That sounds good on paper, except for a few points I've learned from experience:
1) Opportunity cost will screw you. Yeah, I could burn CDs myself and print my own inserts. But the time it takes to do that is more valuable working at my job, taking care of the stuff I do at home (paying bills), and living my life. It would take a lot longer than the two weeks discmakers takes to print as many CDs, and the opportunity costs outweigh the percieved benefits. 2) CD-Rs don't mean crap in the music marketplace. Radio, labels, and music fans laugh at CD-Rs. Unless it's a stamped silver CD, you're not professional, and if you're not professional, you're not worth the time. Not a valid argument in this day and age, but perception sadly still rules. 3) 850 CDs is actually a lot in my genre. KMFDM is one of the larger artists in my scene, and all reports from reputable industry people indicate that their last album (ATTAK) sold under 6000 copies, internationally. Six Thousand CDs sold for a band with easily a dozen albums to their name, and as many years of history. They pack midsized clubs here in Seattle and have a fanbase that extends from age 16 to 46, and they can only move 6000 copies of an album. So that's a meter of the scale of albums that get sold on the indie level.
Clearly, you have some good critical thinking, and these are things many artists have tried, but sadly experience proves otherwise.
I guess $5 is a fine price for CDs where the artist is signed to a RIAA label that can afford to punch out 10,000 copies of said CD at pennies per disc. But for independant artists, it's a little different.
Let's just ignore the $5,000 to $10,000 investment in a home music recording studio, the $400 mastering fees, and just look at the actual CD manufacture. It costs $2.50 a CD to have Discmakers (http://www.discmakers.com) print up 1000 CDs in shiny plastic cases with professional full color 6 panel insert graphics and on CD printing. (And if you want quality CDs in any reasonable amount of time, you don't go with Joes Bargain CD Duplication.) I mail out 100 to radio stations around the country, with press kits, at an additional cost of about $2 per kit. I give away 25 to local DJs in clubs and my indie label gives away another 25 to a distro house, all for promotion. Now I'm down to 850 CDs that can actually be sold, and I'm out $2700.
Now assuming that I sell all of these myself and get 100% of the profit (I don't, but we'll keep this simple), I now need to sell 540 CDs at your ideal price of $5 each just to break even. This leaves 310 CDs which I can sell for a net profit of $1550.
$1550 for a years work writing 12 songs, performing them, recording them, mixing them down, and making them available to people on the widely available CD format, which most non-geeks use and enjoy. Can you see why no sane person who wants to eat or pay rent would ever charge so little for a CD?
And I've never once been contacted about being paid directly for MP3 or other downloadable copies of my songs. No one has ever offered some fair price for a non-CD version of my music. But plenty of people have told me that they downloaded my music off Kazaa or WinMX and thought it was pretty cool, thanks for writing it, but no I won't buy a CD, hey, why are you getting mad at me?
The RIAA, sure, they scam the artists who sign with them. But the little guys get screwed too.
I am a musician, and I know very few fellow musicians who don't use Autotune, or some variant.
It's a tool, like any other tool in the studio, and it's used to achieve a certain effect (getting notes on key) without going back and tracking a difficult passage dozens of times. Sure, artists could do that, but it's a massive waste of time, and a source of frustration. As a tool, it's no less invalid than compressors, digital reverb units and effects processors, and anything else that's available to the modern musician. If using an Autotune unit (or the software) is fake, than so is adding reverb with a processor instead of recording every instrument live in a large hall.
Consumers want a musical product that is enjoyable, and a large portion of that enjoyment comes from the quality and professionalism that a polished and on-key composition delivers. If you're interested in the pure art, then go listen to some live acoustic musicians at a coffee house, or vote with your dollars by only listening to artists who don't use Autotune.
But for 99% of working bands, playing live shows on tour means living out of a van for perhaps several months at a time, not an ideal environment for keeping your voice in top notch shape. If an inexpensive box or piece of software can help them deliver the high quality performance that their fans expect, and that helps them pay their rent when they get home, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
When finished in 2004 the line will stretch about 107 metres along the outside of the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above the planet.
It's just a robotic system for manipulating cargo outside the ISS without the need for someone to do a EVA. It's not like it's that hard to figure out from the article, if you'd actually read it.
Does anyone know a better site that has tech news with a higher signal to noise ratio? Because wading through the same tiresome uninformed/. comments in an effort to keep up on DMCA and tech issues is really getting frustrating...
The days of playing sequences off a DAT are not numbered -- they're already long gone.
I'd have to offer a dissenting view. I play in two industrial bands in Seattle, and know several others in the same area, and we all play live shows to DAT. It's not that we're opposed to soft synths (I've listened to Reason (har har), and several other bands are selling their gear to move to software based solutions), but it's a matter of expense and reliability. It's a lot cheaper to have a backup DAT tape if something goes wrong with the first one, than to have a backup PC with all your settings on it. If your DAT deck dies, you can find or borrow another one that will play your tape in short notice, relatively quickly and inexpensively, even on the road. If power dies or someone trips on a cord, all you have to do when it comes back on, is skip ahead to the next song on the DAT, which takes at most three seconds. If power dies with a laptop, you have to reboot, reload the software, get back to where you were in the setlist. That could take minutes, and that dead time makes for a nasty crowd. Even for different setlists, it's cheap to make different DAT tapes for different setlists, and it's a matter of spending five minutes before the show programming the DAT to skip around the tape if you want to change the play order on an existing DAT. You never have to worry about hard drives crashing, the LCD display cracking, or optimizing the performance of the DAT player. You can mount a DAT deck in a SKB case and knock it around and know it will still work at the show. And believe me, after several weeks on the road, carrying your own equipment up and down stairs into dark, skanky clubs, the last thing you want is any hassle. If everything just plugs in and works, you can direct all your effort to putting energy into your live performance, and arguing with the club owner about getting paid, instead of trying to diagnose problems with a laptop.
If you're in a band that can afford a dedicated sound/synth/computer tech on the road, then I say go for it. It certainly could open up vast new ways of doing things live. But until I reach that level and see the kind of rock solid reliability I get from a DAT, I personally won't be changing anytime soon.
DAT is still used by musicians everywhere, and the level of machine that they would buy ($700+) has SCMS Copy Protection Defeat built right in. Of course, you don't see musicians rampantly pirating music because of this feature...
It all comes down to this: Some middle manager gets a whiff of some technology, spends a few days writing up a proposal showing how his company can earn X Dollars and save Y Dollars in profits that would be lost to a vague piracy threat if they go with this technology, and some upper manager sits in a meeting for an hour and approves the proposal. The middle manager is motivated by company politcs, the upper manager is motivated by profit, and no one cares about technology, the Rights of Consumers, or whether there's any proof, scientific or otherwise, that this system will work. Companies can only see a Quarter into the future, and only remember the last three months. And capitalism works because it relies of people being greedy, which they always are.
Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?
Their cillia starts to fall out in the front, or in a circular patch over their oral pore. They get a lot more moody, and thinner, and they tend to say lots of things like "Eh, my endoplasmic reticulum isn't what it used to be!", and "In my day, they didn't teach Mitosis in school, you just learned about it the hard way!" If the cells can afford it, they try to move south for their last days, which explains the appearance of some higher mammals...
Sounds like you want to get into Gameboy development. At the company I work for, one of the guys from our handheld division walked by my cube saying something about the AI code he just wrote in optimized Z80.
At first, I shuddered, having horrible flashbacks to my father throwing some assembler manuals and a Timex Sinclair 1000 in my lap at age 8 and telling me to learn it. But then I looked at the Gamecube SDK and Hardware docs I've been pouring over and wondered if it wouldn't be more fun to explore that simpler, more elegant world...
In the real world, you _would_ get fired for taking credit for someone else's work, trying to pass it off on your own.
Actually, from what I've seen, in the real world you get promoted for taking credit for someone else's work, especially when it's one of your underlings who slaved away while you were out on the golf course.
whoever claims he is a former infogrames worker is wrong, I've had TA since october 1997 and I know for a fact that cavedog was NOT dead when infogrames acquired GT
That's funny, because four months before Bruno Bonnell came to Humongous Entertainment Headquarters in Bothel, WA to tell myself and the 400 other employees that Ron Gilbert and Shelly Day were no longer our bosses and that we were now a fully owned subsidiary of Infogrames, I seem to remember having this conversation:
Boss: "So, you're now a fulltime employee of Humongous."
Me: "Uh, what happened to Cavedog."
Boss: "It is no more."
The website stayed up, a pretty face was put on for the customers, and the PR Nazis ran around madly telling people (especially the much beleaguered YardDogs, who generally cared about the TA community) not to say anything negative (or truthful) about Cavedog, but the fact is, all projects were canceled, all employees were moved to Humongous projects (or were let go, or left to form another company), and whatever hope there was for Cavedog pretty much completely dried up.
I'm sure if you found some employee who made sure to grab all the source before he left Cavedog to work for another games company in the Seattle/Bellevue area, he could probably be bribed to hand off the source he had in some way that would not trace back to him, thus avoiding personal legal hassles, while simultaneously benefitting all the people who really want to see the endless lines of well commented C++ covering everything from AI, to Network Play, to Graphics Rendering.
So, seeing as I'm a musician, I'd really like a T.C. Electronix Fireworx effects module, another Delta 1010 digital audio IO board, and a dbx 376 tube mic preamp. You get those to my mailbox, and then we'll talk.;)
These companies/consortiums/cartels don't want to live in Reality. They want to live in an alternate world where money perpetually flows in their direction every second of every day at an ever increasing rate so that their quarterly return graph looks like y=x^2. They want to be paid for every viewing by every eyeball and every listen by every ear of every piece of media they have ever touched, handled, or signed off on in any way. That's all they want. That's all they care about.
And the fact that it's impossible in Reality is not daunting to them, because they have enough money to play with the Alternate Reality known as the Legal System, where the rules are not based on ethics or morality (not really they're not, although some may claim otherwise) but on precident and convincing the lawmakers that it will benefit them (payola, reelection, etc.) Then the Police can sweep in and harrass the "media hackers", since by definition, they are now criminals.
The reason they don't care about good encryption or being fair is that some bean counters have determined that it's not the fastest way to increasing profits, and that is all that does matter. Fairness doesn't buy these execs bigger mansions, faster cars, or hotter hookers. And the reason it's so repulsive is that they're literally locusts, eating everything in sight on a path to instant fatness but inevitable starvation, but it's as if they've somehow bought out Mother Nature to make the crops grow back artifically fast through bribes to the Soil Nutrient Bureaucrats.
Any reasonable person can see how benefiting artists and consumers alike is what's best for everyone. No one may get fabulously wealthy overnight, but entertainers will be well compensated, and the people will get entertainment at prices that are reasonable. The opportunity costs of pirating entertainment would outweigh the costs of getting it legally, and piracy would disappear for all but the very poorest and entertainment starved of people. But the cartels don't care. The RIAA and MPAA aren't interested in anything but increasing their own wealth RIGHT NOW at the expense of everything else, and it's no wonder there's a groundswell of people who want them gone.
You can make your slogan "Earth: As Close As You Can Get To The Action, With Your Feet Still On The Ground!" Or maybe even "Earth: Now The Closest Planet To The Sun!"
Seriously though, 7.7 Billion years from now is a LONG TIME AWAY. I highly doubt that any life form higher than an insect will exist then in a form that we would recognize today. And while possibly providing insight into what planets orbiting other white dwarves we should look to for signs of past life (once we get equipment that can resolve their existance, much less probe their surface), I don't think this is anything anyone needs to worry about today.
Of course, assuming further checks prove that the Earth will survive past the death of our own sun, perhaps we should leave a legacy to the rest of the Universe by planting the sum knowledge of mankind somewhere safe below the surface (assuming we could sheild it from geologic destruction) and send out satellites to the furthest reaches of the galaxy proclaiming the gift to all Life, everywhere. Just be sure to pack this with some T-Shirts that read, "I went to Earth, and all I got was this lousy Data Crystal."
And disillusioned customers stop buying music, so the record companies have the worst year in a long time... Also this attracts the attention of the Senate... Now who wins?
TARKIN: The National Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that Hillary Rosen has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
TAGGE: That's impossible! How will the RIAA maintain control without the bureaucracy?
TARKIN: The Major Labels now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the consumers in line. Fear of the DMCA and the New Police State.
Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that.
It may have to do with the order that the row and column are printed in. If the rows are printed first, and the LCD has defects at that point, you only lose the time and money that went into the first few steps. Then if the Columns are printed later, and the LCD has defects, you lose that much more time and process cost. Thus minimizing the complexity and reducing the chance of defects in later printing stages is a wise move, from an economical standpoint.
At the fab I briefly contracted for, no one cared if you dropped the US$10 raw wafers, but people flipped out if you dropped the US$300 processed wafers that came out of the implanter 8 hours later...
One BIO-Bug by itself is pretty dull. At $40 a pop, buying several ranks somewhere below buying a console game, which is fun by itself at about the same cost. They also turn worse than the Titanic on shag carpet, but seem to do better on linolium or hardwood.
I guess if you have a Garage, and can afford to blow $80+ on a few of these guys, they could be highly amusing. Maybe they're also good for the office, if your coworkers aren't annoyed by the constant "chirp-chirp-chirp-ANNNHHHHH-ANNNNHHHH!" sound that they emit...
Just my NSHO, after buying one a month ago and turning it on exactly three times.
Coders who follow these rules produce what? 3000-6000 lines of code a year? Ain't gonna get product out the door that way. What you get is code with lots of comments about what it is supposed to do, but doesn't because of all the time spent on documentation instead of design and debugging.
No, they produce much, much more. I wrote about 4000 lines of C++ in 2 months for the networking component of a Racing Game. It worked great when it was demoed in front of the Company Board. It was well commented. And then I spent three days typing up 47 pages of documentation on my work before adding and improving on the project.
So to reiterate, 2 months, at about 50 hours a week, writing 4000 lines of well commented, well formatted code, and writing complete system documentation for that component. Design Time included. And I am not an Uber-Programmer.
This is not hard. It's highly doable. Only the people who think it can't be done are the people who won't be able to do it.
Good code is not just code that compiles and runs efficiently. Good code also has the following properties:
Clear, Consistant Formatting - This code complies with the company standard for writing code. Indents are properly nested, Functions are named consistantly, variables use Hungarian Notation or some other standard. Any programmer should be able to look at code by another programmer and pick up on it very quickly, without shaking their head and saying "What the hell were they thinking?"
Copious Comments - Lots of comments, clearly written and explanatory. What does this function do? Put a block at the beginning explaining it. How does this algorithm work briefly? Write a paragraph if you have to. The best comment I heard was from a friend about a former coworkers code: "It's English with some C++ thrown inbetween the comments."
Documentation - Anyone who shrugs this off is an idiot. You always have time for documentation. And it's not just for the instance where a programmer gets "hit by a bus." It's for people who leave behind code when they quit, or go to a new project. It's for the new hires, so they can understand and study and learn good design, good techniques, and developer rationale. It forces developers to explain themselves. And it allows non-techies to understand what they're doing. Imagine you had to get through 12 years of grade school with no books. Pretty frightening, eh? Documentation is good. Write it.
Coders who follow these rules truly are an asset to their company. Geeks who hack, write unreadable code, and utter geek credos about enforcing obfuscation and being purposefully vague have no place in a business environment.
That's good thinking on NASA's part, because after being cooped up in a spaceship on a multi-month trip to Mars, I'd be in a mood for a few hours with any 'ore I could find.
Sure, the tech is cheap and relatively disposable, but is moving every feature but the kitchen sink into the cellphone really the way to do it? The phone can already send and transmit voice, so why not keep the text-to-speech synthesis at some central server where the systems can be maintained and upgraded, rather than having to support/manufacture/refurbish thousands of phones out in the field?
The cellphone may have all the power of an original Palm Pilot these days, but we don't need to make it into a Onyx Server.
I can't say I'm surprised that the "hacker youth" is disconnected with the past. Who doesn't know teens like this? In this consumer-oriented society, the focus is on having and bragging about it, not on doing or knowing.
Hell, when I was that age, I used to read computer magazines in class, and a girl who sat next to me once asked "why I read those things?" Since she was hot and I was shocked that she was actually speaking to me, I answered the not quite accurate "it tells me how to fix them," to which she replied, "why don't you just take it to the shop?" Likewise, several months ago, I was talking with a younger cousin about the video game industry (where I'm currently working), and we were discussing what makes games good. His entire list of quality games was less than a year old, and when I mentioned Pac Man and the Infocom games, he had only the vaguest clue that such things once existed. Furthermore, his interests were more in how to get rich writing games rather than how a programmer actually writes good AI routines, or an artist animates characters realisticaly.
The point is, there will always be a large element of society, at any age, which is both ignorant and uninterested in the history of anything. Most of these people will remain in the realm of Average Consumer, while the inquisitive will go forth, research the past, and build the future. The danger comes from the past-less few who simply abuse the tools that are available to them, or arguably worse, become the leaders who direct the doers of society, with little grip on why the wheels of progress turn a certain way, and no concern for how they're powered to enable to future. Because when the percieved joy is in reaching the destination, rather than within the journey itself, it tends to be one hell of a bumpy ride that doesn't exactly pave a smooth road for those who follow.
When I was a kid, my Dad used to joke around by saying "Vere are your Pap-ahs? Vee haf vays of making you tak!" I didn't understand it until I was older, and once I did, I laughed because I believed such a thing could never happen here.
The real question that the populace needs to ask is whether or not any system of National IDs would really provide a benefit for the People in the form of Enhanced Security, while simultaneously not eroding our Freedoms. Furthermore, what will be the implications of the information that such a system provides, and what reliability do we have for the accuracy and precision of that data?
If such cards hold information on criminal record, citizenship status, and so forth, will this information be used in a discriminatory fashion? Will convicted murderer be able to board an airliner? How about someone who plead guilty to petty theft decades ago? How about people with speeding tickets? Will cards hold information on ethnic background, and if so, how will this affect racial profiling?
Furthermore, how will the data be stored? Will it all be contained on a Smart Card (easily hackable), or will it be contained in a Central Database? Who will be in charge of this Database? If this central database is hacked, aren't all records for all citizens suddenly called into question? And if this database is undetectibly hacked, how will this provide any more security than a person carrying a forged driver's license? It is doubtful that this card on it's own will be enough to provide true security. Schneier talks of a dual data system, where a user provides a password or biometric data in addition to the ID card to provide authentication. Couldn't these also be stolen or faked, perhaps not at the personal level, but also by hacking the card or database?
What about the convienience factor? Many people have said that while Americans clamor for security, the aspect of life that they're least willing to give up is convieneince. Will transmitting a query across the network for every ID card access be so painfully slow that many people will forgo its use? Will people who forget or lose their card be locked out of their daily routines until the situation is resolved? And how will foreigners deal with the lack of a National ID card? Will they be issued a temporary one upon arrival in this nation? How easy will these be to forge, and how will this affect tourism, and their opinion of "America, The Haven of Freedom and Democracy"?
I for one wonder how many of these questions will be asked by people who will decide whether or not such a system should be implemented. This is not a trivial issue, and the proper analysis of such a system will take time, time that few want to waste in this era of fast solutions and anxious precautions.
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That sounds good on paper, except for a few points I've learned from experience:
1) Opportunity cost will screw you. Yeah, I could burn CDs myself and print my own inserts. But the time it takes to do that is more valuable working at my job, taking care of the stuff I do at home (paying bills), and living my life. It would take a lot longer than the two weeks discmakers takes to print as many CDs, and the opportunity costs outweigh the percieved benefits.
2) CD-Rs don't mean crap in the music marketplace. Radio, labels, and music fans laugh at CD-Rs. Unless it's a stamped silver CD, you're not professional, and if you're not professional, you're not worth the time. Not a valid argument in this day and age, but perception sadly still rules.
3) 850 CDs is actually a lot in my genre. KMFDM is one of the larger artists in my scene, and all reports from reputable industry people indicate that their last album (ATTAK) sold under 6000 copies, internationally. Six Thousand CDs sold for a band with easily a dozen albums to their name, and as many years of history. They pack midsized clubs here in Seattle and have a fanbase that extends from age 16 to 46, and they can only move 6000 copies of an album. So that's a meter of the scale of albums that get sold on the indie level.
Clearly, you have some good critical thinking, and these are things many artists have tried, but sadly experience proves otherwise.
I guess $5 is a fine price for CDs where the artist is signed to a RIAA label that can afford to punch out 10,000 copies of said CD at pennies per disc. But for independant artists, it's a little different.
Let's just ignore the $5,000 to $10,000 investment in a home music recording studio, the $400 mastering fees, and just look at the actual CD manufacture. It costs $2.50 a CD to have Discmakers (http://www.discmakers.com) print up 1000 CDs in shiny plastic cases with professional full color 6 panel insert graphics and on CD printing. (And if you want quality CDs in any reasonable amount of time, you don't go with Joes Bargain CD Duplication.) I mail out 100 to radio stations around the country, with press kits, at an additional cost of about $2 per kit. I give away 25 to local DJs in clubs and my indie label gives away another 25 to a distro house, all for promotion. Now I'm down to 850 CDs that can actually be sold, and I'm out $2700.
Now assuming that I sell all of these myself and get 100% of the profit (I don't, but we'll keep this simple), I now need to sell 540 CDs at your ideal price of $5 each just to break even. This leaves 310 CDs which I can sell for a net profit of $1550.
$1550 for a years work writing 12 songs, performing them, recording them, mixing them down, and making them available to people on the widely available CD format, which most non-geeks use and enjoy. Can you see why no sane person who wants to eat or pay rent would ever charge so little for a CD?
And I've never once been contacted about being paid directly for MP3 or other downloadable copies of my songs. No one has ever offered some fair price for a non-CD version of my music. But plenty of people have told me that they downloaded my music off Kazaa or WinMX and thought it was pretty cool, thanks for writing it, but no I won't buy a CD, hey, why are you getting mad at me?
The RIAA, sure, they scam the artists who sign with them. But the little guys get screwed too.
It's a tool, like any other tool in the studio, and it's used to achieve a certain effect (getting notes on key) without going back and tracking a difficult passage dozens of times. Sure, artists could do that, but it's a massive waste of time, and a source of frustration. As a tool, it's no less invalid than compressors, digital reverb units and effects processors, and anything else that's available to the modern musician. If using an Autotune unit (or the software) is fake, than so is adding reverb with a processor instead of recording every instrument live in a large hall.
Consumers want a musical product that is enjoyable, and a large portion of that enjoyment comes from the quality and professionalism that a polished and on-key composition delivers. If you're interested in the pure art, then go listen to some live acoustic musicians at a coffee house, or vote with your dollars by only listening to artists who don't use Autotune.
But for 99% of working bands, playing live shows on tour means living out of a van for perhaps several months at a time, not an ideal environment for keeping your voice in top notch shape. If an inexpensive box or piece of software can help them deliver the high quality performance that their fans expect, and that helps them pay their rent when they get home, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
When finished in 2004 the line will stretch about 107 metres along the outside of the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above the planet.
/. comments in an effort to keep up on DMCA and tech issues is really getting frustrating...
It's just a robotic system for manipulating cargo outside the ISS without the need for someone to do a EVA. It's not like it's that hard to figure out from the article, if you'd actually read it.
Does anyone know a better site that has tech news with a higher signal to noise ratio? Because wading through the same tiresome uninformed
I'd have to offer a dissenting view. I play in two industrial bands in Seattle, and know several others in the same area, and we all play live shows to DAT. It's not that we're opposed to soft synths (I've listened to Reason (har har), and several other bands are selling their gear to move to software based solutions), but it's a matter of expense and reliability. It's a lot cheaper to have a backup DAT tape if something goes wrong with the first one, than to have a backup PC with all your settings on it. If your DAT deck dies, you can find or borrow another one that will play your tape in short notice, relatively quickly and inexpensively, even on the road. If power dies or someone trips on a cord, all you have to do when it comes back on, is skip ahead to the next song on the DAT, which takes at most three seconds. If power dies with a laptop, you have to reboot, reload the software, get back to where you were in the setlist. That could take minutes, and that dead time makes for a nasty crowd. Even for different setlists, it's cheap to make different DAT tapes for different setlists, and it's a matter of spending five minutes before the show programming the DAT to skip around the tape if you want to change the play order on an existing DAT. You never have to worry about hard drives crashing, the LCD display cracking, or optimizing the performance of the DAT player. You can mount a DAT deck in a SKB case and knock it around and know it will still work at the show. And believe me, after several weeks on the road, carrying your own equipment up and down stairs into dark, skanky clubs, the last thing you want is any hassle. If everything just plugs in and works, you can direct all your effort to putting energy into your live performance, and arguing with the club owner about getting paid, instead of trying to diagnose problems with a laptop.
If you're in a band that can afford a dedicated sound/synth/computer tech on the road, then I say go for it. It certainly could open up vast new ways of doing things live. But until I reach that level and see the kind of rock solid reliability I get from a DAT, I personally won't be changing anytime soon.
Just say that it is being passed because the pr0n0graphic movie industry is paying money to Congress to protect their profits.
Personally, I find the actions and motivations of some high level movie industry people to be more pornographic than real porn...
"The underlying issue is not old media versus new technology. It is creativity versus theft," said Disney CEO Michael Eisner.
Yeah, because The Little Mermaid, Atlantis, and Aladdin were very original ideas all thought up by the geniuses at Disney...
Why not? Publishers have been faking good games for years now...
DAT is still used by musicians everywhere, and the level of machine that they would buy ($700+) has SCMS Copy Protection Defeat built right in. Of course, you don't see musicians rampantly pirating music because of this feature...
It all comes down to this: Some middle manager gets a whiff of some technology, spends a few days writing up a proposal showing how his company can earn X Dollars and save Y Dollars in profits that would be lost to a vague piracy threat if they go with this technology, and some upper manager sits in a meeting for an hour and approves the proposal. The middle manager is motivated by company politcs, the upper manager is motivated by profit, and no one cares about technology, the Rights of Consumers, or whether there's any proof, scientific or otherwise, that this system will work. Companies can only see a Quarter into the future, and only remember the last three months. And capitalism works because it relies of people being greedy, which they always are.
Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?
Their cillia starts to fall out in the front, or in a circular patch over their oral pore. They get a lot more moody, and thinner, and they tend to say lots of things like "Eh, my endoplasmic reticulum isn't what it used to be!", and "In my day, they didn't teach Mitosis in school, you just learned about it the hard way!" If the cells can afford it, they try to move south for their last days, which explains the appearance of some higher mammals...
At first, I shuddered, having horrible flashbacks to my father throwing some assembler manuals and a Timex Sinclair 1000 in my lap at age 8 and telling me to learn it. But then I looked at the Gamecube SDK and Hardware docs I've been pouring over and wondered if it wouldn't be more fun to explore that simpler, more elegant world...
In the real world, you _would_ get fired for taking credit for someone else's work, trying to pass it off on your own.
Actually, from what I've seen, in the real world you get promoted for taking credit for someone else's work, especially when it's one of your underlings who slaved away while you were out on the golf course.
whoever claims he is a former infogrames worker is wrong, I've had TA since october 1997 and I know for a fact that cavedog was NOT dead when infogrames acquired GT
That's funny, because four months before Bruno Bonnell came to Humongous Entertainment Headquarters in Bothel, WA to tell myself and the 400 other employees that Ron Gilbert and Shelly Day were no longer our bosses and that we were now a fully owned subsidiary of Infogrames, I seem to remember having this conversation:
Boss: "So, you're now a fulltime employee of Humongous."
Me: "Uh, what happened to Cavedog."
Boss: "It is no more."
The website stayed up, a pretty face was put on for the customers, and the PR Nazis ran around madly telling people (especially the much beleaguered YardDogs, who generally cared about the TA community) not to say anything negative (or truthful) about Cavedog, but the fact is, all projects were canceled, all employees were moved to Humongous projects (or were let go, or left to form another company), and whatever hope there was for Cavedog pretty much completely dried up.
I'm sure if you found some employee who made sure to grab all the source before he left Cavedog to work for another games company in the Seattle/Bellevue area, he could probably be bribed to hand off the source he had in some way that would not trace back to him, thus avoiding personal legal hassles, while simultaneously benefitting all the people who really want to see the endless lines of well commented C++ covering everything from AI, to Network Play, to Graphics Rendering.
;)
So, seeing as I'm a musician, I'd really like a T.C. Electronix Fireworx effects module, another Delta 1010 digital audio IO board, and a dbx 376 tube mic preamp. You get those to my mailbox, and then we'll talk.
These companies/consortiums/cartels don't want to live in Reality. They want to live in an alternate world where money perpetually flows in their direction every second of every day at an ever increasing rate so that their quarterly return graph looks like y=x^2. They want to be paid for every viewing by every eyeball and every listen by every ear of every piece of media they have ever touched, handled, or signed off on in any way. That's all they want. That's all they care about.
And the fact that it's impossible in Reality is not daunting to them, because they have enough money to play with the Alternate Reality known as the Legal System, where the rules are not based on ethics or morality (not really they're not, although some may claim otherwise) but on precident and convincing the lawmakers that it will benefit them (payola, reelection, etc.) Then the Police can sweep in and harrass the "media hackers", since by definition, they are now criminals.
The reason they don't care about good encryption or being fair is that some bean counters have determined that it's not the fastest way to increasing profits, and that is all that does matter. Fairness doesn't buy these execs bigger mansions, faster cars, or hotter hookers. And the reason it's so repulsive is that they're literally locusts, eating everything in sight on a path to instant fatness but inevitable starvation, but it's as if they've somehow bought out Mother Nature to make the crops grow back artifically fast through bribes to the Soil Nutrient Bureaucrats.
Any reasonable person can see how benefiting artists and consumers alike is what's best for everyone. No one may get fabulously wealthy overnight, but entertainers will be well compensated, and the people will get entertainment at prices that are reasonable. The opportunity costs of pirating entertainment would outweigh the costs of getting it legally, and piracy would disappear for all but the very poorest and entertainment starved of people. But the cartels don't care. The RIAA and MPAA aren't interested in anything but increasing their own wealth RIGHT NOW at the expense of everything else, and it's no wonder there's a groundswell of people who want them gone.
You can make your slogan "Earth: As Close As You Can Get To The Action, With Your Feet Still On The Ground!" Or maybe even "Earth: Now The Closest Planet To The Sun!"
Seriously though, 7.7 Billion years from now is a LONG TIME AWAY. I highly doubt that any life form higher than an insect will exist then in a form that we would recognize today. And while possibly providing insight into what planets orbiting other white dwarves we should look to for signs of past life (once we get equipment that can resolve their existance, much less probe their surface), I don't think this is anything anyone needs to worry about today.
Of course, assuming further checks prove that the Earth will survive past the death of our own sun, perhaps we should leave a legacy to the rest of the Universe by planting the sum knowledge of mankind somewhere safe below the surface (assuming we could sheild it from geologic destruction) and send out satellites to the furthest reaches of the galaxy proclaiming the gift to all Life, everywhere. Just be sure to pack this with some T-Shirts that read, "I went to Earth, and all I got was this lousy Data Crystal."
And disillusioned customers stop buying music, so the record companies have the worst year in a long time... Also this attracts the attention of the Senate... Now who wins?
TARKIN: The National Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that Hillary Rosen has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
TAGGE: That's impossible! How will the RIAA maintain control without the bureaucracy?
TARKIN: The Major Labels now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the consumers in line. Fear of the DMCA and the New Police State.
Apparently the column drivers on an LCD cost more than the row drivers. I have no idea why, but I will accept that.
It may have to do with the order that the row and column are printed in. If the rows are printed first, and the LCD has defects at that point, you only lose the time and money that went into the first few steps. Then if the Columns are printed later, and the LCD has defects, you lose that much more time and process cost. Thus minimizing the complexity and reducing the chance of defects in later printing stages is a wise move, from an economical standpoint.
At the fab I briefly contracted for, no one cared if you dropped the US$10 raw wafers, but people flipped out if you dropped the US$300 processed wafers that came out of the implanter 8 hours later...
One BIO-Bug by itself is pretty dull. At $40 a pop, buying several ranks somewhere below buying a console game, which is fun by itself at about the same cost. They also turn worse than the Titanic on shag carpet, but seem to do better on linolium or hardwood.
I guess if you have a Garage, and can afford to blow $80+ on a few of these guys, they could be highly amusing. Maybe they're also good for the office, if your coworkers aren't annoyed by the constant "chirp-chirp-chirp-ANNNHHHHH-ANNNNHHHH!" sound that they emit...
Just my NSHO, after buying one a month ago and turning it on exactly three times.
No, they produce much, much more. I wrote about 4000 lines of C++ in 2 months for the networking component of a Racing Game. It worked great when it was demoed in front of the Company Board. It was well commented. And then I spent three days typing up 47 pages of documentation on my work before adding and improving on the project.
So to reiterate, 2 months, at about 50 hours a week, writing 4000 lines of well commented, well formatted code, and writing complete system documentation for that component. Design Time included. And I am not an Uber-Programmer.
This is not hard. It's highly doable. Only the people who think it can't be done are the people who won't be able to do it.
- Clear, Consistant Formatting - This code complies with the company standard for writing code. Indents are properly nested, Functions are named consistantly, variables use Hungarian Notation or some other standard. Any programmer should be able to look at code by another programmer and pick up on it very quickly, without shaking their head and saying "What the hell were they thinking?"
- Copious Comments - Lots of comments, clearly written and explanatory. What does this function do? Put a block at the beginning explaining it. How does this algorithm work briefly? Write a paragraph if you have to. The best comment I heard was from a friend about a former coworkers code: "It's English with some C++ thrown inbetween the comments."
- Documentation - Anyone who shrugs this off is an idiot. You always have time for documentation. And it's not just for the instance where a programmer gets "hit by a bus." It's for people who leave behind code when they quit, or go to a new project. It's for the new hires, so they can understand and study and learn good design, good techniques, and developer rationale. It forces developers to explain themselves. And it allows non-techies to understand what they're doing. Imagine you had to get through 12 years of grade school with no books. Pretty frightening, eh? Documentation is good. Write it.
Coders who follow these rules truly are an asset to their company. Geeks who hack, write unreadable code, and utter geek credos about enforcing obfuscation and being purposefully vague have no place in a business environment.That's good thinking on NASA's part, because after being cooped up in a spaceship on a multi-month trip to Mars, I'd be in a mood for a few hours with any 'ore I could find.
Ba Dum Bum.
The cellphone may have all the power of an original Palm Pilot these days, but we don't need to make it into a Onyx Server.
Hell, when I was that age, I used to read computer magazines in class, and a girl who sat next to me once asked "why I read those things?" Since she was hot and I was shocked that she was actually speaking to me, I answered the not quite accurate "it tells me how to fix them," to which she replied, "why don't you just take it to the shop?" Likewise, several months ago, I was talking with a younger cousin about the video game industry (where I'm currently working), and we were discussing what makes games good. His entire list of quality games was less than a year old, and when I mentioned Pac Man and the Infocom games, he had only the vaguest clue that such things once existed. Furthermore, his interests were more in how to get rich writing games rather than how a programmer actually writes good AI routines, or an artist animates characters realisticaly.
The point is, there will always be a large element of society, at any age, which is both ignorant and uninterested in the history of anything. Most of these people will remain in the realm of Average Consumer, while the inquisitive will go forth, research the past, and build the future. The danger comes from the past-less few who simply abuse the tools that are available to them, or arguably worse, become the leaders who direct the doers of society, with little grip on why the wheels of progress turn a certain way, and no concern for how they're powered to enable to future. Because when the percieved joy is in reaching the destination, rather than within the journey itself, it tends to be one hell of a bumpy ride that doesn't exactly pave a smooth road for those who follow.
The real question that the populace needs to ask is whether or not any system of National IDs would really provide a benefit for the People in the form of Enhanced Security, while simultaneously not eroding our Freedoms. Furthermore, what will be the implications of the information that such a system provides, and what reliability do we have for the accuracy and precision of that data?
If such cards hold information on criminal record, citizenship status, and so forth, will this information be used in a discriminatory fashion? Will convicted murderer be able to board an airliner? How about someone who plead guilty to petty theft decades ago? How about people with speeding tickets? Will cards hold information on ethnic background, and if so, how will this affect racial profiling?
Furthermore, how will the data be stored? Will it all be contained on a Smart Card (easily hackable), or will it be contained in a Central Database? Who will be in charge of this Database? If this central database is hacked, aren't all records for all citizens suddenly called into question? And if this database is undetectibly hacked, how will this provide any more security than a person carrying a forged driver's license? It is doubtful that this card on it's own will be enough to provide true security. Schneier talks of a dual data system, where a user provides a password or biometric data in addition to the ID card to provide authentication. Couldn't these also be stolen or faked, perhaps not at the personal level, but also by hacking the card or database?
What about the convienience factor? Many people have said that while Americans clamor for security, the aspect of life that they're least willing to give up is convieneince. Will transmitting a query across the network for every ID card access be so painfully slow that many people will forgo its use? Will people who forget or lose their card be locked out of their daily routines until the situation is resolved? And how will foreigners deal with the lack of a National ID card? Will they be issued a temporary one upon arrival in this nation? How easy will these be to forge, and how will this affect tourism, and their opinion of "America, The Haven of Freedom and Democracy"?
I for one wonder how many of these questions will be asked by people who will decide whether or not such a system should be implemented. This is not a trivial issue, and the proper analysis of such a system will take time, time that few want to waste in this era of fast solutions and anxious precautions.