I'd rather download tracks at no cost that, after X number of times, gradually become low quality; e.g. the vocalist starts to sing out of tune, the drummer is off by a beat, etc. If it's classical music, the solo violinist could start to sound screechy and out of tune. And so forth. The same concept could be applied to video, by the way; that pretty star suddenly develops warts and a raspy voice. Fred Astaire starts tripping and falling on stage as the audience hoots and throws garbage.
The college market for music is huge, and these are the people who grew up with computers, Napster, etc. For sure they will notice copy protection. Perhaps not the C-average H.S. barely-grads who will be beauticians, waiters, civil servants etc., but even they are probably more computer literate than than the older generation and use IM, cell phones, and cool portable CD players.
I think people will keep on buying CDs but the overall value of CDs will go down as the inconvenience factor increases.
How, exactly, will they do this? By using encrypted XSL? It seems to me that once they move from closed format binary files to standards based textual files it becomes easier to "crack" the format. Based on my cursory reading of the information available, I think XDoc is a good idea and represents a positive trend. All data should be xml-based these days, where feasible.
As for the PDF issue, last I knew PDF is a proprietary standard that costs money to license. I'm not sure why things like ps2pdf exist as free linux utilities, though I'm sure glad they do; I guess Adobe wants their formats to be world standards. Also, it's really easy to view PDF documents in a browser, and usually the plug-in is bundled; it's such a no-brainer to use that PDF as a de facto standard will likely remain so for years. The fact that Word doesn't have a (built in) Save As PDF doesn't seem to have slowed them down too much.
I suspect Adobe's bread and butter products are mainly Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Pagemaker, PhotoDeluxe (which is usually a bundled freebie so they probably get about $10/copy), and their web design tools. They have little competition in the WinTel market for Photoshop and Pagemaker and they have a strong presense on the Mac side as well. I don't think Adobe's going away any time soon.
One can only hope that the US gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order.
One can only hope that the EU gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order.
And oh by the way, let's not see any more Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Schroders, anti-Semitism, racism, skinheads, anti-immigrant violence, football hooligans, subsidizing of unprofitable and uncompetitive industries, anti-Americanism, lazy unions, tolerance of Islamic terror groups, and... oh, nevermind!
Yeah, I agree with you. The telemarketing companies are scum, but the drones who work at the call centers are "just doing their job", annoying though it may be.
That's why it's better to simply waste their time than to scream and abuse them; the telemarketer gets paid by the hour as well as by commission, so you're not hurting them too much, and you're wasting their employer's time and money.
Having said that, my time is precious to me and I always just politely request to be added to the no-call list; they say OK and have a nice day, I say you too, and we're done within 20 seconds or so.
There are lots of guerilla tactics to hurt telemarketers where it counts. Time is money to them, as the CNN article rightly points out. So waste their time as much as possible; every minute probably stops them from bothering maybe 10 more people.
Express great interest in their product and make them explain all the options in detail. Pretending you are hard of hearing or your phone's out of whack helps in this regard.
Bring them to the point of taking your credit card number, then go looking for the card. About every 30 seconds, tell them you are still looking--was it in my purse? No, on my desk? No, darn it where did I put it? Maybe I can find an old statement and just read you the number? The telemarketer is by this time salivating for the sale and will put up with this for quite a long time.
Pretend you have just ordered a competing product with superior features, and force them to defend their product. They surely have a script for this, but if you keep making up more features you will eventually wear them out and make them put their supervisor on the line. Whenever this happens, you should insist on talking to the original telemarketer, since supervisors have more power to terminate a conversation.
There are all the usual tactics that have been covered on/. and other forums ad nauseum (see Jim Florentine's website, Tom Mabe's website, and AntiTelemarketer.com. You can act mentally retarted, or cough uncontrollably, or chew loudly during a dinner hour call, or mix intelligent statements with meaningless babble to throw them off the script.
Actually, I think it's pretty well written, considering that Rickard's from Sweden. In fact, his English is so idiomatically good you were fooled into thinking he's a typical semi-literate American, haha!
I read both articles and it seems to me that Rickard Öberg raised some valid objections. Your assertion that "At worst, some of the stuff TMC said is open for interpretation and debate" seems a bit understated.
I would like to see him quantify his LOC statements; what is "a lot"? If the excessive code in the J2EE version accounts for at least 70% of the difference, then I'd say Middleware's LOC comparison is completely discredited. If it's only 10-20% then the comparison should stand.
More importantly, if the J2EE version was coded poorly and the.NET version was coded well, then the tests are invalid, pure and simple. Indeed, if it's true that Microsoft paid Middleware Co. to do the work, that's enough reason to suspect bias. It's like asking a political candidate whom to vote for.
Well, you've touched on a very good point. Communities that want to encourage local business should offer a tax break to new stores and factories until they are profitable. That's just common sense. Jobs are a lot better than sales tax. Jobs foster safe, stable communities. Jobs translate into income tax, excise tax, property tax, capital gains tax, etc. etc. Once a business is profitable, it's paying corporate income tax, property tax, licensing fees, etc. etc. It's not like anyone's getting a free ride, including e-tailers.
This whole idea of taxing e-business transactions makes no sense. E-Tailers are not comparable to retail shops, as many in this discussion have already pointed out. The only point of taxing e-businesses would be to protect stores. I'm sure the Europeans will go down this road, because they are very protective of their small stores.
However the U.S. would be better advised to let the market evolve in the most efficient manner. Maybe it will result in loss of employment in local communities; that's an unfortunate but necessary side effect of economic development. They'll somehow be employed doing something else in the future, just as the buggy whip and horse saddle makers did.
You call that person a moron and then you go on to espouse this tribal mentality. Rather intolerant, aren't we now. Fine, so move to a nice little tribal society, perhaps in some part of Africa, and stick your head in the sand and the rest of us won't have to carry the burden of defending your right to speak freely. You'll be happier too. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get on with the business of living in the modern world and, perhaps, attempting to improve it a bit.
"Can you really justify not giving the poor people of California, Massachusetts, and Virginia the food stamps and Section 8 housing checks they so richly deserve?"
Tongue in cheek here, methinks. Yet, the states are approaching this with a completely straight face; they would say you are exactly right. Having squandered their huge surpluses during the boom years on pork barrel spending, they are now looking to save their own jobs by attacking a sector that has no political voice in their locale.
Most online merchants are not profitable, investors have stopped buying their stock, and the economy is in recession. It's both stupid and crazy to levy new taxes right now, and unfortunately it's all too likely to pass, if the Demos can get their way. Of course they'll then find a way to blame the resulting destruction of tech businesses and related tech infrastructure companies on GW Bush.
Probably they made a strategic decision to pump up Linux to further annoy Microsoft. It's all revenge for OS/2, and of course anything that hurts Microsoft at this point is good for IBM (not to mention the rest of the industry).
Yes, and not only that, but it also makes good business sense to make your page as accessible as possible. Does a mail order house really wish to cut off a couple million sight-impaired people just because the web designer couldn't be bothered to put in ALT tags and maintain a plain text, non-Flash version?
Anyway this should be in the "duh" category, similar to not holding hot coffee between your legs, and should not merit a lawsuit. Mandating a mechanical compliance with an arbitrary, catch-all law is the bad way; educating the public to understand the advantages of accessibility is the good way.
Will the casual Linux user (people running it as a browser/email/word processor desktop at home or whatever) be able to take advantage of this or is it a hacker's domain? I'd love to receive radio directly, and even record some programs to hard disk occasionally.
Granola? That sugar-filled, grain-heavy junk food?
Granola has long since been discredited as a health food; anti-oxidant fruits like purple grapes, green algae, and tofu are the correct breakfast food for berkeley commune linux nuts these days.
What's it going to be like when internet2 is pervasive? When every home is wired with fiber optics for 100 Mb net access, or 1000 Mb access or whatever? You will be able to download the equivalent of a present day CD in a few seconds. You will have a handheld with 100s of gigabytes of storage and, thanks to BlueTooth Rev. 17, you'll be able to beam an entire movie at DVD quality to a friend's handheld in a matter of seconds.
In this future world, perhaps about five to ten years from now, how on earth will RIAA prevent music and video piracy? It seems doubtful that drm initiatives will succeed; people have an enormous incentive to bypass it, and as bandwidth increases, that incentive will only grow.
I think eventually we'll have to come to some sort of compromise between the content producers, marketers, and consumers, and settle on some sort of "reasonable fair use" doctrine as once existed with cassettes and VCRs.
Microsoft is that big. They have $18 billion in the bank. They can buy their customers. They can buy top programmers. They influence the guys in suits. They're still the monopoly.
Every competitor to Microsoft has withered on the vine, poisoned by its own hubris. Lotus, Borland, Novell, Wordperfect, Corel--they all made strategic blunders, alienated their users, gave MS the opening it needed to eat their lunch. Oracle is heading that way. A few more releases of SQL Server, and maybe bundling the SQL Server engine in the NT operating system, and Oracle will dwindle into insignificance.
If it makes you feel better, I use Linux in my home office and would never go back to windows. However, when the titans that are supporting Linux are looking a little shaky, the writing's on the wall.
Linux has a crack at being an enterprise operating system; I just hope it can gather enough momentum before it's too late.
I'm not so sure MS can't win over open source. Consider that a lot of open source work is contributed by commercial software companies (Oracle, IBM, many others). As MS methodically stamps out their competition they are eliminating the commercially supported entities that have helped fund and extend Linux into a threat to Windows.
Ultimately MS will probably kill Oracle, Borland, and a few others. In doing so, they will eliminate thousands of software engineering jobs which enable people to write open source software in their spare time. They'll all be flipping burgers and presto! only MS will have programmers.
A slow economy usually causes people to indulge in more entertainment, not less, to escape grim reality. One would therefore expect that from Sept 11 2001 until now, entertainment receipts would have risen dramatically. Movies seem to be doing OK. Music, not so OK. It's not clear why. But, it's clear that using the economy as a cause of music sales decline is not a very compelling argument. One would expect the opposite.
Blaming p2p is an emotional argument, not a logical one. RIAA sees it happening, and they have an instant scapegoat. In reality, music lovers who are computer literate use p2p to expand their musical horizons effortlessly. How does this hurt the music industry in the long term? I know of teens who have developed a taste for classical chamber music because of p2p, and 40-somethings like myself who have dabbled in pop music just to catch up a bit. Neither group is likely to go out and pay $16-18 for the CDs in question without even a way to hear them (those of us without teen kids at least).
Bricklin's point that CD prices actually increased since 1996 seems more relevant. Even as prices rose, alternative and "free" ways were found to obtain the exact same music at nearly CD quality. Of course, "free" is relative; you still need hundreds of dollars worth of equipment (computers, burners, MP3 portables) to take advantage of "free" downloads, and if you do a lot of file transfers at home, you are probably paying at least $40/month for broadband access.
Maybe all these poor suffering music companies should get into the broadband business and invest in CD-ROMs, MP3 players, etc. I mean, get with the growth sector. All those leather saddle makers in 1895 switched, if they had any intelligence, to automobile upholstery. The rest ended up in the soup kitchen line. Tough luck; that's capitalism and progress.
LIndows boots up, runs a decent browser and word processor and probably never crashes. The fact that it's not the best distro out there is probably irrelevant here. People aren't that stupid; if they hear they can d/l stuff for free they're not gonna pay the $99. A few will but word will get around. One hopes the Walmart clerks will have the sense to warn their customers about this, if nothing else.
As you point out Lindows is doing something else really important--getting pre-installed. Why don't RH and the others try a little harder in this arena? If someone sold a decent Linux laptop I'd buy it in a minute (would have--got a COmpaq with XP on it and am still configuring Linux).
if it's for hourly contracting work, the contract is entirely negotiable; I regularly strike clauses that I don't like, and they expect me to do so. They put'em in knowing the savvy, experienced contractor is going to object. It's a sort of game. (sigh) what happened to doing business on a handshake?
This kind of work has been done for about 25 years at The Monroe Institute in Virginia, USA. They have a number of recordings of brain synchronization tones available for sale that induce sleep, deep trance states, and encourage self-awareness in various ways.
Some of them come with voice overlays to encourage the user to have certain kinds of insights and experiences. It's great to see this kind of research becoming more mainstream; there's a lot of potential for helping kids with ADD, insomniacs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather download tracks at no cost that, after X number of times, gradually become low quality; e.g. the vocalist starts to sing out of tune, the drummer is off by a beat, etc. If it's classical music, the solo violinist could start to sound screechy and out of tune. And so forth. The same concept could be applied to video, by the way; that pretty star suddenly develops warts and a raspy voice. Fred Astaire starts tripping and falling on stage as the audience hoots and throws garbage.
The college market for music is huge, and these are the people who grew up with computers, Napster, etc. For sure they will notice copy protection. Perhaps not the C-average H.S. barely-grads who will be beauticians, waiters, civil servants etc., but even they are probably more computer literate than than the older generation and use IM, cell phones, and cool portable CD players.
I think people will keep on buying CDs but the overall value of CDs will go down as the inconvenience factor increases.
How, exactly, will they do this? By using encrypted XSL? It seems to me that once they move from closed format binary files to standards based textual files it becomes easier to "crack" the format. Based on my cursory reading of the information available, I think XDoc is a good idea and represents a positive trend. All data should be xml-based these days, where feasible.
As for the PDF issue, last I knew PDF is a proprietary standard that costs money to license. I'm not sure why things like ps2pdf exist as free linux utilities, though I'm sure glad they do; I guess Adobe wants their formats to be world standards. Also, it's really easy to view PDF documents in a browser, and usually the plug-in is bundled; it's such a no-brainer to use that PDF as a de facto standard will likely remain so for years. The fact that Word doesn't have a (built in) Save As PDF doesn't seem to have slowed them down too much.
I suspect Adobe's bread and butter products are mainly Photoshop and, to a lesser extent, Pagemaker, PhotoDeluxe (which is usually a bundled freebie so they probably get about $10/copy), and their web design tools. They have little competition in the WinTel market for Photoshop and Pagemaker and they have a strong presense on the Mac side as well. I don't think Adobe's going away any time soon.
One can only hope that the US gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order.
One can only hope that the EU gets its act together, ousts the corrupt political system and law system and recreates justice and order.
And oh by the way, let's not see any more Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Schroders, anti-Semitism, racism, skinheads, anti-immigrant violence, football hooligans, subsidizing of unprofitable and uncompetitive industries, anti-Americanism, lazy unions, tolerance of Islamic terror groups, and... oh, nevermind!
Kick the habit! No more Saudi Arabian oil!
If half the cars in the U.S. were hybrids, the U.S. would probably be a net oil exporter.
Yeah, I agree with you. The telemarketing companies are scum, but the drones who work at the call centers are "just doing their job", annoying though it may be.
That's why it's better to simply waste their time than to scream and abuse them; the telemarketer gets paid by the hour as well as by commission, so you're not hurting them too much, and you're wasting their employer's time and money.
Having said that, my time is precious to me and I always just politely request to be added to the no-call list; they say OK and have a nice day, I say you too, and we're done within 20 seconds or so.
There are lots of guerilla tactics to hurt telemarketers where it counts. Time is money to them, as the CNN article rightly points out. So waste their time as much as possible; every minute probably stops them from bothering maybe 10 more people.
/. and other forums ad nauseum (see Jim Florentine's website, Tom Mabe's website, and AntiTelemarketer.com. You can act mentally retarted, or cough uncontrollably, or chew loudly during a dinner hour call, or mix intelligent statements with meaningless babble to throw them off the script.
Express great interest in their product and make them explain all the options in detail. Pretending you are hard of hearing or your phone's out of whack helps in this regard.
Bring them to the point of taking your credit card number, then go looking for the card. About every 30 seconds, tell them you are still looking--was it in my purse? No, on my desk? No, darn it where did I put it? Maybe I can find an old statement and just read you the number? The telemarketer is by this time salivating for the sale and will put up with this for quite a long time.
Pretend you have just ordered a competing product with superior features, and force them to defend their product. They surely have a script for this, but if you keep making up more features you will eventually wear them out and make them put their supervisor on the line. Whenever this happens, you should insist on talking to the original telemarketer, since supervisors have more power to terminate a conversation.
There are all the usual tactics that have been covered on
Have fun!
Actually, I think it's pretty well written, considering that Rickard's from Sweden. In fact, his English is so idiomatically good you were fooled into thinking he's a typical semi-literate American, haha!
I read both articles and it seems to me that Rickard Öberg raised some valid objections. Your assertion that "At worst, some of the stuff TMC said is open for interpretation and debate" seems a bit understated.
.NET version was coded well, then the tests are invalid, pure and simple. Indeed, if it's true that Microsoft paid Middleware Co. to do the work, that's enough reason to suspect bias. It's like asking a political candidate whom to vote for.
I would like to see him quantify his LOC statements; what is "a lot"? If the excessive code in the J2EE version accounts for at least 70% of the difference, then I'd say Middleware's LOC comparison is completely discredited. If it's only 10-20% then the comparison should stand.
More importantly, if the J2EE version was coded poorly and the
Well, you've touched on a very good point. Communities that want to encourage local business should offer a tax break to new stores and factories until they are profitable. That's just common sense. Jobs are a lot better than sales tax. Jobs foster safe, stable communities. Jobs translate into income tax, excise tax, property tax, capital gains tax, etc. etc. Once a business is profitable, it's paying corporate income tax, property tax, licensing fees, etc. etc. It's not like anyone's getting a free ride, including e-tailers.
This whole idea of taxing e-business transactions makes no sense. E-Tailers are not comparable to retail shops, as many in this discussion have already pointed out. The only point of taxing e-businesses would be to protect stores. I'm sure the Europeans will go down this road, because they are very protective of their small stores.
However the U.S. would be better advised to let the market evolve in the most efficient manner. Maybe it will result in loss of employment in local communities; that's an unfortunate but necessary side effect of economic development. They'll somehow be employed doing something else in the future, just as the buggy whip and horse saddle makers did.
You call that person a moron and then you go on to espouse this tribal mentality. Rather intolerant, aren't we now. Fine, so move to a nice little tribal society, perhaps in some part of Africa, and stick your head in the sand and the rest of us won't have to carry the burden of defending your right to speak freely. You'll be happier too. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get on with the business of living in the modern world and, perhaps, attempting to improve it a bit.
"Can you really justify not giving the poor people of California, Massachusetts, and Virginia the food stamps and Section 8 housing checks they so richly deserve?"
Tongue in cheek here, methinks. Yet, the states are approaching this with a completely straight face; they would say you are exactly right. Having squandered their huge surpluses during the boom years on pork barrel spending, they are now looking to save their own jobs by attacking a sector that has no political voice in their locale.
Most online merchants are not profitable, investors have stopped buying their stock, and the economy is in recession. It's both stupid and crazy to levy new taxes right now, and unfortunately it's all too likely to pass, if the Demos can get their way. Of course they'll then find a way to blame the resulting destruction of tech businesses and related tech infrastructure companies on GW Bush.
Probably they made a strategic decision to pump up Linux to further annoy Microsoft. It's all revenge for OS/2, and of course anything that hurts Microsoft at this point is good for IBM (not to mention the rest of the industry).
Yes, and not only that, but it also makes good business sense to make your page as accessible as possible. Does a mail order house really wish to cut off a couple million sight-impaired people just because the web designer couldn't be bothered to put in ALT tags and maintain a plain text, non-Flash version?
Anyway this should be in the "duh" category, similar to not holding hot coffee between your legs, and should not merit a lawsuit. Mandating a mechanical compliance with an arbitrary, catch-all law is the bad way; educating the public to understand the advantages of accessibility is the good way.
Will the casual Linux user (people running it as a browser/email/word processor desktop at home or whatever) be able to take advantage of this or is it a hacker's domain? I'd love to receive radio directly, and even record some programs to hard disk occasionally.
Granola? That sugar-filled, grain-heavy junk food?
Granola has long since been discredited as a health food; anti-oxidant fruits like purple grapes, green algae, and tofu are the correct breakfast food for berkeley commune linux nuts these days.
What's it going to be like when internet2 is pervasive? When every home is wired with fiber optics for 100 Mb net access, or 1000 Mb access or whatever? You will be able to download the equivalent of a present day CD in a few seconds. You will have a handheld with 100s of gigabytes of storage and, thanks to BlueTooth Rev. 17, you'll be able to beam an entire movie at DVD quality to a friend's handheld in a matter of seconds.
In this future world, perhaps about five to ten years from now, how on earth will RIAA prevent music and video piracy? It seems doubtful that drm initiatives will succeed; people have an enormous incentive to bypass it, and as bandwidth increases, that incentive will only grow.
I think eventually we'll have to come to some sort of compromise between the content producers, marketers, and consumers, and settle on some sort of "reasonable fair use" doctrine as once existed with cassettes and VCRs.
Microsoft is that big. They have $18 billion in the bank. They can buy their customers. They can buy top programmers. They influence the guys in suits. They're still the monopoly.
Every competitor to Microsoft has withered on the vine, poisoned by its own hubris. Lotus, Borland, Novell, Wordperfect, Corel--they all made strategic blunders, alienated their users, gave MS the opening it needed to eat their lunch. Oracle is heading that way. A few more releases of SQL Server, and maybe bundling the SQL Server engine in the NT operating system, and Oracle will dwindle into insignificance.
If it makes you feel better, I use Linux in my home office and would never go back to windows. However, when the titans that are supporting Linux are looking a little shaky, the writing's on the wall.
Linux has a crack at being an enterprise operating system; I just hope it can gather enough momentum before it's too late.
I'm not so sure MS can't win over open source. Consider that a lot of open
source work is contributed by commercial software companies (Oracle, IBM, many
others). As MS methodically stamps out their competition they are eliminating
the commercially supported entities that have helped fund and extend Linux into
a threat to Windows.
Ultimately MS will probably kill Oracle, Borland, and a few others. In doing
so, they will eliminate thousands of software engineering jobs which enable
people to write open source software in their spare time. They'll all be
flipping burgers and presto! only MS will have programmers.
It's a grim picture, actually.
A slow economy usually causes people to indulge in more entertainment, not less, to escape grim reality. One would therefore expect that from Sept 11 2001 until now, entertainment receipts would have risen dramatically. Movies seem to be doing OK. Music, not so OK. It's not clear why. But, it's clear that using the economy as a cause of music sales decline is not a very compelling argument. One would expect the opposite.
Blaming p2p is an emotional argument, not a logical one. RIAA sees it happening, and they have an instant scapegoat. In reality, music lovers who are computer literate use p2p to expand their musical horizons effortlessly. How does this hurt the music industry in the long term? I know of teens who have developed a taste for classical chamber music because of p2p, and 40-somethings like myself who have dabbled in pop music just to catch up a bit. Neither group is likely to go out and pay $16-18 for the CDs in question without even a way to hear them (those of us without teen kids at least).
Bricklin's point that CD prices actually increased since 1996 seems more relevant. Even as prices rose, alternative and "free" ways were found to obtain the exact same music at nearly CD quality. Of course, "free" is relative; you still need hundreds of dollars worth of equipment (computers, burners, MP3 portables) to take advantage of "free" downloads, and if you do a lot of file transfers at home, you are probably paying at least $40/month for broadband access.
Maybe all these poor suffering music companies should get into the broadband business and invest in CD-ROMs, MP3 players, etc. I mean, get with the growth sector. All those leather saddle makers in 1895 switched, if they had any intelligence, to automobile upholstery. The rest ended up in the soup kitchen line. Tough luck; that's capitalism and progress.
Lexmark's low end Postscript printers are advertized as Linux compatible. check out www.lexmark.com for latest models. I love my 320.
LIndows boots up, runs a decent browser and word processor and probably never crashes. The fact that it's not the best distro out there is probably irrelevant here. People aren't that stupid; if they hear they can d/l stuff for free they're not gonna pay the $99. A few will but word will get around. One hopes the Walmart clerks will have the sense to warn their customers about this, if nothing else.
As you point out Lindows is doing something else really important--getting pre-installed. Why don't RH and the others try a little harder in this arena? If someone sold a decent Linux laptop I'd buy it in a minute (would have--got a COmpaq with XP on it and am still configuring Linux).
> I could only reply, "She's still dead."
You're just quoting the mother of the murdered girl. This entire post sounds like a troll to me. Doesn't deserve "interesting" mod, that's for sure.
if it's for hourly contracting work, the contract is entirely negotiable; I regularly strike clauses that I don't like, and they expect me to do so. They put'em in knowing the savvy, experienced contractor is going to object. It's a sort of game. (sigh)
what happened to doing business on a handshake?
This kind of work has been done for about 25 years at The Monroe Institute in Virginia, USA. They have a number of recordings of brain synchronization tones available for sale that induce sleep, deep trance states, and encourage self-awareness in various ways.
Some of them come with voice overlays to encourage the user to have certain kinds of insights and experiences. It's great to see this kind of research becoming more mainstream; there's a lot of potential for helping kids with ADD, insomniacs, etc.