They spent decades trying to wipe out hackers (e.g. Steve Jones raid by FBI) and then go "Oops". THEY WERE WARNED AT THE TIME!
Reminds me of the places where all the wolves had to be killed because they were destroying all the deer herds. Which is what they had always done, but they were competing with the PEOPLE who wanted to destroy all the deer herds.
Then wolf nostalgia set in and so a few had to be cautiously reintroduced. What was free became managed. So what they want isn't hacking, they want to reintroduce a weakened strain as an innoculation.
you dont come up with a theory, then stick your head in the sand when observational data fails to fit it.
But that's the way much of science works! ESPECIALLY physics.
You might be interested in checking out "Against Method" by the wonderful Paul Feyerabend sometime. Then, and only then, Kuhn. And then look into the treatment of Arp by the astronomy community.
Unless life *always* evolves out of matter (like crystals out of molten rock, see Schrodinger)... given enough time... because it's just one of the lesser-known epiphenomenomena of matter... in which case it is *everywhere*
My limited understanding of gravity (I was a somewhat inspired physics undergrad decades ago) is that, apart from a few tested equations -- e.g., light bent by the sun -- we really don't know any more about gravity than Newton did. There is utterly no evidence, after a LOT of theories and experiments, of any physical agency... particle or wave... that might explain the "existence" of gravity.
(If I missed something, let me know.)
To my mind, it's looking bleak... there may something fundamentally wrong with our perceptions. So, because of our ignorance, any idea for an experiment that might allow the modification of gravity in any way will, and should, attract more attention than most ideas. 'Cause it's gotten embarassing.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
simply broadcast advertisements 24/7
Why don't you try it that way then... and let me know how it works out.
If you observe how most people acquire their listening preferences, you'll find that most people are relatively naive about music, and acquire their tastes as a result of accidents... for example, what their parents and significant others listen to.
Most people are also lazy (okay, "short of time") and will push the easiest buttons to push (can't program a VCR). They are social creatures, and will tend to listen to what other people they are around most listen to. (Do you know the names of any Asian music stars? Ever had an opportunity?)
This is all simple observation. From there you can deduce that the radio is the easiest place to find music, etc., etc.
The idea that commercial radio does *anything* to expand listener's horizons is *so* contraindicated by experience that it isn't even worth entertaining.
Trouble is, various parts of the universe are running contradictory subroutines. For example, the daemon routine that causes me to eat cheese curls and drink Mountain Dew is vigorously objected to by the administrative routine that monitors my spare tire. Girlfriend ring vs. motorcycle, etc.
Your theoretical rate fails to take account of such inefficiencies, from which it seems clear to me that Design is spending too much time watching videos.
Re:what's it take to get a decent name?
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 1
Art it may be, music it ain't.
I understand the sentiment. Having spent several years creating new sounds with a computer -- and teasing field -recorded sounds into contexts where they're unrecognizable -- my experience is that many people agree with your assessment.
A series of different sounds is not music. It's *how* the sounds are *organized* -- and to some extent, how familiar they are -- that decides whether people respond to them as music or not. Like others, I've spent a lot of time exploring that edge. Interestingly people will try to respond to a series of sounds as if it were music until familiar sounds and structures are no longer prominent.
It's not lowercase, but I can recommend Boards of Canada's "Geogaddi" as one fine new exploration of the edge where many people would have problems deciding whether it's music or not. I'd be surprised to hear many people say that it's not an interesting experience, and feel certain that a majority would deny that it's music. TODAY.
Adding the word 'music' after 'lowercase' is misleading most of the time. The point of lowercase (which, IMO, seldom qualifies as music) is the exploration of sounds. The emphasis is on the sounds themselves rather than their organization... and on experiencing how your brain responds to those sounds.
Whether lowercase ultimately evolves forms that lead people to respond to it *as music* is an open question. It *is* art, but a lot of it hasn't advanced far past shuck-and-jive yet.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
The market is working just fine. The problem is that the majority are willing to listen to the homogeneous crap that CCU broadcasts.
The majority have their tastes determined by what the machine is programmed to throw up. People want what the commercials have to offer because they don't know what they're missing. It takes time and opportunity to evolve a taste for things that are more challenging. Unless you are fortunate to have musical friends who can guide you, it's easier just to go with the commercial flow. After all, it's pleasant enough -- in a Stepford Wives sort of way.
A very important perception, Jon... thanks for sharing it -- and for bashing Lukas' money-raking ways.
The comix message has enabled the imagination and courage of adolescents for half-a-century -- thank you St. Stan et. a. -- as against the corporate message that we should all be good cogs and faithful consumers. An incredible new culture is indeed rising up from the rusting ruins obliquely portrayed in Blade Runner & The Matrix. And thank you Holywood.
This (possibly tongue-in-cheek) is exactly the kind of response they're trying to generate... divide and conquer. Tiers instead of a flat rate would generate more revenue.
This is a pretty insensitive, geeky remark. (Take it from a geek who used to be a thorn.) It's akin to the way Tesla's been treated by history.
It sucks that all the talented people who made Napster possible have been shit on -- by the slavering, semi-legitimate assholes who control, in every aspect, what music reaches your ears -- at the cost of opening a visionary new era of digital distribution... an era which is inevitable, and which will free us, at last, thank god Awmighty, from those slavering bitches.
May the Napsterites find higher mountains to conquer.
The first offering was too clunky and too consumer unfriendly to hold much hope for its success, says Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner's incoming chief executive.
When are they going to learn to model these things on experiences that are already familiar to people?
You'd think a giant corporation would have the resources to learn from decades of interface mistakes, not to mention all the bad interfaces on the web.
This is a business of trial and error.'
It doesn't have to be, if you've GOT A CLUE. Probably just another case of wanting to fail to protect the status quo.
A pianist can play more expressively on an acoustic instrument.
I support MIDI vigorously, but there's no question that you're right here. For example, MIDI supports only 127 velocity levels; there's no question that a virtuoso can tickle a lot more sensitivity out of a piano.
It still takes a *lot* of work to coax high-quality expressivity out of synthesizer, but it can be done -- enough so that a listener with decades of experience can be fooled. But it still takes someone with taste, adequate time, and a lot of experience to achieve that.
It's still the case, and probably will be the case for a long time, that it takes an exquisite ear to achieve exquisite results... whether on an acoustic instrument or an electronic one. There is no substitute for careful listening and skilled craftmanship.
That is certainly untrue. The human ear is in fact sensitive to differences in timing as small as a millionth of a second. This fact has a lot to do with how we resolve the direction of a sound source.
That number may be applicable in the case of reverb/acoustics, but be careful not to apply it across the board. It's also easy to demonstrate that two notes played within about 35 milliseconds are heard as one sound by the ear.
A lot more fuss is made about latency (e.g. with respect to MIDI or audio cards) on theoretical grounds than is worth considering in the real world. Capture a recording of a good drummer or virtuoso pianist and you'll see double-digit delays in high-hat hits or the notes of a chord. These delays have not been troublesome simply because the ear/mind doesn't have that kind of resolution... and because they are part of what makes a human performance different from the performance of a sequencer.
Mix delays of that sort with the playing of a band... where distance between players and other considerations that drop timing to a secondary consideration... and real world performances delays of up to perhaps 100 ms are tolerated among even professionals without comment.
Jim Allchins assertion that there is no way for Microsoft to remove Internet Explorer from Windows without crippling the OS.
This is such an obvious crock to anyone beyond programming 101.
Apple doesn't have a browser cleverly woven into it's operating systems. What, MS programmers can't do what Apple programmers can do?
I would even be willing to wager that the Explorer stuff is carefully marked out in The Source Code... well, as carefully as probably anything is. But then, that's a DeepDarkSecret, innit?
And (also important in a concert) the audio engineer can't hear what he's doing with the spotlights, making it very hard to get right.
I 'spect that the result could be *modelled* for the engineer's monitoring, so that might not be a problem.
The question is whether this will actually be suitable for hi-fi music. Can the non-linearity of the air be exploited to provide a reasonably flat response? Such important details seem to be missing from descriptions of the system so far.
Scientists playing with DNA can make pretty much anything happen. But they still can't create matter with a thought.
Of course, the tacit assumption there is that dirt was *created*.
If it's possible to believe in a god that has always existed, it's equally possible to believe that matter has always existed... and then, if life emerges from 'dirt', no supernatural power is needed to explain it. Occam's razor.
No matter how far believers dig into the dirt trying to escape the available evidence, in the end it's a matter of personal style... you either permit unsupported belief into your mental structure, or you don't.
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
there doesn't seem to be a single setting for everything that I've ripped....tweaks a single number in the file header to force it in line with the rest of my collection.... Is this sort of thing possible?
No, because simply increasing the maximum volume level (normalizing) won't increase the average volume (achieved by compression and tailoring EQ.) This is the kind of task that mastering engineers get paid to do.
If you could find an audio program that you could script to do some of this, and were willing to wait for the processing happen, you might get close enough for satisfaction. Such a program may already exist, though I can't name one offhand.
Re:Ahh yes. More newsbites
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 1
I'm tending to agree. This is the same meddlesome hand-wringing that have greated every new, expansive technology since Gutenburg.
While life's options expand and time for the lengthy hand-written letter is diminished, e-mail permits quick and painless comms that might not otherwise happen.
Did the very similar telephone network (now much more mature) help or hinder human relations? Self-evident, I think, and probably a 1/10-scale model for web relations once the technology is matured.
When people gathered around the weekly Our Miss Brooks or Green Lantern on 40s broadcast radio, they weren't conversing during the show, but evidently the delight added to their lives, post-show, as they returned again and again.
Not to deemphasize the importance of face-to-face, so important in conveying the subtle intentions and conventions of intelligent conversation, the twinkle of the eye, the furl of the brow, the lilt in the voice. Who would want to dispense with it? And life's best things are best shared in person. But when time, space, money, etc. prevent, or we want to connect with communities that space would have excluded us from in the past, it's a new and wonderful world.
Finally, isolation ain't all bad. The contemplative mind luxuriates in it. Few of us grow in the rain of idle chatter and quickly irrelevant news of the day, of jokes retold a hundred times and the downpour of trivial values. There are deep growthful resources on the web that go beyond the daily trivia, that we best expose ourselves to in quiet. Even the porn sites challenge perceptions tainted by prejudice and hatred.
Let those who see nothing be assured that it is their eyes, and not the world, in need of clearing.
I "grew up" in the 8-bit era and recall that we used vectored interrupts to handle real-time needs. That worked extremely well with processors running at 1/1000 of today's speeds.
After reading the article, I'm left wondering why "unpreemptable kernals" were ever conceived in the first case. To lower the cost of hardware? On the "limited-access freeway" model? Or just to K.I.S.S.?
Good! because the idea of 'filling a slot' or 'finding your niche' was a morbid perversion of natural, elective work which flows out of your becoming and grows as you grow.
Better to be poor and free than to be secure but owned.
The internet is only *a* net, not the only game in town. There are an infinite number of possible nets. Those carelessly left behind in the rush to colonize the green planet can be resurrected.
What's the hurt? Is there anyone who's no longer able to communicate? Have the real issues been hidden? I can still do research on Google in ten minutes that would take a half-day at the library. I still trade e-mail with who I want.
And should those things go away, or the surveillance get too intrusive, I'll join/go make another net.
Nobody's forcing anyone to visit those commercial sites. While I rarely get to any of them, they must providing some service that lots of people need.
Nobody has to buy into the corporate culture, or to buy their stuff. If lots of people do, that's their lookout. If you want a nose candy high, go buy some nose candy, but if you aren't aware of the side benefits, too goddamn bad.
Slashdot Mirror
They spent decades trying to wipe out hackers (e.g. Steve Jones raid by FBI) and then go "Oops". THEY WERE WARNED AT THE TIME!
Reminds me of the places where all the wolves had to be killed because they were destroying all the deer herds. Which is what they had always done, but they were competing with the PEOPLE who wanted to destroy all the deer herds.
Then wolf nostalgia set in and so a few had to be cautiously reintroduced. What was free became managed. So what they want isn't hacking, they want to reintroduce a weakened strain as an innoculation.
Hey hackers, want to be weakened?
you dont come up with a theory, then stick your head in the sand when observational data fails to fit it.
But that's the way much of science works! ESPECIALLY physics.
You might be interested in checking out "Against Method" by the wonderful Paul Feyerabend sometime. Then, and only then, Kuhn. And then look into the treatment of Arp by the astronomy community.
I could go on, but the list is LONG....
Unless life *always* evolves out of matter (like crystals out of molten rock, see Schrodinger) ... given enough time ... because it's just one of the lesser-known epiphenomenomena of matter ... in which case it is *everywhere*
in which case the universe is full of salesmen
My limited understanding of gravity (I was a somewhat inspired physics undergrad decades ago) is that, apart from a few tested equations -- e.g., light bent by the sun -- we really don't know any more about gravity than Newton did. There is utterly no evidence, after a LOT of theories and experiments, of any physical agency ... particle or wave ... that might explain the "existence" of gravity.
... there may something fundamentally wrong with our perceptions. So, because of our ignorance, any idea for an experiment that might allow the modification of gravity in any way will, and should, attract more attention than most ideas. 'Cause it's gotten embarassing.
(If I missed something, let me know.)
To my mind, it's looking bleak
simply broadcast advertisements 24/7
... and let me know how it works out.
... for example, what their parents and significant others listen to.
Why don't you try it that way then
If you observe how most people acquire their listening preferences, you'll find that most people are relatively naive about music, and acquire their tastes as a result of accidents
Most people are also lazy (okay, "short of time") and will push the easiest buttons to push (can't program a VCR). They are social creatures, and will tend to listen to what other people they are around most listen to. (Do you know the names of any Asian music stars? Ever had an opportunity?)
This is all simple observation. From there you can deduce that the radio is the easiest place to find music, etc., etc.
The idea that commercial radio does *anything* to expand listener's horizons is *so* contraindicated by experience that it isn't even worth entertaining.
Trouble is, various parts of the universe are running contradictory subroutines. For example, the daemon routine that causes me to eat cheese curls and drink Mountain Dew is vigorously objected to by the administrative routine that monitors my spare tire. Girlfriend ring vs. motorcycle, etc.
Your theoretical rate fails to take account of such inefficiencies, from which it seems clear to me that Design is spending too much time watching videos.
Art it may be, music it ain't.
I understand the sentiment. Having spent several years creating new sounds with a computer -- and teasing field -recorded sounds into contexts where they're unrecognizable -- my experience is that many people agree with your assessment.
A series of different sounds is not music. It's *how* the sounds are *organized* -- and to some extent, how familiar they are -- that decides whether people respond to them as music or not. Like others, I've spent a lot of time exploring that edge. Interestingly people will try to respond to a series of sounds as if it were music until familiar sounds and structures are no longer prominent.
It's not lowercase, but I can recommend Boards of Canada's "Geogaddi" as one fine new exploration of the edge where many people would have problems deciding whether it's music or not. I'd be surprised to hear many people say that it's not an interesting experience, and feel certain that a majority would deny that it's music. TODAY.
Adding the word 'music' after 'lowercase' is misleading most of the time.
The point of lowercase (which, IMO, seldom qualifies as music) is the exploration of sounds. The emphasis is on the sounds themselves rather than their organization... and on experiencing how your brain responds to those sounds.
Whether lowercase ultimately evolves forms that lead people to respond to it *as music* is an open question. It *is* art, but a lot of it hasn't advanced far past shuck-and-jive yet.
The market is working just fine. The problem is that the majority are willing to listen to the homogeneous crap that CCU broadcasts.
The majority have their tastes determined by what the machine is programmed to throw up. People want what the commercials have to offer because they don't know what they're missing. It takes time and opportunity to evolve a taste for things that are more challenging. Unless you are fortunate to have musical friends who can guide you, it's easier just to go with the commercial flow. After all, it's pleasant enough -- in a Stepford Wives sort of way.
the young, the real avatars of culture...
... thanks for sharing it -- and for bashing Lukas' money-raking ways.
A very important perception, Jon
The comix message has enabled the imagination and courage of adolescents for half-a-century -- thank you St. Stan et. a. -- as against the corporate message that we should all be good cogs and faithful consumers. An incredible new culture is indeed rising up from the rusting ruins obliquely portrayed in Blade Runner & The Matrix. And thank you Holywood.
This (possibly tongue-in-cheek) is exactly the kind of response they're trying to generate... divide and conquer. Tiers instead of a flat rate would generate more revenue.
Napster as a company is irrelevant.
... an era which is inevitable, and which will free us, at last, thank god Awmighty, from those slavering bitches.
This is a pretty insensitive, geeky remark. (Take it from a geek who used to be a thorn.) It's akin to the way Tesla's been treated by history.
It sucks that all the talented people who made Napster possible have been shit on -- by the slavering, semi-legitimate assholes who control, in every aspect, what music reaches your ears -- at the cost of opening a visionary new era of digital distribution
May the Napsterites find higher mountains to conquer.
The first offering was too clunky and too consumer unfriendly to hold much hope for its success, says Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner's incoming chief executive.
When are they going to learn to model these things on experiences that are already familiar to people?
You'd think a giant corporation would have the resources to learn from decades of interface mistakes, not to mention all the bad interfaces on the web.
This is a business of trial and error.'
It doesn't have to be, if you've GOT A CLUE.
Probably just another case of wanting to fail to protect the status quo.
A pianist can play more expressively on an acoustic instrument.
... whether on an acoustic instrument or an electronic one. There is no substitute for careful listening and skilled craftmanship.
I support MIDI vigorously, but there's no question that you're right here. For example, MIDI supports only 127 velocity levels; there's no question that a virtuoso can tickle a lot more sensitivity out of a piano.
It still takes a *lot* of work to coax high-quality expressivity out of synthesizer, but it can be done -- enough so that a listener with decades of experience can be fooled. But it still takes someone with taste, adequate time, and a lot of experience to achieve that.
It's still the case, and probably will be the case for a long time, that it takes an exquisite ear to achieve exquisite results
That is certainly untrue. The human ear is in fact sensitive to differences in timing as small as a millionth of a second. This fact has a lot to do with how we resolve the direction of a sound source.
... where distance between players and other considerations that drop timing to a secondary consideration ... and real world performances delays of up to perhaps 100 ms are tolerated among even professionals without comment.
That number may be applicable in the case of reverb/acoustics, but be careful not to apply it across the board. It's also easy to demonstrate that two notes played within about 35 milliseconds are heard as one sound by the ear.
A lot more fuss is made about latency (e.g. with respect to MIDI or audio cards) on theoretical grounds than is worth considering in the real world. Capture a recording of a good drummer or virtuoso pianist and you'll see double-digit delays in high-hat hits or the notes of a chord. These delays have not been troublesome simply because the ear/mind doesn't have that kind of resolution... and because they are part of what makes a human performance different from the performance of a sequencer.
Mix delays of that sort with the playing of a band
Beta carotene is good for you.
No wait, beta carotene is bad for you.
anyone ever heard of CRAMPONS? Cleats? Ski poles?
Jim Allchins assertion that there is no way for Microsoft to remove Internet Explorer from Windows without crippling the OS.
... well, as carefully as probably anything is. But then, that's a DeepDarkSecret, innit?
This is such an obvious crock to anyone beyond programming 101.
Apple doesn't have a browser cleverly woven into it's operating systems. What, MS programmers can't do what Apple programmers can do?
I would even be willing to wager that the Explorer stuff is carefully marked out in The Source Code
You mean... not wearing pants *isn't* okay?
(Rustle rustle zip)
And (also important in a concert) the audio engineer can't hear what he's doing with the spotlights, making it very hard to get right.
I 'spect that the result could be *modelled* for the engineer's monitoring, so that might not be a problem.
The question is whether this will actually be suitable for hi-fi music. Can the non-linearity of the air be exploited to provide a reasonably flat response? Such important details seem to be missing from descriptions of the system so far.
Scientists playing with DNA can make pretty much anything happen. But they still can't create matter with a thought.
Of course, the tacit assumption there is that dirt was *created*.
If it's possible to believe in a god that has always existed, it's equally possible to believe that matter has always existed... and then, if life emerges from 'dirt', no supernatural power is needed to explain it. Occam's razor.
No matter how far believers dig into the dirt trying to escape the available evidence, in the end it's a matter of personal style... you either permit unsupported belief into your mental structure, or you don't.
there doesn't seem to be a single setting for everything that I've ripped....tweaks a single number in the file header to force it in line with the rest of my collection.... Is this sort of thing possible?
No, because simply increasing the maximum volume level (normalizing) won't increase the average volume (achieved by compression and tailoring EQ.) This is the kind of task that mastering engineers get paid to do.
If you could find an audio program that you could script to do some of this, and were willing to wait for the processing happen, you might get close enough for satisfaction. Such a program may already exist, though I can't name one offhand.
I'm tending to agree. This is the same meddlesome hand-wringing that have greated every new, expansive technology since Gutenburg.
While life's options expand and time for the lengthy hand-written letter is diminished, e-mail permits quick and painless comms that might not otherwise happen.
Did the very similar telephone network (now much more mature) help or hinder human relations? Self-evident, I think, and probably a 1/10-scale model for web relations once the technology is matured.
When people gathered around the weekly Our Miss Brooks or Green Lantern on 40s broadcast radio, they weren't conversing during the show, but evidently the delight added to their lives, post-show, as they returned again and again.
Not to deemphasize the importance of face-to-face, so important in conveying the subtle intentions and conventions of intelligent conversation, the twinkle of the eye, the furl of the brow, the lilt in the voice. Who would want to dispense with it? And life's best things are best shared in person. But when time, space, money, etc. prevent, or we want to connect with communities that space would have excluded us from in the past, it's a new and wonderful world.
Finally, isolation ain't all bad. The contemplative mind luxuriates in it. Few of us grow in the rain of idle chatter and quickly irrelevant news of the day, of jokes retold a hundred times and the downpour of trivial values. There are deep growthful resources on the web that go beyond the daily trivia, that we best expose ourselves to in quiet. Even the porn sites challenge perceptions tainted by prejudice and hatred.
Let those who see nothing be assured that it is their eyes, and not the world, in need of clearing.
I "grew up" in the 8-bit era and recall that we used vectored interrupts to handle real-time needs. That worked extremely well with processors running at 1/1000 of today's speeds.
After reading the article, I'm left wondering why "unpreemptable kernals" were ever conceived in the first case. To lower the cost of hardware? On the "limited-access freeway" model? Or just to K.I.S.S.?
The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared
Good! because the idea of 'filling a slot' or 'finding your niche' was a morbid perversion of natural, elective work which flows out of your becoming and grows as you grow.
Better to be poor and free than to be secure but owned.
The internet is only *a* net, not the only game in town. There are an infinite number of possible nets. Those carelessly left behind in the rush to colonize the green planet can be resurrected.
What's the hurt? Is there anyone who's no longer able to communicate? Have the real issues been hidden? I can still do research on Google in ten minutes that would take a half-day at the library. I still trade e-mail with who I want.
And should those things go away, or the surveillance get too intrusive, I'll join/go make another net.
Nobody's forcing anyone to visit those commercial sites. While I rarely get to any of them, they must providing some service that lots of people need.
Nobody has to buy into the corporate culture, or to buy their stuff. If lots of people do, that's their lookout. If you want a nose candy high, go buy some nose candy, but if you aren't aware of the side benefits, too goddamn bad.