Because of late, the music I'm finding has the most interesting qualities to it is music produced by people on the internet who are creative and talented and who just happen to either be signed to a label so-below-the-radar that it would be normally invisible or someone working in obscurity in their bedroom who cares to share it with me.
Some of these people HAVE been signed later on once they had some exposure.
There's some people who SHOULD be signed to a big label instead of poppy teen angst dreck but there is a big business in selling poppy teen angst dreck to teens who need to hear poppy teen angst dreck.
My own opinion? I'm biased. I'm a musician. I haven't made it my full time profession but I've been paid for playing in any number of different venues from the secular to the sacred and any number of different genres.
But I know what I'm doing with a computer and I do my IT job so I can play exactly what I want most of the time rather than play what will pay (a big difference).
An interesting tidbit: within two days of my first solo CD being released it was on the original Napster. It was a weird feeling in that I felt flattered that someone would want to listen and angry at the same time. But that passed.
I later came to the conclusion that those who really were into it would buy later on. And some have. I don't expect everyone to.
But King Kong? I do think the world just doesn't need another one. But maybe he'll surprise us.
Back in the early 1990s I worked for a company that sold computer systems, peripherals and printers.
I was working technical support at the time and received a call from someone up near the arctic circle and they were a print shop or some-such and had a critical job they needed to print but had ran out of toner.
They had no spare toner.
The closest spare toner they could get was several hundred miles away and accessible only by helicopter.
We set-up an arrangement so that they would get several toner cartridges though they would miss the deadline.
A little while later, the woman I spoke to called me back and indicated there was giant black streaks on anything they wanted to print.
Apparently, in utter desperation to print they took an electric drill, took a toner cartridge for their copy machine and used a drinking straw to place the liquid toner for the copier into the empty container for the printer which used a dry toner system.
What resulted is what our production people called "toner bombing" a printer.
You can sandblast it all you like but it's not going to ever print like it did before and it's all but destined for the landfill at that point.
They RUINED a high-end, $10,000+ printer for volume production.
My personal favorite was a friend who will go nameless to prevent embarassment was installing a 25 mhz processor accelerator in his Amiga 1000 computer if I remember correctly. The original CPU speed was a 7 mhz 68000 and this was a 68030 processor with math coprocessor onboard as well.
This device set him back a pretty penny, nearly as much as the cost of the computer originally and the anticipation was high he would be computing at maximum possible speed.
He had installed it and was nearly at the point where he was about to boot the machine that the halogen work lamp that was installed via a clamp to the frame of his desk in his work area became unclamped and fell several feet on top of the processor board.
Which promptly shattered in several pieces. Destroyed. Unusable.
Needless to say, the anger was furious and the smiting of said lamp was legendary.
I can't think of many incidents that top that one.
I think what we think of as "modern music" would not sound the same without it.
Keith Emersons' heart stopping sounds at the close of the single "Lucky Man" was probably my first exposure to synthesizer music. I later heard Switched on Bach as well as many of the electronic german bands who specialized in synthesis.
Some synthesizer-predominant artists such as Tangerine Dream, Synergy, Kraftwerk, Michael Hoenig, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and SFF among many, many others simply wouldn't sound the same OR actually sound at all without them.
I think of an interview with the canadian band Saga who at one time owned "one of everything" that Moog made and was offered an endorsement deal from Moog and they said "why bother? We already own everything you make!" That's a ringing endorsement.
And the secret to the Moog sound was the filters in those instruments. Every synthesizer made had their own unique sound. But everyone tried to copy the Moog filter sound and didn't quite succeed.
I bet they will still be buying Minimoogs' in 100 years - something about that design and sound with tweakable knobs urges playing.
Small wonder that in the 80s when synth makers went to touch panels or increment and decrement buttons players liked them less even though the sounds were unique because the interface made you play a certain way. The sound was more alive when you could manipulate the sound with knobs while playing.
Notable makers who used the "knobs as sound shaping devices" were Wolfgang Palm of the venerable PPG (and later Waldorf) as well as Roland who resurrected the "plethora of knobs" idea with their JD800. Knobs work and Mr. Moog must have just understood this. Some others did too.
But the Moog sound was instantly identifiable. And it is still used today. And very likely 100 years from now. That Minimoog voyager with blue LEDs is an object of lust for more than just a few.
Bon Voyage, Robert: Let's hope he'll rest in peace or spend eternity driving God insane with giant filter sweeps on the biggest modular in the universe.
Tour de France cyclists has similar devices so when they are riding thru the mountains their coaches can determine from remote whether they are working too hard or too light or if they need to ease off or change gearing.
As an avid recreational cyclist I already have a wristwatch styled heart rate monitor that measures percentage of maximum heart rate, amount of time spent in a pariticular heart rate zone, etc. What I'm saying is the technology exists for this and has for some time.
Sigh. I recognize this all too well. I knew one of these and was interested until I smartened up.
I dub them "angels with broken wings". Damaged goods. Attractive and nice but they totally play into the hands of a male with what I call a "caretaker personality", we get something from taking care of them. Break out and break free.
I moved on. Interestingly, the one I knew became very interested in me when I wasn't so interested in her anymore and was playing in a band on stage with actual audiences cheering and it was much better to move on and have a relationship with someone who wasn't damaged.
It was hard to let go but we grow up sometime.
I've been married to someone who is normal for over ten years now, it's possible to have a real relationship with someone who isn't damaged.
When my employer supplied me with a wireless laptop I decided to see just how secure my friends' hotspot was one day when he was out of town.
Not only was it not secure, but for some reason it could be received TWO MILES AWAY from his home.
I called him to let him know this and he was very surprised and later went to a more secure setup.
But you would be surprised how many unsecured wireless connections are nearby.
I suppose that this isn't surprising news but with the prevalence of articles like this you would think people would be a little more with it.
But I think the real point of this article is social engineering can be used to obtain almost any information if the engineer is good enough at what he or she is doing.
I really loved BeOS - I still have all of my old BeOS discs (PR3, all of the subsequent releases until v5 etc).
I still have an old PowerMac with BeOS V5 on a SCSI hard drive. I boot it once in a while to enjoy the Be flavor.
Lots of great multimedia features and it gave me my appetitive for Linux/Unix operating systems as well as OS X....
Best thing ever: Be's ridiculous software midi synthesizer allowed you to specify stupefyingly fast bpm rates.
You'd bust out laughing running some midi sequence at 32767 beats per minute and it would use so much of the system resources it would bring it to its knees but the fusillade of immense note density would have had Frank Zappa applauding.
You could also do things like have a spinning cube and each cube face running its own quicktime movie on it. This was on a 180 mhz PowerPC G3 with 80 megs of ram and a 1.6 gig hard drive and it ran it respectably.
There are other issues. The Lockheed Skunk Works did a lot of research on a hydrogen powered aircraft called Suntan right around the time Powers was shot down in his U2 as a putative U2 replacement aircraft.
The aircraft was a high altitude, Mach 2.5 hydrogen fueled aircraft and several secret prototypes were nearing completion in the Florida Everglades (and Pratt and Whitney had made special engines for this plane) at the time the project was cancelled in favor of the A-12 blackbird project (Mach 3 standard fuel derivative though just as exotic).
They learned a lot about how to deal with handling hydrogen in aircraft applications but the biggest issue (and one that would effect any liquid methane or hydrogen fueled a/c) is infrastructure.
You need facilities to handle and process exotic fuels and this means anywhere this aircraft is based from or landing at would need access to these fuels.
Otherwise you need special tanker aircraft and/or special trucks to bring in fuel to a given location.
One of the biggest problems with the rumored aurora liquid methane aircraft was not so much that it was impossible to create but that it was thirsty and we just don't have an national infrastructure for exotic fuels and it would be very expensive to create one.
I saw this article and found it plausible however, film tends to be an immersive experience. Who is seriously going to watch a big name film on a tiny iPod-like screen? I don't watch movies on my computer very often because I have a home entertainment system in the living room purpose-built for that task - larger screen, a surround sound set of speakers. A two inch LCD screen and a set of headphones to watch on the bus on the way to work just won't be as satisfying as watching a film in a real auditorium. The iPod worked since it was the logical extension to the Sony Walkman idea.
Horrible.
I suppose one should purchase non-DRM infected technology while one can.
The link above links to a story at Wired that purports to tell the real reason for all of this:
Synopsis: Moving to Pentium D chips so that hardware DRM can be enabled to prevent free exchange of copyrighted materials so the inevitable iTunes movie store and Movie iPod can be created. It is being done so Hollywood can be on board secure in the knowledge that their property won't be stolen. It's the only way that Hollywood would apparently allow it.
I hate to think that this is the reason but it would make as much sense as some of the stories I'm reading here.
I'd like to think it's Intel manufacturing PPC chips but if Jobs is wanting to increase the marketshare to other areas this would be a way of insuring that Hollywood can rest safe knowing that lame movies such as "Dude Where's my Car" won't be stolen by leeching maniacs.
Frankly? If this is it I don't see ANYONE buying it PC or Mac user no matter how cool the store is. People buy movies to watch on their home entertainment systems - I only watch on my Mac if the wife is using the big system.
I had meant to respond earlier today to this but time ran away with itself as usual.
This really reminds me very strongly of several years ago at the height of the G4 issues and about eight or nine months prior to the G5 introduction.
There were rumors going on that were ridiculous - quad processor G4 machines that were far in excess of the speed they ever got to (I believe it was 1.7 ghz prediction) or some such, video cards that were ridiculous higher than 8x agp and built in analog and digital multitrack audio and it was priced so low and the features so optimistic that I said to myself "never going to happen."
When the real machines were unveiled, everyones expectations were so high that they sort of built a prison for themselves - if Cameron Diaz (or other cheesecake babe of your choice) personally delivered the machine to you on a gold platter and a peck on the cheek it would still have been a vast dissappointment to these people.
Odder yet - the vast majority of those who were clamoring for dual cores with dual cpus and PCI Express were almost universally gamers.
Not the core buyer for this machine anyway - the audience for these machines were pro video and pro audio folks who needed big, fat, fast buses and fast (but not excessively so) machines. I/O hogs.
Gamers want different things and it isn't in this release anyway.
Audio and video pros need respectable video cards but don't require PCI Express cards that the gaming world would deem a necessity.
Can anyone out there honestly tell me "I couldn't do my audio/video/web production duties on a dual 2.7?" with a straight face? Give me a break. It is the fastest Mac that ever was (so far).
The tools are there. The machines are there. People are going to gobble them up.
Maybe they're not as exciting as people want but it comes down to expectations again and they are a prison.
Mark my words though: -someone will overclock the 2.7 to 3. -I bet they will hit 3 ghz next release -
2.7 and 3.0 is only 300 mhz away. -But they'll still be dissappointed!
Little did you realize, fools, that the whole purpose for me learning an instrument or three, recording my creations in various bands and uploading them to MP3.COM was to INFECT the corporate drones of the world with my music.
Sooner or later, they will bow to my sonic juggernaut and will be forced to listen. And sooner or later connecting the dots will be easier - the yuppies of today who listen to rock won't want to hear 'elevator' music in elevators, they'll want to hear the music of their generation so my stuff will fit right in - edgy and aggressive enough to please rock tastes but ambient and synth-i-fied enough to sooth those rattled corporate exec nerves.
Of course, it's doubtful that tracks like 'aliensporebomb', 'squeeze toy brain' and 'requiem for a dead cat' are going to make it in the burgeoning elevator music anaesthesia world.
But some of my more mellow instrumental tracks just might. I moved over to zebox which seemed to be a bit more pleasant but will eventually host my tracks on my own server on my own time.
Still, MP3.COM was an interesting experiment while it lasted and lo and behold they actually paid me once in a while.
My father died in 1975 when I was 11 and my mom died in 1998.
I know how it is to feel set adrift and cut off from everything. I married a woman with a large family and they make me feel welcome to be there but I still feel the occasional "orphan" type feelings, especially at holidays.
The weird thing is there are no living relatives on my mothers' side that we know of (long story) and also on my fathers' side he did not keep in touch with his family much - we get occasional cards from them who we don't know too well.
So, Christmas is sort of a weird time - very, very bittersweet. It's true - you won't know how much you'll miss your folks until they go.
Pretty grim stuff for a Christmas gift thing but my mom had her fun foibles too which I now remember fondly.
Okay, I've gotten a lot of strange gifts in my time but this year had a few that were strange:
A friend gave me a brick of 30 cdr discs with mini jewel cases (despite the fact that he already knew I had at least 250 on hand at any given time).
Another friend gave me a Brak t-shirt from the Adult Swim block on cartoon network. But the weird thing about it is a t-shirt promoting the "Learnmore High School Lowly Worms". I'm dating myself but haven't gone to high school since 1981 so it's sort of odd.
My bro-in-law gave me garbage pail kids candy. I didn't know they still made it - last time I saw that was back in the 80s sometime.
He also gave me a CD, a DVD of a band I like, the latest Onion book and a big gift certificate for a cycling catalog I peruse so that was cool.
This year my wife and I got in a car accident about ten days before christmas so we did not really get gifts for each other - we're hoping to do that the first week of January. That's weird.
This isn't totally surprising. My firm has been doing this for months now.
E-mail (via Assentor), IM traffic (via Facetime), and other means of recording/tracking are well implemented.
Some are wondering "why the oppressive security?" and it's essentially because during the late 1990s when the stock market was booming some broker/traders performed unethical behavior in the name of getting a big payoff (some commissions could be larger than their entire yearly salary).
Here we're pretty locked down..
If management doesn't want you to get an e-mail, you never see it. Compliance reviewers look at all outside e-mail before it ever gets to you.
If you send an e-mail outside they review it before it's allowed to go out.
If you e-mail someone in the firm (say an investment banker and you're a research employee) you'll get an e-mail back saying you're not supposed to talk to that person (some of the unethical abuses were when research and investment banking were a little too cooperative together).
What about using winsock proxy to route IM traffic thru port 80 as http traffic so as to just go thru the standard web proxies? Locked out - that trick was figured out pretty quick.
What about Telnet and FTP? Long since locked out.
What about using something like Putty to set-up an SSH tunnel to my Linux box at home?
(1) the actual SSH traffic is locked out. (2) we do software sweeps of desktop machines to
see if they run any nonstandard software.
That software gets flagged in a database and
the machine is confiscated by data security
to see if there are any compliance violations.
Webmail? Long since locked out. All of the majors and minors and new ones as they pop up.
Modems? The few who have them use them for business purposes.
Modem pool? It actually can tell if you try and initiate a TCP/IP style PPP connection and BOOT you out after 20-30 seconds. Not sure how but it's pretty amazing. Then data security grills you on why you were trying to do that.
You might ask: "JESUS! Why so much oppressive security? It's not a military base is it?"
Well, here's the deal - after the dot bomb and the Enron deal and the Martha Stewart thing and the many brokerages fined for unethical behavior, investors REQUIRED some evidence they were taking steps to "do the right thing" in enforcing the type of behavior they wanted to see instead of just letting the loose cannons run the show. It kind of sucks to be so oppressive/oppressed but it has to be done to keep things as legal as it possibly can be.
The money is good but if you don't like this kind of environment don't work in the securities industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I would really love to see Xbench results from a DTK
machine even though it would be running under emulation of some sorts.
I suppose it's not possible to do this without violating NDA, correct?
Which is interesting:
Because of late, the music I'm finding has the most interesting qualities to it is music produced by people on the internet who are creative and
talented and who just happen to either be signed
to a label so-below-the-radar that it would be
normally invisible or someone working in obscurity
in their bedroom who cares to share it with me.
Some of these people HAVE been signed later on
once they had some exposure.
There's some people who SHOULD be signed to a big
label instead of poppy teen angst dreck but there
is a big business in selling poppy teen angst
dreck to teens who need to hear poppy teen angst
dreck.
My own opinion? I'm biased. I'm a musician.
I haven't made it my full time profession but I've
been paid for playing in any number of different
venues from the secular to the sacred and any
number of different genres.
But I know what I'm doing with a computer and I do my IT job so I can play exactly what I want most of the time rather than play what will pay (a big difference).
An interesting tidbit: within two days of my first
solo CD being released it was on the original
Napster. It was a weird feeling in that I felt
flattered that someone would want to listen and
angry at the same time. But that passed.
I later came to the conclusion that those who
really were into it would buy later on. And
some have. I don't expect everyone to.
But King Kong? I do think the world just doesn't
need another one. But maybe he'll surprise us.
Not correct.
The 2.5 and 2.7 ghz duals are liquid cooled
(9 fans and liquid cooling).
The 2.0 and 2.3 duals are air cooled (9 fans).
And I don't believe it is water cooling but rather
some synthetic liquid that enhances the cooling
process. Creepy.
Back in the early 1990s I worked for a company that sold computer systems, peripherals and printers.
I was working technical support at the time and received a call from someone up near the arctic
circle and they were a print shop or some-such and had a critical job they needed to print but had
ran out of toner.
They had no spare toner.
The closest spare toner they could get was several hundred miles away and accessible only by helicopter.
We set-up an arrangement so that they would get several toner cartridges though they would miss
the deadline.
A little while later, the woman I spoke to called me back and indicated there was giant black streaks on anything they wanted to print.
Apparently, in utter desperation to print they
took an electric drill, took a toner cartridge
for their copy machine and used a drinking straw
to place the liquid toner for the copier into
the empty container for the printer which used a
dry toner system.
What resulted is what our production people
called "toner bombing" a printer.
You can sandblast it all you like but it's not
going to ever print like it did before and it's
all but destined for the landfill at that point.
They RUINED a high-end, $10,000+ printer for
volume production.
Thus endeth the lesson.
My personal favorite was a friend who will go nameless to prevent embarassment was installing a 25 mhz processor accelerator in his Amiga 1000 computer if I remember correctly. The original CPU speed was a 7 mhz 68000 and this was a 68030 processor with math coprocessor onboard as well.
This device set him back a pretty penny, nearly as much as the cost of the computer originally and the anticipation was high he would be computing at maximum possible speed.
He had installed it and was nearly at the point where he was about to boot the machine that the halogen work lamp that was installed via a clamp to the frame of his desk in his work area became unclamped and fell several feet on top of the processor board.
Which promptly shattered in several pieces.
Destroyed. Unusable.
Needless to say, the anger was furious and the smiting of said lamp was legendary.
I can't think of many incidents that top that one.
I think what we think of as "modern music" would not sound the same without it.
Keith Emersons' heart stopping sounds at
the close of the single "Lucky Man" was
probably my first exposure to synthesizer
music. I later heard Switched on Bach as
well as many of the electronic german bands
who specialized in synthesis.
Some synthesizer-predominant artists
such as Tangerine Dream, Synergy,
Kraftwerk, Michael Hoenig, Klaus Schulze,
Ash Ra Tempel, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos,
and SFF among many, many others simply
wouldn't sound the same OR actually
sound at all without them.
I think of an interview with the canadian
band Saga who at one time owned "one of
everything" that Moog made and was offered
an endorsement deal from Moog and they said
"why bother? We already own everything you
make!" That's a ringing endorsement.
And the secret to the Moog sound was the filters
in those instruments. Every synthesizer made
had their own unique sound. But everyone tried
to copy the Moog filter sound and didn't quite
succeed.
I bet they will still be buying Minimoogs' in
100 years - something about that design and
sound with tweakable knobs urges playing.
Small wonder that in the 80s when synth
makers went to touch panels or increment and
decrement buttons players liked them less
even though the sounds were unique because
the interface made you play a certain way.
The sound was more alive when you could
manipulate the sound with knobs while
playing.
Notable makers who used the "knobs as sound
shaping devices" were Wolfgang Palm of the
venerable PPG (and later Waldorf) as well as
Roland who resurrected the "plethora of knobs"
idea with their JD800. Knobs work and Mr.
Moog must have just understood this. Some
others did too.
But the Moog sound was instantly identifiable.
And it is still used today. And very likely
100 years from now. That Minimoog voyager
with blue LEDs is an object of lust for more
than just a few.
Bon Voyage, Robert:
Let's hope he'll rest in peace or spend eternity
driving God insane with giant filter sweeps on
the biggest modular in the universe.
Tour de France cyclists has similar devices so when
they are riding thru the mountains their coaches
can determine from remote whether they are working
too hard or too light or if they need to ease off
or change gearing.
As an avid recreational cyclist I already have a
wristwatch styled heart rate monitor that measures
percentage of maximum heart rate, amount of time
spent in a pariticular heart rate zone, etc. What
I'm saying is the technology exists for this and
has for some time.
Sigh. I recognize this all too well. I knew one
of these and was interested until I smartened up.
I dub them "angels with broken wings". Damaged goods. Attractive and nice but they totally
play into the hands of a male with what I call
a "caretaker personality", we get something from
taking care of them. Break out and break free.
I moved on. Interestingly, the one I knew became
very interested in me when I wasn't so interested
in her anymore and was playing in a band on
stage with actual audiences cheering and it was much better to move on and have a relationship with someone who wasn't damaged.
It was hard to let go but we grow up sometime.
I've been married to someone who is normal for
over ten years now, it's possible to have a real
relationship with someone who isn't damaged.
It's possible and it happens - you can move on.
The late 1980s booms may also have been the
"Aurora" spyplane but since it has never
come out of the black that is debatable.
Apparently most of the "skyquake booms"
occurred on thursday mornings so you
very well likely did hear shuttle booms.
Glad to see the crew and orbiter home and safe.
When my employer supplied me with a wireless laptop
I decided to see just how secure my friends' hotspot
was one day when he was out of town.
Not only was it not secure, but for some reason it
could be received TWO MILES AWAY from his home.
I called him to let him know this and he was very
surprised and later went to a more secure setup.
But you would be surprised how many unsecured
wireless connections are nearby.
I suppose that this isn't surprising news but with
the prevalence of articles like this you would
think people would be a little more with it.
But I think the real point of this article is
social engineering can be used to obtain almost
any information if the engineer is good enough
at what he or she is doing.
The spyware/adware/malware removal dance does tend
to get a bit frustrating after awhile.
But some of it is down to a specific user who has visited places that while not illegal or against
corporate uses might be frowned on in some places.
I work for a firm that allows people to use their
home laptops on our network after we install an
antivirus solution among other things.
One of the things I noted with one user is she was a very heavy limewire user.
After she had spent some time there her machine was so slow it was utterly unusable.
She had an almost unbelievable 22,000 pieces of
spyware on her computer.
After removing these items the machine FELT like a
completely different machine. Unbelievable.
I really loved BeOS - I still have all of my old
BeOS discs (PR3, all of the subsequent releases
until v5 etc).
I still have an old PowerMac with BeOS V5 on a SCSI
hard drive. I boot it once in a while to enjoy the
Be flavor.
Lots of great multimedia features and it gave me my
appetitive for Linux/Unix operating systems as well
as OS X....
Best thing ever: Be's ridiculous software midi synthesizer allowed you to specify stupefyingly
fast bpm rates.
You'd bust out laughing running some midi sequence
at 32767 beats per minute and it would use so much
of the system resources it would bring it to its
knees but the fusillade of immense note density
would have had Frank Zappa applauding.
You could also do things like have a spinning
cube and each cube face running its own quicktime
movie on it. This was on a 180 mhz PowerPC G3
with 80 megs of ram and a 1.6 gig hard drive and
it ran it respectably.
There are other issues. The Lockheed Skunk
Works did a lot of research on a hydrogen
powered aircraft called Suntan right around
the time Powers was shot down in his
U2 as a putative U2 replacement aircraft.
The aircraft was a high altitude,
Mach 2.5 hydrogen fueled aircraft and
several secret prototypes were nearing
completion in the Florida Everglades
(and Pratt and Whitney had made special
engines for this plane) at the time
the project was cancelled in favor of
the A-12 blackbird project (Mach 3
standard fuel derivative though just
as exotic).
They learned a lot about how to deal
with handling hydrogen in aircraft
applications but the biggest issue (and
one that would effect
any liquid methane or hydrogen fueled
a/c) is infrastructure.
You need facilities to handle and process
exotic fuels and this means anywhere this
aircraft is based from or landing at would
need access to these fuels.
Otherwise you need special tanker aircraft
and/or special trucks to bring in fuel to a
given location.
One of the biggest problems with the rumored
aurora liquid methane aircraft was not so much
that it was impossible to create but that it
was thirsty and we just don't have an national
infrastructure for exotic fuels and it would be
very expensive to create one.
But it will have to happen someday.
Would that be a regular "sick piece of crap" or a "decroded piece of crap?" (snicker).
We need Napoleon to do hardware commentary.
I saw this article and found it plausible however, film tends to be
an immersive experience. Who is seriously going to watch a big
name film on a tiny iPod-like screen? I don't watch movies on my
computer very often because I have a home entertainment system
in the living room purpose-built for that task - larger screen, a
surround sound set of speakers. A two inch LCD screen and a set
of headphones to watch on the bus on the way to work just won't
be as satisfying as watching a film in a real auditorium. The iPod
worked since it was the logical extension to the Sony Walkman
idea.
Horrible.
I suppose one should purchase non-DRM infected technology
while one can.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67749,00.html ?tw=wn_tophead_1
The link above links to a story at Wired that purports to tell the real
reason for all of this:
Synopsis: Moving to Pentium D chips so that hardware DRM can be enabled to prevent free exchange of copyrighted materials so the inevitable iTunes movie store and Movie iPod can be created. It is being done so Hollywood can be on board secure in the knowledge that their property won't be stolen. It's the only way that Hollywood would apparently allow it.
I hate to think that this is the reason but it would make as much
sense as some of the stories I'm reading here.
I'd like to think it's Intel manufacturing PPC chips but if Jobs is
wanting to increase the marketshare to other areas this would
be a way of insuring that Hollywood can rest safe knowing that
lame movies such as "Dude Where's my Car" won't be stolen by
leeching maniacs.
Frankly? If this is it I don't see ANYONE buying it PC or Mac user
no matter how cool the store is. People buy movies to watch on
their home entertainment systems - I only watch on my Mac if
the wife is using the big system.
Thoughts?
I had meant to respond earlier today to this but time ran away with itself as usual.
This really reminds me very strongly of several years ago at the height of the G4 issues and about
eight or nine months prior to the G5 introduction.
There were rumors going on that were ridiculous - quad processor G4 machines that were far in excess of the speed they ever got to (I believe it was 1.7 ghz prediction) or some such, video cards that were ridiculous higher than 8x agp and built in analog and digital multitrack audio and it was priced so low and the features so optimistic that I said to myself "never going to happen."
When the real machines were unveiled, everyones expectations were so high that they sort of built a prison for themselves - if Cameron Diaz (or other cheesecake babe of your choice) personally delivered the machine to you on a gold platter and a peck on the cheek it would still have been a vast dissappointment to these people.
Odder yet - the vast majority of those who were clamoring for dual cores with dual cpus and PCI Express were almost universally gamers.
Not the core buyer for this machine anyway - the audience for these machines were pro video and pro audio folks who needed big, fat, fast buses and fast (but not excessively so) machines. I/O hogs.
Gamers want different things and it isn't in this
release anyway.
Audio and video pros need respectable video cards
but don't require PCI Express cards that the
gaming world would deem a necessity.
Can anyone out there honestly tell me "I couldn't do my audio/video/web production duties on a dual
2.7?" with a straight face? Give me a break.
It is the fastest Mac that ever was (so far).
The tools are there. The machines are there.
People are going to gobble them up.
Maybe they're not as exciting as people want
but it comes down to expectations again and
they are a prison.
Mark my words though:
-someone will overclock the 2.7 to 3.
-I bet they will hit 3 ghz next release -
2.7 and 3.0 is only 300 mhz away.
-But they'll still be dissappointed!
This is truth. I just bought the G3 Live in Denver DVD for $9.99
two days at at the Sam Goody in downtown Minneapolis.
They had the CD of the same music for $17 or thereabouts.
The DVD has better audio encoding.
The DVD has a video performance included.
The DVD includes the same songs.
Why would anyone buy a CD if the DVD gives you so much more?
Little did you realize, fools, that the whole purpose for me
learning an instrument or three, recording my creations in
various bands and uploading them to MP3.COM was to
INFECT the corporate drones of the world with my music.
Sooner or later, they will bow to my sonic juggernaut and will be forced to listen. And sooner or later connecting the
dots will be easier - the yuppies of today who listen to rock
won't want to hear 'elevator' music in elevators, they'll want
to hear the music of their generation so my stuff will fit
right in - edgy and aggressive enough to please rock tastes
but ambient and synth-i-fied enough to sooth those rattled
corporate exec nerves.
Of course, it's doubtful that tracks like 'aliensporebomb', 'squeeze toy brain' and 'requiem for a dead cat' are going to
make it in the burgeoning elevator music anaesthesia world.
But some of my more mellow instrumental tracks just might. I moved over to zebox which seemed to be a bit
more pleasant but will eventually host my tracks on my own
server on my own time.
Still, MP3.COM was an interesting experiment while it lasted and lo and behold they actually paid me once in a while.
You guys are making me all misty inside! Arrrgh!
My father died in 1975 when I was 11 and my mom
died in 1998.
I know how it is to feel set adrift and cut off
from everything. I married a woman with a large
family and they make me feel welcome to be there
but I still feel the occasional "orphan" type
feelings, especially at holidays.
The weird thing is there are no living relatives
on my mothers' side that we know of (long story)
and also on my fathers' side he did not keep in touch with his family much - we get occasional cards from them who we don't know too well.
So, Christmas is sort of a weird time - very,
very bittersweet. It's true - you won't know
how much you'll miss your folks until they go.
Pretty grim stuff for a Christmas gift thing but
my mom had her fun foibles too which I now
remember fondly.
Have a great holiday everyone!
Okay, I've gotten a lot of strange gifts in my
time but this year had a few that were strange:
A friend gave me a brick of 30 cdr discs with mini
jewel cases (despite the fact that he already knew
I had at least 250 on hand at any given time).
Another friend gave me a Brak t-shirt from the
Adult Swim block on cartoon network. But the
weird thing about it is a t-shirt promoting the
"Learnmore High School Lowly Worms". I'm dating
myself but haven't gone to high school since 1981
so it's sort of odd.
My bro-in-law gave me garbage pail kids candy. I
didn't know they still made it - last time I saw
that was back in the 80s sometime.
He also gave me a CD, a DVD of a band I like, the
latest Onion book and a big gift certificate for a
cycling catalog I peruse so that was cool.
This year my wife and I got in a car accident
about ten days before christmas so we did not
really get gifts for each other - we're hoping
to do that the first week of January. That's weird.
This isn't totally surprising. My firm has been doing this for months now.
E-mail (via Assentor), IM traffic (via Facetime),
and other means of recording/tracking are well
implemented.
Some are wondering "why the oppressive security?" and it's essentially because during the late 1990s when the stock market was booming some broker/traders performed unethical behavior in
the name of getting a big payoff (some commissions
could be larger than their entire yearly salary).
Here we're pretty locked down..
If management doesn't want you to get an e-mail, you never see it. Compliance reviewers look at all outside e-mail before it ever gets to you.
If you send an e-mail outside they review it
before it's allowed to go out.
If you e-mail someone in the firm (say an investment banker and you're a research employee) you'll get an e-mail back saying you're not supposed to talk to that person (some of the unethical abuses were when research and investment banking were a little too cooperative together).
What about using winsock proxy to route IM traffic
thru port 80 as http traffic so as to just go thru
the standard web proxies? Locked out - that trick
was figured out pretty quick.
What about Telnet and FTP? Long since locked out.
What about using something like Putty to set-up an
SSH tunnel to my Linux box at home?
(1) the actual SSH traffic is locked out.
(2) we do software sweeps of desktop machines to
see if they run any nonstandard software.
That software gets flagged in a database and
the machine is confiscated by data security
to see if there are any compliance violations.
Webmail? Long since locked out. All of the
majors and minors and new ones as they pop up.
Modems? The few who have them use them for
business purposes.
Modem pool? It actually can tell if you try and
initiate a TCP/IP style PPP connection and BOOT
you out after 20-30 seconds. Not sure how but
it's pretty amazing. Then data security grills
you on why you were trying to do that.
You might ask: "JESUS! Why so much oppressive
security? It's not a military base is it?"
Well, here's the deal - after the dot bomb and
the Enron deal and the Martha Stewart thing and
the many brokerages fined for unethical behavior,
investors REQUIRED some evidence they were taking
steps to "do the right thing" in enforcing the
type of behavior they wanted to see instead of
just letting the loose cannons run the show. It
kind of sucks to be so oppressive/oppressed but
it has to be done to keep things as legal as it
possibly can be.
The money is good but if you don't like this kind
of environment don't work in the securities
industry.