Sounds like we've got a different definition of "recent". '91 was high school for me; the Albini article was late-college. IMO, the Napster explosion is at the far edge of what I'd call "recent".
In the 1995 Grammies...
Jagged Little Pill won Record of the Year
Hootie won Best New Artist
Kiss From A Rose won Song of the Year
I guess I just wouldn't consider '95 "recent", and the fact that I read Hit Men (as did most people I knew at the time) in '92 or '93 -- the facts of the Music Biz have been "public knowledge" as far as I could see for a decade or so.
Until recently, nobody except the people being screwed knew anything about it.
Sorry, but that's just not true. As far back as 1991 (over a decade ago!) it was being widely reported -- just witness Dannen's excellent book
Hit Men, which came out 7/91. Or the anti-signing screed
"Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked", which I don't have a date on -- but I know I read months or years before Love's speech.
The problem's been around, it's been out in the open, but it's just now getting the attention it deserves because it's a convenient excuse for people who want to justify using P2P music networks.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not condemning people for sharing music via P2P, but if all these people are "sharing the tunes for the benefit of the artist", they should also be feeding the artists -- going to concerts and buying two CDs, three t-shirts, and six beers (how do you think bands get re-booked? Tip your damn wait staff!) Some people do. I applaud them. Most people, being lazy, don't.
The Hippocratic Oath, as I understand it (IANAD), didn't exactly have too many gray areas. "No harm" meant, among other things, "don't cut someone open" even if it meant, say, removing cancerous tissue.
The Geek Oath would be even worse off when it comes to gray areas. For example:
I used to work at a (now defunct, like the rest of 'em) dot-com. Our software was, by most definitions, spyware: If you downloaded and installed our software, it would keep track of what you listened to (via pretty much any media player -- we had the top twelve or so covered by the end) and send that info to our servers, which would respond with a wealth of information -- current news, tour dates in your area if you so chose, new releases, etc. The longer you listened, the more information you would get -- "Oh, I realize you're not listening to Radiohead right now, but by the way they've got an album coming out..."
Now: a) We never attempted to sneak onto someone's system; b) We made the uninstall as painless and obvious as possible; c) We never hid the fact that we were sending back listening statistics. But still, we *were* monitoring what you were listening to.
So would I have been in violation of this theoretical Geek Oath?
(Save your flames and your "I'd never!"s -- fact is, a lot of people did, myself included. It just Didn't Work Out, but our management handled the end -- once it was obvious that it was inevitable -- very well.)
You're going to use an ISO image for a room full of twenty completely different machines?
I'll admit I don't know exactly what the computer labs in Oregon and Washington look like, but if they're anything like the ones at my old high school (a decade ago) they're made up of a mix-and-match from the bottom of the donation barrel from local businesses. Add to that the fact that you're going to have one or two "power-user" kids (in high school, at least) who have brought in their own hardware (CD burners, better sound cards, whatever) and you have a host of ever-so-slightly different machines.
I agree that, given 20 brand spankin' new Dells that were bought bulk, the ISO option would take about fifteen minutes per machine, tops -- but these schools probably don't have that luxury. A full computer lab would probably take a weekend of serious work, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the high schools have a bunch of willing volunteers.
If you're an upstanding Christian you've got nothing to fear from the Inquisition either, right?
Logic like that -- one step away from "They wouldn't be suspects if they hadn't done something wrong" -- is ridiculous.
The schools don't have the time, money, or manpower (those three are, of course, related) to handle the audit, especially right at the end of the school year. The timing couldn't've been better, nor the message as ridiculously heavy-handed.
I can't wait to hear how, in two months, the seven biggest school districts in Washington are all running some flavor of Linux.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling I'll be reading about how lottery ticket prices are going to be raised to be able to pay Microsoft off.
(On a side note, are lottery sales still used for paying for state education programs? I seem to remember that being the case when I was growing up in the midwest...)
Yes, but by owning Napster, Bertlesmann also accepts liability for it.
In other words, the other major labels (if they're still interested -- I don't know what they lawsuits have been doing lately) could effectively sue Bertlesmann -- and Bertlesmann has a bit more at stake than Napster did to simply declare bankruptcy or send out "Sorry, your investment returned nothing and now we're dead" letters.
Frankly, I'm surprised by this move. Bertlesmann was already pretty much single-handedly funding Napster, thereby exhibiting a large amount of pressure as to Napster's next few moves, both technology- and litigation-wise. About the only thing Bertlesmann didn't already own was the liability aspect. I'm not sure why they'd bother to put "Sue Us Now" down in blood, at this point. Seems quite silly to me.
Unless of course they're planning on rebranding Napster as "MyPlay2".
Yeah, everyone knows that you're never going to get a bit-for-bit copy of a MD using most consumer or prosumer gear. Generational loss occurs even with (most -- see below) pro MD gear. However, a) you have to circumvent the SCMS code (or have/create a 00-master) in order to even be able to get more than one digital generation; and b) you didn't say anything about bit-for-bit copies, you just said "copy protection" and "no digital outs" (you can always make copies through an analog stage, and SCMS defeaters are common -- hence my earlier "weak copy protection" comment)
In any case, from what I understand (I haven't worked with MD too much in the last two years, but I've got a ton of my own MDs that I need to archive -- hence my knowledge of the MDS-E10 etc) the new Sony NetMD (MZ-N707, probably on minidisco.com but I'm too lazy to provide a link) has software that converts MP3 -> ATRAC3 (maybe ATRAC3r) and possibly back. So, if you're actually interested, that just might let you "read/write the compressed digital data".
Unfortunately, no, I don't know off the top of my head of any pro deck that allows you to output before the decompression stage. I've heard rumors of a serial port on some units (not the Sony MDS-E12, fwiw) that will do just that, but I don't have model numbers so this is essentially hearsay.
And the NetMD won't let you dump a disc that as recorded elsewhere to an ATRAC3(r?) file on your HD.
I don't know about "for the consumer", but several companies (Napster, a few ISPs I think, maybe AIMster?) attempted to use the DMCA against the *AA industries.
If I remember correctly, the response from the *AA each time was basically "Of course that's not what we meant when we wrote the law, and here's our expensive lawyer to explain what we *did* mean."
I'm not holding out much hope for the bnetd case.
This isn't a signature, but a final line to make sure my final line above isn't skipped.
If anybody thinks most of the stories posted today have been, well, a bit overdone, be thankful that at least we've only been seeing links to other AFD jokes on the web.
If Taco were to write his own.. well, they'd probably look like these, courtesy of NewsForge.
Well, if you want to throttle the Conspiracy Meter up to full, it could very well be a bait-and-switch tactic. To wit:
Hollywood pays for and introduces ridiculous legislation.
Legislation gets a head of steam before Joe Consumer hears about it
Joe Consumer gets pissed off, and actually makes his opinion known
Hollywood backs off, and says "Okay, okay, we'll modify the legislation to basically make region controls and DMCA-style anti-circumvention measures et al completely legal and eliminate fair-use loopholes..."
Joe Consumer, seeing "Alphabet Soup Bill defeated in Senate", thinks "We won!" and goes on his merry, fair-use-less, way.
...wrt the "relationships" page with The Sims. My wife has a veritable zoo of character's she's created, and constantly has romances going between any and every member, especially since I got her "Hot Date" for her birthday.
Something tells me the "roleplayed a romance with characters of both genders" stat would be quite a bit higher.
My "moving parts" setup can get me great-sounding audio recorded at 44.1/48kHz and the equivalent of roughly 1600 kbps for over three hours continuous. This "cool" solid-state device is not only lossy and has a really low capped bitrate, it'll only record for about a half-hour at its highest quality. I'll stick to my DAT setup, thanks. Call me when you've got this thing recording at at least 192kpbs for at least 74 minutes -- by then you'll have a solid-state minidisc recorder.
To answer your question about decent mics -- if all you're doing is recording meetings, even the cheap-but-good mics at Sound Professionals would probably be overkill. Most of their mics are tiny ("stealth") units that you could easily just toss out on the meeting table, and they're good enough to be able to pick up voices without too much background noise just fine.
"How do you do a data link between a TV and a laptop?," Karas asks. "Audio out."
Look out, folks. It's time for Limey::Convergence! Now all we need is another freebie proctology tool to connect through our keyboards.. just in time, too, my last one just broke.
Clarke said it is not clear that the country needs to have a mandatory identity card but suggested there might be a use for credit card-size "smart cards" that contain data on microchips. Such cards could be used for specific actions such as boarding airplanes and crossing U.S. borders, he said.
I can see it now: These three lanes to the Ambassador Bridge are for Oracle ID cards, these three lanes are for Sun cards, and that one over there -- that's backed up all the way to Ann Arbor -- is for those pathetic losers who are concerned about privacy.
When I was in college (in Michigan, natch) we had a SmartCard Student ID that you could put up to $50 on (on the SmartChip or whatever). Almost nobody used it, though, after having filled it up and then lost it -- that $50 was nonrecoverable, as transient and easier to lose than cash, and extremely easy to use if someone else happened to get it.
The last thing I'd want to have is a SmartCard with my SSN et al.
Imagine what would've happened to Sandra Bullock if she had one;-)
Who needs an IDE?
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
cc-mode.el
Syntax highlighting, data dictionary, easy compilation and debugging... what else do you want?
But as long as you're looking for whom piracy really hurts, ask the guitarist in the coffee shop, or the group scratching out a living touring in a beat-up van.
Riight. That would explain, then, why the last concert I attended -- performed by two guitarists in a coffee shop (Peter Mulvey and Erin McKeown, if anyone cares) -- both artists encouraged people to record and spread the show itself, and even went as far as to say "Copy our CDs for your friends. Tell 'em that if they like it, they can pick up their own copy at our websites."
Even ignoring the terminology ("piracy"), it seems that those two starving-artist types are interest in (wait for it..) people hearing their music. What a novel idea. Too bad Hillary will never get it, nor does she want to.
Re:Why people love Code Red
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 1
Of course virus writing is a victimless crime. Like punching someone in the dark.
The movie was excellent; there were a few absolutely top-notch scenes, from both acting and sfx standpoints. However, if you haven't gone and seen it yet, leave when the narrator kicks in.
It's about forty-five minutes too long; I'm convinced Spielberg simply wanted to emulate Kubrick as much as possible, and therefore threw a nearly nonsensical completely gratuitous and most especially pointless ending on the movie -- nevermind that it takes up nearly a third of the running time. I would've considered it a masterpiece if they would've just rolled credits after Joe hit the "submerge" button.
Does anyone know much about the "Supertoys" short story? I figure I'll go snooping with Google in a bit; but the short story that Wired reprinted at the link in this article doesn't seem complete. A recent issue of Playboy had two short stories by Brian Aldiss that had "Supertoys" names -- did he just write a whole bunch of short stories about David-the-neurotic-robot, or are all of these excerpts from a novel?
If this is ever going to be done, it would have to be a unanimous vote from every country, holding majority elections in the country to decide the nation vote. Because this could easily fuck up and you don't wanna fuck up the planet unless everyone agrees it will be fun.
So you want a popular vote to determine whether or not to move the planet?
No thanks, I'd rather not have the idiot neighbors on my block deciding on the fate of the world. How about letting "experts" (determination of the rank left as an exercise for the reader) decide instead?
Besides, do you think the rest of the world is about to take voting advice from the United States?
The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works.
So, did Mr. Bono's ghost have anything to do with this one, too?
"Clearly precludes" my ass. There's no difference between "unlimited protection" and "protection that will expire five years from now, or rather now, I really mean now..."
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1995 Grammies...
- Jagged Little Pill won Record of the Year
- Hootie won Best New Artist
- Kiss From A Rose won Song of the Year
I guess I just wouldn't consider '95 "recent", and the fact that I read Hit Men (as did most people I knew at the time) in '92 or '93 -- the facts of the Music Biz have been "public knowledge" as far as I could see for a decade or so.Sorry, but that's just not true. As far back as 1991 (over a decade ago!) it was being widely reported -- just witness Dannen's excellent book Hit Men, which came out 7/91. Or the anti-signing screed "Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked", which I don't have a date on -- but I know I read months or years before Love's speech.
The problem's been around, it's been out in the open, but it's just now getting the attention it deserves because it's a convenient excuse for people who want to justify using P2P music networks.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not condemning people for sharing music via P2P, but if all these people are "sharing the tunes for the benefit of the artist", they should also be feeding the artists -- going to concerts and buying two CDs, three t-shirts, and six beers (how do you think bands get re-booked? Tip your damn wait staff!) Some people do. I applaud them. Most people, being lazy, don't.
The Geek Oath would be even worse off when it comes to gray areas. For example:
I used to work at a (now defunct, like the rest of 'em) dot-com. Our software was, by most definitions, spyware: If you downloaded and installed our software, it would keep track of what you listened to (via pretty much any media player -- we had the top twelve or so covered by the end) and send that info to our servers, which would respond with a wealth of information -- current news, tour dates in your area if you so chose, new releases, etc. The longer you listened, the more information you would get -- "Oh, I realize you're not listening to Radiohead right now, but by the way they've got an album coming out..."
Now: a) We never attempted to sneak onto someone's system; b) We made the uninstall as painless and obvious as possible; c) We never hid the fact that we were sending back listening statistics. But still, we *were* monitoring what you were listening to.
So would I have been in violation of this theoretical Geek Oath?
(Save your flames and your "I'd never!"s -- fact is, a lot of people did, myself included. It just Didn't Work Out, but our management handled the end -- once it was obvious that it was inevitable -- very well.)
I'll admit I don't know exactly what the computer labs in Oregon and Washington look like, but if they're anything like the ones at my old high school (a decade ago) they're made up of a mix-and-match from the bottom of the donation barrel from local businesses. Add to that the fact that you're going to have one or two "power-user" kids (in high school, at least) who have brought in their own hardware (CD burners, better sound cards, whatever) and you have a host of ever-so-slightly different machines.
I agree that, given 20 brand spankin' new Dells that were bought bulk, the ISO option would take about fifteen minutes per machine, tops -- but these schools probably don't have that luxury. A full computer lab would probably take a weekend of serious work, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the high schools have a bunch of willing volunteers.
Some of whom probably even read Slashdot.
If you're an upstanding Christian you've got nothing to fear from the Inquisition either, right?
Logic like that -- one step away from "They wouldn't be suspects if they hadn't done something wrong" -- is ridiculous.
The schools don't have the time, money, or manpower (those three are, of course, related) to handle the audit, especially right at the end of the school year. The timing couldn't've been better, nor the message as ridiculously heavy-handed.
I can't wait to hear how, in two months, the seven biggest school districts in Washington are all running some flavor of Linux.
Unfortunately, I have a feeling I'll be reading about how lottery ticket prices are going to be raised to be able to pay Microsoft off.
(On a side note, are lottery sales still used for paying for state education programs? I seem to remember that being the case when I was growing up in the midwest...)
Does this new bill mean (if it were in the US) it would have to be xenu.prn?
As the Usenet thread points out, does this mean the Democratic Underground would have to move to democraticunderground.prn?
What's ICANN got to say about all this, since (I thought) they turned down .sex, .xxx, and .porn?
(Nevermind, scratch that last part.. I couldn't care less about what ICANN has to say about this.)
This seems to me to be one-upping the legislation that tries to redefine SMTP . Yikes.
In other words, the other major labels (if they're still interested -- I don't know what they lawsuits have been doing lately) could effectively sue Bertlesmann -- and Bertlesmann has a bit more at stake than Napster did to simply declare bankruptcy or send out "Sorry, your investment returned nothing and now we're dead" letters.
Frankly, I'm surprised by this move. Bertlesmann was already pretty much single-handedly funding Napster, thereby exhibiting a large amount of pressure as to Napster's next few moves, both technology- and litigation-wise. About the only thing Bertlesmann didn't already own was the liability aspect. I'm not sure why they'd bother to put "Sue Us Now" down in blood, at this point. Seems quite silly to me.
Unless of course they're planning on rebranding Napster as "MyPlay2".
Is this the new Katz manifesto? I thought I was blocking his articles...
In any case, from what I understand (I haven't worked with MD too much in the last two years, but I've got a ton of my own MDs that I need to archive -- hence my knowledge of the MDS-E10 etc) the new Sony NetMD (MZ-N707, probably on minidisco.com but I'm too lazy to provide a link) has software that converts MP3 -> ATRAC3 (maybe ATRAC3r) and possibly back. So, if you're actually interested, that just might let you "read/write the compressed digital data".
Unfortunately, no, I don't know off the top of my head of any pro deck that allows you to output before the decompression stage. I've heard rumors of a serial port on some units (not the Sony MDS-E12, fwiw) that will do just that, but I don't have model numbers so this is essentially hearsay. And the NetMD won't let you dump a disc that as recorded elsewhere to an ATRAC3(r?) file on your HD.
(Now, if you would've said "Weak copy-protection is built into the spec via SCMS", you would've been right)
If I remember correctly, the response from the *AA each time was basically "Of course that's not what we meant when we wrote the law, and here's our expensive lawyer to explain what we *did* mean."
I'm not holding out much hope for the bnetd case.
This isn't a signature, but a final line to make sure my final line above isn't skipped.
If Taco were to write his own.. well, they'd probably look like these, courtesy of NewsForge.
Why does information want to be free? Why not cupcakes?
By Robin "Roblimo" Miller
Online tech pub The Register merges with Weekly World News
By Robin "Roblimo" Miller
There's Funny, and then there's Not Funny. Too bad Not Funny doesn't own any mirrors.
- Hollywood pays for and introduces ridiculous legislation.
- Legislation gets a head of steam before Joe Consumer hears about it
- Joe Consumer gets pissed off, and actually makes his opinion known
- Hollywood backs off, and says "Okay, okay, we'll modify the legislation to basically make region controls and DMCA-style anti-circumvention measures et al completely legal and eliminate fair-use loopholes..."
- Joe Consumer, seeing "Alphabet Soup Bill defeated in Senate", thinks "We won!" and goes on his merry, fair-use-less, way.
Okay, sure it's far-fetched.Something tells me the "roleplayed a romance with characters of both genders" stat would be quite a bit higher.
To answer your question about decent mics -- if all you're doing is recording meetings, even the cheap-but-good mics at Sound Professionals would probably be overkill. Most of their mics are tiny ("stealth") units that you could easily just toss out on the meeting table, and they're good enough to be able to pick up voices without too much background noise just fine.
Look out, folks. It's time for Limey::Convergence! Now all we need is another freebie proctology tool to connect through our keyboards.. just in time, too, my last one just broke.
Now what would I do with a sig?
"It's not my fault! They told me they fixed it!"
When I was in college (in Michigan, natch) we had a SmartCard Student ID that you could put up to $50 on (on the SmartChip or whatever). Almost nobody used it, though, after having filled it up and then lost it -- that $50 was nonrecoverable, as transient and easier to lose than cash, and extremely easy to use if someone else happened to get it.
The last thing I'd want to have is a SmartCard with my SSN et al.
Imagine what would've happened to Sandra Bullock if she had one ;-)
Syntax highlighting, data dictionary, easy compilation and debugging... what else do you want?
Riight. That would explain, then, why the last concert I attended -- performed by two guitarists in a coffee shop (Peter Mulvey and Erin McKeown, if anyone cares) -- both artists encouraged people to record and spread the show itself, and even went as far as to say "Copy our CDs for your friends. Tell 'em that if they like it, they can pick up their own copy at our websites."
Even ignoring the terminology ("piracy"), it seems that those two starving-artist types are interest in (wait for it..) people hearing their music. What a novel idea. Too bad Hillary will never get it, nor does she want to.
-Tapin (ha-ha!) Muntz.
(Further conclusion: Tapin is an annoying pedant)
It's about forty-five minutes too long; I'm convinced Spielberg simply wanted to emulate Kubrick as much as possible, and therefore threw a nearly nonsensical completely gratuitous and most especially pointless ending on the movie -- nevermind that it takes up nearly a third of the running time. I would've considered it a masterpiece if they would've just rolled credits after Joe hit the "submerge" button.
Does anyone know much about the "Supertoys" short story? I figure I'll go snooping with Google in a bit; but the short story that Wired reprinted at the link in this article doesn't seem complete. A recent issue of Playboy had two short stories by Brian Aldiss that had "Supertoys" names -- did he just write a whole bunch of short stories about David-the-neurotic-robot, or are all of these excerpts from a novel?
So you want a popular vote to determine whether or not to move the planet?
No thanks, I'd rather not have the idiot neighbors on my block deciding on the fate of the world. How about letting "experts" (determination of the rank left as an exercise for the reader) decide instead?
Besides, do you think the rest of the world is about to take voting advice from the United States?
So, did Mr. Bono's ghost have anything to do with this one, too?
"Clearly precludes" my ass. There's no difference between "unlimited protection" and "protection that will expire five years from now, or rather now, I really mean now..."
Oh well.