Songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, promotion, and delivery to stores are still labor-intensive processes, and cost-push inflation pushes the current-dollar cost of labor up.
How is this possible? How can an independent singer-songwriter prove in court that the songs he claims to have written are in fact original, as opposed to being subconscious copies of an existing copyrighted work that has been played on the radio?
The other companies still fix prices at around 16.98
When CDs came out, they cost seventeen 1983-dollars. Now they cost seventeen 2003-dollars. I'm guessing that compared to the cost of groceries, a 2003-dollar is worth about half of a 1983-dollar.
Edison didn't "go away" really. He founded General Electric
And guess what? GE is going to be part of the RIAA and MPAA soon. Its NBC unit will soon acquire Vivendi Universal Entertainment, parent of Universal Music Group (RIAA member) and Universal Pictures (MPAA member). So I guess the Edison Records and Edison Pictures labels will soon be back after all.
daemontools is far easier and more convenient to use than init scripts
System administrators prefer to take the path of least resistance. Is DJB's init script replacement easier to learn and configure than BIND is to patch? And if DJB chooses not to support a particular platform, what about the money required to purchase a specimen of a supported platform?
The last few times I've installed djbdns, all I've had to do was type in emerge djbdns, go away for a few minutes, come back, and start adding data.
emerge: Bad command or file name. Installing and configuring Gentoo Linux on a production system is not always an option.
Distribute an unmodified tarball, along with whatever patches you want to apply
Applying a patch to a copyrighted program prepares a derivative work of that program. Will it be lawful under all nations' copyright laws for end users of DJB's programs to apply such patches, compile the patched programs, and run the compiled binaries? Though DJB claims that 17 USC 117 seems to allow this, not all U.S. district court judges interpret section 117 the same way, and not all jurisdictions have adopted corresponding legislation. Until DJB explains the specific terms for distribution of patches to his software (Trolltech's QPL might suit his liking), distributing patches will remain only quasi-lawful in many cases.
For purposes of blocking sitefinder.verisign.com's IP
What happens to a DJBDNS server's Sitefinder blocking performance should Verisign restart the Sitefinder web site and move its web server to a different IP every 24 hours?
Then how do employees copy work-related files across the network? Aren't SMB/Samba and NFS peer-to-peer services? You might want to discuss this with your employer's IT department, to get "use of P2P apps" clarified to "unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted works" or "use of file-sharing apps that communicate with the public Internet" depending on whether RIAA liability or bandwidth use was the main concern in banning "P2P".
Similarly, if someone sells me $10K speaker wires and I believe they have a powerful effect on my stereo system, I am likely to perceive the effect and may even think the improvement is worth $10K.
What, are the bits more pristine than when using a conventional cable?
Possibly. Not all modulation schemes are the same, and some cables seem to reject ambient electromagnetic noise better than others, which might as well be antennas.
Are the 1s and 0s more like 0.999 and 0.001 than 0.998 and 0.002 with cheap cables?
Yes. Signals sent at very high data rates typically use some sort of complicated modulation that's sensitive to frequency response, phase response, linearity, or the like. I'm guessing that a more expensive cable will generally have its capacitance and its inductance balanced out, its wires will be of thick enough gauge that using a long cable or bending the cable doesn't cause excessive resistance and signal loss, and its connectors will resist corrosion. In some cases this can have a measurable effect on the bit error rate, such as in a noisy environment or with the more complicated modulations used with high data rates. See also the differences between IEEE 1284 conforming parallel cables and los-baratos[1] cables, CAT5 vs. CAT5e vs. CAT6 Ethernet cable, etc.
I remember this from the early days of CD: paint the outside edge of your CD with a green (or black) market, and your CD was supposed to sound better.
The only thing applying black marker to the outside of a CD does is block the CD player from reading that part of the CD. This incidentally disables some forms of copy restriction such as Sony's Key2Audio. It has been joked that Sony Music considered having black permanent markers banned in the U.S. under the DMCA as a circumvention device.
The IFF is just a container format like AVI. Contrary to AVI, IFF is a good container format.
I thought AVI was based on RIFF, which in turn was based on IFF. What specific problems do you see with AVI vs. IFF, and how do they compare to the newer Ogg and Matroska container formats?
One of the reasons Wisdom Tree published NES games without becoming a Nintendo licensee is that Wisdom Tree wanted to publish religious edutainment, but Nintendo had a policy of not allowing overt religious content in the games. I once owned an NES cart from Wisdom Tree called Exodus, a total conversion of the earlier Crystal Mines (a boulder dash clone). The game's bonus stages referenced Exodus, the second book of the Tanach. (The Tanach is the Jewish Bible originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and it together with the New Testament forms the Christian Bible.)
If you put "om" (a syllable associated with Hinduism) into "Hebrew" (the English name of a language associated with Judaism), you get "Homebrew". How's that for religious content?
I own a GameCube, and I've never opened the cover to see a disc spinning counterclockwise. GameCube discs seem to store the boot sector on a data layer that goes outside-in (like the second layer of a DVD) rather than inside-out (like a CD or the first layer of a DVD), and this may be how the myth started.
Switching from Windows to Linux may not always be feasible. I acquired a copy of a Mandrake 9.x series distro. I told Mandrake to install in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 2000. It autodetected my Radeon 9000 video card as a "radeon", but when I clicked Test, X no worky. Are you now saying I need to buy all new hardware just to run Linux with usable X11?
Is installing Cygwin+XFree86+KDE as easy as Next, Next, Next, Next, Finish, or does it take experience getting one's hands dirty working at a command line and reading code? Does it Just Work(tm) almost all the time, or does it misdetect the environment or otherwise fail to actually work on some hardware/OS combinations? Does the Cygwin layer introduce an unacceptable speed hit on the OP's computer? Do Cygwin, XFree86, and KDE take up gigabytes of disk space?
Don't you get it? Sony is shooting itself in the foot. Kids will ask for a PSX (a PS2 with a built-in DVR) for Christmas, and Santa will bring a PSX (a PS1).
Then consider switching to a free software operating system
I have considered it, and I have tried it. However, it's much harder to install drivers for not-properly-autodetected hardware such as my ATI Radeon 9000 video card and my Microtek ScanMaker 4850 scanner under recent Mandrake Linux releases than under a properly patched Windows 2000 system. If I had the money to replace all my hardware with well-supported hardware, I'd have the money to buy another computer to run Linux on, but I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Major-label singer-songwriters seem to be able to pay for a professional musicologist's services with part of the advance on royalties.
Gee, I wonder where all that extra money went?
Songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, promotion, and delivery to stores are still labor-intensive processes, and cost-push inflation pushes the current-dollar cost of labor up.
If you want me to listen, stay Independent
How is this possible? How can an independent singer-songwriter prove in court that the songs he claims to have written are in fact original, as opposed to being subconscious copies of an existing copyrighted work that has been played on the radio?
Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs: Read it and weep
The other companies still fix prices at around 16.98
When CDs came out, they cost seventeen 1983-dollars. Now they cost seventeen 2003-dollars. I'm guessing that compared to the cost of groceries, a 2003-dollar is worth about half of a 1983-dollar.
-96dB of quiet.
For those who are playing at home, this is the approximate noise floor of 16-bit linear PCM.
one of the most annoying things is that the equipment manufacturers *intentionally* cripple consumer gear. Things like SCMS
B*tch to Congress to get parts of the Audio Home Recording Act repealed.
It costs MORE to put an anolog output circuit on the minidisc recorders
MiniDisc is based on ATRAC, a lossy audio codec. Do you really want to trust your masters to an audio format that itself introduces generation loss?
Edison didn't "go away" really. He founded General Electric
And guess what? GE is going to be part of the RIAA and MPAA soon. Its NBC unit will soon acquire Vivendi Universal Entertainment, parent of Universal Music Group (RIAA member) and Universal Pictures (MPAA member). So I guess the Edison Records and Edison Pictures labels will soon be back after all.
daemontools is far easier and more convenient to use than init scripts
System administrators prefer to take the path of least resistance. Is DJB's init script replacement easier to learn and configure than BIND is to patch? And if DJB chooses not to support a particular platform, what about the money required to purchase a specimen of a supported platform?
The last few times I've installed djbdns, all I've had to do was type in emerge djbdns, go away for a few minutes, come back, and start adding data.
emerge: Bad command or file name. Installing and configuring Gentoo Linux on a production system is not always an option.
Distribute an unmodified tarball, along with whatever patches you want to apply
Applying a patch to a copyrighted program prepares a derivative work of that program. Will it be lawful under all nations' copyright laws for end users of DJB's programs to apply such patches, compile the patched programs, and run the compiled binaries? Though DJB claims that 17 USC 117 seems to allow this, not all U.S. district court judges interpret section 117 the same way, and not all jurisdictions have adopted corresponding legislation. Until DJB explains the specific terms for distribution of patches to his software (Trolltech's QPL might suit his liking), distributing patches will remain only quasi-lawful in many cases.
For purposes of blocking sitefinder.verisign.com's IP
What happens to a DJBDNS server's Sitefinder blocking performance should Verisign restart the Sitefinder web site and move its web server to a different IP every 24 hours?
Unless your company blocks anonymizer.com entirely
In other words, "unless water is wet".
P2P apps = fired
Then how do employees copy work-related files across the network? Aren't SMB/Samba and NFS peer-to-peer services? You might want to discuss this with your employer's IT department, to get "use of P2P apps" clarified to "unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted works" or "use of file-sharing apps that communicate with the public Internet" depending on whether RIAA liability or bandwidth use was the main concern in banning "P2P".
Similarly, if someone sells me $10K speaker wires and I believe they have a powerful effect on my stereo system, I am likely to perceive the effect and may even think the improvement is worth $10K.
Which is why blind tests are so important, right?
What, are the bits more pristine than when using a conventional cable?
Possibly. Not all modulation schemes are the same, and some cables seem to reject ambient electromagnetic noise better than others, which might as well be antennas.
Are the 1s and 0s more like 0.999 and 0.001 than 0.998 and 0.002 with cheap cables?
Yes. Signals sent at very high data rates typically use some sort of complicated modulation that's sensitive to frequency response, phase response, linearity, or the like. I'm guessing that a more expensive cable will generally have its capacitance and its inductance balanced out, its wires will be of thick enough gauge that using a long cable or bending the cable doesn't cause excessive resistance and signal loss, and its connectors will resist corrosion. In some cases this can have a measurable effect on the bit error rate, such as in a noisy environment or with the more complicated modulations used with high data rates. See also the differences between IEEE 1284 conforming parallel cables and los-baratos[1] cables, CAT5 vs. CAT5e vs. CAT6 Ethernet cable, etc.
I remember this from the early days of CD: paint the outside edge of your CD with a green (or black) market, and your CD was supposed to sound better.
The only thing applying black marker to the outside of a CD does is block the CD player from reading that part of the CD. This incidentally disables some forms of copy restriction such as Sony's Key2Audio. It has been joked that Sony Music considered having black permanent markers banned in the U.S. under the DMCA as a circumvention device.
The IFF is just a container format like AVI. Contrary to AVI, IFF is a good container format.
I thought AVI was based on RIFF, which in turn was based on IFF. What specific problems do you see with AVI vs. IFF, and how do they compare to the newer Ogg and Matroska container formats?
I wonder how Flash manufacturers will react to the news.
Flash? Squirrels? Flash and squirrels?
Yo, I went up to a thug gangster and he was like, Yo motherf***** WEEEE!!!
3 words: Halo's Less Fun.
One of the reasons Wisdom Tree published NES games without becoming a Nintendo licensee is that Wisdom Tree wanted to publish religious edutainment, but Nintendo had a policy of not allowing overt religious content in the games. I once owned an NES cart from Wisdom Tree called Exodus, a total conversion of the earlier Crystal Mines (a boulder dash clone). The game's bonus stages referenced Exodus, the second book of the Tanach. (The Tanach is the Jewish Bible originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and it together with the New Testament forms the Christian Bible.)
If you put "om" (a syllable associated with Hinduism) into "Hebrew" (the English name of a language associated with Judaism), you get "Homebrew". How's that for religious content?
And aram doesn't count.
Doesn't? I've read that many GameCube games use the sound chip's slower RAM as a disc cache.
I own a GameCube, and I've never opened the cover to see a disc spinning counterclockwise. GameCube discs seem to store the boot sector on a data layer that goes outside-in (like the second layer of a DVD) rather than inside-out (like a CD or the first layer of a DVD), and this may be how the myth started.
Is KDE for Cygwin considered mature enough to Just Work(tm)? Can it run on less than the newest, most powerful machines?
Switching from Windows to Linux may not always be feasible. I acquired a copy of a Mandrake 9.x series distro. I told Mandrake to install in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 2000. It autodetected my Radeon 9000 video card as a "radeon", but when I clicked Test, X no worky. Are you now saying I need to buy all new hardware just to run Linux with usable X11?
Is installing Cygwin+XFree86+KDE as easy as Next, Next, Next, Next, Finish, or does it take experience getting one's hands dirty working at a command line and reading code? Does it Just Work(tm) almost all the time, or does it misdetect the environment or otherwise fail to actually work on some hardware/OS combinations? Does the Cygwin layer introduce an unacceptable speed hit on the OP's computer? Do Cygwin, XFree86, and KDE take up gigabytes of disk space?
Don't you get it? Sony is shooting itself in the foot. Kids will ask for a PSX (a PS2 with a built-in DVR) for Christmas, and Santa will bring a PSX (a PS1).
Then consider switching to a free software operating system
I have considered it, and I have tried it. However, it's much harder to install drivers for not-properly-autodetected hardware such as my ATI Radeon 9000 video card and my Microtek ScanMaker 4850 scanner under recent Mandrake Linux releases than under a properly patched Windows 2000 system. If I had the money to replace all my hardware with well-supported hardware, I'd have the money to buy another computer to run Linux on, but I don't.