For the past few years I've been quietly looking for an industry eye open to the idea of a historically based video game, wherein the individual characters create speculative history dealing in culture, politics, music, religion, and war -- while still maintaining an intense game atmosphere.
Entirely right, except it's not limited to academics. Thousands of us doing this have never been part of academia. I've been including mathematically-based pieces in my work for more than 30 years.
As far as money goes, Tom Hamilton did his hot price of gold piece in 2003 ("London Fix," on Muse Eek 118). And Charles Dodge's gorgeous "Earth's Magnetic Field" was a top-selling classical LP ca. 1969, on Nonesuch.
amelith: The ones who are likely to welcome this are people who already work freelance in jobs such as writing and journalism, like the author of the article maybe? They already have to do time management and have a large amount of control over their working hours. Nobody is likely to ring them at 3AM to complain about a typo in their last article for example.
Spoken like a non-freelancer? You're mostly right. I've been a freelance writer (as well as composer, engraver, consultant, programmer, and photographer) for the past 30-plus years. As a freelancer on the US east coast, I work "in" a dozen times zones, from Prague to Portland, and until I set clear rules, that phone would ring at any hour of the day or night.
I've been computer-connected 24/7 since 2001, but now the phone and Skype are answered only automatically and a message must be left, even if I am here. I suggest callers always send an email to confirm their call and their question, because my clients know that their calls will be returned only when I can focus adequately on their question. Usually that is promptly, sometimes it isn't... but the delay helps them both realize what is actually important and clarify the problem for themselves (and consequently for me). Their deadline is my deadline, but their panic is not my panic. The work always gets done, in time and well.
As you say, always-on is a great advantage for those who can manage their time and insist they not be taken advantage of. Managing it also helps clarity of thought and family life. But I had to develop the ability to say no to unacceptable work, even if it means a light diet for a while.
Since everyone's telling personal stories, I'll tell mine, with a short preface: keep in mind that those who work in IT and wonder who will be the bus drivers and janitors... you are the bus drivers and janitors. Janitors clean up to make work easier, cleaner and safer for others; programmers are largely involved with the same task. Even when you are in 'creative' mode, you become the bus driver, finding the best route to accomplish a task.
I'm a composer. That means I've done many things -- driven a truck, run a printing press, done programming, designed hardware, put down sidewalks, written books, shoveled dirt, run a business. I've learned a great deal doing it: That little of what we do is lovable work. That what we work hard to learn and put to use grows stale as society moves on. That as focus sharpens on a goal, scope of vision fades.
Let me fork this. I live in a rural area now, to which I moved 30 years ago. When I have focused, career-driven visitors from the city, it astounds me how few can experience what is before them. The cannot taste the air, hear the wind, see the grass beneath their feet. Who they are has become what they do. And I can't help but fear that their lives will empty out over broken levees when society's wind and rain blow in another direction.
Here in this topic, for example, a momentary subthread about 8-bit processors and math appeared. And, having been an 8-bit programmer who even wrote a book about it, I got a momentary historical shiver from it. And I thought, yes, I once loved doing that. But it was not lasting in my life. Technology moves on, and eventually everyone will either keep up or leave -- and the latter will dominate. The love will turn into what? A hobby pursued from a rocking chair? Anecdotes from Ye Olde Programmer? Forgetfulness?
I suppose that's why the Trumps of the world build great architectural monuments with their names on them. It's been said that one doesn't die until the last person who personally knew you dies -- or until your last monument crumbles. But I also suppose that a painting or a novel or a symphony is a kind of lasting persona.
And now to the other fork. As a nonpop composer, I know that my culture has shifted for a few generations away from this artform, and that there much less room for composers than for bus drivers or programmers. I had the misfortune of being born smack in the middle of the decline, which reached its bottom a few years ago. Now that I've been composing for 42 years, there's a chance that what I love may also be what I do. (At the rate of change, I will be about 120 years old by then.)
It has been possible to stay a composer with other work. This is the situation most artists find themselves in, and others in this topic have pointed to their novels and screenplays sitting on shelves. But the astounding thing is that it's not just the Sunday-afternoon artists who are in this position. Just one of the more than hundreds of composers I've known personally over the years is living on the results of that work.
I can hear the thoughts. That's the way the market works. On the other hand, only a kind of capitalist theocracy (a capitaliban, if you will) defines everything in terms of its monetary value and its place as a 'product'. (Those who know the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny will recognize the theme, where the worst crime was not murder, but bankruptcy.) The point of this statement is not to complain about an artist's condition, but to identify a dramatic flaw in the theme of "how to do what you love": What you love to do cannot be fully brought to fruition within a society that does not value the results.
The results can be weakened, the quality reduced, the visibility lowered. And yet, these cultural artifacts are what define the meaning of our societi
Re:I doubt there will be a digital dark age
on
The Digital Dark Age
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· Score: 1
Okay, I'm glad you took the time for this reply so late in the ever-decreasing slashdot interest curve...
#1: The Internet is here to stay.
Remember the Dark Ages. The real Dark Ages, and the reason for them. It was a political choice based in religion and power. Future technologies, for some period of time, simply may not exist. We may indeed have a kind of Dark Ages that will remove this option. As the Internet is politically segregated today, it can be further segregated, then destroyed. These scenarios have been proposed, and they are not impossible, just unlikely.
#2: The most treasured knowledge will always be migrated to newer technologies.
Here's a problem -- knowing what that 'treasured knowledge' may be. If Bach or Mahler lived today, for example, most of their works will have been permanently lost because their work was not treasured as they grew old when they did live. We tend to treasure what's personal or what's popular, but rarely have the cultural vision to understand what is ultimately culturally lasting. Imprisoning cultural vision in technologies that quickly fade is a mistake. Sure, I may migrate my material (I believe I'm a very good composer), but who will do the next generation of work?
#3: If there is a will, there is a way.
This is a kind of American myth, like the unending frontier. It's very positive, but ultimately it fails. The forces of nature (including those involved in the deterioration of technology) need only be applied intermittently to break the chain of possibility. And that does not even include the question of cost, which every archivist faces.
These three points you make can be multiplied: there must be a technology, there must be cultural vision, and their must be will and funding. What in the world qualifies for all three, even now?
Funny this should suddenly become a topic now. It's hardly new. I've seen many great program-teaching games, and I even wrote "Simul-80", a programming game for the Z-80, back in 1980. It had both a real-person version (lots of running around with program counter wheels and scraps of paper with data) and I even created a program to emulate the simulation. Great fun. Anyone wanting to download it can find it at ftp://maltedmedia.com/simul-80/
Wow. I guess critics of sci-fi sacred cows get modded as trolls, no matter that my criticism is legitimate and no one has answered it. Like soap operas, BSG is a way to pass the time, I suppose. Big ideas aren't easy.
I don't understand the trend to turn sci-fi shows into soap operas. At least when a ST:TNG plot was dull (or had kids in it), it was over in an hour. But the whole BSG story line is wretched stuff -- bad plot, bad acting, not to mention the same old bad science, and a dearth of Big Ideas.
SG-1 was (is) formula, but at least it doesn't have the pretentions of BSG. Babylon 5's contributions of a scruffy environment and credibly mean-spirited characters was a good one, even if it did use a long-term plot line.
Am I the only one who loathes BSG as a 'Young and the Restless' without the makeup?
The only problem with this method is that companies cannot track who owes them how much, and which companies get the bigger share of the chunk of taxes.
It's not the only problem. There is a huge issue with independent artists who buy in small quantities and pay a tax that goes to other, wealthy artists.
There are ways of opting out -- but they involve the expense of buying a business name, registering, and buying CDs only from approved vendors.
For more information, see my essay on copy protection and read the section covering the CPCC 'zero-rating' program.
Dennis
My website has been crawled by Overture, and last week I received 26 mailings addressed to every name in my resume! Not only absurdly inefficient, but hideously wasteful.
They're still coming...
This mailing is a 3-fold card stock mailer offering (depending on the mailer) "Increased Sales Leads" or "Overture Helps Your Business Succeed" or "Success Stories". Inside the first is "Overture Helps John Deere Harvest Sales Leads", with an offer to advertise the recipients website, a screen shot of Yahoo!, and other pitches. The second has the same sales pitch, but talks about John Deere, Travelworm, and EverythingHome. The last drops Travelworm and includes Match.com.
The 26 mailers I received weighed over 1.5 lbs in total -- high-class mailers, but just to the names harvested from my site. For sure, I am not the home of NPR's Terry Gross... but I got one to my address with her name. The names are references, those who have commissioned or interviewed me, composers, sculptors, performers, directors, etc. -- anyone whose name appeared in my resume.
That some really bad data mining and wretched results from Overture -- not to mention that I've got to recycle this mass of stuff that's starting to arrive!
what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.
Not everybody's a newcomer. We've been doing this since September 1995 at Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar -- three years before the DMCA and more than seven years before the CARP proposal.
During that time we have gone through six different servers, four of which are long gone along with their logs -- including one which carried web logs during the retroactive CARP period.
Furthermore, we archive shows that contain upwards of 15 compositions per show. We don't stream using a streaming server, but via HTTP. A cable connection would download most or all of a show, even though a listener might click off after our opening 10-minute essay. The logs would report 15 songs, even though none would actually be listened to.
And what of listeners that skipped through the show for one piece? The logs still report 15-25 compositions.
The CARP rules were unworkable. A blanket and reasonable license is a much better approach. The industry was really shaking down the cybercasting scene to consolidate power; the royalties were cream.
Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.
We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.
Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.
Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).
But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.
On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does
not
represent most nonpop artists) would have been $5,160, more than a dozen times a typical license for the same 900-watt radio station we broadcast from.
So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.
I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.
WTF!? What backwater planet have you been living in? The Flash 6 SWF format is the only multimedia format with specific features for accessibility (especially for the visually impaired, blind). For pete's sake, they have an entire site devoted to Macromedia accessibility, complete with a Section 508 explanation
Flash was just about the last to do this, and why the W3C accessibility site railed against it. Good grief, Flash was one of the very reasons the accessibility discussions were so intense! Flash technology held out against accessibility until it was bludgeoned by the advent of Section 508 requirements on publicly-funded sites.
SMIL was already there, as were the very basics of HTML.
Even with the "new" Macromedia, Section 508 accessibility standards look like CYA to me. Brng up accessibility on the Dreamweaver newsgroup. It's a pariah.
When some newbie shows up and complains about how what we've done doesn't suit him, and doesn't even bother to educate himself about what we've not only worked hard to produce but actually think is cool, it's downright insulting; in fact, it's arrogant.
Nope. The newbie is right. Linux has made the attempt to move into the 'real world' and guess what? It's really hell out there. People don't appreciate what you do, and just violate your community all to hell.
Remember the Internet before the Web? I do. Been violated all to hell.
If you want to be loved, stay out of the marketplace.
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd
Ah! And there you have it. Well said.
I do support for the local cable modem company, and this is one of the most frequent issues I have to solve. They just don't want it -- even the family that ran a daycare in their house where all the kids used the computer. Just too much trouble.
A successful operating system must expect nothing from its users.
True, but these are generally the same MS users that are flamed repeatedly around here (no, not necessarily by you) for being clueless perpetual newbies. Rhetoric aside, the average Windows/MS Office/Photoshop user is not someone who is familiar with the workings of their computer (from my experience). As competent as they may be in the applications that they use, switching them to another platform is likely to cause more problems than it seems would be warranted.
I am a Windows/Office/Photoshop user who is familiar with the workings of my computer. I have built them and programmed right down to hex entry on a KIM-1 back in the 1970s.
And I use Windows. Why? I've tried BeOS and Linux (still have both installed), but they don't have the ability to run cheaply. They do "cause more problems than it seems would be warranted."
Okay, BeOS is pretty much dead, even though it still naps on my machine.
But Linux is alive and Linux is free, you say? Nope to both. You cannot go to Staples and grab a piece of hardware and expect it to plug in and work. You can't reflexively exchange documents -- yes, the problem exists for getting to Macs, too, but an inexpensive program ends the frustration, even if it gets in the way of reflexive exchange. I use reflexive to mean the kind of training that I as a typist have -- give me a European keyboard and my productivity goes down. Make me transfer a Mac file and my productivity goes down.
Even worse for my own work, my audio hardware (high-end stuff) is entirely unsupported in Linux. Combined with the fact that there are no audio applications that come even close to those I use daily, and Linux fades even more. The lack of support for high-end sound is a major Linux failure... look at the Linux driver pages and see how few drivers exist for cards other than Soundblaster-style gaming boards.
And in the bizarre-behavior deparment: If I run Linux networking of any kind, I not only have to turn my computer off, but -- for reasons I've never figured out -- have to reinstall my Windows networking components when I turn the machine back on and boot into Windows. My solution? Don't use Linux for networking on the machine I really need to be productive on.
The applications are incomplete. There is nothing close to MSWord, Photoshop, Pagemaker, etc. I don't even know how to use my existing library of 4,000 fonts, some of them pretty expensive. And my files that go back to Windows circa 1992, all of which can be read by current programs.
Frankly, who would want this kind of hassle in a personal computing environment, much less in a business environment where the default operating system is Windows?
Yes, I remember that the topic is "Making Linux Look Harder Than It is," but my point is that Linux is hard not just because it demands new learning and new learning styles, but because it means giving up a wide array of features and choices. As an experienced computer user and (former) programmer, I expect a competitive system to subsume the abilities of that which it proposes to replace.
Sure, there's a political context. It can almost be characterized as a freedom vs. security debate. But if operating systems were even a tiny fraction as important a principle as free speech, I'd be much more inclined to be a Linux evangelist. As it stands, Linux is my 'second amendment' -- here if, ultimately, I need it.
I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").
We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know/. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.
Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)
Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.
We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.
It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.
Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.
It was? I didn't get VH-1 in the early 1990s, and didn't see them on any of the cable channels I did get. But when I lived in Europe in 1991, I saw these everywhere. Who really was first? What year?
The way I see it... just like everything else it has its place in some things. I LOVE MDI text editors. MDI is also very well done in Cool Edit Pro.
Some of us are odd-folks-out in this discussion. I use different sorts of windows for different purposes. You're right about Cool Edit... MDI and multiple instances. And Opera... modified MDI with maximized and resizable windows within, and the ability to drag the transfer window somewhere else.
I use Finale and Sonar stretched across two screens. For FTP, it's full screen for a while, then put in the corner. I pull and stretch windows. Right now, as I type this response, I have the browser with a window below it, overlapping, so I'm reminded what I was working on.
Docking is good. Tabs are good. Optional snap-to-grid docking is even better. The float or dock or pull outside of document tools in Paint Shop Pro are great.
Pagemaker is bad -- no dock, no float outside document window (can't drag off the screen). (It's also obsolete, but I have lots of projects in this format.)
Maybe some of us work with more different styles of applications at once, and have different styles for each. I use keyboard shortcuts extensively in Finale and Word, rarely in browsers. I use page down/up and arrow down/up differently within the same app.
I hate focus-follows-mouse because I don't want the damn cursor to be part of what I'm looking at, especially a waveform or a graphics project.
Like most folks I know, I work and think in a nonlinear, messy way. I have a trackball on the left, a tablet on the right, and use HPR to read me what's happening in my browser when I'm not using the zoom in-out feature of Opera, and have various text and graphics projects open. Right now I am converting our latest radio show to digital form, and watching email arrive.
Overlapping windows are wonderful. When I'm burning a CD, I can leave just the progress bar peeking out, and do the same with an FTP in progress at the same time. If I'm comparing two documents for consistency, I can put them next to each other, and drag a border over the window below so I can look in a detailed way. A quick ALT-TAB gets me wherever I want to be, and CTRL-TAB within MDI projects.
And images... wow, it's hard to imagine a way of working where overlapping segments of images in progress could be done away with, even with two monitors.
In other words, the addition of options is wonderful, so long as it's not some kind of techno-religious conversion that makes alternative ways of working heretical.
That program was very innovative for the time. It might have looked a bit toyish and more like a game because of all the pretty graphics, but it was quite powerful, especially considering the platform.
Was? AudioMulch has yet to reach version 1.0, and is capable of an enormous range of manual and automatable music/sound processing tasks. My piece HighBirds (Prime) for 2 electric guitars (first guitar, second guitar) and playback, premiered last year at the Ought-One Festival, was created in AudioMulch.
There aren't many apps with a full range of oscillators, granulators, shapers, mixers, delays, reverbs, filters, modulators, etc., workable as an emulated equipment console as well as a patch bay.
Stretch AudioMulch across two 19-inch screens, and it's a powerful realtime audio (and Midi) processing and manipulation system. With a HD full of audio files for sources, I can compose/improvise a whole night's concert from a single application.
As for what it sounds like, it doesn't sound like anything except the composer who's using it.
It is impossible to reconcile the existenance of substantive choice and the influence of monopolists. They are mutally exclusive. Either choice exisits ergo their is no monopoly OR no choice exisits and their is a monopoly.
Monopoly is relative, even though it may seem absolute, and there's a semantic slipperiness because of the mix of antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. Monopoly also, for example, includes the creation of monopoly status through predatory action or other actions defined as monopolistic practices... the deliberate move to limit choice.
Also, recall that Sherman in 1890 was talking about maintaining a decentralized economy. Even as late as 1952, Humphrey reinforced the civic intention of antitrust vs. a purely economic argument. Today's interpretation is quite different for the laws' and practices' origins, and evolution (or devolution) is a matter of perspective. The aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws has slowed considerably as Sherman's model is turned away from in a corporate-dominated legislative system.
Ultimately, in absolutist terms, there is no monopoly where I can still drill my own well or produce my own electricity or grow my own food or create a computer from carved beads and twigs.
Hmmm, this seems to be exactly what Cringley said in his article. Nobody, so far, has been able to make a profit and they are not likely to in the near(?) future.
(Raises hand.) We have a local cable TV company who put in cable modems in January. They had thought out putting glass in 5 years ago, and can now reap the benefits. 500 customers in a 2,500-population town. $40/month for broadband, $30 if you bring your own modem. ROI within 18 months. Disclaimer: I consulted on the project.
Maybe you have to be small, have to think ahead, or just be in the right place. Dunno.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points all, especially the cultural biases.
For the past few years I've been quietly looking for an industry eye open to the idea of a historically based video game, wherein the individual characters create speculative history dealing in culture, politics, music, religion, and war -- while still maintaining an intense game atmosphere.
Dennis
http://bathory.org/
Entirely right, except it's not limited to academics. Thousands of us doing this have never been part of academia. I've been including mathematically-based pieces in my work for more than 30 years.
As far as money goes, Tom Hamilton did his hot price of gold piece in 2003 ("London Fix," on Muse Eek 118). And Charles Dodge's gorgeous "Earth's Magnetic Field" was a top-selling classical LP ca. 1969, on Nonesuch.
Dennis
Buy my stuff before it's done:
We Are All Mozart
amelith: The ones who are likely to welcome this are people who already work freelance in jobs such as writing and journalism, like the author of the article maybe? They already have to do time management and have a large amount of control over their working hours. Nobody is likely to ring them at 3AM to complain about a typo in their last article for example.
Spoken like a non-freelancer? You're mostly right. I've been a freelance writer (as well as composer, engraver, consultant, programmer, and photographer) for the past 30-plus years. As a freelancer on the US east coast, I work "in" a dozen times zones, from Prague to Portland, and until I set clear rules, that phone would ring at any hour of the day or night.
I've been computer-connected 24/7 since 2001, but now the phone and Skype are answered only automatically and a message must be left, even if I am here. I suggest callers always send an email to confirm their call and their question, because my clients know that their calls will be returned only when I can focus adequately on their question. Usually that is promptly, sometimes it isn't ... but the delay helps them both realize what is actually important and clarify the problem for themselves (and consequently for me). Their deadline is my deadline, but their panic is not my panic. The work always gets done, in time and well.
As you say, always-on is a great advantage for those who can manage their time and insist they not be taken advantage of. Managing it also helps clarity of thought and family life. But I had to develop the ability to say no to unacceptable work, even if it means a light diet for a while.
Dennis
My latest project
Since everyone's telling personal stories, I'll tell mine, with a short preface: keep in mind that those who work in IT and wonder who will be the bus drivers and janitors ... you are the bus drivers and janitors. Janitors clean up to make work easier, cleaner and safer for others; programmers are largely involved with the same task. Even when you are in 'creative' mode, you become the bus driver, finding the best route to accomplish a task.
I'm a composer. That means I've done many things -- driven a truck, run a printing press, done programming, designed hardware, put down sidewalks, written books, shoveled dirt, run a business. I've learned a great deal doing it: That little of what we do is lovable work. That what we work hard to learn and put to use grows stale as society moves on. That as focus sharpens on a goal, scope of vision fades.
Let me fork this. I live in a rural area now, to which I moved 30 years ago. When I have focused, career-driven visitors from the city, it astounds me how few can experience what is before them. The cannot taste the air, hear the wind, see the grass beneath their feet. Who they are has become what they do. And I can't help but fear that their lives will empty out over broken levees when society's wind and rain blow in another direction.
Here in this topic, for example, a momentary subthread about 8-bit processors and math appeared. And, having been an 8-bit programmer who even wrote a book about it, I got a momentary historical shiver from it. And I thought, yes, I once loved doing that. But it was not lasting in my life. Technology moves on, and eventually everyone will either keep up or leave -- and the latter will dominate. The love will turn into what? A hobby pursued from a rocking chair? Anecdotes from Ye Olde Programmer? Forgetfulness?
I suppose that's why the Trumps of the world build great architectural monuments with their names on them. It's been said that one doesn't die until the last person who personally knew you dies -- or until your last monument crumbles. But I also suppose that a painting or a novel or a symphony is a kind of lasting persona.
And now to the other fork. As a nonpop composer, I know that my culture has shifted for a few generations away from this artform, and that there much less room for composers than for bus drivers or programmers. I had the misfortune of being born smack in the middle of the decline, which reached its bottom a few years ago. Now that I've been composing for 42 years, there's a chance that what I love may also be what I do. (At the rate of change, I will be about 120 years old by then.)
It has been possible to stay a composer with other work. This is the situation most artists find themselves in, and others in this topic have pointed to their novels and screenplays sitting on shelves. But the astounding thing is that it's not just the Sunday-afternoon artists who are in this position. Just one of the more than hundreds of composers I've known personally over the years is living on the results of that work.
I can hear the thoughts. That's the way the market works. On the other hand, only a kind of capitalist theocracy (a capitaliban, if you will) defines everything in terms of its monetary value and its place as a 'product'. (Those who know the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny will recognize the theme, where the worst crime was not murder, but bankruptcy.) The point of this statement is not to complain about an artist's condition, but to identify a dramatic flaw in the theme of "how to do what you love": What you love to do cannot be fully brought to fruition within a society that does not value the results.
The results can be weakened, the quality reduced, the visibility lowered. And yet, these cultural artifacts are what define the meaning of our societi
Okay, I'm glad you took the time for this reply so late in the ever-decreasing slashdot interest curve...
#1: The Internet is here to stay.
Remember the Dark Ages. The real Dark Ages, and the reason for them. It was a political choice based in religion and power. Future technologies, for some period of time, simply may not exist. We may indeed have a kind of Dark Ages that will remove this option. As the Internet is politically segregated today, it can be further segregated, then destroyed. These scenarios have been proposed, and they are not impossible, just unlikely.
#2: The most treasured knowledge will always be migrated to newer technologies.
Here's a problem -- knowing what that 'treasured knowledge' may be. If Bach or Mahler lived today, for example, most of their works will have been permanently lost because their work was not treasured as they grew old when they did live. We tend to treasure what's personal or what's popular, but rarely have the cultural vision to understand what is ultimately culturally lasting. Imprisoning cultural vision in technologies that quickly fade is a mistake. Sure, I may migrate my material (I believe I'm a very good composer), but who will do the next generation of work?
#3: If there is a will, there is a way.
This is a kind of American myth, like the unending frontier. It's very positive, but ultimately it fails. The forces of nature (including those involved in the deterioration of technology) need only be applied intermittently to break the chain of possibility. And that does not even include the question of cost, which every archivist faces.
These three points you make can be multiplied: there must be a technology, there must be cultural vision, and their must be will and funding. What in the world qualifies for all three, even now?
I covered this topic three years ago, by the way: http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sl-archv.html
Dennis
Funny this should suddenly become a topic now. It's hardly new. I've seen many great program-teaching games, and I even wrote "Simul-80", a programming game for the Z-80, back in 1980. It had both a real-person version (lots of running around with program counter wheels and scraps of paper with data) and I even created a program to emulate the simulation. Great fun. Anyone wanting to download it can find it at ftp://maltedmedia.com/simul-80/
Dennis
Wow. I guess critics of sci-fi sacred cows get modded as trolls, no matter that my criticism is legitimate and no one has answered it. Like soap operas, BSG is a way to pass the time, I suppose. Big ideas aren't easy.
Dennis
I don't understand the trend to turn sci-fi shows into soap operas. At least when a ST:TNG plot was dull (or had kids in it), it was over in an hour. But the whole BSG story line is wretched stuff -- bad plot, bad acting, not to mention the same old bad science, and a dearth of Big Ideas.
SG-1 was (is) formula, but at least it doesn't have the pretentions of BSG. Babylon 5's contributions of a scruffy environment and credibly mean-spirited characters was a good one, even if it did use a long-term plot line.
Am I the only one who loathes BSG as a 'Young and the Restless' without the makeup?
Dennis
My first hard drive instrument was in 1994 -- the "Diskklang". A pix at the bottom of this page: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/instruments. html
The platters were bigger then, and the sound was very nice.
Dennis
It's not the only problem. There is a huge issue with independent artists who buy in small quantities and pay a tax that goes to other, wealthy artists.
There are ways of opting out -- but they involve the expense of buying a business name, registering, and buying CDs only from approved vendors.
For more information, see my essay on copy protection and read the section covering the CPCC 'zero-rating' program. Dennis
Has anyone gotten the Overture snail-mail?
My website has been crawled by Overture, and last week I received 26 mailings addressed to every name in my resume! Not only absurdly inefficient, but hideously wasteful.
They're still coming...
This mailing is a 3-fold card stock mailer offering (depending on the mailer) "Increased Sales Leads" or "Overture Helps Your Business Succeed" or "Success Stories". Inside the first is "Overture Helps John Deere Harvest Sales Leads", with an offer to advertise the recipients website, a screen shot of Yahoo!, and other pitches. The second has the same sales pitch, but talks about John Deere, Travelworm, and EverythingHome. The last drops Travelworm and includes Match.com.
The 26 mailers I received weighed over 1.5 lbs in total -- high-class mailers, but just to the names harvested from my site. For sure, I am not the home of NPR's Terry Gross ... but I got one to my address with her name. The names are references, those who have commissioned or interviewed me, composers, sculptors, performers, directors, etc. -- anyone whose name appeared in my resume.
That some really bad data mining and wretched results from Overture -- not to mention that I've got to recycle this mass of stuff that's starting to arrive!
DennisSpeaking of self-plugs, gosh, been away for a few days, come back to a huge lot of posts on new music, and not one mentions...
http://kalvos.org/
...and the coalition it spawned...
http://nonpopradio.com/
Dennis aka Kalvos
what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.
Not everybody's a newcomer. We've been doing this since September 1995 at Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar -- three years before the DMCA and more than seven years before the CARP proposal.
During that time we have gone through six different servers, four of which are long gone along with their logs -- including one which carried web logs during the retroactive CARP period.
Furthermore, we archive shows that contain upwards of 15 compositions per show. We don't stream using a streaming server, but via HTTP. A cable connection would download most or all of a show, even though a listener might click off after our opening 10-minute essay. The logs would report 15 songs, even though none would actually be listened to.
And what of listeners that skipped through the show for one piece? The logs still report 15-25 compositions.
The CARP rules were unworkable. A blanket and reasonable license is a much better approach. The industry was really shaking down the cybercasting scene to consolidate power; the royalties were cream.
Dennis
Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.
We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.
Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year, but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.
Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).
But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.
On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does
not
represent most nonpop artists) would have been $5,160, more than a dozen times a typical license for the same 900-watt radio station we broadcast from.So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.
I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar
WTF!? What backwater planet have you been living in? The Flash 6 SWF format is the only multimedia format with specific features for accessibility (especially for the visually impaired, blind). For pete's sake, they have an entire site devoted to Macromedia accessibility, complete with a Section 508 explanation
Flash was just about the last to do this, and why the W3C accessibility site railed against it. Good grief, Flash was one of the very reasons the accessibility discussions were so intense! Flash technology held out against accessibility until it was bludgeoned by the advent of Section 508 requirements on publicly-funded sites.
SMIL was already there, as were the very basics of HTML.
Even with the "new" Macromedia, Section 508 accessibility standards look like CYA to me. Brng up accessibility on the Dreamweaver newsgroup. It's a pariah.
Dennisas a side note, I will add I've just seen *one* Flash site I liked
I thought that too, until I found this: http://www.soh.nsw.gov.au/virtual_tour/vrtour2.htm l
DennisWhen some newbie shows up and complains about how what we've done doesn't suit him, and doesn't even bother to educate himself about what we've not only worked hard to produce but actually think is cool, it's downright insulting; in fact, it's arrogant.
Nope. The newbie is right. Linux has made the attempt to move into the 'real world' and guess what? It's really hell out there. People don't appreciate what you do, and just violate your community all to hell.
Remember the Internet before the Web? I do. Been violated all to hell.
If you want to be loved, stay out of the marketplace.
Dennis
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd
Ah! And there you have it. Well said.
I do support for the local cable modem company, and this is one of the most frequent issues I have to solve. They just don't want it -- even the family that ran a daycare in their house where all the kids used the computer. Just too much trouble.
A successful operating system must expect nothing from its users.
Dennis
True, but these are generally the same MS users that are flamed repeatedly around here (no, not necessarily by you) for being clueless perpetual newbies. Rhetoric aside, the average Windows/MS Office/Photoshop user is not someone who is familiar with the workings of their computer (from my experience). As competent as they may be in the applications that they use, switching them to another platform is likely to cause more problems than it seems would be warranted.
I am a Windows/Office/Photoshop user who is familiar with the workings of my computer. I have built them and programmed right down to hex entry on a KIM-1 back in the 1970s.
And I use Windows. Why? I've tried BeOS and Linux (still have both installed), but they don't have the ability to run cheaply. They do "cause more problems than it seems would be warranted."
Okay, BeOS is pretty much dead, even though it still naps on my machine.
But Linux is alive and Linux is free, you say? Nope to both. You cannot go to Staples and grab a piece of hardware and expect it to plug in and work. You can't reflexively exchange documents -- yes, the problem exists for getting to Macs, too, but an inexpensive program ends the frustration, even if it gets in the way of reflexive exchange. I use reflexive to mean the kind of training that I as a typist have -- give me a European keyboard and my productivity goes down. Make me transfer a Mac file and my productivity goes down.
Even worse for my own work, my audio hardware (high-end stuff) is entirely unsupported in Linux. Combined with the fact that there are no audio applications that come even close to those I use daily, and Linux fades even more. The lack of support for high-end sound is a major Linux failure ... look at the Linux driver pages and see how few drivers exist for cards other than Soundblaster-style gaming boards.
And in the bizarre-behavior deparment: If I run Linux networking of any kind, I not only have to turn my computer off, but -- for reasons I've never figured out -- have to reinstall my Windows networking components when I turn the machine back on and boot into Windows. My solution? Don't use Linux for networking on the machine I really need to be productive on.
The applications are incomplete. There is nothing close to MSWord, Photoshop, Pagemaker, etc. I don't even know how to use my existing library of 4,000 fonts, some of them pretty expensive. And my files that go back to Windows circa 1992, all of which can be read by current programs.
Frankly, who would want this kind of hassle in a personal computing environment, much less in a business environment where the default operating system is Windows?
Yes, I remember that the topic is "Making Linux Look Harder Than It is," but my point is that Linux is hard not just because it demands new learning and new learning styles, but because it means giving up a wide array of features and choices. As an experienced computer user and (former) programmer, I expect a competitive system to subsume the abilities of that which it proposes to replace.
Sure, there's a political context. It can almost be characterized as a freedom vs. security debate. But if operating systems were even a tiny fraction as important a principle as free speech, I'd be much more inclined to be a Linux evangelist. As it stands, Linux is my 'second amendment' -- here if, ultimately, I need it.
Dennis
I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").
We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.
Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)
Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.
We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.
It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.
Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.
Dennis
http://kalvos.org/
And yes, it was VH-1 that started this.
It was? I didn't get VH-1 in the early 1990s, and didn't see them on any of the cable channels I did get. But when I lived in Europe in 1991, I saw these everywhere. Who really was first? What year?
Dennis
The way I see it... just like everything else it has its place in some things. I LOVE MDI text editors. MDI is also very well done in Cool Edit Pro.
Some of us are odd-folks-out in this discussion. I use different sorts of windows for different purposes. You're right about Cool Edit ... MDI and multiple instances. And Opera ... modified MDI with maximized and resizable windows within, and the ability to drag the transfer window somewhere else.
I use Finale and Sonar stretched across two screens. For FTP, it's full screen for a while, then put in the corner. I pull and stretch windows. Right now, as I type this response, I have the browser with a window below it, overlapping, so I'm reminded what I was working on.
Docking is good. Tabs are good. Optional snap-to-grid docking is even better. The float or dock or pull outside of document tools in Paint Shop Pro are great.
Pagemaker is bad -- no dock, no float outside document window (can't drag off the screen). (It's also obsolete, but I have lots of projects in this format.)
Maybe some of us work with more different styles of applications at once, and have different styles for each. I use keyboard shortcuts extensively in Finale and Word, rarely in browsers. I use page down/up and arrow down/up differently within the same app.
I hate focus-follows-mouse because I don't want the damn cursor to be part of what I'm looking at, especially a waveform or a graphics project.
Like most folks I know, I work and think in a nonlinear, messy way. I have a trackball on the left, a tablet on the right, and use HPR to read me what's happening in my browser when I'm not using the zoom in-out feature of Opera, and have various text and graphics projects open. Right now I am converting our latest radio show to digital form, and watching email arrive.
Overlapping windows are wonderful. When I'm burning a CD, I can leave just the progress bar peeking out, and do the same with an FTP in progress at the same time. If I'm comparing two documents for consistency, I can put them next to each other, and drag a border over the window below so I can look in a detailed way. A quick ALT-TAB gets me wherever I want to be, and CTRL-TAB within MDI projects.
And images ... wow, it's hard to imagine a way of working where overlapping segments of images in progress could be done away with, even with two monitors.
In other words, the addition of options is wonderful, so long as it's not some kind of techno-religious conversion that makes alternative ways of working heretical.
DennisThat program was very innovative for the time. It might have looked a bit toyish and more like a game because of all the pretty graphics, but it was quite powerful, especially considering the platform.
Was? AudioMulch has yet to reach version 1.0, and is capable of an enormous range of manual and automatable music/sound processing tasks. My piece HighBirds (Prime) for 2 electric guitars (first guitar, second guitar) and playback, premiered last year at the Ought-One Festival, was created in AudioMulch.
There aren't many apps with a full range of oscillators, granulators, shapers, mixers, delays, reverbs, filters, modulators, etc., workable as an emulated equipment console as well as a patch bay.
Stretch AudioMulch across two 19-inch screens, and it's a powerful realtime audio (and Midi) processing and manipulation system. With a HD full of audio files for sources, I can compose/improvise a whole night's concert from a single application.
As for what it sounds like, it doesn't sound like anything except the composer who's using it.
Dennis
It is impossible to reconcile the existenance of substantive choice and the influence of monopolists. They are mutally exclusive. Either choice exisits ergo their is no monopoly OR no choice exisits and their is a monopoly.
Monopoly is relative, even though it may seem absolute, and there's a semantic slipperiness because of the mix of antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. Monopoly also, for example, includes the creation of monopoly status through predatory action or other actions defined as monopolistic practices ... the deliberate move to limit choice.
Also, recall that Sherman in 1890 was talking about maintaining a decentralized economy. Even as late as 1952, Humphrey reinforced the civic intention of antitrust vs. a purely economic argument. Today's interpretation is quite different for the laws' and practices' origins, and evolution (or devolution) is a matter of perspective. The aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws has slowed considerably as Sherman's model is turned away from in a corporate-dominated legislative system.
Ultimately, in absolutist terms, there is no monopoly where I can still drill my own well or produce my own electricity or grow my own food or create a computer from carved beads and twigs.
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/
Hmmm, this seems to be exactly what Cringley said in his article. Nobody, so far, has been able to make a profit and they are not likely to in the near(?) future.
(Raises hand.) We have a local cable TV company who put in cable modems in January. They had thought out putting glass in 5 years ago, and can now reap the benefits. 500 customers in a 2,500-population town. $40/month for broadband, $30 if you bring your own modem. ROI within 18 months. Disclaimer: I consulted on the project.
Maybe you have to be small, have to think ahead, or just be in the right place. Dunno.
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/