I shop for and buy old Yamaha sound generators and MIDI tone modules.
I perfer Yamaha because they have scanned and made available for download all of the manuals for all of their music products regardless of how obscure or how old it is.
This is very important because a MIDI tone module is just a small box with a serial port (with non-standard interface) on one end and a pair of standard phone jacks on the other. The ability to get extraordinary sounds out of this box depends entirely on knowing what elaborate set of codes to send to its serial port.
Most music sound generator companies won't tell you these codes (called MIDI sys-ex command formats) or want to charge you more money than the entire used synthesizer is worth for them.
Not Yamaha. Whenever I see a Yamaha listing on eBay for a synth that I have never heard of before, I just download the manual and study it. If I think that I can use the device, then I bid and sometimes win. With other synth manufacturers, I look at the listings on eBay and if there is no manual included, I pass on it regardless of how cheap or cool it may be.
Providing all the documentation that your potental customers would ask for before they ask for it is the sign of a great company. Everybody else, please wake up!
the final vestigal organs of independent thought... fleeing to neighboring countries.
This is the most likely result of bad corrupt overbearing cultural laws.
One thing that gets missed in all the discussion of 'music piracy' is that the music flows in two directions. The global media corporations (all five of them) need constant new input in the form of popular talent to be repackaged and sold globally. They don't create this new music: they record it in state-of-the-art studios, package it and market it, but they don't create it. They have agents that go out to clubs to find it for them. Always the bands themselves can't wait to get signed by a global record company.
But if with their oppressive laws they run the risk of alienating their primal musical sources. Bands and their fans will make a serious effort to keep new and exciting music hidden from the global music industry. The music industry will remain clueless to the changing trends in popular youth taste until someone or some band comes out of nowhere and claims the allegiance of millions of youth people in a manner that the global media corporations can't easily exploit.
This happened to a small degree in 1964 when the musical groups in northern England blasted away all the payola driven gunk off the pop charts for almost two years. At that time the idea that pop music could come out of Northwestern England was incomprehensible to record executives. Even after wave after wave of #1 hit singles from Liverpool and Manchester hit the American charts, they still couldn't believe it. Only when it didn't die off in 1965 did they start to cash in on the Beatles and later the Stones.
The next musical wave to come out of nowhere could hit them even stronger, because the fans will have a legal interest and a technological capability to keep their music away from the global media corporations. If someone figures out how to combine the intensity of Islam with that of American rock music, oh watch out. Fifty years ago the prison preachers just couldn't believe that an illiterate junkie convict who called himself Malcolm X wouldn't pray to a blue-eyed Jesus, and now 1/4 or more of millions of prisoners in the USA are devout Muslims.
This is a type of law that focuses on people who don't vote, young people. Young people are really the only people who are downloading MP3 and DivX stuff. 55 year olds aren't going to risk jail and bank account confication in order to hear "I can't get no satisfaction" one more time. Basically when laws like this are passed, they are written very broad so that anything involving music recordings in digital form can be interpreted by some mean old judge somewhere as illegal. But they are always enforced very politically. Rich white kids will get away with claiming that their brother's girlfriend's old college Napster account makes it OK for them to download anything and everything, while black college students will be thrown in prison for downloading 80 year-old African-American history items from the Library of Congress without written permission from the CEOs of the global media corporations.
These kind of laws just perpetuate and intensify the level of institutional corruption already present in a country. They seem new and extreme for America, but it's just standard operating procedure in the third world. What's disheartening is the extent that the US Congress is adopting third world legal standards. Before the Reagon era there was always someone in the back rooms of the Capitol who would just say that these bills were Bongo Congo laws and not the way that we do things here. Now the corporations are in a positive feedback corruption loop passing dumb laws right and left.
In the long run, the effect of really dumb corrupt laws is to transfer innovation both in culture and technology to another part of the world where there isn't so much pressure from the government. The reason Hollywood became the world's film capital is because all the bright people moved there from the NorthEast in order to get away from Edison's crushing patents, back when he claimed to have invented everything and had enough money to hire private goon squads to bust up any movie or sound recording activity that didn't pay him off.
Sometimes you just gotta lighten up and let people create and copy, regardless of how many patents or copyrights your lawyers say you own. In the end, it's good for business.
Do politicians in America go out of their way to stifle innovation or is it just my perception?
Politicians in the US are seriously busy, they often don't read the laws that they vote on. They vote the party line. The bills (proposed laws) are written by the politician's aides who move back and forth between government and industry.
Passing really bad laws will, in the long run, just transfer innovation to areas of the world outside of US control and influence.
Jeez, this schmuck really deserves the death penality. With the world's population growing so rapidly, we just don't need people like this around.
Life is really all that special. Every life form is unique. When someone comes out of the tube with their brain scrambled like this, we don't really have any moral obligation to keep them around.
For hundreds of years we dealt with people like this by putting them in the Army. They go wacko and kill dozens of people on the other side of the world? Cool, give em a medal. They get killed themselves? No big deal. One less asshole hanging around.
But now the Army is so technical and specialized that they are unable to meet their social function as general asshole disposal unit. The army's primary function of defending the country has been solved by hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, so the Army's secondary social functions take on more importance each year.
So we need some other way to deal with total psychopathic losers. If the lithium lollypop doesn't work or a heroin hot-shot from heaven fails to take out the trash, a standard lethal injection will do the trick. No reason to get all worked up about it. At least we don't shoot people in the head and then charge their relatives ten cents for the bullet like the Chinese do.
I know lots of European history. Once you get past all the insufferable kings and queens it all comes down to a huge continental civil war that has been going on for 2000 years. It flares up in roughly 100 year intervals (except for the 'hundred years war' in the 1600's where it started and forgot to stop and continued until so many people were dead that they decided to stop and fuck for a generation before going back to it.
The last episode of the great endless European war was a double-header that started in 1914, wiped out an entire generation by 1918. It would have just gone on and on had not the flu wiped out everybody that the bullets and gas didn't. They took a generational break and went back at it in 1939. By then the Europeans had so impressed everyone else with their savageness and blood-lust that entire continent was kept split right down the center for two whole generations with the threat that if they didn't behave, they would get nuked out of existence and written out of the history books. The Europeans responded by refusing to fuck and go to church, so now they have the lowest birthrate in the world, to the relief of their neighbors.
So now they pretend to be united so they occupiers will ignore them. But if history is any guide, they'll restart their endless war again sometime between 2010 and 2020 with the latest generation of techno death toys. Maybe this time they will succeed in actually completing the massive continental suicide that they have been working on for the past 2000 years. God knows, next time around there's going to be a lot of people around to help them do it.
I'm always amazed at how Europeans will go ballistic over the supposed differences between themselves and the people who look, act, and talk like them 100 miles away.
Then the lump all the Muslims, Chinese, and Indians together each as one people. Chinese do this..., Muslims think that..., Indians always...
I read in Variety that music recording sales are up 7% from last summer. Hurray for them.
But take into consideration that the target demographic for music sales is growing at more than that rate. Music sales is a young person's game: most buyers of music recordings are between 15 and 25 years old. This is the fastest growing segment of the world's population. Plus incomes are growing in formerly poor and desperate areas of the world. This means that even if the RIAA companies did nothing or completely goofed up their marketing, they would still have the 7% sales growth at least. There are 7% more people in the demographic band than last year.
The fact that record sales are not growing as fast as the demographic band proves that the record company executives are totally incompetent and undeserving of their seven figure compensation packages. Most of the young people who buy CDs live in the third world where they have a choice of paying $25 US for an official CD or $2-3 for a 'pirate' version.
Now the CD industry has NO marginal costs (blank CDs cost $0.05 each in bulk) per additional unit of product sold. That means that the RIAA companies are giving away their most profitable market sector to the pirates by not charging $2-3 per CD disk in the developing countries where the young people of the emerging middle-class don't have a lot of disposable income for music recordings.
The record company executives should all be fired for being too stupid to figure this out or too greedly and inflexible to adjust their business plan to maximize their revenues.
Sueing people in the 'finished development' world (the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Aus...) is just a side-show to hide the incompetence of the Music dept execs from the head media corporate execs.
The population figures say that global music record industry should be booming with profits in 2004. If it's not, it's not because of file swappers.
User Interface design is just paying attention to the things that people say about the program. The more pissed they get, the better the feedback and the more room for improvement.
1. Use natural language words. No rn, ds, ect..
2. Add tons!!! of documentation. You can't have too much documentation.
The early music hits of Elvis Presley and other early rock'n'rollers from the 1950s comes directly from the African-American common music tradition. These songs, rythyms, and chord progressions were developed by slaves over hundreds of years. They passed from person to person in the American Black community as a folk tradition, a way of dealing with the harsh realities of African-American life in the deep South. They didn't just appear out of the thin air, even if that is what is seems like to modern people who learned to love this music after hearing it on the radio.
If anyone deserves to benefit from the sale of this music, it is people who are descendent from the people who actually created it.
The wealth generated by African-American music should go to the music departments of the high schools, community colleges, and universities (especially the historically African-American colleges) of the South. Many of these departments have had major cutbacks in their budgets while the five major global media corporations take in billions of dollars annually from the sale of songs based on African-American musical traditions.
Americans always talk a lot about justice, but they mean 'just us' when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is.
Well, that depends, in Quebec people speak English with quite marked French accents.
People outside Canada often forget that Canada is two nations in one country. If you are moving to Quebec, you would benefit greatly from learning French before arriving. Because Quebec is a French speaking nation and outside of the wealthy parts of the larger cities, most people don't speak English. Or they had a few years long ago in school and haven't used it since.
The language situation is not as bad as it seems, though. English and French share more than half of their words. It's the pronounciation that's a real killer for anglophones (the fancy polite word for native English speakers). French has many more vowel sounds than English and it is spoken about twice as fast. Imagine deep south USA english spoken at three times the speed of a Mississippi conversation with half the words being completely different. That's what French can sound like to newly arrived anglophone.
But like all skills, you can master it. It's worth it because Quebec is a great place. If you're a Slashdot reader, then you have experience at mastering difficult things. This is just one more on the list.
People writing for embedded systems in the late 1980's were usually writing for the Intel 8051 family or the Motorola 68HC11 or 6809 families, or the Z-80 family. Those families are still supported due to the huge amount of code already in place. But the chips themselves now mostly have internal rewritable Flash ROM instead of external EPROMs and many of the peripherals are incorporated into the processor chip itself. The processors have grown to surface-mount packages with 100 pins per inch being common. Plug in replacements for the 8051 now have higher speeds and 3 clock cycles per instruction instead of the original 12 clocks per instruction. They are also much cheaper.
Newer embedded systems tend towards the Harvard architecture chips like the Microchip PIC, the Atmel AVR, and TI MPS series. They run much faster than older embed CPUs and are also very cheap. The Atmel Tiny11 AVR 32 RAM registers, 1024 bytes of rewritable program memory, runs at 6 MIPS and costs $0.41 in quantity 25 at Digikey. One time programmables have all but disappeared.
16 bit MPUs with interated peripherals like the 68000 family are much cheaper than 15 years ago. Their firmware is usually written in C and it's not uncommon for them to have 128K or 512K internal flash memories. This is where viruses that manage to get into code can lie dormant. Especially since the code can be locked so it can't be examined after burning into the chip. If a third world developer put a virus into a common device with a 16 bit microcontroller and installed millions (like traffic lights or ATMs) throughout the country, we could be easily crippled, fast and hard.
I agree. eBay is an auction service. If they are going to sell music then they should do it at the price that people want to pay, instead of a fixed fantasy price from the RIAA companies.
I buy and sell equipment and 'things' on eBay. I'm toying with the idea of offering some of the specialized wire-wound specialized electronic prototypes that I have been able to get working. When I want music that I haven't heard before, I check audio CDs out from the library. When I want a specific song, I use KazaaLite to get it from one of millions of people who are sharing billions of files. I don't have any need for music download services that charge large amounts of money for audio data in restricted and semi-encrypted formats. The only way that the music sellers can compete with Kazaa is to be better than Kazaa. Nothing else is going to work.
Actually eBay should sell movie tickets by auction. Say the $250 million blockbuster ShitheadMan II will be released this friday. The local theatre can auction tickets for the first show that might go up to $30-$40 a seat. However a Wednesday evening showing of Return of Bozo III that was released a month ago might only bring an auction price of $1.35. Still is better than an projecting a film to an empty seat.
Finding and buying specialized things on EBay seems to be just an American phenomenon. I can't see something like this in Germany, where it's still illegal to have stores open on Sunday or for individual stores to have sales on overstocked items. It seems that law was passed in the late 1930's because storeowners of a certain group where liquidating their merchandise at reduced prices in order to leave the country before being liquidated themselves. This was considered an affront to good German shopkeepers who never had sales so laws were passed making it illegal to reduce the price of an item unless all the local shopkeepers reduced the price of the item at the same time. After the war, the laws remained to promote 'order' and remain in effect to this day.
Can you imagine eBay taking off in such an environment? I often feel sorry for the Germans (I'm not Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't), they think that they're so free, and yet they have all these insane laws that prove otherwise. Generally the USA is the best place to buy things because they have the widest selections, the best prices, and honest merchants who are seriously interested in making it easy for to actually buy what you want. And Oregon is the best place to buy stuff in the USA because there is no sales tax. No VAT, No GST/PST, no nothing. You buy something that costs $99.95, give the clerk a hundred dollars, and get back a 5 cent coin with polite 'Thank You, Have A Nice Day'. Try doing that anywhere else in the civilized world!
A worst-case scenario involving viruses would be if a virus writer were able to get his (always guys here doing this stuff) code into the compiliers for embedded systems. Then the virus could lie undetected in the millions of unnoticed systems in hospitals, air traffic controls, automobiles, traffic lights, ect... until activated by an external event or date. The effect for the West would be like Klattu's shutting down the electricity worldwide for a minute in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951, Robert Wise, director).
The embedded microcontrollers have had the same price/performance gains as desktop/office PCs and now many have firmware systems that are too big to monitor on the assembly language level. Even 32K has lots of room to hold a nasty little bug undetected.
The companies that write compiliers for embedded systems are often very small. I'm not sure as to the extent that they realize the amount of damage that could be done by a virus in embedded systems firmware spread over millions of units. I'm sure that they're super professional, though. However, as the firmware development gets outsourced to the third world, this becomes an excellent undetectable opportunity to invoke major havoc.
On the same note, I would assume that all of the high tech military equipment that the USA has been selling to its allies over the past twenty years has trojans in the firmware that will render the equipment inoperable should the 'allies' try to use it against US forces. I mean, that just makes sense, doesn't it?
Our local Portland Oregon USA computer recycler FreeGeek is selling used PS2 keyboards for about a dollar each.
However that doesn't really address the issue of avoiding having to have a keyboard inserted to boot the PC. I have been looking into this issue recently and found that an inexpensive microcontroller can reproduce keyboard signals quite easily. The Atmel AVR Tiny11 sells at DigiKey for $0.41 each in quantity 25 and $0.56 in quantity one. It's an 8 pin DIP that runs at 1 MHz with no external parts. Its Flash memory holds 512 instructions and it has 32 registers. The companion chip, the AVR Tiny 12, sells for $1.10 quantity 25 and can be programmed directly from the PC parallel port. The PIC controllers from Microchip Inc. have devices in the same price/performance range, but they are more difficult to develop software for and they need external programmers to write the code into their Flash memory.
It's necessary to know what bytes the PC sends to the keyboard on power-up and what the keyboard sends back to the PC. Then these bytes can be formatted by the dongle and sent to the PC to mimic a keyboard.
The PC keyboard has weird programming. Each key sends at least one byte when pressed and some send two or more. When released the same byte set is resent preceeded by the byte 0xf0.
Now any Slashdotter, when given the job of encoding a keyboard with less than 128 individual keys, would assign a 7-bit scan code to each key with the high bit either set or clear depending on whether the key was pressed or released. Simple and elegant. But the standard PC keyboard has this strange multibyte configuration that makes it difficult to decode the keypresses. Not to mention that there is no way to turn off the auto-repeat for the entire keyboard.
Nevertheless, the keyboard scancodes are standardized throughout the world. And there are hundreds of millions of keyboards out there. The newer ones only use about 13 milliAmps of power.
I developed an AVR program to take the PS2 keypresses and mimic a MIDI keyboard by sending note on/off messages according to the keypresses. I'm surprised at how well it works. Except for a few key combinations that don't register together, the PS2 keyboard can function like a MIDI music keyboard (without velocity and aftertouch detection, of course). For a few dollars, I have a small light portable keyboard that plugs into a tone module and adds hundreds of musical instrument sounds to small music group jams. This application is posted on www.avrfreaks.org in the user projects section of the Academy forum.
Why not call it the 'kalimba' if the whole thing is just a little box that you hold between your palms and work with your thumbs?
By the way, mes amis, is the accent for the name 'jackito' on the first syllable, "jack' i to" like the english 'jackulator' or the middle syllable, "ja-kee'-to" like a drunken frat boy doing vulgar Mexican imitation?
I thought that you guys in France weren't allowed to make up stupid words for marketing purposes. Isn't there 'un academie francais' that decides whether or not all these new nitwit words are really French or not? Do they have vigilantes that go around making sure that no one tries to sneak in an English word into a sign by putting a bogus accent over an 'e' like they do in Quebec?
I have a seriously difficult time believing the numbers generated by the OECD on the subject of western young people's downloading pop music and comic book movies.
These people are serious stuffed shirt economists. I don't think that they have the methodogy or the skills to track the semi-legit world of P2P and the various secretive subcultures asssociated with warez and big time file sharing. I suspect that they are simply repeating highly questionable numbers obtained from dubious sources that have clear political agendas (the RIAA, anyone?)
You wouldn't smoke pot from any of these guys in the OCED, why trust their analysis of P2P usage? I suspect that this is just another example of economists getting bad data from journalists who got numbers from secret sources (the RIAA) who just pulled them out of their ass to get laws passed to make themselves rich.
The OCED should stick to what they do best and tracking the P2P/warez underground is not it.
The underlying reason for software stealing that no one ever talks about is that software is absurdly expensive to produce. The average programmer does only dozen lines a day in working code. that sounds like a cocaine commercial
We need a whole new generation of software productivity tools that will increase the usable output of programmers by an order of magnitude. Stuff that is science fiction now, like comment compiliers where you describe what the program should do and the compilier generates the source code. Software tools that understand (to a degree) native spoken languages and generate code that is compilable.
Let's be real here, line-oriented languages like C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Perl, Visual Basic,...you name it... were great...twenty years ago. But as the hardware has come down in price a thousand fold, the software situation has stagnated. I realize that software is in a Sysiphusian position: every major hardware advance knocks the software development for it back to assembly language, like when microprocessors first appeared.
If software only cost one tenth of its current cost to develop, software development corporations wouldn't feel the need to call for jail terms and big fines for people who copy it and adapt it to their own use. Corps could get their development costs back and needed profits easier if the development costs were not so high. Moving development to places where programmers work for 1/10th the salary of American programmers isn't a solution, it's a delaying tactic to admitting the problem and developing a solution.
This is an area where the open source movement doesn't help. Open source simply takes the inherent inefficiencies of software development and spreads them over a larger group than a contracted development team.
One would think that Microsoft with tens of billions in cash would be applying huge amounts of resources to developing next generation software tools. But they get the best programmers for the current development tools for peanuts (compared to their resources), so better software tools would only disrupt their profit flow.
This is an area where the government usually would put up the R&D funds. But the government is now only interested in funding new, exciting, and expensive ways to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap. They say that the private sector should be funding this.
The situation just goes round in stagnant circles. Everybody just continues to struggle with braindead nitwit 1970's compiliers and languages like C, and complaining about the high cost of software.
At my favorite Starbucks, the one at the corner of NW 23rd Ave and Overton St. in Portland Oregon, I heard Elis Regina "Folhas Secas" and Salif Keita "Bolon" within an hour.
I couldn't believe it.
Someone who seriously knows good music is programming their tunes.
I read this in one of the books on Sony. I forget which. The company name was derived in the late 1940's. This explanation makes more sense than 'Sonus' and 'Sonny Boy'. Why would Japanese use Latin when English was the main language of western exposure and the language of the occupation? Any why would anyone even remotely serious name a company after the term 'Sonny Boy'? The 'Sound Nippon' derivavive is simply more believable. Often history comes down to what is more believable when there are multiple explanations or interpretations.
The contract between the 'artist' and the global media corp has nothing to do with me. My copying a song has nothing to do with whether or not the 'artist' gets paid or how much. Even if I did give money to the global media corp, it is unlikely that a reasonable amount would reach the 'artist'.
My point is that having listed to the same song hundreds of times and thousands of commercials before and after, I assume the right to copy and listen to it. With my attention span, I paid for it.
The actual laws were written by representatives of the global media corps for their benefit only. All conditions and assumptions are based on their writing of the laws for their own gain. But there are many other factors involved with culture, media corp profits are only one. Since the laws were written only to maximize media corp profits, I don't see any need to accept these laws or the assumptions that the media corps insist are present.
Basically if I can get access to a sound and a recording device, I assume the right to make a recording for my own use. This is my interpretation of the copyright law. It is also the same opinion of hundreds of millions of other people.
It's the global media corps who forced the current situation into such polarized extremes, not us. We were always willing to buy at a negotiated price the recordings when limited copyright period and fair use were part of the legal stucture. Now that they are defacto not, we are no longer willing to give money to the global media corporations for music recordings. They stole the public domain, which a far, far greater crime than 'stealing' from an 'artist' of a song that was recorded thirty years ago.
Sony (whose name comes from a combination of the words - 'Sound Nippon') seems to be going after the wrong market. They should be pursuing the young and NOT rich, and leave the rich to Apple.
Approximately 75% of the world's people are under the age of 25 and don't have a whole lot of money. This is the market that Sony should be targeting. Instead they are using DRM, proprietary formats, and tie-ins to product from other Sony divisions to capture a chunk of the world's recorded music marketplace. Stupid, because the vast majority of people who would be buying Sony products won't because they can't afford them.
Myself, for example. I get CD audio recordings from the public library. Then I rip them using open source software onto a $20 5 gig hard drive on a $150 PC. The recordings that I would want to hear again at some point in the future I write to a $0.09 CD-R blank (that holds 100 songs in 192kbps MP3 format) using a $25 CDRW. Then I play them outside through a $20 CDR/RW capable MP3 CD player. Every device in the process costs less than an order-of-magnitude of the price that Sony (and Apple) charges for the same utility. If someone can make the equipment profitable for this price then Sony certainly can. And I live in the wealthy western first-world. Outside the US, the EU, Japan, and Canada, people have to work ten times as many hours for the money to buy the same level of equipment.
Sony needs to relearn that innovation is as much a process of getting new equipment affordable as it is a process of designing new toys.
By the way, am I stealing music? No, almost all of the stuff that I listen to I bought many years ago in different formats (45 RPM vinyl, or 33RPM LP). I bought it, I can listen to it.
Or, I listened to the songs so many times on the radio and listened to the commercials so many times that I own the right to have a copy of the song by having listened to the hundreds of radio commercials. That concept of ownership may seem unusual but it is no more strange than the various types of music ownership devised by the media companies. I absolutely, totally, and completely refuse to accept the legitimacy of the laws regarding music copyright because those laws were written by RIAA lobbyists specifically for the sole benefit of the media companies. When the media companies recognize the principle of fair use and limited copyright periods, I will negotiate the concept of music ownership with them. But they never will recognize these principles, so I feel no obligation to honor the legitimacy of the laws that they wrote to enrich themselves.
When the CD recorders first appeared cheaply (less than $200 US) about six years ago, I bought one from Mitsumi and it lasted eight months with light use. They wouldn't honor the warranty; they wouldn't pick up the telephone for the customer-support line or answer e-mails.
A second CDRW, a BTC, lasted eleven months before dying and I was able to get a warranty replacement that still works five years later. A third, a brand and model recommended as a best-buy by PC World magazine lasted six months. Again a worthless warranty due to the companie's refusal to answer e-mail or phone calls.
My current CD-RW, an Artec WRA, has lasted two years with no problems with moderate use.
So with time, devices like CD/DVD writers get better in quality even as the price drops.
I considered buying a 8x DVD writer for $99 at the local discount electronics store. But, reviewing my notes at the difficulties with the quality of early CD recorders made me postpone buying one. I'll wait several more years, or until I have a pressing need to put 4.7Gig on a single disk.
I've found that using the 'DVDdecoder' program I can copy movies from DVDs to my hard drive in VOB files that are 700 megabytes in size each. In this manner a movie can be backed up from DVD to CD-R using about six or seven CDs per film. It's inconvenient, yes, but it does work until the DVD recorders become more reliable.
If you're really pressed for time, say just a half hour between pottery painting class and picking up the kids, then try a little Dimethyltriptamine (DMT).
It packs all the punch of acid trip into 15 minutes. And leaves you all warm and fuzzy afterwards.
See Ken Russell's 1981 film with William Hurt called 'Altered States' where he injects DMT into a withdrawn patient just see what will happen. When he asks her what she feels, she replies, "I feel like God is touching my heart."
Slashdot Mirror
I shop for and buy old Yamaha sound generators and MIDI tone modules.
I perfer Yamaha because they have scanned and made available for download all of the manuals for all of their music products regardless of how obscure or how old it is.
This is very important because a MIDI tone module is just a small box with a serial port (with non-standard interface) on one end and a pair of standard phone jacks on the other. The ability to get extraordinary sounds out of this box depends entirely on knowing what elaborate set of codes to send to its serial port.
Most music sound generator companies won't tell you these codes (called MIDI sys-ex command formats) or want to charge you more money than the entire used synthesizer is worth for them.
Not Yamaha. Whenever I see a Yamaha listing on eBay for a synth that I have never heard of before, I just download the manual and study it. If I think that I can use the device, then I bid and sometimes win. With other synth manufacturers, I look at the listings on eBay and if there is no manual included, I pass on it regardless of how cheap or cool it may be.
Providing all the documentation that your potental customers would ask for before they ask for it is the sign of a great company. Everybody else, please wake up!
the final vestigal organs of independent thought ... fleeing to neighboring countries.
This is the most likely result of bad corrupt overbearing cultural laws.
One thing that gets missed in all the discussion of 'music piracy' is that the music flows in two directions. The global media corporations (all five of them) need constant new input in the form of popular talent to be repackaged and sold globally. They don't create this new music: they record it in state-of-the-art studios, package it and market it, but they don't create it. They have agents that go out to clubs to find it for them. Always the bands themselves can't wait to get signed by a global record company.
But if with their oppressive laws they run the risk of alienating their primal musical sources. Bands and their fans will make a serious effort to keep new and exciting music hidden from the global music industry. The music industry will remain clueless to the changing trends in popular youth taste until someone or some band comes out of nowhere and claims the allegiance of millions of youth people in a manner that the global media corporations can't easily exploit.
This happened to a small degree in 1964 when the musical groups in northern England blasted away all the payola driven gunk off the pop charts for almost two years. At that time the idea that pop music could come out of Northwestern England was incomprehensible to record executives. Even after wave after wave of #1 hit singles from Liverpool and Manchester hit the American charts, they still couldn't believe it. Only when it didn't die off in 1965 did they start to cash in on the Beatles and later the Stones.
The next musical wave to come out of nowhere could hit them even stronger, because the fans will have a legal interest and a technological capability to keep their music away from the global media corporations. If someone figures out how to combine the intensity of Islam with that of American rock music, oh watch out. Fifty years ago the prison preachers just couldn't believe that an illiterate junkie convict who called himself Malcolm X wouldn't pray to a blue-eyed Jesus, and now 1/4 or more of millions of prisoners in the USA are devout Muslims.
This is a type of law that focuses on people who don't vote, young people. Young people are really the only people who are downloading MP3 and DivX stuff. 55 year olds aren't going to risk jail and bank account confication in order to hear "I can't get no satisfaction" one more time.
Basically when laws like this are passed, they are written very broad so that anything involving music recordings in digital form can be interpreted by some mean old judge somewhere as illegal. But they are always enforced very politically. Rich white kids will get away with claiming that their brother's girlfriend's old college Napster account makes it OK for them to download anything and everything, while black college students will be thrown in prison for downloading 80 year-old African-American history items from the Library of Congress without written permission from the CEOs of the global media corporations.
These kind of laws just perpetuate and intensify the level of institutional corruption already present in a country. They seem new and extreme for America, but it's just standard operating procedure in the third world. What's disheartening is the extent that the US Congress is adopting third world legal standards. Before the Reagon era there was always someone in the back rooms of the Capitol who would just say that these bills were Bongo Congo laws and not the way that we do things here. Now the corporations are in a positive feedback corruption loop passing dumb laws right and left.
In the long run, the effect of really dumb corrupt laws is to transfer innovation both in culture and technology to another part of the world where there isn't so much pressure from the government. The reason Hollywood became the world's film capital is because all the bright people moved there from the NorthEast in order to get away from Edison's crushing patents, back when he claimed to have invented everything and had enough money to hire private goon squads to bust up any movie or sound recording activity that didn't pay him off.
Sometimes you just gotta lighten up and let people create and copy, regardless of how many patents or copyrights your lawyers say you own. In the end, it's good for business.
I would too, but I can't see anything at all now after the operation. The eye doctor said that it was because I jack off too much.
Do politicians in America go out of their way to stifle innovation or is it just my perception?
Politicians in the US are seriously busy, they often don't read the laws that they vote on. They vote the party line. The bills (proposed laws) are written by the politician's aides who move back and forth between government and industry.
Passing really bad laws will, in the long run, just transfer innovation to areas of the world outside of US control and influence.
Jeez, this schmuck really deserves the death penality. With the world's population growing so rapidly, we just don't need people like this around.
Life is really all that special. Every life form is unique. When someone comes out of the tube with their brain scrambled like this, we don't really have any moral obligation to keep them around.
For hundreds of years we dealt with people like this by putting them in the Army. They go wacko and kill dozens of people on the other side of the world? Cool, give em a medal. They get killed themselves? No big deal. One less asshole hanging around.
But now the Army is so technical and specialized that they are unable to meet their social function as general asshole disposal unit. The army's primary function of defending the country has been solved by hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, so the Army's secondary social functions take on more importance each year.
So we need some other way to deal with total psychopathic losers. If the lithium lollypop doesn't work or a heroin hot-shot from heaven fails to take out the trash, a standard lethal injection will do the trick. No reason to get all worked up about it. At least we don't shoot people in the head and then charge their relatives ten cents for the bullet like the Chinese do.
I know lots of European history. Once you get past all the insufferable kings and queens it all comes down to a huge continental civil war that has been going on for 2000 years. It flares up in roughly 100 year intervals (except for the 'hundred years war' in the 1600's where it started and forgot to stop and continued until so many people were dead that they decided to stop and fuck for a generation before going back to it.
The last episode of the great endless European war was a double-header that started in 1914, wiped out an entire generation by 1918. It would have just gone on and on had not the flu wiped out everybody that the bullets and gas didn't. They took a generational break and went back at it in 1939. By then the Europeans had so impressed everyone else with their savageness and blood-lust that entire continent was kept split right down the center for two whole generations with the threat that if they didn't behave, they would get nuked out of existence and written out of the history books. The Europeans responded by refusing to fuck and go to church, so now they have the lowest birthrate in the world, to the relief of their neighbors.
So now they pretend to be united so they occupiers will ignore them. But if history is any guide, they'll restart their endless war again sometime between 2010 and 2020 with the latest generation of techno death toys. Maybe this time they will succeed in actually completing the massive continental suicide that they have been working on for the past 2000 years. God knows, next time around there's going to be a lot of people around to help them do it.
I'm always amazed at how Europeans will go ballistic over the supposed differences between themselves and the people who look, act, and talk like them 100 miles away.
Then the lump all the Muslims, Chinese, and Indians together each as one people. Chinese do this..., Muslims think that..., Indians always...
I read in Variety that music recording sales are up 7% from last summer. Hurray for them.
But take into consideration that the target demographic for music sales is growing at more than that rate. Music sales is a young person's game: most buyers of music recordings are between 15 and 25 years old. This is the fastest growing segment of the world's population. Plus incomes are growing in formerly poor and desperate areas of the world. This means that even if the RIAA companies did nothing or completely goofed up their marketing, they would still have the 7% sales growth at least. There are 7% more people in the demographic band than last year.
The fact that record sales are not growing as fast as the demographic band proves that the record company executives are totally incompetent and undeserving of their seven figure compensation packages. Most of the young people who buy CDs live in the third world where they have a choice of paying $25 US for an official CD or $2-3 for a 'pirate' version.
Now the CD industry has NO marginal costs (blank CDs cost $0.05 each in bulk) per additional unit of product sold. That means that the RIAA companies are giving away their most profitable market sector to the pirates by not charging $2-3 per CD disk in the developing countries where the young people of the emerging middle-class don't have a lot of disposable income for music recordings.
The record company executives should all be fired for being too stupid to figure this out or too greedly and inflexible to adjust their business plan to maximize their revenues.
Sueing people in the 'finished development' world (the USA, EU, Japan, Canada, Aus...) is just a side-show to hide the incompetence of the Music dept execs from the head media corporate execs.
The population figures say that global music record industry should be booming with profits in 2004. If it's not, it's not because of file swappers.
User Interface design is just paying attention to the things that people say about the program. The more pissed they get, the better the feedback and the more room for improvement.
1. Use natural language words. No rn, ds, ect..
2. Add tons!!! of documentation. You can't have too much documentation.
The early music hits of Elvis Presley and other early rock'n'rollers from the 1950s comes directly from the African-American common music tradition. These songs, rythyms, and chord progressions were developed by slaves over hundreds of years. They passed from person to person in the American Black community as a folk tradition, a way of dealing with the harsh realities of African-American life in the deep South. They didn't just appear out of the thin air, even if that is what is seems like to modern people who learned to love this music after hearing it on the radio.
If anyone deserves to benefit from the sale of this music, it is people who are descendent from the people who actually created it.
The wealth generated by African-American music should go to the music departments of the high schools, community colleges, and universities (especially the historically African-American colleges) of the South. Many of these departments have had major cutbacks in their budgets while the five major global media corporations take in billions of dollars annually from the sale of songs based on African-American musical traditions.
Americans always talk a lot about justice, but they mean 'just us' when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is.
speak English with nearly American accents
Well, that depends, in Quebec people speak English with quite marked French accents.
People outside Canada often forget that Canada is two nations in one country. If you are moving to Quebec, you would benefit greatly from learning French before arriving. Because Quebec is a French speaking nation and outside of the wealthy parts of the larger cities, most people don't speak English. Or they had a few years long ago in school and haven't used it since.
The language situation is not as bad as it seems, though. English and French share more than half of their words. It's the pronounciation that's a real killer for anglophones (the fancy polite word for native English speakers). French has many more vowel sounds than English and it is spoken about twice as fast. Imagine deep south USA english spoken at three times the speed of a Mississippi conversation with half the words being completely different. That's what French can sound like to newly arrived anglophone.
But like all skills, you can master it. It's worth it because Quebec is a great place. If you're a Slashdot reader, then you have experience at mastering difficult things. This is just one more on the list.
Hello,
People writing for embedded systems in the late 1980's were usually writing for the Intel 8051 family or the Motorola 68HC11 or 6809 families, or the Z-80 family. Those families are still supported due to the huge amount of code already in place. But the chips themselves now mostly have internal rewritable Flash ROM instead of external EPROMs and many of the peripherals are incorporated into the processor chip itself. The processors have grown to surface-mount packages with 100 pins per inch being common. Plug in replacements for the 8051 now have higher speeds and 3 clock cycles per instruction instead of the original 12 clocks per instruction. They are also much cheaper.
Newer embedded systems tend towards the Harvard architecture chips like the Microchip PIC, the Atmel AVR, and TI MPS series. They run much faster than older embed CPUs and are also very cheap. The Atmel Tiny11 AVR 32 RAM registers, 1024 bytes of rewritable program memory, runs at 6 MIPS and costs $0.41 in quantity 25 at Digikey. One time programmables have all but disappeared.
16 bit MPUs with interated peripherals like the 68000 family are much cheaper than 15 years ago. Their firmware is usually written in C and it's not uncommon for them to have 128K or 512K internal flash memories. This is where viruses that manage to get into code can lie dormant. Especially since the code can be locked so it can't be examined after burning into the chip. If a third world developer put a virus into a common device with a 16 bit microcontroller and installed millions (like traffic lights or ATMs) throughout the country, we could be easily crippled, fast and hard.
I agree. eBay is an auction service. If they are going to sell music then they should do it at the price that people want to pay, instead of a fixed fantasy price from the RIAA companies.
I buy and sell equipment and 'things' on eBay. I'm toying with the idea of offering some of the specialized wire-wound specialized electronic prototypes that I have been able to get working.
When I want music that I haven't heard before, I check audio CDs out from the library. When I want a specific song, I use KazaaLite to get it from one of millions of people who are sharing billions of files. I don't have any need for music download services that charge large amounts of money for audio data in restricted and semi-encrypted formats. The only way that the music sellers can compete with Kazaa is to be better than Kazaa. Nothing else is going to work.
Actually eBay should sell movie tickets by auction. Say the $250 million blockbuster ShitheadMan II will be released this friday. The local theatre can auction tickets for the first show that might go up to $30-$40 a seat. However a Wednesday evening showing of Return of Bozo III that was released a month ago might only bring an auction price of $1.35. Still is better than an projecting a film to an empty seat.
Finding and buying specialized things on EBay seems to be just an American phenomenon. I can't see something like this in Germany, where it's still illegal to have stores open on Sunday or for individual stores to have sales on overstocked items. It seems that law was passed in the late 1930's because storeowners of a certain group where liquidating their merchandise at reduced prices in order to leave the country before being liquidated themselves. This was considered an affront to good German shopkeepers who never had sales so laws were passed making it illegal to reduce the price of an item unless all the local shopkeepers reduced the price of the item at the same time. After the war, the laws remained to promote 'order' and remain in effect to this day.
Can you imagine eBay taking off in such an environment? I often feel sorry for the Germans (I'm not Jewish, otherwise I wouldn't), they think that they're so free, and yet they have all these insane laws that prove otherwise. Generally the USA is the best place to buy things because they have the widest selections, the best prices, and honest merchants who are seriously interested in making it easy for to actually buy what you want. And Oregon is the best place to buy stuff in the USA because there is no sales tax. No VAT, No GST/PST, no nothing. You buy something that costs $99.95, give the clerk a hundred dollars, and get back a 5 cent coin with polite 'Thank You, Have A Nice Day'. Try doing that anywhere else in the civilized world!
A worst-case scenario involving viruses would be if a virus writer were able to get his (always guys here doing this stuff) code into the compiliers for embedded systems. Then the virus could lie undetected in the millions of unnoticed systems in hospitals, air traffic controls, automobiles, traffic lights, ect... until activated by an external event or date. The effect for the West would be like Klattu's shutting down the electricity worldwide for a minute in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951, Robert Wise, director).
The embedded microcontrollers have had the same price/performance gains as desktop/office PCs and now many have firmware systems that are too big to monitor on the assembly language level. Even 32K has lots of room to hold a nasty little bug undetected.
The companies that write compiliers for embedded systems are often very small. I'm not sure as to the extent that they realize the amount of damage that could be done by a virus in embedded systems firmware spread over millions of units. I'm sure that they're super professional, though. However, as the firmware development gets outsourced to the third world, this becomes an excellent undetectable opportunity to invoke major havoc.
On the same note, I would assume that all of the high tech military equipment that the USA has been selling to its allies over the past twenty years has trojans in the firmware that will render the equipment inoperable should the 'allies' try to use it against US forces. I mean, that just makes sense, doesn't it?
Our local Portland Oregon USA computer recycler FreeGeek is selling used PS2 keyboards for about a dollar each.
However that doesn't really address the issue of avoiding having to have a keyboard inserted to boot the PC. I have been looking into this issue recently and found that an inexpensive microcontroller can reproduce keyboard signals quite easily. The Atmel AVR Tiny11 sells at DigiKey for $0.41 each in quantity 25 and $0.56 in quantity one. It's an 8 pin DIP that runs at 1 MHz with no external parts. Its Flash memory holds 512 instructions and it has 32 registers. The companion chip, the AVR Tiny 12, sells for $1.10 quantity 25 and can be programmed directly from the PC parallel port. The PIC controllers from Microchip Inc. have devices in the same price/performance range, but they are more difficult to develop software for and they need external programmers to write the code into their Flash memory.
It's necessary to know what bytes the PC sends to the keyboard on power-up and what the keyboard sends back to the PC. Then these bytes can be formatted by the dongle and sent to the PC to mimic a keyboard.
The PC keyboard has weird programming. Each key sends at least one byte when pressed and some send two or more. When released the same byte set is resent preceeded by the byte 0xf0.
Now any Slashdotter, when given the job of encoding a keyboard with less than 128 individual keys, would assign a 7-bit scan code to each key with the high bit either set or clear depending on whether the key was pressed or released. Simple and elegant. But the standard PC keyboard has this strange multibyte configuration that makes it difficult to decode the keypresses. Not to mention that there is no way to turn off the auto-repeat for the entire keyboard.
Nevertheless, the keyboard scancodes are standardized throughout the world. And there are hundreds of millions of keyboards out there. The newer ones only use about 13 milliAmps of power.
I developed an AVR program to take the PS2 keypresses and mimic a MIDI keyboard by sending note on/off messages according to the keypresses. I'm surprised at how well it works. Except for a few key combinations that don't register together, the PS2 keyboard can function like a MIDI music keyboard (without velocity and aftertouch detection, of course). For a few dollars, I have a small light portable keyboard that plugs into a tone module and adds hundreds of musical instrument sounds to small music group jams. This application is posted on www.avrfreaks.org in the user projects section of the Academy forum.
Why not call it the 'kalimba' if the whole thing is just a little box that you hold between your palms and work with your thumbs?
By the way, mes amis, is the accent for the name 'jackito' on the first syllable, "jack' i to" like the english 'jackulator' or the middle syllable, "ja-kee'-to" like a drunken frat boy doing vulgar Mexican imitation?
I thought that you guys in France weren't allowed to make up stupid words for marketing purposes. Isn't there 'un academie francais' that decides whether or not all these new nitwit words are really French or not? Do they have vigilantes that go around making sure that no one tries to sneak in an English word into a sign by putting a bogus accent over an 'e' like they do in Quebec?
I have a seriously difficult time believing the numbers generated by the OECD on the subject of western young people's downloading pop music and comic book movies.
These people are serious stuffed shirt economists. I don't think that they have the methodogy or the skills to track the semi-legit world of P2P and the various secretive subcultures asssociated with warez and big time file sharing. I suspect that they are simply repeating highly questionable numbers obtained from dubious sources that have clear political agendas (the RIAA, anyone?)
You wouldn't smoke pot from any of these guys in the OCED, why trust their analysis of P2P usage? I suspect that this is just another example of economists getting bad data from journalists who got numbers from secret sources (the RIAA) who just pulled them out of their ass to get laws passed to make themselves rich.
The OCED should stick to what they do best and tracking the P2P/warez underground is not it.
The underlying reason for software stealing that no one ever talks about is that software is absurdly expensive to produce. The average programmer does only dozen lines a day in working code. that sounds like a cocaine commercial
We need a whole new generation of software productivity tools that will increase the usable output of programmers by an order of magnitude. Stuff that is science fiction now, like comment compiliers where you describe what the program should do and the compilier generates the source code. Software tools that understand (to a degree) native spoken languages and generate code that is compilable.
Let's be real here, line-oriented languages like C, C++, Ada, Pascal, Perl, Visual Basic,...you name it... were great...twenty years ago. But as the hardware has come down in price a thousand fold, the software situation has stagnated. I realize that software is in a Sysiphusian position: every major hardware advance knocks the software development for it back to assembly language, like when microprocessors first appeared.
If software only cost one tenth of its current cost to develop, software development corporations wouldn't feel the need to call for jail terms and big fines for people who copy it and adapt it to their own use. Corps could get their development costs back and needed profits easier if the development costs were not so high. Moving development to places where programmers work for 1/10th the salary of American programmers isn't a solution, it's a delaying tactic to admitting the problem and developing a solution.
This is an area where the open source movement doesn't help. Open source simply takes the inherent inefficiencies of software development and spreads them over a larger group than a contracted development team.
One would think that Microsoft with tens of billions in cash would be applying huge amounts of resources to developing next generation software tools. But they get the best programmers for the current development tools for peanuts (compared to their resources), so better software tools would only disrupt their profit flow.
This is an area where the government usually would put up the R&D funds. But the government is now only interested in funding new, exciting, and expensive ways to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap. They say that the private sector should be funding this.
The situation just goes round in stagnant circles. Everybody just continues to struggle with braindead nitwit 1970's compiliers and languages like C, and complaining about the high cost of software.
At my favorite Starbucks, the one at the corner of NW 23rd Ave and Overton St. in Portland Oregon, I heard Elis Regina "Folhas Secas" and Salif Keita "Bolon" within an hour.
I couldn't believe it.
Someone who seriously knows good music is programming their tunes.
I read this in one of the books on Sony. I forget which. The company name was derived in the late 1940's. This explanation makes more sense than 'Sonus' and 'Sonny Boy'. Why would Japanese use Latin when English was the main language of western exposure and the language of the occupation? Any why would anyone even remotely serious name a company after the term 'Sonny Boy'?
The 'Sound Nippon' derivavive is simply more believable. Often history comes down to what is more believable when there are multiple explanations or interpretations.
The contract between the 'artist' and the global media corp has nothing to do with me. My copying a song has nothing to do with whether or not the 'artist' gets paid or how much.
Even if I did give money to the global media corp, it is unlikely that a reasonable amount would reach the 'artist'.
My point is that having listed to the same song hundreds of times and thousands of commercials before and after, I assume the right to copy and listen to it. With my attention span, I paid for it.
The actual laws were written by representatives of the global media corps for their benefit only. All conditions and assumptions are based on their writing of the laws for their own gain. But there are many other factors involved with culture, media corp profits are only one. Since the laws were written only to maximize media corp profits, I don't see any need to accept these laws or the assumptions that the media corps insist are present.
Basically if I can get access to a sound and a recording device, I assume the right to make a recording for my own use. This is my interpretation of the copyright law. It is also the same opinion of hundreds of millions of other people.
It's the global media corps who forced the current situation into such polarized extremes, not us. We were always willing to buy at a negotiated price the recordings when limited copyright period and fair use were part of the legal stucture. Now that they are defacto not, we are no longer willing to give money to the global media corporations for music recordings. They stole the public domain, which a far, far greater crime than 'stealing' from an 'artist' of a song that was recorded thirty years ago.
Sony (whose name comes from a combination of the words - 'Sound Nippon') seems to be going after the wrong market. They should be pursuing the young and NOT rich, and leave the rich to Apple.
Approximately 75% of the world's people are under the age of 25 and don't have a whole lot of money. This is the market that Sony should be targeting. Instead they are using DRM, proprietary formats, and tie-ins to product from other Sony divisions to capture a chunk of the world's recorded music marketplace. Stupid, because the vast majority of people who would be buying Sony products won't because they can't afford them.
Myself, for example. I get CD audio recordings from the public library. Then I rip them using open source software onto a $20 5 gig hard drive on a $150 PC. The recordings that I would want to hear again at some point in the future I write to a $0.09 CD-R blank (that holds 100 songs in 192kbps MP3 format) using a $25 CDRW. Then I play them outside through a $20 CDR/RW capable MP3 CD player. Every device in the process costs less than an order-of-magnitude of the price that Sony (and Apple) charges for the same utility. If someone can make the equipment profitable for this price then Sony certainly can. And I live in the wealthy western first-world. Outside the US, the EU, Japan, and Canada, people have to work ten times as many hours for the money to buy the same level of equipment.
Sony needs to relearn that innovation is as much a process of getting new equipment affordable as it is a process of designing new toys.
By the way, am I stealing music? No, almost all of the stuff that I listen to I bought many years ago in different formats (45 RPM vinyl, or 33RPM LP). I bought it, I can listen to it.
Or, I listened to the songs so many times on the radio and listened to the commercials so many times that I own the right to have a copy of the song by having listened to the hundreds of radio commercials. That concept of ownership may seem unusual but it is no more strange than the various types of music ownership devised by the media companies. I absolutely, totally, and completely refuse to accept the legitimacy of the laws regarding music copyright because those laws were written by RIAA lobbyists specifically for the sole benefit of the media companies. When the media companies recognize the principle of fair use and limited copyright periods, I will negotiate the concept of music ownership with them. But they never will recognize these principles, so I feel no obligation to honor the legitimacy of the laws that they wrote to enrich themselves.
When the CD recorders first appeared cheaply (less than $200 US) about six years ago, I bought one from Mitsumi and it lasted eight months with light use. They wouldn't honor the warranty; they wouldn't pick up the telephone for the customer-support line or answer e-mails.
A second CDRW, a BTC, lasted eleven months before dying and I was able to get a warranty replacement that still works five years later. A third, a brand and model recommended as a best-buy by PC World magazine lasted six months. Again a worthless warranty due to the companie's refusal to answer e-mail or phone calls.
My current CD-RW, an Artec WRA, has lasted two years with no problems with moderate use.
So with time, devices like CD/DVD writers get better in quality even as the price drops.
I considered buying a 8x DVD writer for $99 at the local discount electronics store. But, reviewing my notes at the difficulties with the quality of early CD recorders made me postpone buying one. I'll wait several more years, or until I have a pressing need to put 4.7Gig on a single disk.
I've found that using the 'DVDdecoder' program I can copy movies from DVDs to my hard drive in VOB files that are 700 megabytes in size each. In this manner a movie can be backed up from DVD to CD-R using about six or seven CDs per film. It's inconvenient, yes, but it does work until the DVD recorders become more reliable.
Thank you,
If you're really pressed for time, say just a half hour between pottery painting class and picking up the kids, then try a little Dimethyltriptamine (DMT).
It packs all the punch of acid trip into 15 minutes. And leaves you all warm and fuzzy afterwards.
See Ken Russell's 1981 film with William Hurt called 'Altered States' where he injects DMT into a withdrawn patient just see what will happen. When he asks her what she feels, she replies, "I feel like God is touching my heart."