I cut the DIN 5 connector (old style keyboard) and the PS2 mouse connector (MiniDIN 6) off very old obsolete motherboards.
Then I combine them with a 40 cent microcontroller (AVR Tiny11) to make MIDI tone module controllers from standard PS2 keyboards.
It works really well. Press the keys, notes go on, release keys, notes off. Just like a piano keyboard but smaller and much cheaper. There are, however, certain key combinations that don't play full chords. I'm not sure if it's the internal keyboard matrix decoding or the microcontroller's firmware.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
In America, the amount of punishment has no relation to the amount of damage that your crime has done to people.
For example, if you get caught with ten cents worth of weed, expect to be greatly punished for years. You lose the right to vote, drive, travel, and student loans. Expect the same thing next year if you get caught listening to an MP3 file.
Release a virus that destroys data and rips off thousands of credit card numbers; get probation.
Bankrupt and loot a Fortune 50 major corporation, transfer the funds offshore, destroy the pensions and life savings of thousands of employees, and our president will give you the Medal of Freedom.
One of the interesting side effects of the information age is that it is no longer possible to judge a correspondent's quality by the number of spelling and grammar mistakes made in their writing. Until recently, it was common to do so.
However, now, it simply means that the linkage between the spelling and grammar checker is faulty on the writer's computer. Or they forgot to use a spelling and grammar checker. Or it's too slow or not seamlessly integrated into the operating system. Or it's set to a wrong language translator.
Linux will finally be accepted and embraced by the computer user community when we can do these things much better than Windows. All this other legal and technical stuff is just a distraction by the obsessive/compulsive lawyers and software engineers to impede us from creating truly useful and functionally powerful solutions to software problems.
So remember, run your stuff through a spell and grammar checker.
If (and I suspect that is a big if) Google is forced to comply with this extortion on the part of the French government, then Google should absolutely refuse to allow of their search engine or advertising services to anyone accessing their site from a.fr domain.
What the French government doesn't quite seem to understand is that, in the information age, France is just another brand. And, a minor legacy historical empire one at that. Notwithstanding the fact that the government of France is the king of all shit in the hexagon of land between Germany and Spain, Atlantic, and Mediteranian. And fully recognizing that France is the mother of western civilization and the primal definer of the good life, outside of France the French government doesn't amount to much. Attention, mes amis, don't put yourselves in the position of forcing us to choose between Google and France. You won't be happy with the results. We like France; we need Google. We don't particularily need or like Louis Vitton company or their rich parasitic customers.
A real question for the future is IF the waters around the large North American Arctic islands melt, will this new navigitable passage be international waters or Canadian territorial waters?
A global warming pattern could open a passage between Europe and Asia across northern Canada and north of Alaska. The question is could Canada regulate hazardous materials or the size of ships or collect tolls for passage between Canadian islands from these ships?
Six hundred years ago, the Arctic was warmer. The Chinese record sailing from Greenland to China across the northern coast of Russia that is today locked almost always in ice. This was from 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about Chinese explorations in the early 1400's.
Flagrant, organized, and large scale willful copyrignt infringement.
Free offshore (from Japan to 'gai'-land) marketing and product modification, coupled with a total and complete lack of business ability to profit from these free services given to them.
Without any hint of Orwellian irony, let me remind everyone that the RIAA actually does own all music.
They have enough legal resources to prove that anything you have written has been written before, is copyrighted, and was unconsciously copied into your so-called composition. It doesn't matter that you wrote it, they still already own it.
If it's music, they own it. They own all music.
And with the new American system of infinite copyright renewal, they own everything forever.
The point is, you can not win a legal argument in a totally corrupt legal environment unless you have more money than your opponent.
And the RIAA has a lot of money since the consolidation of the world's entire entertainment industry into five global media corporations.
The only way that you can meet your cultural needs and obligations in this new climate is to be so uncool, so dorky, so unprofitable that the merchants of cool will avoid you and your culture lest your dorkiness rub off on them and affect their personal coolness standing in corporate matrix.
I bet you think that I'm kidding!
But don't worry. As a Slashdot reader, you are so dorky and uncool that it is unlikely that your cultural activities will be noticed by the copyright cops.
If you want to protect your cultural identity, then don't dream of selling it to the A&R man watching your gig from the corner.
Many Young People Never have used Typewriters
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I sometimes get the opportunity to talk to younger people, 23 and younger. I'll often ask if they have used certain technologies that older people take for granted but are hardly around anymore.
About half of the people in my little poll have used a typewriter, if just briefly. Many say that they tried it for a while when their parents pulled down their old college typewriter from the closet. Many people are impressed by the typewriter's feel and musically polyrythmic possiblities. No one would attempt to do any serious writing on it.
The whole question of keyboard layout is somewhat quaint anyway. We should be talking to our PCs. Voice recognition software is stuck in a legal limbo, due to Dragon's bankruptcy problems and IBM's complete and total ineptitude at refining and marketing this innovative technology.
Voice recognition technology is at the same place that mouse and GUI technology was back in 1981. Almost ready to be widely adopted and integrated into PC, but locked down by totally clueless management. Remember the Xerox executive who, after having a tour of Palo Alto Research Center and being shown the Xerox Star (the first GUI PC), remarked, "Boy, you sure get great reception on this thing!".
My complaint about the keyboard is that there are far too many keys. Half the keys on the board I never use. The Keypad, the function keys, and all those weird buttons above the function keys that are different on every keyboard but do nothing on any keyboard; who needs this stuff?
Well, I think that these players should have a background MP3 to OGG convertor that runs whenever you listen to an MP3 music file.
It would be selectable on/off of course. When you open a song and listen to it, it also creates an OGG file of the song in the same directory. Then you can delete the MP3 file, again selectable for background operation.
This would facilitate the conversion from corporate controlled MP3 to open-source formats. MP3 is a dead-end because anyone who writes an MP3 program exposes themselves to legal harassment.
Fortunately we have a set of good MP3 players and rippers already. But with most of the world's music recordings being converted into digital format at this time, it would be best to get them into a format that isn't subject to legal harassment.
No one is going to convert their MP3 collections to OGG just to avoid possible distant legal patent issues, so this process should be done by code in the MP3 program itself in the background as the song is playing.
Plus the manufacturers of portable digital music players should incorporate OGG playback into their devices. What is it, maybe a thousand bytes of code extra in a firmware chip?
Maybe we should do open-source manufacturing. We do an open-source design of a ASIC that will play compressed digital, put up some funds to get it fabricated, put it into a little box with an audio headphone amp and some flash memory, and sell them ourselves to each other. How about an online Slashdot store that sells fully open-source electronics?
You're the type of guy that picked flowers, played with dolls and brushed their hair, aren't you?
Well, yes, most people named Simonetta pick flowers, have played with dolls and still brush their hair. Few of us are guys.
A very high percentage of people I meet that are like you are homosexual...
Admit it, you don't meet all that many people like us.
To every other realistic, red blooded, meat eating MAN who likes to watch football, drink beer, and look at cheerleaders I say let there be more football games. The more the merrier.
If you haven't already, you might want to check out Denis Leary's album "No Cure For Cancer" (download a few tracks from Kazaa). It's not a whole-grain critique of this mentality, it's an affirmation of its power.
Simonetta lives at - http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeauty/f antasy.htm
Just because EA locked up ESPN branding doesn't mean the others are going to just go away.
Well, yes, they should go away. They should go away and invent a new game that takes full advantage of the computer medium. Some new game that doesn't just copy the experience of watching a television program based on a bunch of guys running around a field and throwing an odd-shaped ball.
A video game based on football is two-degrees of seperation from the participants of the actual game itself. So go away and invent a game that brings the computer player into the game itself.
What type of game is that? I have no idea; I'm not a game designer. But I'm sure that this game will be more profitable and satisfying than anything ESPN does better on live-action television.
There are a lot of people out there who invent games. They would be willing to exchange their concepts for a percentage of the sales receipts. So instead of spending millions developing a video game based on a sport and a brand-name license in which you MUST have millions of sales units for any reasonable profit, make lots of new games with new concepts. Most will die on the vine, but some will really take off. When that happens, the profits for the game company will be much greater per unit because there won't be all the ESPN-license fees and royalities to pay off.
Sort of like how the record industry is supposed to work.
Hello,
If you're interested in 'Classic Rock' let me suggest taking it a step further and learning how to actually play this music on guitar.
Learning guitar is easier now than ever before. Get any guitar and the try searching the web for tablatures of classic rock and pop songs. Most of the best stuff from that era has been written out and posted. I've seen whole web sites explaining how to play every last guitar note in Stairway To Heaven.
Another great way to learn guitar is to download MIDI files of favorite songs. Then get a music notation program like MIDIsoft Studio4 that will display the sheet music from the MIDI file. If you can read music (anyone can learn), you can figure out what all the notes are in the solos and what the chord structures are.
The local public library may have guitar books with CDs inside that show how to play every lick and styles that would take years to figure out on your own.
Look for cheap synths and stomp boxes on eBay. Plastic box stuff like Rocktek and Arion flangers, delays, and distortions sound great and sell for $10-$15.
Also try tuning the strings down one half step or one whole step to D-G-C-F-A-D. Without so much tension on the strings, they are easier to bend which makes it easier to play super-intense lead guitar solos and riffs. A lot of professional metal guitarists do this.
Well, I think part of the problem is...the dearth of good music to come after the bands of the 70's-80's. In the past...music evolved...southern black blues...from those ideas...Elvis, Chuck Berry...older rock and roll led to the rock of the 60's...
One overlooked reason there was such a creative explosion of popular music in the 60's and 70's was that Black (African-American) music had been segragated from white US mainstream music until that time. The Black music tradition had developed for a hundred years since the US Civil War but it was isolated from mainstream white culture (except for a few individual artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and styles like Dixieland Jazz and Ragtime). In the 1960's young white people started actively researching and learning Black music and adapting it to top-40 styles. Plus for the first time there was lots of crossover of Black artists and record companies like Motown to become hugely popular.
By the early 1980's, this source of new musical inspiration had been fully explored and the Black and mainstream white music styles began to split again. Pop music is as segregated now as it was in the 1940's. Few Black artists are mainstream A-list money entertainers in the mostly white music genres (like Country) and even fewer whites are accepted as first-rate artists in the Black genres like Hip-Hop.
Anyway, if you're learning guitar allow me to suggest searching the web for tablatures of classic rock and pop songs. Most of the best stuff from that era has been written out and posted. I've seen whole web sites explaining how to play every last guitar note in Stairway To Heaven.
Another great way to learn guitar is to download MIDI files of favorite songs. Then get a music notation program like MIDIsoft Studio4 that will display the sheet music from the MIDI file. If you can read music (anyone can learn), you can figure out what all the notes are in the solos and what the chord structures are.
The local public library may have guitar books with CDs inside that show how to play every lick and styles that would take years to figure out on your own.
Look for cheap synths and stomp boxes on eBay. Plastic box stuff like Rocktek and Arion flangers, delays, and distortions sound great and sell for $10-$15.
All these stories about how the president of Harvard made statements all come from the same schmuck AP reporter. They are all just being rewritten and recirculated by one news agency to another in a giant media feedback loop.
So where's the transcript of the actual speech?
By the way, most people aren't any good at math, men or women. So what? As long as some people are, and they publish their work, and they are willing to work for money that ordinary people can give them, then what difference does it make?
It's like saying that women can't play music because there have never been any women in the Rolling Stones.
"Mi domando chi è il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio"
What language is it in? I would guess that it's one of those obscure European legacy languages that should have disappeared along with all the 'funny money' when the Euro currency was introduced.
and who is this - Altan?
Links, oh my brothers, links as in href=... are the foundation of our modern civilization. Without links were are all just barbarians, subhumans walking around with plastique wrapped across our chests looking for a pizza shop or a crowded bus in order to show our love for our all-merciful god.
Computer-generated music is bad for music industry because once it becomes an accepted and popular musical trend than anyone can generate their own music by simply downloading the software and running it through a soundcard or 'softSynthesizer'. There will be no need to buy music recordings from global media corporations. The 'globos' would definitely want to avoid this situation. The best situation for the 'globos' is the way things were in the 1960's. Everyone connected to a narrow number of media outlets, everyone developing an emotional connection to a limited number of 'artists' who were all under corporate contract, and total corporate ownership of the disk and media distribution network.
These conditions lead to a generation that has an abnormal emotional attachment to music, especially recordings owned by media corporations.
Those days are gone. Today's youth no longer have an abnormal emotional attachment to music. Young people today are fine.
Celebrate the future. Weep for the emotionally-crippled boomers who will lose their entire life cultural framework as the 'globos' put their music into permanent DRM limbo.
Many people think that bars are horrible places to be in. If you don't like alcohol that much, hate loud, constant, unequalized sound and dark, smelly places, and don't have a lot of money...bars totally suck. People need to develop tiny amplifiers that are the size of paperback books with great sound along with inexpensive but expressive musical instruments and play in coffeeshops and fast-food places late in the evening when they are not busy.
- Instruments can be bought cheaply now on eBay and Craigslist. Music can be learned from the internet and music educational software.
- Basically the global music corporations Do have the legal resources to prove that they 'own' every melody ever written and every story ever told. That's why it's becoming increasing important to develop culture outside of the corporate framework and to continue to build (through file-sharing and 100 gigabyte hard disk swapping) vast individual private libraries of 'pirated' material in order to keep the public domain (which is everything that has been broadcast on a public media like radio and TV) available for ourselves and for future generations.
...most of the art produced in the past was a) not all that original, b) not well motivated (save for keeping the artist fed), and c) forgotten as it got real boring after a while...."
Art in the past was used by the rich as a replacement for today's photographs, by the church to inspire devotion, and by the state to assure loyality to the king. Art in the past was very difficult to do and there weren't that many good artists. Art for art's sake didn't appear until the mid 1800's, the invention of photography, and the rise of the middle-class.
There's nothing wrong with the situation we're in today. In the sense that it's no different from the past, it hasn't really gotten any worse...
The biggest change recently in culture (art, music, etc..) is the concept that a few global corporations can 'own' not only the individual works of art but the underlying ideas, concepts, melodies, and stories as well. This is the long-term result of the transfer of the public domain into corporate ownership that is resulting from the legal extension of the copyright period indefinitely.
In the future, culture will become something that is guarded and hidden in order to protect it from being taken by the global media corporations. People will shield their culture from the public in the same manner that Native Americans and other tribal peoples hide and guard their most basic and intimate rituals from outsiders.
The boomers are all aware of this situation where the music from 40 years ago is being constantly pumped into public spaces and how much it annoys people (like younger people of so-called 'Gen X') who don't share a cultural identification with these recordings. Mostly though, they don't care if only because they happen to like this music.
The blame is not on the 'boomers' themselves but instead on the music industry. These 40-year-old recordings are the cheapest and most cost-effective way to fill public space with background music. Every time one of these recordings gets played in public, someone, somewhere gets paid off. Every time.
The only way to make these recordings disappear from public space is to change the financial framework of the music 'publishing' industry, which determines who gets the money whenever these recordings are played in public space. But that's simply not going to happen without forcing the disintegration of the music industry. One more argument to 'pirate' music recordings and swap music files without money transfers.
'Blaming the boomers' is too easy because even if all the boomers were to disappear tomorrow nothing that they are assumed to control would actually change. Boomers are just filling slots in a 'system of power' that itself needs to be changed for your life to get better.
I'm at the point where I don't even hear TV network news or newspapers any more. I get all my news from National Public Radio, the BBC, Slashdot, and the local left-leaning community radio station (www.kboo.fm).
It has definitely changed the way that I filter current events. For instance, I had a peek at Yahoo!'s headlines a few minutes ago and there was a story about Harvard University's president making derogatory remarks about women. I clicked on the headline and read a paragraph of the story. Then I look through the rest of the story text for a link to a transcript of the actual speech itself. I wanted to see exactly what he said and in what context.
Of course, there was no link. So I assumed that the news reporters were taking his remarks out of context. This is the influence of Slashdot where everything is linked and if you say something stupid a hundred thousand people will see it and many will take the time to reply about how stupid you are.
By refusing to stand up to mass media manipulation by the far right, the major corporate media outlets (the TV networks, Clear Channel, the daily newspapers) have damaged their credibility beyond repair to me. No one takes them as seriously as they take themselves or believes that they are as credible as they were thirty years ago.
Once you get past its headline, the corporate news story is often nothing more than propaganda for the continued economic benefit of the corporate management class.
The past hundred years has seen a complete and total global communications revolution. It will continue. Don't worry, you will be able to get the news and information that you need from the internet in the future.
The vast amount of electronic junk taking up landfill is a problem that we should take at least some responsibility for.
Allow me to suggest a project to build biodegradable computers. Aside from those two words, I don't have any idea as to how to do it. But if Man can put and man on the moon or create an open-source alternative to Microsoft from the mud up, we can face the challenge of building a biodegradable computer.
The first hurdle is the massive lack of imagination needed to find currently productive uses for discarded technology. A recycling of computer parts and components. I do a few hours of recycling at the local PC community recycling center (FreeGeek in Portland, Oregon) in exchange for parts cut of motherboards and broken stereo circuit boards headed for landfill. Connectors, Flash BIOS chips from sockets, power chips and capacitors, that sort of stuff that can be reused in different electronic designs at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying new individual components from catalogs.
Another source of inspiration would be nature. For instance, the electric eel fish that stuns and kills its prey by delivering an electric charge of several hundred volts to it underwater. Fish are certainly biodegradable after a few days. Phew!! Or consider the human brain. Billions of very low speed biochemical electronic connections in a massively parallel system. Again fully biodegradable.
Anyway, I'm rambling on a dreary Sunday morning surrounded by 4mm of ice on every street and surface for 50 km.
Who's the leader of the gang who's stolen our PC? M-I-C-R-O-S - opps! OH NO! - F - T! Mickey Mouse! Microsoft! Mickey Mouse! Microsoft!
The richest man who ever lived is calling you a thief, M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
Where's my file? Microsoft! All my work? Microsoft!
Could there ever be an end to all this needless grief? M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
I use this an anger-management mantra whenever I get DASPO'ed (being driven into a state mouth-foaming rage by the work of a Dumb-As-Shit-Programmer). It usually works.
I would be interested in learning of any other ways to control the anger that occasionally happens after getting zapped by truly stupid software. I guess Slashdot would be the place to ask. Everyone must have some special secret little tricks that they use to avoid going postal whenever bad software destroys hours of work.
Jezz-I hope so.
Slashdot Mirror
I cut the DIN 5 connector (old style keyboard) and the PS2 mouse connector (MiniDIN 6) off very old obsolete motherboards.
Then I combine them with a 40 cent microcontroller (AVR Tiny11) to make MIDI tone module controllers from standard PS2 keyboards.
It works really well. Press the keys, notes go on, release keys, notes off. Just like a piano keyboard but smaller and much cheaper. There are, however, certain key combinations that don't play full chords. I'm not sure if it's the internal keyboard matrix decoding or the microcontroller's firmware.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
In America, the amount of punishment has no relation to the amount of damage that your crime has done to people.
For example, if you get caught with ten cents worth of weed, expect to be greatly punished for years. You lose the right to vote, drive, travel, and student loans. Expect the same thing next year if you get caught listening to an MP3 file.
Release a virus that destroys data and rips off thousands of credit card numbers; get probation.
Bankrupt and loot a Fortune 50 major corporation, transfer the funds offshore, destroy the pensions and life savings of thousands of employees, and our president will give you the Medal of Freedom.
One of the interesting side effects of the information age is that it is no longer possible to judge a correspondent's quality by the number of spelling and grammar mistakes made in their writing. Until recently, it was common to do so.
However, now, it simply means that the linkage between the spelling and grammar checker is faulty on the writer's computer. Or they forgot to use a spelling and grammar checker. Or it's too slow or not seamlessly integrated into the operating system. Or it's set to a wrong language translator.
Linux will finally be accepted and embraced by the computer user community when we can do these things much better than Windows. All this other legal and technical stuff is just a distraction by the obsessive/compulsive lawyers and software engineers to impede us from creating truly useful and functionally powerful solutions to software problems.
So remember, run your stuff through a spell and grammar checker.
If (and I suspect that is a big if) Google is forced to comply with this extortion on the part of the French government, then Google should absolutely refuse to allow of their search engine or advertising services to anyone accessing their site from a .fr domain.
What the French government doesn't quite seem to understand is that, in the information age, France is just another brand. And, a minor legacy historical empire one at that. Notwithstanding the fact that the government of France is the king of all shit in the hexagon of land between Germany and Spain, Atlantic, and Mediteranian. And fully recognizing that France is the mother of western civilization and the primal definer of the good life, outside of France the French government doesn't amount to much.
Attention, mes amis, don't put yourselves in the position of forcing us to choose between Google and France. You won't be happy with the results. We like France; we need Google. We don't particularily need or like Louis Vitton company or their rich parasitic customers.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in the music business about the nature of DRM technology.
Allow me help clarify things.
DRM on recordings means you pay us to listen to your music. Lack of DRM on recordings means we pay you to listen to your musical recordings.
Everything will proceed much more smoothly in the chaotic new music industry when this primal axiom is understood by all parties.
A real question for the future is IF the waters around the large North American Arctic islands melt, will this new navigitable passage be international waters or Canadian territorial waters?
A global warming pattern could open a passage between Europe and Asia across northern Canada and north of Alaska. The question is could Canada regulate hazardous materials or the size of ships or collect tolls for passage between Canadian islands from these ships?
Six hundred years ago, the Arctic was warmer. The Chinese record sailing from Greenland to China across the northern coast of Russia that is today locked almost always in ice. This was from 1421 by Gavin Menzies, about Chinese explorations in the early 1400's.
Flagrant, organized, and large scale willful copyrignt infringement.
Free offshore (from Japan to 'gai'-land) marketing and product modification, coupled with a total and complete lack of business ability to profit from these free services given to them.
Without any hint of Orwellian irony, let me remind everyone that the RIAA actually does own all music.
They have enough legal resources to prove that anything you have written has been written before, is copyrighted, and was unconsciously copied into your so-called composition. It doesn't matter that you wrote it, they still already own it.
If it's music, they own it. They own all music.
And with the new American system of infinite copyright renewal, they own everything forever.
The point is, you can not win a legal argument in a totally corrupt legal environment unless you have more money than your opponent.
And the RIAA has a lot of money since the consolidation of the world's entire entertainment industry into five global media corporations.
The only way that you can meet your cultural needs and obligations in this new climate is to be so uncool, so dorky, so unprofitable that the merchants of cool will avoid you and your culture lest your dorkiness rub off on them and affect their personal coolness standing in corporate matrix.
I bet you think that I'm kidding!
But don't worry. As a Slashdot reader, you are so dorky and uncool that it is unlikely that your cultural activities will be noticed by the copyright cops.
If you want to protect your cultural identity, then don't dream of selling it to the A&R man watching your gig from the corner.
I sometimes get the opportunity to talk to younger people, 23 and younger. I'll often ask if they have used certain technologies that older people take for granted but are hardly around anymore.
About half of the people in my little poll have used a typewriter, if just briefly. Many say that they tried it for a while when their parents pulled down their old college typewriter from the closet. Many people are impressed by the typewriter's feel and musically polyrythmic possiblities. No one would attempt to do any serious writing on it.
The whole question of keyboard layout is somewhat quaint anyway. We should be talking to our PCs. Voice recognition software is stuck in a legal limbo, due to Dragon's bankruptcy problems and IBM's complete and total ineptitude at refining and marketing this innovative technology.
Voice recognition technology is at the same place that mouse and GUI technology was back in 1981. Almost ready to be widely adopted and integrated into PC, but locked down by totally clueless management. Remember the Xerox executive who, after having a tour of Palo Alto Research Center and being shown the Xerox Star (the first GUI PC), remarked, "Boy, you sure get great reception on this thing!".
My complaint about the keyboard is that there are far too many keys. Half the keys on the board I never use. The Keypad, the function keys, and all those weird buttons above the function keys that are different on every keyboard but do nothing on any keyboard; who needs this stuff?
Well, I think that these players should have a background MP3 to OGG convertor that runs whenever you listen to an MP3 music file.
It would be selectable on/off of course.
When you open a song and listen to it, it also creates an OGG file of the song in the same directory. Then you can delete the MP3 file, again selectable for background operation.
This would facilitate the conversion from corporate controlled MP3 to open-source formats. MP3 is a dead-end because anyone who writes an MP3 program exposes themselves to legal harassment.
Fortunately we have a set of good MP3 players and rippers already. But with most of the world's music recordings being converted into digital format at this time, it would be best to get them into a format that isn't subject to legal harassment.
No one is going to convert their MP3 collections to OGG just to avoid possible distant legal patent issues, so this process should be done by code in the MP3 program itself in the background as the song is playing.
Plus the manufacturers of portable digital music players should incorporate OGG playback into their devices. What is it, maybe a thousand bytes of code extra in a firmware chip?
Maybe we should do open-source manufacturing. We do an open-source design of a ASIC that will play compressed digital, put up some funds to get it fabricated, put it into a little box with an audio headphone amp and some flash memory, and sell them ourselves to each other. How about an online Slashdot store that sells fully open-source electronics?
You're the type of guy that picked flowers, played with dolls and brushed their hair, aren't you?
f antasy.htm
Well, yes, most people named Simonetta pick flowers, have played with dolls and still brush their hair. Few of us are guys.
A very high percentage of people I meet that are like you are homosexual...
Admit it, you don't meet all that many people like us.
To every other realistic, red blooded, meat eating MAN who likes to watch football, drink beer, and look at cheerleaders I say let there be more football games. The more the merrier.
If you haven't already, you might want to check out Denis Leary's album "No Cure For Cancer" (download a few tracks from Kazaa). It's not a whole-grain critique of this mentality, it's an affirmation of its power.
Simonetta lives at - http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeauty/
Just because EA locked up ESPN branding doesn't mean the others are going to just go away.
Well, yes, they should go away. They should go away and invent a new game that takes full advantage of the computer medium. Some new game that doesn't just copy the experience of watching a television program based on a bunch of guys running around a field and throwing an odd-shaped ball.
A video game based on football is two-degrees of seperation from the participants of the actual game itself. So go away and invent a game that brings the computer player into the game itself.
What type of game is that? I have no idea; I'm not a game designer. But I'm sure that this game will be more profitable and satisfying than anything ESPN does better on live-action television.
There are a lot of people out there who invent games. They would be willing to exchange their concepts for a percentage of the sales receipts. So instead of spending millions developing a video game based on a sport and a brand-name license in which you MUST have millions of sales units for any reasonable profit, make lots of new games with new concepts. Most will die on the vine, but some will really take off. When that happens, the profits for the game company will be much greater per unit because there won't be all the ESPN-license fees and royalities to pay off.
Sort of like how the record industry is supposed to work.
Hello,
If you're interested in 'Classic Rock' let me suggest taking it a step further and learning how to actually play this music on guitar.
Learning guitar is easier now than ever before. Get any guitar and the try searching the web for tablatures of classic rock and pop songs. Most of the best stuff from that era has been written out and posted. I've seen whole web sites explaining how to play every last guitar note in Stairway To Heaven.
Another great way to learn guitar is to download MIDI files of favorite songs. Then get a music notation program like MIDIsoft Studio4 that will display the sheet music from the MIDI file. If you can read music (anyone can learn), you can figure out what all the notes are in the solos and what the chord structures are.
The local public library may have guitar books with CDs inside that show how to play every lick and styles that would take years to figure out on your own.
Look for cheap synths and stomp boxes on eBay. Plastic box stuff like Rocktek and Arion flangers, delays, and distortions sound great and sell for $10-$15.
Also try tuning the strings down one half step or one whole step to D-G-C-F-A-D. Without so much tension on the strings, they are easier to bend which makes it easier to play super-intense lead guitar solos and riffs. A lot of professional metal guitarists do this.
Best of luck.
Well, I think part of the problem is...the dearth of good music to come after the bands of the 70's-80's. In the past...music evolved...southern black blues...from those ideas...Elvis, Chuck Berry...older rock and roll led to the rock of the 60's...
One overlooked reason there was such a creative explosion of popular music in the 60's and 70's was that Black (African-American) music had been segragated from white US mainstream music until that time. The Black music tradition had developed for a hundred years since the US Civil War but it was isolated from mainstream white culture (except for a few individual artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and styles like Dixieland Jazz and Ragtime). In the 1960's young white people started actively researching and learning Black music and adapting it to top-40 styles. Plus for the first time there was lots of crossover of Black artists and record companies like Motown to become hugely popular.
By the early 1980's, this source of new musical inspiration had been fully explored and the Black and mainstream white music styles began to split again. Pop music is as segregated now as it was in the 1940's. Few Black artists are mainstream A-list money entertainers in the mostly white music genres (like Country) and even fewer whites are accepted as first-rate artists in the Black genres like Hip-Hop.
Anyway, if you're learning guitar allow me to suggest searching the web for tablatures of classic rock and pop songs. Most of the best stuff from that era has been written out and posted. I've seen whole web sites explaining how to play every last guitar note in Stairway To Heaven.
Another great way to learn guitar is to download MIDI files of favorite songs. Then get a music notation program like MIDIsoft Studio4 that will display the sheet music from the MIDI file. If you can read music (anyone can learn), you can figure out what all the notes are in the solos and what the chord structures are.
The local public library may have guitar books with CDs inside that show how to play every lick and styles that would take years to figure out on your own.
Look for cheap synths and stomp boxes on eBay. Plastic box stuff like Rocktek and Arion flangers, delays, and distortions sound great and sell for $10-$15.
All these stories about how the president of Harvard made statements all come from the same schmuck AP reporter. They are all just being rewritten and recirculated by one news agency to another in a giant media feedback loop.
So where's the transcript of the actual speech?
By the way, most people aren't any good at math, men or women. So what? As long as some people are, and they publish their work, and they are willing to work for money that ordinary people can give them, then what difference does it make?
It's like saying that women can't play music because there have never been any women in the Rolling Stones.
Ok, you have my attention.
What does this mean?
"Mi domando chi è il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio"
What language is it in? I would guess that it's one of those obscure European legacy languages that should have disappeared along with all the 'funny money' when the Euro currency was introduced.
and who is this - Altan?
Links, oh my brothers, links as in href=... are the foundation of our modern civilization. Without links were are all just barbarians, subhumans walking around with plastique wrapped across our chests looking for a pizza shop or a crowded bus in order to show our love for our all-merciful god.
Computer-generated music is bad for music industry because once it becomes an accepted and popular musical trend than anyone can generate their own music by simply downloading the software and running it through a soundcard or 'softSynthesizer'. There will be no need to buy music recordings from global media corporations. The 'globos' would definitely want to avoid this situation. The best situation for the 'globos' is the way things were in the 1960's. Everyone connected to a narrow number of media outlets, everyone developing an emotional connection to a limited number of 'artists' who were all under corporate contract, and total corporate ownership of the disk and media distribution network.
These conditions lead to a generation that has an abnormal emotional attachment to music, especially recordings owned by media corporations.
Those days are gone. Today's youth no longer have an abnormal emotional attachment to music. Young people today are fine.
Celebrate the future. Weep for the emotionally-crippled boomers who will lose their entire life cultural framework as the 'globos' put their music into permanent DRM limbo.
All your points are well-taken and insightful:
Nevertheless,
Many people think that bars are horrible places to be in. If you don't like alcohol that much, hate loud, constant, unequalized sound and dark, smelly places, and don't have a lot of money...bars totally suck. People need to develop tiny amplifiers that are the size of paperback books with great sound along with inexpensive but expressive musical instruments and play in coffeeshops and fast-food places late in the evening when they are not busy.
- Instruments can be bought cheaply now on eBay and Craigslist. Music can be learned from the internet and music educational software.
- Basically the global music corporations Do have the legal resources to prove that they 'own' every melody ever written and every story ever told. That's why it's becoming increasing important to develop culture outside of the corporate framework and to continue to build (through file-sharing and 100 gigabyte hard disk swapping) vast individual private libraries of 'pirated' material in order to keep the public domain (which is everything that has been broadcast on a public media like radio and TV) available for ourselves and for future generations.
...most of the art produced in the past was a) not all that original, b) not well motivated (save for keeping the artist fed), and c) forgotten as it got real boring after a while. ..."
Art in the past was used by the rich as a replacement for today's photographs, by the church to inspire devotion, and by the state to assure loyality to the king. Art in the past was very difficult to do and there weren't that many good artists. Art for art's sake didn't appear until the mid 1800's, the invention of photography, and the rise of the middle-class.
There's nothing wrong with the situation we're in today. In the sense that it's no different from the past, it hasn't really gotten any worse...
The biggest change recently in culture (art, music, etc..) is the concept that a few global corporations can 'own' not only the individual works of art but the underlying ideas, concepts, melodies, and stories as well. This is the long-term result of the transfer of the public domain into corporate ownership that is resulting from the legal extension of the copyright period indefinitely.
In the future, culture will become something that is guarded and hidden in order to protect it from being taken by the global media corporations. People will shield their culture from the public in the same manner that Native Americans and other tribal peoples hide and guard their most basic and intimate rituals from outsiders.
The boomers are all aware of this situation where the music from 40 years ago is being constantly pumped into public spaces and how much it annoys people (like younger people of so-called 'Gen X') who don't share a cultural identification with these recordings. Mostly though, they don't care if only because they happen to like this music.
The blame is not on the 'boomers' themselves but instead on the music industry. These 40-year-old recordings are the cheapest and most cost-effective way to fill public space with background music. Every time one of these recordings gets played in public, someone, somewhere gets paid off. Every time.
The only way to make these recordings disappear from public space is to change the financial framework of the music 'publishing' industry, which determines who gets the money whenever these recordings are played in public space. But that's simply not going to happen without forcing the disintegration of the music industry. One more argument to 'pirate' music recordings and swap music files without money transfers.
'Blaming the boomers' is too easy because even if all the boomers were to disappear tomorrow nothing that they are assumed to control would actually change. Boomers are just filling slots in a 'system of power' that itself needs to be changed for your life to get better.
I'm at the point where I don't even hear TV network news or newspapers any more. I get all my news from National Public Radio, the BBC, Slashdot, and the local left-leaning community radio station (www.kboo.fm).
It has definitely changed the way that I filter current events. For instance, I had a peek at Yahoo!'s headlines a few minutes ago and there was a story about Harvard University's president making derogatory remarks about women. I clicked on the headline and read a paragraph of the story. Then I look through the rest of the story text for a link to a transcript of the actual speech itself. I wanted to see exactly what he said and in what context.
Of course, there was no link. So I assumed that the news reporters were taking his remarks out of context. This is the influence of Slashdot where everything is linked and if you say something stupid a hundred thousand people will see it and many will take the time to reply about how stupid you are.
By refusing to stand up to mass media manipulation by the far right, the major corporate media outlets (the TV networks, Clear Channel, the daily newspapers) have damaged their credibility beyond repair to me. No one takes them as seriously as they take themselves or believes that they are as credible as they were thirty years ago.
Once you get past its headline, the corporate news story is often nothing more than propaganda for the continued economic benefit of the corporate management class.
The past hundred years has seen a complete and total global communications revolution. It will continue. Don't worry, you will be able to get the news and information that you need from the internet in the future.
The vast amount of electronic junk taking up landfill is a problem that we should take at least some responsibility for.
Allow me to suggest a project to build biodegradable computers. Aside from those two words, I don't have any idea as to how to do it. But if Man can put and man on the moon or create an open-source alternative to Microsoft from the mud up, we can face the challenge of building a biodegradable computer.
The first hurdle is the massive lack of imagination needed to find currently productive uses for discarded technology. A recycling of computer parts and components. I do a few hours of recycling at the local PC community recycling center (FreeGeek in Portland, Oregon) in exchange for parts cut of motherboards and broken stereo circuit boards headed for landfill. Connectors, Flash BIOS chips from sockets, power chips and capacitors, that sort of stuff that can be reused in different electronic designs at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying new individual components from catalogs.
Another source of inspiration would be nature. For instance, the electric eel fish that stuns and kills its prey by delivering an electric charge of several hundred volts to it underwater. Fish are certainly biodegradable after a few days. Phew!!
Or consider the human brain. Billions of very low speed biochemical electronic connections in a massively parallel system. Again fully biodegradable.
Anyway, I'm rambling on a dreary Sunday morning surrounded by 4mm of ice on every street and surface for 50 km.
-- to the tune of the Mickey Mouse theme ---
Who's the leader of the gang who's stolen our PC?
M-I-C-R-O-S - opps! OH NO! - F - T!
Mickey Mouse! Microsoft!
Mickey Mouse! Microsoft!
The richest man who ever lived is calling you a thief,
M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
Where's my file?
Microsoft!
All my work?
Microsoft!
Could there ever be an end to all this needless grief?
M-I-C-R-O-S - 'opps! OH NO!' - F - T!
I use this an anger-management mantra whenever I get DASPO'ed (being driven into a state mouth-foaming rage by the work of a Dumb-As-Shit-Programmer). It usually works.
I would be interested in learning of any other ways to control the anger that occasionally happens after getting zapped by truly stupid software. I guess Slashdot would be the place to ask. Everyone must have some special secret little tricks that they use to avoid going postal whenever bad software destroys hours of work.
Jezz-I hope so.