it is the general purpose computers that circumvent the laws yet are technically capable (and programmable!) of being a media player that will save the day. Ultimately the consumers will get what they want and by and large everyone will win (artists, entertainers, and their management overall will be richer than ever), though there will be a lot of bloodshed on the way.
Also, did DAT fail because of the copy protection? I think DAT failed because it has all the disadvantages of tape; no instant random track access, complicated/expensive/failure-prone transport with very delicate media (thin mylar tape), limited high speed duplication capability, etc... that make it pretty lousy compared to the CD's consumers would be copying with it. Notice CDR's have taken off like gangbusters and burners/media have dropped in price like rocks. "Consumer Audio" CD products have the same copy protection as DAT... You buy a computer burner/media or prosumer DAT deck / computer media to avoid copy protection. DAT is still very much alive for musicians and people recording concerts. Sony still makes ever smaller walkman sized decks that are very popular for bootlegging concerts of Sony Music Artists...
Burris
What is happening now to the movie and music industries will soon happen to EVERY industry. When we can build universal assemblers (matter compilers) that can turn dirt into nourishing food at the push of a button, will we mandate copy protection to save the farmers? Will we ban these machines to protect the jobs of carpenters, skilled laborers, machine tool manufacturers, etc ad nauseum?
John Gilmore is one of the few people who truly understand what is happening and where this is all heading.
Burris
Burris
Burris
I very highly recommend everyone read the paper, which was published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal under the title "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems" in 1949. It's pretty accessible, you don't need to be a crypto weenie to understand it. However, you can't even pretend to know anything about cryptology without having read that paper.
Shannon is the MAN.
Burris
Burris
Burris
There's another great article about this on k5.
Burris
Burris
I'm not sure what the Linn discs are made of but they appear to have a hole for the spike too. Talk to your hifi dealer, they probably have something. Otherwise small scrap pieces of marble or slate might work pretty well.
Burris
The most important thing is that speakers be positioned properly and mounted on rigid stands. Speaker positioning is a large topic that I can't go into depth here but there are many excellent articles on the web (use Google). Important things to remember are that corners are never a good spot for speakers. The stands should be heavy (most can be filled with sand or lead shot) and mounted on adjustable spikes. The spikes are adjustable so you can match the contours of your floor (which is never perfectly flat). This allows you to set the stands so when you put your hand on top of the speaker and try to wiggle it the speaker will not move. This is important as if the speaker can wiggle than some energy will be lost. Any setup can get you 90% of the way there, but in high performance audio it's that last 10% where all the action is (and your ears/brain can really tell the difference). Trust me on this one, spending some bucks on nice rigid speaker stands with spikes on the bottom (use floor protectors under them if you have a hardwood floor) makes a big difference, it's not just cosmetic.
Subwoofers also need careful placement. While your brain cannot localize deep bass, improper placement can cause phase cancellation with the other speakers which creates comb filtering that sounds bad. Many subwoofers have phase adjustment but there is no substitute for proper placement in the first place.
In short, it's not worth spending a lot of money on good audio equipment if you don't bother to learn to set it up properly. Spending a few days with trial and error speaker placement, using your favorite and best sounding CD for reference, can make all the difference.
Stereophile, a magazine dedicated to ridiculously expensive audio reproduction equipment, has some nice articles on low/zero cost "tweaks" (such as speaker placement) that can greatly improve the sound of your system. Some of it may sound pretty tweaky, and some of it is, but by and large it is sound advice (no pun intended). Search their archives for "Fine Tunes"
Burris
Burris
Wow, thanks for the link, that article rules!
"International borders aren't even speed bumps on the Information Superhighway." - Tim May
some people just don't get it...
Burris
Secondly, all of the people who are ranting and raving about how unfetterred copying on the internet will lead to the death of art are also mistaken. Copyright is a relatively new legal concept and the arts survived before it and they will survive after it. In fact, many people can successfully argue that the finest of art and music was better before the existance of Copyright, but that is irrelevant.
The main problem many people have is they are stuck with this outdated assumption that every single copy made should be accounted for and paid for. If my friend sends me a copy of a song and I listen to it once, decide it is garbage, and never listen to it again, who loses? The answer is: Nobody.
The problem isn't that people on Napster and other information trading systems do not want to pay for any of the music under any circumstances. It's that they cannot! If you download something from Napster and really like it, the only way to compensate the artist is to go to the store and buy their album. This certainly happens, but because of the dissociation between the downloading and the purchasing, there isn't a good way to measure this activity (downlaoding then buying).
Given that you cannot stop people from copying bits and you cannot force people to pay for art either before or after the fact, the only hope for artists is to make voluntary payments after the fact as simple and painless as possible. We have the techonolgy, the main road blocks are political. Many people are vehemently opposed to voluntary tipping of artists but those same people always insist on some type of involuntary a priori payment, which shows that they are in denial of reality (you can't stop people from copying bits).
The upshot of a voluntary tipping system that is integrated into browsers, viewers, players, etc... is that many more small artists who couldn't support themselves on their art alone will be able to. What will happen to the "mega pop stars" is less certain, but it is entirely possible that these folks will get even richer. The Internet will become the greatest thing to ever happen to art. The only thing is certain is that the people who have been making money by virtue of the control they have over the traditional distribution mechanisms (i.e. big record companies) are going to loose.
People want to support the artists they like. After all, we all do what we have to do to make money so we can eat, so the idea that people are unsympathetic to the needs of artists has no merit whatsoever. I find it very disturbing that record company executives who get rich off the backs of artists go around pontificating about how common people do not understand this basic fact of life (artists need food too). The evidence is that fans voraciously purchase hats, t-shirts, and other trinkets (even CD's) for little other purpose than to enrich their favorite band. Stephen King's "The Plant" experiment is also good evidence. The author of the referenced article tries to make it look like a failure when it was actually a complete success. Not only did a ridiculously high number of people purchase the first part (over 75%), some people expressed interest in tipping more than the suggested one dollar and some went ahead and made multiple purchases. The author tries to make it look like a failure, because the second part wasn't successful, but that's just because people didn't like the first part all that much, and nobody likes to read a book in stages; people like to read the whole thing at once.
Summary: you can't stop people from copying bits. You can't force people to pay for something they have a copy of, either before or after the fact. The only solution is to make it as simple and painless as possible for people to voluntarily contribute to the artist after they get a copy, no matter where they get the copy from.
Burris
"What do you do when you know that you know, that you know that you're wrong? You've got to Face the Music, you gotta listen to the Cosmos Song."
Burris
Burris
Burris
Burris
Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.
Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.
Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).
If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.
Burris
Burris
Unfortunately, the watches that are both solar and radio controlled are not available in the US yet. (Europe and the US and Japan all have different frequences/standards for time broadcast and each watch has an antenna that is tuned for one or the other.)
burris
Burris
(to be fair, Gore is just as much of a prohibitionist as Dubya)
Burris
Burris