and for what it is worth, yes I do think a colour, 60GB bluetooth enabled, firewire][ iPod with video out and full support for syncing to iphoto would be the duck's nuts and I'll buy one the instant it comes out.
One by one:
Color: take it or leave it. I think the 'pod should stand alone as a kickass music player, video would be a distraction.
60GB HD: Hell yes. I'm probably going to end up trading in my 10GB when this announcement comes through, the more space the merrier
Bluetooth: For synching contacts and calendar info ONLY, I'd go for it. Hardcore data transmission over bluetooth would be painful. Beside, you've got to plug the damn thing in to charge it anyway. Power over bluetooth, that I'd go for;) A BT headset would be cumbersome - the theoretical max on BT data transfer isn't really sufficient for music and that means you'd need some kind of cumbersome powersource in your headphones. No thanks.
Video Out: meh. No thanks. See above.
iPhoto synching: again, leave it to an Apple-made PDA. Leave to music to the pod.
What I'd love is recording capability - a line-in or Firewire Microphone. THAT I'd seriously drool over. Not that I'm not drooling over the prospects of next week now anyway...:)
Possibly planning a bomb attack, yes. But one witness to it has repeatedly fooled the authorities and the other has recanted his testimony. Ari Fleischer said it wasn't a plot, more like "loose talk."
Regardless, Padilla is being held without charges in a military brig. His case started the same way - being held as a material witness for some unnamed crime. I don't care if he planned to blow up the entire country, he's got rights, and being held without the ability to see a lawyer and without being charged is a violation of those rights.
And finally, Padilla was supposedly in on a plan to plant a "Dirty Bomb" somewhere in the 'states. That's not much of an explosive, it's a radiation hazard. Just to get your facts straight.
Sound familiar to anyone else? Oh yeah, there was the case of Jose Padilla, an american citizen who was being held as a 'material witness' to some unknown crime, prevented from seeing his lawyer (violating the write of habeas corpus)transferred to a military brig outside Charleston, SC as an 'enemy combatant' and has yet to be charged with a crime.
Ain't it great when the government starts repeating itself?
geez Pudge, you could at least credit Macslash somewhere in your articles when they beat you to the punch by a whole friggin' week. Your headlines are eerily similar too.
don't know how related this is really, but I just got an email about this in my inbox this morning. This is the meat of it, and the emphasis is mine
To: The Staff of The New York Public Library
Re: A Possible New Round of Budget Reductions
As you probably read or heard in the local media, the New York City Office of Management and Budget has sent a notice to all agencies receiving City operating support indicating the possibility of a new round of budget reductions.
If their talks do not produce the savings the City is seeking, we have been told that our reduction will be another 3.5% of our City operating support, or $3.6 million. This would come on top of a loss already of $19.2 million of our City budget.
I have been asked to let the Office of Management and Budget know what the impact of this reduction would be on our Library system. My reply to OMB is that a total loss of $22.8 million--$3.5 million plus $19.2 million--would force us into a layoff situation, with the possible loss of as many as 110 positions. We would also face serious reductions in our days and hours of operation.
(insert placating paragraph here)
Of all the city services to cut, they decide to cut funding to the libraries? That seem a little nuts to anyone else?
I don't know if this is a prediction or a hopw, but I imagine broadband prices dropping to something affordable - 50 bucks a month cuts a whole lot of people off from the true advantages of the 'net - always on connections, automatic system updates, information on demand, movie trailers and the like. I pay $5 a month now for dialup, I see no reason why cheap broadband isn't too far in the future as well.
Even better anecdote: Do you remember when you could smoke in Burger Kings? Remember those gaudy gold ashtrays with the logo stamped into the bottom? I need to hit a Greenwich village junk store and see if I can find some of those.:)
B Daltons is still around, though, just serving a different audience.
B. Dalton's is also owned by...guess who? Barnes and Noble, thank you for playing. BN bought 'em and kept 'em around to serve as their shopping mall/mass transit hub (like Union Station, Wash. DC) outlet.
I've actually tried this (burning to CD, reencoding to MP3) and it's completely unlistenable - it's so distorted it's incomprehensible. Why I'll leave up to the experts.
The point isn't to make copying impossible, it's to make it too difficult for joe-user.
Go listen to Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, A Love Supreme, or (gasp) almost any symphony from what the modern industry calls the "classical" genre, and you'll see that an 'album' doesn't have to be a collection of bad songs with a few hits thrown on there.
I'll bite.
What you're talking about is a song cycle, essentially. You want everything to be related on a disc. So do I. But the idea that the concept of the "Album as album" rather than "album as collection" has been dead for 50 years is utterly wrong.
Ben Folds Five: Whatever and Ever, Amen
Elvis Costello: The Juliet Letters
Shawn Colvin: Sonny Came Home
Great Big Sea: Turn
Toad the Wet Sprocket: Dulcinea
Jude: No One Is Really Beautiful
Ok, so most music now sucks. Fine. But if what you're looking for are stories, I really don't think you're looking very hard.
Oh, and a really easy way to make any set of songs jive together is to pick up a live recording, preferably of one concert instead of a tour. The track linkage could be literally anything, even the mood the audience was in on a particular night.
ClearChannel Communications (my current nemesis of choice) has such a strong foothold in NYC it's scary. Want to listen to the radio? Most of the radio stations are run by clearchannel. See a show? They own broadway theaters. See a concert? Irving Plaza and Roseland (among others) are run by clearchannel. Avoid all that and take a walk? They own a good portion of the billboards. Take the subway instead? Sorry, the advertising in the subways (including the new digital billboards cropping up around certain subway lines) goes through them too.
Gives a new meaning to the word "Tentacle," don't it?
Triv
(It's not as scary as what I saw a few months ago, though - a Post Office truck with a big honkin' Microsoft MSN ad on the side.)
It's worth noting that among this artist's other works are screenshots of his cluttered Mac desktop [conceptlab.com], used as a "visual medium" for artistic expression.
I wouldn't have a problem with the desktop art piece if it weren't so friggin' abvious that it's a tiled background pattern. You CAN arrange thousands of icons and make it art (use the files like Seurat did, as overlapping pixels) but tiling it is the cheap way out.
I got hit with a definition of adulthood recently that I'm finding hard to shake: I got a promotion from hourly to salaried (go me!) and with that came paperwork. Fine. But one of the forms was a mandatory life insurance form. They wanted to know who my beneficiaries are.
I'm 21 years old. The last thing I was worrying about was who would get the 4% of my paycheck they hold in case I die within the next however many moons.
So, the definition: being an adult is having to seriously think about the wellbeing of someone other than yourself.
(having said that, even with those forms, I'm still fighting back adulthood):)
I'm no technology expect, but I am a musician with some digital music experience, and I'm pretty damn sure that such a thing is impossible.
First off: MIDI signal only sends information on pitch, note duration and attack velocity. Any other information is interpreted by the synthesizer (hard- or software) and produced as sound. It doesn't carry data about sound quality, that's up the the synth.
That said, if you play a melody into your imagined setup there has to be some point where the computer red-flags what you're playing, compares it to a staggeringly huge database of known melodies, markes it as copyrighted and cuts off all signal to your speakers. Problem is, there's no way for midi to measure tempo. I could play the same melody at two different speeds and the note relationship would look the same to the database. Melodies aren't unique, far from it. I could change the chords to anything and have something new.
The problem is one of fuzzy logic and it's a rather nifty catch-22. In order for a piece to be flagged as something you don't have the rights to play, the computer has to be rather lenient in its interpretation of what you're playing (because every live performance of anything will be slightly different). But as soon as that leniency is introduced into the program the results won't be accurate enough to tell for certain.
Besides, all this'll do will bring back the good ol' accoustic instrumentation, and personally, I say go for it.:)
You laugh, but I've seen braille on drive-up ATMs.
Yeah, and it's there for three reasons, one silly, two practical.
The practical reason is that it's cheaper (and/or less complicated) for the companies who make the ATM to only buy one set of buttons. Why bother discriminating between the two?
Also, how can you be sure the person who's driving the car is the same person who's using the ATM?
The silly reason is one of standards - certain things must be handicap-accessable regardless of where they are, like there being wheelchair access to government buildings, social security offices and the like. There are no exceptions to the rule, even if the rule makes no sense under some circumstances.
It reminds me something I read about a town in Jersey that has to employ an elevator inspector even though the town has no elevators.
AOL makes money (ok, attempts to make money) by communicating with to the lowest common denominator, to the crows who don't know what DRM is and won't notice that their downloaded MusicNet files aren't in.mp3 but in.AMN (or whatever) format, that they require a new/AOL-embedded application to read them, and that their creditcard is being charged by the burn.
I wonder what'd happen if someone actually tried to bring hardcore DRM to the Mac? Audible.com comes close but the rights management is completely transparent until you try to burn a file to disk more than once (there are, of course, work-arounds), and they incorporated iTunes integration with apple's help. Anything else I think is pretty much set up to fail (anyone remember liquid audio?)
Another good one had a wizard's battle of giant machines kinda like mechs, but more organic like giant lobster-clawed dealies.
Actually, they were robotic dinosaurs, one piloted by Marvin Mazoola (the gentle alchemist) and the other by his semi-crazed half-brother, Mad Marlin Mazoola (the evil sorcerer). It's part of a dream sequence in the aforementioned "Incredible Adventures of Jack Flanders". Well, sort of a dream sequence - since the whole thing happens in a different dimention, who's to say what's real?
But, yeah, one of my favorite scenes too. I'm kicking myself for not recognizing the wing-ed shadow one tho.
It's not free (and it isn't really what you're talking about) but ZBS Media has been putting out sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas for close to two decades. Their most notable series are the Ruby Series (a film-noir detective set on another planet - I recommend the first one. Oh yeah, and she slows time.:) and Jack Flanders (an inter-dimentional traveller, for lack of a better description. More fantasyish. Check this one.) Both are awsome. They're also completely not-for-profit, so if you like their stuff you can donate at their website.
...you haven't read your own sig recently, have you?
People want to believe they're special. Being on the inside of a deal like this makes 'em feel special. That's all there is to it. Kinda funny actually - we here tend to disregard what the general population thinks about all sorts of stuff and we're usually better for it, except the old rule of "If it's too good to be true..." still holds firm - we know we're special, just like everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
and for what it is worth, yes I do think a colour, 60GB bluetooth enabled, firewire][ iPod with video out and full support for syncing to iphoto would be the duck's nuts and I'll buy one the instant it comes out.
One by one:
Color: take it or leave it. I think the 'pod should stand alone as a kickass music player, video would be a distraction.
60GB HD: Hell yes. I'm probably going to end up trading in my 10GB when this announcement comes through, the more space the merrier
Bluetooth: For synching contacts and calendar info ONLY, I'd go for it. Hardcore data transmission over bluetooth would be painful. Beside, you've got to plug the damn thing in to charge it anyway. Power over bluetooth, that I'd go for ;) A BT headset would be cumbersome - the theoretical max on BT data transfer isn't really sufficient for music and that means you'd need some kind of cumbersome powersource in your headphones. No thanks.
Video Out: meh. No thanks. See above.
iPhoto synching: again, leave it to an Apple-made PDA. Leave to music to the pod.
What I'd love is recording capability - a line-in or Firewire Microphone. THAT I'd seriously drool over. Not that I'm not drooling over the prospects of next week now anyway...:)
Triv
I'm pretty sure he meant vote 'em out of office, not bug people as they vote...
Triv
nono, read it again. He WAS being held as a material witness, he's NOW being held as an enemy combatant.
Possibly planning a bomb attack, yes. But one witness to it has repeatedly fooled the authorities and the other has recanted his testimony. Ari Fleischer said it wasn't a plot, more like "loose talk."
Regardless, Padilla is being held without charges in a military brig. His case started the same way - being held as a material witness for some unnamed crime. I don't care if he planned to blow up the entire country, he's got rights, and being held without the ability to see a lawyer and without being charged is a violation of those rights.
And finally, Padilla was supposedly in on a plan to plant a "Dirty Bomb" somewhere in the 'states. That's not much of an explosive, it's a radiation hazard. Just to get your facts straight.
Triv
Sound familiar to anyone else? Oh yeah, there was the case of Jose Padilla, an american citizen who was being held as a 'material witness' to some unknown crime, prevented from seeing his lawyer (violating the write of habeas corpus)transferred to a military brig outside Charleston, SC as an 'enemy combatant' and has yet to be charged with a crime.
Ain't it great when the government starts repeating itself?
Triv
geez Pudge, you could at least credit Macslash somewhere in your articles when they beat you to the punch by a whole friggin' week. Your headlines are eerily similar too.
Triv
(insert placating paragraph here)
Of all the city services to cut, they decide to cut funding to the libraries? That seem a little nuts to anyone else?
Triv
I don't know if this is a prediction or a hopw, but I imagine broadband prices dropping to something affordable - 50 bucks a month cuts a whole lot of people off from the true advantages of the 'net - always on connections, automatic system updates, information on demand, movie trailers and the like. I pay $5 a month now for dialup, I see no reason why cheap broadband isn't too far in the future as well.
Triv
Even better anecdote: Do you remember when you could smoke in Burger Kings? Remember those gaudy gold ashtrays with the logo stamped into the bottom? I need to hit a Greenwich village junk store and see if I can find some of those. :)
Triv
B Daltons is still around, though, just serving a different audience.
B. Dalton's is also owned by...guess who? Barnes and Noble, thank you for playing. BN bought 'em and kept 'em around to serve as their shopping mall/mass transit hub (like Union Station, Wash. DC) outlet.
Trib
Insite, as in, "to insite a riot," is a real word. I agree with the sentiment, but there's probably a better example of what you're talking about. :)
Triv
I've actually tried this (burning to CD, reencoding to MP3) and it's completely unlistenable - it's so distorted it's incomprehensible. Why I'll leave up to the experts.
The point isn't to make copying impossible, it's to make it too difficult for joe-user.
Triv
Go listen to Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, A Love Supreme, or (gasp) almost any symphony from what the modern industry calls the "classical" genre, and you'll see that an 'album' doesn't have to be a collection of bad songs with a few hits thrown on there.
I'll bite.
What you're talking about is a song cycle, essentially. You want everything to be related on a disc. So do I. But the idea that the concept of the "Album as album" rather than "album as collection" has been dead for 50 years is utterly wrong.
Ben Folds Five: Whatever and Ever, Amen
Elvis Costello: The Juliet Letters
Shawn Colvin: Sonny Came Home
Great Big Sea: Turn
Toad the Wet Sprocket: Dulcinea
Jude: No One Is Really Beautiful
Ok, so most music now sucks. Fine. But if what you're looking for are stories, I really don't think you're looking very hard.
Oh, and a really easy way to make any set of songs jive together is to pick up a live recording, preferably of one concert instead of a tour. The track linkage could be literally anything, even the mood the audience was in on a particular night.
Triv
ever been to New York City?
ClearChannel Communications (my current nemesis of choice) has such a strong foothold in NYC it's scary. Want to listen to the radio? Most of the radio stations are run by clearchannel. See a show? They own broadway theaters. See a concert? Irving Plaza and Roseland (among others) are run by clearchannel. Avoid all that and take a walk? They own a good portion of the billboards. Take the subway instead? Sorry, the advertising in the subways (including the new digital billboards cropping up around certain subway lines) goes through them too.
Gives a new meaning to the word "Tentacle," don't it?
Triv
(It's not as scary as what I saw a few months ago, though - a Post Office truck with a big honkin' Microsoft MSN ad on the side.)
True enough about audible, except they only let you burn each track once. But that's all most of us would need, right? :)
Triv
It's worth noting that among this artist's other works are screenshots of his cluttered Mac desktop [conceptlab.com], used as a "visual medium" for artistic expression.
I wouldn't have a problem with the desktop art piece if it weren't so friggin' abvious that it's a tiled background pattern. You CAN arrange thousands of icons and make it art (use the files like Seurat did, as overlapping pixels) but tiling it is the cheap way out.
Triv
I got hit with a definition of adulthood recently that I'm finding hard to shake: I got a promotion from hourly to salaried (go me!) and with that came paperwork. Fine. But one of the forms was a mandatory life insurance form. They wanted to know who my beneficiaries are.
:)
I'm 21 years old. The last thing I was worrying about was who would get the 4% of my paycheck they hold in case I die within the next however many moons.
So, the definition: being an adult is having to seriously think about the wellbeing of someone other than yourself.
(having said that, even with those forms, I'm still fighting back adulthood)
Triv
I'm no technology expect, but I am a musician with some digital music experience, and I'm pretty damn sure that such a thing is impossible.
:)
First off: MIDI signal only sends information on pitch, note duration and attack velocity. Any other information is interpreted by the synthesizer (hard- or software) and produced as sound. It doesn't carry data about sound quality, that's up the the synth.
That said, if you play a melody into your imagined setup there has to be some point where the computer red-flags what you're playing, compares it to a staggeringly huge database of known melodies, markes it as copyrighted and cuts off all signal to your speakers. Problem is, there's no way for midi to measure tempo. I could play the same melody at two different speeds and the note relationship would look the same to the database. Melodies aren't unique, far from it. I could change the chords to anything and have something new.
The problem is one of fuzzy logic and it's a rather nifty catch-22. In order for a piece to be flagged as something you don't have the rights to play, the computer has to be rather lenient in its interpretation of what you're playing (because every live performance of anything will be slightly different). But as soon as that leniency is introduced into the program the results won't be accurate enough to tell for certain.
Besides, all this'll do will bring back the good ol' accoustic instrumentation, and personally, I say go for it.
Triv
You laugh, but I've seen braille on drive-up ATMs.
Yeah, and it's there for three reasons, one silly, two practical.
The practical reason is that it's cheaper (and/or less complicated) for the companies who make the ATM to only buy one set of buttons. Why bother discriminating between the two?
Also, how can you be sure the person who's driving the car is the same person who's using the ATM?
The silly reason is one of standards - certain things must be handicap-accessable regardless of where they are, like there being wheelchair access to government buildings, social security offices and the like. There are no exceptions to the rule, even if the rule makes no sense under some circumstances.
It reminds me something I read about a town in Jersey that has to employ an elevator inspector even though the town has no elevators.
Triv
AOL makes money (ok, attempts to make money) by communicating with to the lowest common denominator, to the crows who don't know what DRM is and won't notice that their downloaded MusicNet files aren't in .mp3 but in .AMN (or whatever) format, that they require a new/AOL-embedded application to read them, and that their creditcard is being charged by the burn.
I wonder what'd happen if someone actually tried to bring hardcore DRM to the Mac? Audible.com comes close but the rights management is completely transparent until you try to burn a file to disk more than once (there are, of course, work-arounds), and they incorporated iTunes integration with apple's help. Anything else I think is pretty much set up to fail (anyone remember liquid audio?)
Triv
29.95 for 3 CDs, dippy. did you READ it?
The $55 dramas are the most expensive - "Moon over morocco" shipped on 7 casettes originally, probably the same number of CDs.
:)
The "Ruby" series are much shorter and cheaper - Ruby I comes on three discs and costs $30ish.
Ya get what you pay for in this one, and as I said, they're completely Not-For-Profit - they've gotta get the cash somewhere.
Triv
Another good one had a wizard's battle of giant machines kinda like mechs, but more organic like giant lobster-clawed dealies.
Actually, they were robotic dinosaurs, one piloted by Marvin Mazoola (the gentle alchemist) and the other by his semi-crazed half-brother, Mad Marlin Mazoola (the evil sorcerer). It's part of a dream sequence in the aforementioned "Incredible Adventures of Jack Flanders". Well, sort of a dream sequence - since the whole thing happens in a different dimention, who's to say what's real?
But, yeah, one of my favorite scenes too. I'm kicking myself for not recognizing the wing-ed shadow one tho.
Triv
It's not free (and it isn't really what you're talking about) but ZBS Media has been putting out sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas for close to two decades. Their most notable series are the Ruby Series (a film-noir detective set on another planet - I recommend the first one. Oh yeah, and she slows time. :) and Jack Flanders (an inter-dimentional traveller, for lack of a better description. More fantasyish. Check this one.) Both are awsome. They're also completely not-for-profit, so if you like their stuff you can donate at their website.
Enjoy.
Triv
...you haven't read your own sig recently, have you?
People want to believe they're special. Being on the inside of a deal like this makes 'em feel special. That's all there is to it. Kinda funny actually - we here tend to disregard what the general population thinks about all sorts of stuff and we're usually better for it, except the old rule of "If it's too good to be true..." still holds firm - we know we're special, just like everybody else.
Triv